07mk
11hr ago
The issue is that the "in discourse" is a load-bearing portion of what makes the heckler's veto negative. Because discourse is just consenting people talking, rather than imposing their coercive force on others. It makes sense that there are other standards when coercion is involved, and certainly perfection ought never be the standard. I think there's plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on any value between 50.0000001% and 99.9999999% though.
07mk
11hr ago
The refusal of Dems to say "okay we won but let's change things so everyone is more comfortable next time" may be the single most important thing behind the future death of America.
I feel like that might be overstating it, though I have no real strong argument for anything else being a more important thing other than maybe AI being the one most important thing behind the future death of [all nations]. But it's certainly an important point, and I'm not sure why other Dems don't get this, other than hubris, ego, and blindness by hatred. It seems obvious to me that, for my party to be the party that actually deserves to win, it needs to actually be better in some meaningful sense than the other party, and for them to be better in any meaningful sense requires having enough humility to open oneself to attacks of cheating and fraud and other bad things, taking those seriously, and correcting ourselves based on that, especially when they come from our opponents whom we've judged as being evil or whatever. This is abusable, but also, the reverse is also far more abusable.
Though the saying "the way you do anything is the way you do everything" isn't strictly true in every case, I do believe that when it comes to ideological thinking, it's almost always true. The only way we can have any confidence that our proposed policies are truly better than the other guys' proposed policies - instead of merely policies that we've convinced ourselves is better - is by coming to those policies in a humble, self-critical way (necessary, not sufficient, though), which we can only have any confidence we did if we also treat political attacks from our enemies in a humble, self-critical way. The idea of crushing my enemies in order to forward policies that I've genuinely convinced myself is better than the other guy's just because I genuinely consider the other guys evil seems just completely obviously far more evil than that to me.
07mk
12hr ago
I'm not sure what this has to do with the heckler's veto, which has to do with a 3rd party preventing 1 party from communicating to another consenting party by physically impeding the communication. This seems more akin to a tyranny of the majority kind of thing, which is also heavily misused (since, in a democracy, a majority must be tyrannical sometimes, almost definitionally) and I'm not sure really describes this situation accurately either, though it's more fitting.
07mk
13hr ago
One of the major points I (and others) was making is that this not a situation where you can rules lawyer your way out of it. Democracy requires consensus, you need to be persuasive and to make everyone feel like the elections are free and fair.
I feel like I see this kind if application of rules-lawyering in a lot of inappropriate contexts, such as interpersonal relationships. As if there were some 3rd party judge or jury observing the proceedings who everyone is trying to convince, rather than the reality that it's just the other person or people who you need to convince. You can't rules-lawyer your way into someone apologizing to you, forgiving you, being grateful to you, liking you, liking someone else, disliking someone else, etc. You need to actually understand what it would take to convince that specific person and do what it takes to do it, including sacrificing values you might hold sacred, if that's what it takes. Or just understand that you can't do the convincing and stop wasting everyone's time and energy.
Though maybe that's my secular atheistic upbringing speaking, and in extremely religious societies where everyone follows the same religion, this rules-lawyering is both effective and healthy. Maybe that's why this tendency to rules-lawyer is so common; our brains might have evolved to survive in extremely religious societies where everyone can appeal to some god or another to convince others.
07mk
1d ago
Despite what NAACP stands for, I think "colored person" would still be considered an offensive term to refer to someone these days (unlike the enlightened and inclusive "person of color").
07mk
1d ago
Women surrendering to their base instincts when it comes to sex leading to less overall sex seems entirely plausible, though.
07mk
1d ago
I'd guess that calling a black man a "negro" in the USA would be considered more offensive than calling a hapa a "halfsie." Though I don't have direct experience with either to draw on. I do recall it was around a decade ago when there was some Twitter kerfuffle because some Central/South American lady posted about her black cat being named Negro, which a lot of English speakers took issue with.
07mk
1d ago
That gets you the answer to what that person believes radicalized them, which is potentially a useful data point, but also often misleading as to be less than useless. Because whatever reason someone believes they did something will almost always be heavily - probably mostly, by my estimation - reflective of what feeds their ego.
07mk
1d ago
The smartphones can't really be decoupled from the status cause, since smartphones have had, in part, the effect of lowering relative status of most men for most women due to enabling easier access to higher status men than before.
07mk
1d ago
Well, it's okay to say that someone is "black" in America, but refer to them by the Spanish term for the same word and... (ironically, the former used to be considered very offensive as recently as the 2000s, and the latter used to be a standard non-offensive term some time before that).
07mk
1d ago
So the word is actually only used as a subject of a clause, so the first one could work, as in "would you toss me that iPad," but the latter wouldn't really work. A variation like "I don't want you to feed me those veggies" would work, though.
07mk
1d ago
There's always a half-dozen of these fads bouncing around the upper and aspirational upper-middle classes. It's soothing behavior for class anxiety, nothing more.
With how poorly prepared I see some (a lot of) young adults are for adulthood, I have a suspicion that a lot of this is aspirational parents using these "one weird trick," "lifehacks," and such to substitute for the basic traditional stuff like providing a safe, secure home, teaching them basic life skills and inculcating useful values like discipline, and such, because the latter is really really hard and requires a lot of personal sacrifice in both time and energy.
And mostly unrelated, but these hacks remind me a lot of what seems to have happened with the way education standards seem to have evolved by taking "tricks" that high performing people use (e.g. "whole word reading," which is the way a lot of intelligent, fast readers read words in dense texts, by looking at the 1st and last letters and inferring the rest from context, or the techniques of adding or multiplying numbers in one's head more easily by adding on whatever's necessary to get to the nearest multiple of 10, then getting rid of it at the end, which is certainly the way I figured out how to do it when I was young) and teaching it as the baseline to everyone, under the false belief that that would just lift everyone up to high performance. Instead of what I believe is the reality, that high performers have internalized the standard, slower way enough such that they can build these tricks on top of it, and these tricks need that stable base to actually be effective. Looks like a lot of cargo culting.
07mk
1d ago
I mean, it has a net -4 rating, which is hardly mass downvoting. And the core chunk of the comment was pretty transparently a massive strawman about loser men and their supposed unreasonably high standards based on nothing really concrete. I think the lack of substantial rebuttal has mostly to do with magicalkittycat's history of showing the same style of arguing as GuessWho (darwin2500 from Reddit), which makes almost any meaningful argument with him impossible. I've long since accepted that there's little-to-none value to be gained from any conversation with him and learned to just downvote comments from him that I find problematic and just move on.
07mk
1d ago
Fortunately for us, my son never addressed me in the 2nd person around any black people (you is pronounced "nigga" in Korean).
Hm, was he taught Korean in a sort of Western, status-independent way? The only time a Korean child would use that term for his father is when he's overtly trying to disrespect him, as "nigga" is only used when referring to people at or below one's status.
07mk
1d ago
The comment is about the claim that this reflects a "new direction" for the left and pointing out that this is actually exactly just the existing, well-worn standard operating procedure, by way of e.g. making remigration seem completely out of bounds or targeting "the bigger issue" or root cause at the sacrifice of actually solving whatever issue is at hand directly.
07mk
2d ago
Perhaps, and it's certainly possible that it's just something that happened that someone slapped a label onto, but I'm not sure there's such a thing as a positive "unavoidable consequence" that isn't sensitive to "leftist project" policy decisions or any "project" policy decisions. There are about a Graham's Number times more ways things can go negative than they can go positive, and in the rare cases where the positive things happen by chance, they seem extremely easy to destroy, either completely by chance or due to people specifically attacking the parts that make things positive, as is the case here.
07mk
2d ago
With how "melting pot" has been deemed Nazi-adjacent in the past decade, in favor of "salad bowl" or "mosaic," I'm skeptical that repeating history in this way is likely. With immigrants and their children being actively discouraged against assimilating, it's going to be hard for them to "Irishify," even before you get to the superficial differences. Arguably we're seeing some of the fruits of that change in attitude towards immigrant assimilation today, with the strong anti-Jewish push happening on the left.
07mk
2d ago
no matter how far left they move, they won't lose people to the Republicans, because it's simply socially unacceptable for people who have gone Democratic to ever vote for Republicans.
Even if it's socially unacceptable, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen (I'd guess it happened pretty significantly in 2024). And things that are socially unacceptable are socially unacceptable until they're not. Depending on just what a DSA takeover of the Democratic party is like, I could see that changing pretty quickly. I just hope it doesn't get to that point; people are naturally very excited/depressed right after a particular election result, but I'm hopeful that this doesn't portend a trend.
07mk
2d ago
I think you just have a misread of what is meant by "suffering," considering you seem to pair it with "pleasure" as if they're particularly related. "Suffering" isn't an antonym to "pleasure," not is it a synonym to "pain." "Suffering" just means "getting a less desirable consequence than some alternative." It's intrinsically tied to consequentialism, because getting a consequence one dislikes is intrinsically suffering, and consequentialism has to do with determining ethics based on the consequences that they produce.
A paperclip maximizer, to whatever extent it can "believe" things or experience qualia or whatever, is "suffering" if it's not maximizing paperclips, definitionally.
07mk
2d ago
That's neither here nor there to my point, though. My point is that, for our claim of lack of fraud to be credible, we ought to be so welcoming to checks like this that the people who want to do them actually find it easier to do the checks than not (since we'd be carrying the weight for them). For that, I'd say that any claims of difficulty or obstacles in checks ought to be welcomed and encouraged, rather than minimized or even dismissed, especially when our own biased judgment tells us that they're frivolous.
07mk
2d ago
I'm not sure where you're getting that in my comment, as I mentioned nothing about gross hedonic product, which is certainly not an antonym of "suffering" or synonym of "positive... effects" which are the terms I used.
07mk
2d ago
I think that's as strong evidence that leftists care about opposing pedophilia as Republicans' calling out voter fraud in recent elections they lost is evidence that they care about opposing voter fraud. These are just easy weapons lying around to pick up and throw at enemies, nothing more, nothing less. That's even before getting into the fact that, almost certainly, Epstein and his ilk account for less than 0.1% of all pedophilic crime that happened during the time period when they were (are?) active and are almost certainly dwarfed by activities done by much lower class people that those same people conspicuously try to ignore or downplay.
07mk
2d ago
All of these weaknesses of fraud against easy checks like this only means anything if we can be confident that the checking process can and will be done properly without people being impeded. This is why I've said since at least the 2020 election that, as a Democrat, once Trump and his cronies started throwing out (IMHO highly frivolous and malicious) accusations of voter fraud (I think 2020 wasn't the first time they did this, but it wasn't as much of an issue for 2016 due to them actually winning) that I'd want Democrats to go along with and encourage the fraud investigations with so much enthusiasm that even the most die-hard of the MAGAs would be embarrassed and call for backing things up a bit. Without something approaching that level of rooting out fraud in situations that ended up in one's side's favor, lack of fraud can't really be credibly claimed.
One of the things I dislike about that sort of behavior here is that most discussion about things relating to status/victimhood tends to be completely suppressed in generic discussion settings by use of shaming and other status games. Being concerned about low status people who aren't part of the list that's been pre-approved by high-status people is, in itself, low status, and so the lowest status people who can't get on that list get no honest open discussion about their suffering. I'd prefer that The Motte (and also everywhere, but I place that wish in the same category of wishes I have for curing world hunger through feeding everyone unicorn farts) be one place where there could be some honest open discussion about that. But it inevitably attracts people who ostentatiously dismiss it only as concerns of those LOSERS, and YOU aren't a LOSER, ARE YOU? No, if you were a WINNER like ME, you'd just call the LOSERS LOSERS and move on, so why are you discussing it?
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