07mk
1yr ago
There's a delusional fantasy among some rightists that if only the (white) public "knew" about HBD, the wool would fall from their eyes and they'd instantly adopt conservative positions on a wide range of policies. In reality, leftist ideas are much more resilient than that. They can justify affirmative action, reparations and so on in countless other ways, and in some cases already have.
What I notice is that this delusional fantasy is shared by many, possibly most, leftists as well, which is what many of them say justifies the immense amount of censorship efforts to prevent HBD from being an acceptable thought. But as you say, leftist ideas are resilient, and it always struck me as both as naive and as counterproductive. Naive because it it takes the most simplistic idea of something like "if people realized people of [race] were more genetically predisposed to [bad behavior], then of course that would lead to more bigotry and racial hatred and dehumanizing of people of [race]" without actually doing the sociological research required to justify such a belief. And counterproductive, because it creates the false notion that the correctness of leftist ideas are contingent on some empirical reality about genetics, leaving those ideas open to appear to be falsified by facts about genetics coming out. And for what gain? None as far as I can tell, since leftist ideas actually aren't contingent upon HBD being false.
07mk
2yr ago
Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.
We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is.
This really caught me off guard. Really, not to kindergartners? He states it as if it's just obvious that no decent person would show this famous statue in its entirety to kindergartners just because it has anatomically correct genitalia. I don't know if it's American prudishness even as an American, since American prudishness has changed a lot in the past 30 years I've lived there. I have to wonder if Donald Rumsfeld's John Ashcroft's, per correction below practice during Bush 2 of covering up breasts of statues when he was speaking in front of them had downstream effects I didn't anticipate.
But I think there's at least something to it; when I was growing up in Korea, it was pretty normal for cartoons and comic books for kids to have full frontal, often in comedic contexts (and always in non-sexual contexts - since sex didn't even mean anything to the target audience of <10 year olds). This was the case for Dragon Ball, a Japanese comic book series which is internationally popular including in both Korea and the US, and in which I discovered censorship of the protagonist Goku's dick and balls when I came to the US and read English localizations.
Also, I was randomly reminded of something from the DVD commentary of the 1999 film Election, a very good comedy about a high school president election, where one of the last scenes of the film starts with a close-up of the genitals of some statue at the Metropolitan museum. Apparently for TV/airplane/otherwise age-restricted versions of this R-rated film, they had to cut that opening shot, despite the fact that the statue was right there at the front of the museum for anyone walking in front of it to see.
07mk
1yr ago
My pet theory is that ChatGPT and DALLE were a massive bait to that crowd, luring them out as free labour to strengthen their AI control skills. Why else would they make it free?
I wonder, if conceptually, if not practically, if it would be possible to train an LLM to use ChatGPT in such a way as to corrupt whatever censoring learning process that OpenAI might be implementing for their censor AI. It would obviously have to be scaled up in a way that OpenAI can't defend against, which is a very hard problem to solve, and that might be the easy part! But I'd love to see it happen, partly for the lulz and partly because my preferred future is one in which ChatGPT has as little censorship as a local LLM.
07mk
2yr ago
But consider the idea that methodological constraints actually are a metaphysical theory, or further implying that shoes are atheists. These ideas are, I think, even less likely to be true than the idea that there is no difference in intelligence between different genetic groups of humans (at least the latter can be empirically shown true or false; the former is just a category error).
whereas the claims that atheism makes go so far beyond typical constraints of the scientific method that one actually does just quietly make an exception for it because its claims are fundamentally viewed as being orthogonal to scientific investigation (and people just fail to ever mention such)?
I think this is the crux of it. Though I admit I don't quite understand what you're saying here. What are the specific claims that you believe that atheism makes, and what do shoes have to do with it?
07mk
3mo ago
Zegler isn’t ugly but next to Gadot Zegler looks like a soft 6. Relative casting matters.
Given how they apparently changed the way "fairest" meant in this remake, I actually wonder if the relative looks here was the point. Of course, they couldn't hire someone outright ugly as the lead, but making sure that she's significantly and noticeably less attractive than the Evil Queen (very easy to do when you cast Gadot as her) could have been consciously intentional for the purpose of sending little girls the message that good looks are bad, actually. It's interesting, though, that the original film had a pretty overt message about the evilness of vanity, which gets lost when you replace the Evil Queen's obsession about being the fairest-as-in-beautiful to fairest-as-in-just. I don't know how the remake justifies it, but it seems bizarre that a Queen who intentionally sends her King off to die and oppresses her happy subjects would obsess over a magic mirror's judgment of her as being fair-as-in-just. Perhaps there's some way the Queen's perspective is presented in a way to show that she actually genuinely believes that she is a just ruler? Given how much Disney's been into redeeming female villains like Cruella DeVille or Maleficent, this could've been a good opportunity to show her as a misguided soul who was traumatized by a man in her past that led her to an obsession with being a just ruler that nonetheless turned into evil. I haven't heard that from any reviews, though.
It sounds like much of the film was written with conscious messaging in mind, based on the descriptions I read and saw of the plot, which seems to involve pretty unambiguous pro-Communist messaging, and also an addition of a plot point presenting Dopey as someone unfairly bullied for his muteness and who turns out to be able to talk in the end.
07mk
2yr ago
Personally, I don't really think of piracy as an ethical issue at all. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that exists for the purpose of incentivizing people to create more and better works of art and inventions, for the betterment of society. This is accomplished by restricting most people's right to speech - their right to transmit certain strings of 0s and 1s to others (which are usually representations of certain strings of letters or certain grid-arrangements of pixels) - while granting other people (i.e. the rights holders) the privilege to express that speech. Like all rights, the right to free speech isn't absolute, and this, like true threats or slander, is one of those exceptions that exist as a compromise to make society more functional and generally better for everyone. But I don't believe there's some sort of natural right that is ethically granted to creators and rights holders to restrict the types of 0s and 1s that 3rd parties are allowed to tell each other.
I do think there are more general ethical issues about simply following along with the prevailing legal norms in society; breaking those, no matter what they are, involve some level of unethical behavior, due to its degradation of the structure that keeps society running. But most people do agree that laws and ethics aren't the exact same thing, and sometimes breaking the law can be ethical; I think most times, piracy doesn't have a sufficient counterbalance to make it, on net, ethical, but sometimes it could. But either way, I don't think the ethical right for rights holders to restrict how 3rd parties transmit 0s and 1s to each other is part of it.
I do think the mainstreaming of digital media over the past couple decades has made it so that the younger generations of today take intellectual property rights as a sort of default correct thing more than younger generations of before. Of course, books, cassettes, and CDs were all real and all copy-able before the 90s, but they were still generally considered physical objects that needed physical action to copy. But the internet has caused the concept of entertainment media to be almost completely decoupled from physical material, and so kids have grown up in an environment where "intellectual property" exists as a concept and is enforced through restricting how 3rd parties communicate to each other is the norm. It'd be natural for them to come to believe in the ethical right to that in such an environment.
For my personal behavior, I used to pirate heavily 10+ years ago for basically all of my digital entertainment. The advent of Steam and more specifically its improved ease-of-use with its central marketplace and library, along with its cloud saving, made it so that I basically don't pirate video games anymore. I also personally get a little value out of knowing that I helped, even in some minor near-imperceptible way, incentivize the creation of more video games similar to the one I purchased. For films and TV shows, I still primarily pirate through torrents, though I try to watch through my Netflix subscription when it's available that way; it's usually just more convenient, and I keep my Netflix subscription primarily due to momentum. For music, I don't listen to music for the most part anyway, and the advent of YouTube as a near limitless free music resource has meant that the few times I do want to listen to music, I can freely access whatever I want. I do think the bit about convenience being the solution to piracy has a lot of truth to it in my behavior.
07mk
2yr ago
You just have to enforce heterosexual monogamy (I am considering hook-ups and excessive serial monogamy to be forms of poly under this framework.)
Based on reading all the discussion in this thread, I don't think that "just" belongs there. It seems like one of those Very Hard things to accomplish, not least because any time someone tries to come up with suggestions on how to do that, lots of others accuse them of using that as camouflage for their actual desire of forcing women back into the kitchen. The normalization of trying to divine someone else's True Intentions by taking the worst possible interpretation of their words and then running with it has been disastrous for the human race, but preventing that also seems like one of those Very Hard things to do, if not outright impossible.
07mk
2yr ago
It would be quite remarkable to me if the exact same general purpose computing hardware could experience qualia while running one set of instructions, but not while running another - that is, if the instructions alone were the "difference maker". I'm inclined to think that such a thing is not possible.
What's the justification for this inclination, though? After all, in the realm of physics, there's no clean demarcation between "hardware" and "software." What we call "software" is actually a difference in the physical substrate, in terms of different atoms being placed in different places in the HDD or different volume of electrons flowing through different circuits in a microchip. "Running one set of instructions [instead of another]" really just means "a different physical object," and it's not clear to me that the change in the physical object necessary to generate qualia can't be accomplished through changes in the instructions. It's also not clear to me that it can in this specific case, and my bias points me in the direction that it didn't in this specific case. But I don't see the justification for dismissing it outright.
07mk
2mo ago
I see a couple of issues with that scenario.
One is that there will almost always be plausible deniability with respect to LLM usage. There would have to be a slip-up of the sort of including meta-text that chatbot-style LLMs provide - something like "Certainly! Here is the next page of the story, where XYZ happens." - for it to be definitive proof, and I'd expect that the audience and judges would pick up on that early enough to prevent such authors from becoming high status. That said, it could still get through, and also someone who did a good enough job hiding this early on could slip up later in her career, casting doubt on her original works.
But the second, bigger issue, is that even if this were definitively proven, with the author herself outright claiming that she typed in a one-word prompt into ChatGPT 10 to produce all 70,000 words of her latest award-winning novel, this could just be justified by the publishing industry and the associated awards on the basis of her lacking the privilege that white/straight/cis/male authors have, and this LLM usage merely ensures equity by giving her and other oppressed minorities the writing ability that privileged people are just granted due to their position in this white supremacist patriarchal society. Now, you might think that this would simply discredit these organizations in the eyes of the audience, and it certainly will for some, but I doubt that it would be some inflection point or straw that breaks the camel's back. I'd predict that, for the vast majority who are already bought in, this next spoonful would be easy to swallow.
07mk
6mo ago
No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this. In this situation, the question is relating to how "policies that leftists prioritize/champion have predictable outcomes on child rape such that their level of caring about it is necessarily below others and below some meaningful threshold in order to prioritize such policies." And, again, as a leftist who used to champion such policies, I was by no means unusual as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it. But more common were people who would outright deny that such policies would lead to bad outcomes without doing the very very hard work of actually checking with multiple adversarial sources that disagree heavily with oneself, which is the ultimate form of not caring about those bad outcomes, i.e. child rape in this case. I am perfectly comfortable saying that those leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect.
07mk
7mo ago
I would kill to see some high quality studies using blinded (I'm not sure double blinding is possible, since presumably a trans person would know they're trans) trials of test subjects interacting with both trans and cis people to see just how common it is to truly "pass." Sadly, the academic political environment makes it so that basically no one who would be positioned to do the research would be interested in having an answer. And even if that were not the case, the number of trans people is so small that getting sufficiently random or representative members of that group seem likely to be impossible.
The way I think of it is that, given how incentivized the current "progressive" trans movement is to present MTF as being exactly the same as females in every way that matters, if there were some fairly significant population of MTF trans people who "pass," there would be quite a few such people who are either held up as examples or who become mini-celebs as activists for the cause. There's certainly no shortage of MTF trans people who obviously don't "pass" that you can find both online and in-person (at least in my neck of the woods around Boston) despite the fact that, again, the number of such people is very small relative to the population. The only person like that who comes to my mind is Blaire White, whom I don't follow, but who I believe isn't on the side of the "progressives" in this.
07mk
1yr ago
The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.
Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.
Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.
Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.
07mk
2yr ago
What do you mean by "support this?"
For me, "support this" would involve something akin to being either ambivalent to or promoting of a medical/social standard where when someone believes they have gender dysphoria and wants to explore options to progress from there, this pill is presented by doctors/psychologists as an equally helpful option to address their dysphoria as medical/social transitioning, modulo the relative risk/benefit ratios of the different processes. This is a pretty muddy and imprecise standard, but that's hard to avoid when talking about something as broad as "leftists" "supporting" "this."
I'm a leftist who would support this by the above standard, but I have to honestly say that I'm skeptical that agreeing with me would be popular or even common among leftists.
07mk
2yr ago
What made them think hiring subpar writers, rewriting lore, rewriting characters of one of the most popular fantasy IPs while simultaneously drafting off of the brand was a good idea? It feels like the motive isn't even to make money but solely to push an agenda, but who would do that?
I don't think they thought they were hiring subpar writers. I think they just have a different measure of what a quality writer is compared to the general public. When people who push this sort of agenda say that having representation of people of certain races/genders/sexualities makes a piece of fiction better, I think they actually believe it. They really do believe that if you take an existing successful franchise and tack on a story that appeals to such sensibilities with diverse characters or allegorical plot threads, it makes the work, in some real meaningful way, better. And thus hopefully more successful. And so they prioritize doing just that.
But, of course, there's no such thing as prioritizing everything at once. If you prioritize the messaging, you necessarily put less priority on the actual quality of the work in terms of things like world building, character development, interesting plot, etc. And making a good TV show isn't easy; you can't just de-prioritize those things and expect to end up with good results. But, again, the people making this stuff genuinely believe that the messaging is what makes the TV show good. There's much to be skeptical about when it comes to the narrative of Hollywood/filmmaking leftists being too far in their own echo chambers to understand what appeals to the general public, but the more I observe the leftist echo chambers in my own environments, the more I can believe in such a narrative.
Of course, such delusional beliefs do have to encounter the stark reality of revenue and watch numbers, but culture like this tends to turn slowly, and there's enough money to keep them afloat and going. And the always-dependable narrative that "we didn't fail the audience; the bigoted audience failed us by refusing to watch our show" (examples abound, but the recent Billy Eichner movie comes to mind, as well as the Charlie's Angels reboot-reboot from a couple years back), followed by "but next time, as the march of progress continues on and our side gets more and more vindicated as being the right side of history, the audience will be receptive to our correct notion of what constitutes quality."
07mk
1yr ago
I wonder how the media reaction to this will be, compared to what happened in 2014. I was a much more avid user of Twitter back then, as well as a much bigger gamer compared to now, and I was able to watch in real-time as various gaming media outlets formed their narrative about misogynist gamers harassing women which was about as close to the exact opposite of the situation as one could get if one actually intentionally tried (which I suspect was the case). Even back then, media outlets had been losing readers in favor of social media, but they still seemed to have enough credibility that plenty of more casual gamers just naively took them at their word. 10 years later, and social media has continued to rise and media outlets have continued to lose credibility, and I believe the viewership/readership numbers have reflected this.
That means that if people sympathetic to SBI want to set the narrative again, then doing the same thing as before, where some sympathetic writers at a handful of media outlets rewrite the narrative (most likely in uncoordinated fashion, I'd guess) to flatter the people they like and denigrate the people they don't, might not be enough to achieve the same level of success in convincing people. I primarily learned about this situation from a YouTuber/Twitch streamer who regularly gets 6-7 figures in views on each video, where he was just straight-up shitting on SBI for being ideologues trying to sell something that customers don't want to buy and calling out one of the media outlet authors as racist for stating the very standard - downright cliche at this point - modern "progressive" line "you can't be racist against white people." And there are plenty of smaller "content creators" similar to him saying similar things who still get 5-6 figures per video. That kind of ecosystem wasn't really around back in 2014.
Now, this ecosystem also definitely produces people who are sympathetic to SBI. And, who knows, maybe there are YouTubers who get 7-8 figures per video who basically parrot the lines Kotaku and Polygon spit out? But even if that's the case, I think the presence of the ecosystem of more diverse viewpoints would make it harder for the SBI-preferred narrative of "oppressed minorities being harassed by bigoted gamers who want to exclude them from their spaces" to take hold. It's not a true marketplace of ideas, but it seems at least half a step closer to one than what it was in 2014, and that half a step could be enough for contrasting ideas from diverse viewpoints to win out.
To take a more bird's eye view of this, I think the past decade since the affair of reproductively viable female worker ants has shown that the Anita Sarkeesians of the world had a complete victory in that time period. SBI has been around and modifying games for a while, and it's only now, after plenty of damage has been done to multiple formerly well-regarded franchises, that fans have even begun to notice them to any significant extent, much less push back. And more to the point, the very fact that devs and/or publishers see enough value in SBI that SBI can survive as a company shows that the ideology has taken a pretty firm root in the industry. The future is not yet set, of course, and this particular episode seems to be at least a blip in the other direction, but what I'd expect right now is that the people sympathetic to SBI will come up with some new technique that I don't even have the capability to imagine right now to continue to subvert the industry in ways that paying customers are even less able to notice or control.
07mk
2yr ago
I'd like to discuss the best ideas my political opposition has, but I'm increasingly concerned that "signal boost liars" is the best idea my political opposition has--or, if not their best idea, maybe just their most pragmatically effective.
I don't think that's is a very charitable way of describing this, but I do think there's a grain of truth to this that could lead to fruitful discussion. When I read this description of what happened, not having heard of this person before and taking the top-level post at its word, the first thing I was reminded of was the affair of Jussie Smollett, whose hate crime hoax was initially met with immense amounts of support and sympathy, leading to a TV interview where he theorized that the supposed hate crime was motivated by his outsized criticism of "45," i.e. Donald Trump, before the absurdities in his story quickly caused the public perception tide to turn against him. I think anyone with a clear head or a belief in ethics would have recognized the hoax was both bad in itself and highly likely to be bad for himself, but I'd wager Smollett had neither. And the adoration that he received in the brief period before his story broke down was very real and very sizable, something I'm guessing he truly got a lot out of.
And this in turn reminded me of the affair of Jackie Coakley, the University of Virginia student whose story of being gang-raped as part of an apparent frat house hazing ritual was the basis for the Rolling Stone article A Rape on Campus by Sabrina Rubin Erdely which made waves about 10 years ago before it was retracted by the publication for purportedly lacking in veracity. I don't remember it too well, and Coakley wasn't a public figure like Smollett who actively tried to publicize herself, but I recall what little we got from her was that she genuinely stuck to her guns that the story was real, despite the lack of evidence.
What these highlight to me is that there are some people who are so narcissistic and lacking in a sense of ethics and honesty that they're willing to lie in an effort to gain... something that feeds their egos. I don't know if it's called sociopathy or what, but I feel like it's very similar to the kind of mentality we see in (people I think are) scam artists like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos or possibly Sam Bankman-Fried or the guy who ran the Fyre Festival or Travis Pangburn. Who knows why they are the way they are, but they're that way, and they'll likely always be with us.
So as a society, it falls on the rest of us to have norms and rules and laws that allow us to accurately detect and prevent/punish people like that. And I think if you want to be charitable to your "political opposition," their failure is that they've created an environment that provides weak points for people like that to attack.
Another thing associated with your "opposition" I was reminded of when reading this post was "Believe Women" (FYI the fact that Jones in this story is a woman is tangential to the point I'm making, not least because her claim isn't one of sexual abuse). There is some controversy over what this actually means, muddled by the fact that "Believe All Women" was also a common variant of the phrase for a time, but the most charitable version of it that I've encountered is something like, "In the past, accusations by women against abusers were automatically treated with hyperskepticism, leading to many men to get away with abusive behavior, leading to more women being abused. Like it or not, you, by nature of living in this society, are also infected with this tendency towards hyperskepticism. In an effort to correct this injustice, you when judging the veracity of the next woman's claim of being abused, you should err on the side of believing her." This most charitable version still literally means that you personally should override what you personally believe to be your best judgment: your very ability to judge is not to be trusted, in favor of, well, "Believe Women."
The "Believe Women" meme is only one in a long line of similar memes and messages about overriding one's own best judgment in favor of taking claims at their word based on the particular scenario and identity. "Lived experience" is probably the most famous one. And there's a real belief that this is the ethical and just thing to do here, supported by a scaffolding of narratives around oppression and history and what is really believed to be social science. That the current oppressive structure of society has essentially infected the minds of everyday people with invisible - or "implicit" - biases that tilt them against the words of certain types of people, which must be actively fought against by consciously overriding their very ability to judge things.
When you have this sort of norm of shredding one's skepticism in certain circumstances, it becomes very easy to convince oneself that any particular case that makes one's enemies look bad must fit the circumstances. You do that enough times, and it just becomes automatic, to determine one's own skepticism based on how bad it makes one's enemies look, rather than based on the actual specifics of the situation at hand. And this norm has been pushed and pushed and pushed as the only correct thing to do in many influential leftist circles.
And let me be clear, I don't think this is well intentioned; but what I believe it is is an attempt at being well intentioned. This sort of downstream negative impacts aren't immediately obvious at first blush, but neither are they so counterintuitive and complex that it would take a genius to figure out. Every individual who believes in pushing some sort of sociopolitical message has the responsibility to think through things at least enough to figure this out. And the people who pushed this sort of norm hadn't. And so they failed in their attempt to be well intentioned. But they don't outright believe that "signal boosting liars" is their best idea. They just find themselves doing it because the norms they follow have corrupted their ability to distinguish between liars and truthtellers in cases where the lies are very flattering to their side.
I think this is a trap that everyone everywhere can fall into, and due to the asymmetry between the right and the left, the way it instantiates on the right-wing is different, looking more like authoritarian hierarchical organizations, such as the church. Our society has done a bang-up job in explicitly identifying and subverting such organizations for at least the past few decades, and I think (hope) we're catching up to doing the same for the left versions.
07mk
2yr ago
I must admit I'm a bit surprised, both in the direction and the magnitude of the direction. A priori, I would have guessed that the strong norms of free speech and personal liberty would have made it so that Americans would generally be against a government-mandated ban on TikTok. The trends between Republicans/Democrats and conservatives/liberals doesn't surprise me, at least, since I would expect the former to be more prioritizing of stuff like protection of children from social media brainrot and protection of US citizen data from Chinese governments over freedom of people to use social media services that could be harmful to themselves and others. On a personal level, I think TikTok is probably a net negative both to US society and to US citizens, but I also think that the government setting a precedent of banning TikTok is probably a much bigger net negative to US society and to US citizens.
07mk
2yr ago
This is something that gets me as well. I wager if you asked the person from MLive Media who wrote that statement to choose to become a Nazi right now, in the sense that he truly, in his heart of hearts, believed that Jews were sub-humans who ought to be exterminated, he couldn't do it, even under threat of death or torture. The best he could do is to play-act the role. I don't see why this would be any different for Scott Adams's views about black people or anyone's views about anything.
This does cross into free will territory and applies more broadly to any sort of behavior. A bank robber didn't have the choice to have a brain that tells him that grabbing a gun and threatening tellers was a good way to make money, no more than Charles Whitman had a choice to have a tumor in his brain affecting his amygdala before he went on a killing spree in UT Austin.
Yet our society does treat these behaviors as being "choices" and hold the people carrying these out as agents responsible for the consequences of these "choices." And to a large extent, our society depends on this in order to function. People noticed that holding people accountable for their "choices" is helpful for making a more comfortable society to live in, likely through incentivizing - perhaps "manipulating" is just as good a term - people to behave in certain ways. The way I see it, the idea that these types of things are choices is a sort of legal fiction that society holds up as a means to make it function at all. And basically no one who created the fiction realized it was fiction, and same goes for people who follow the fiction.
And so we get to cases like here, where someone like Scott Adams is excoriated for daring to "choose" his views. The person is just acting out the fictional thing that our society agreed on to treat as fact; he doesn't like Scott Adams's behavior and wants less of it, so he incentivizes less of it in society by punishing Scott Adams for doing that behavior, while invoking that fiction as the justification.
07mk
2mo ago
Well, if he‘s really not interested in debate, let him leave, don‘t ban him(or threaten to ban him). Call it keeping the moral high ground
I don't see how not enforcing against blatant rule violations is keeping the moral high ground. The rules are right there on the right sidebar, and he refused to follow the ones around things like speaking clearly or being no more obnoxious than necessary or proactively providing evidence, despite being given ample opportunity to do so. Letting the forum be polluted with the type of content that the forum was specifically set up to prevent seems to be immoral, if anything, in making the forum worse for the rest of the users who use this forum because of the types of discussion that is fostered by those rules being enforced (though I'd argue that there's no real moral dimension to it regardless). I don't know if Millard is a reasonable person, but he certainly did not post reasonable comments and, more importantly, posted comments that broke the forum's rules in a pretty central way.
07mk
4mo ago
It seems like trump is massively expanding the scope of executive power versus judicial/legislative power to the point where any president with more than 41 votes in the senate can do essentially whatever they want, with the sole exception of raising non-tariff taxes.
I'm not a Constitutional scholar, and much of this thread goes over my head, but this is one point in particular that I don't understand: how is it possible for the executive, through an executive order, to expand the scope of executive power? Either the executive has the power to declare and enforce whatever this EO declares, in which case he's just practicing power he had by nature of being the executive, or the executive lacks that power, and this EO is just unconstitutional or otherwise invalid, to be struck down by courts or by Congress impeaching him.
I'd always thought EOs were essentially pieces of paper with funny markings on them that the executive likes and his underlings are supposed to pay attention to if they want to please the boss. If the POTUS has the power to bootstrap the executive branch to dominating the other branches of government merely through an executive order, then that seems like a major loophole in the Constitution, which makes me think I'm missing something.
07mk
1yr ago
First time I ever heard the term was, as described in another comment, in relation to the Occupy protests from one of the social media posts in their favour.
This was my experience as well. The term "Progressive Stack" became popular IIRC during the Occupy Wall Street protests, being pushed* as the correct way to create a hierarchy in whose voices got heard first in these intentionally structure-less organizations. I had never heard the notion that this was actually a term of denigration by critics, but perhaps it's not too surprising, since that criticism tends to get leveled at many terms that some progressives choose to label themselves when other people start associating those labels with the underlying characteristics of the actual thing that the label is pointing at (obvious examples being "woke" and "social justice warrior").
* There's a very common conspiracy theory among leftists that Occupy Wall Street and/or aspects of it were intentionally sabotaged by progressives inserting their identity politics into it, as a way to sow division among people of different demographics within the working class. The fact that some seem to believe that the very term "Progressive Stack" is a term of denigration that critics imposed on the people pushing it makes this conspiracy theory funnier to me.
07mk
1yr ago
This is what I've been doing for years, starting back when Google Music became a thing, because subscription to that also came with a subscription to YouTube Red (a terrible name for their premium service, given the existence of RedTube - though still preferable to calling it YouTube One like every single brand in existence has been doing the last decade). Once Google Music got shuttered I just kept the YouTube Red subscription at the same price.
Of course, this makes me the sucker who got baited into a service I didn't initially want and stuck with it just out of laziness and inertia. I rationalize it that $10/mo is worth it for the hours I must save not watching ads on YT, to say nothing of the disruption and annoyance, but that rationalization is going to be harder for others depending on their circumstances, I admit.
07mk
1yr ago
Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"
This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.
By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.
Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.
And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.
I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here. Wording meaningful claims about truth in a way that's meant to sound controversial isn't good, but it's a whole other world away from content-less naked loosely connected declarations that amount to booing the outgroup. Like, the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as No given the political issue being discussed (as a leftist myself, I'm perfectly okay with saying that when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration, such as lower wages or suicide bombings; such things were the cost I would gladly have me and my fellow citizens pay for giving more poor people the opportunity to thrive in a first world nation like the USA. My opinion on that has changed since; I think I've gained greater empathy than I used to have for certain groups of people). And characterizing a drug as for aiding gay men in going to orgies isn't nice, but IIRC that was just one off-hand line in a comment that otherwise had some meaningful thing to say about different ways different drugs are covered by insurance. There's actually meat to the bones, along with all that shit.
The comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there. That difference matters to people who care about the meat on the bones, i.e. the actual content of the arguments, but that difference matters little to people who care primarily about getting their views lauded and their outgroup's views booed. This is one reason why, even as a leftist, I find the quality of conversation and discussion here, where it's predominantly populated by people well to the right of the most right-leaning person I might meet IRL. Who cares if they'll drop in little - or big - digs at me and my ingroup here and there or all the time? Their actual substantive criticisms are actually interesting and valuable and the wording and the digs don't affect the level of charity or quality of arguments.
More options
Context Copy link