07mk
3hr ago
Socializing is a lot like eating well or exercising. Some people naturally stay thin and fit, while others are just really lucky and actually love working out.
I think this is an apt analogy (along with the stuff about how society has failed a lot of people both in terms of loneliness and obesity) but also not quite right. Eating well or exercising, by nature of physics, definitionally causes someone to stay thin (tautologically by what "eating well" means, to some extent) and arguably fit. But socializing doesn't have similar effect for loneliness. I'd say that building meaningful connections with others is what leads to preventing the deleterious effects akin to preventing obesity. One of my great insights that I had as an adult is that socializing by, e.g. spending lots of periodic time with like-minded people who enjoy your company and like you for who you are and vice versa, doing activities that everyone enjoys and/or is passionate about doesn't actually lead to building meaningful connections or relationships.
07mk
3hr ago
If we assume that those whose ethnicity was listed as "unknown" are disproportionately Pakistani, there might have been as many as 3,000 Pakistani men charged with sex crimes every year since 2017. If each of these defendants had sexually exploited, on average, two white girls apiece, and for each one who was charged, another Pakistani wasn't charged – all of a sudden, the 250k figure doesn't seem half as implausible as I thought two days ago.
That's a lot of assumptions, though, and I think 2-per-defendant seems particularly hard to justify. By the accounts I read, the ratio tended to be skewed the other way around, where each victim had multiple rapists, often in quick succession. These are grooming gangs, so that makes sense. Of course, a gang of, say, 20, could rape 40 girls for the 2-to-1 ratio, but also, it could be gangs of 40 raping 20 girls.
As you say, we don't know. Which I'd guess is just as keikaku by whoever's in charge of collecting data for the British criminal justice system.
07mk
4hr ago
Anecdote from my freshman year of college. I found myself turning down invites because I liked watching pirated shows, and films. A few weeks in I decided to never turn down an invite unless I had a very good excuse. Not disappointed in that choice at all.
I made this kind of decision sometime after college. It's one of my bigger regrets in life, as it raised the amount of suffering I went through in everyday life without providing any meaningful positives. No particular big negative event came out of it, just a constant long-term significant reduction in quality of life compared to the alternative. I ended up regretting it enough to basically reverse it about 5 years ago, never saying Yes to an invite unless there was some specific reason I really wanted to go or to hang out with those specific people. My life has been a lot better in those ~5 years.
07mk
4hr ago
I'd consider a World Cup game easily worth it to go if I had the opportunity to do so without paying, but I'd say that basically any public entertainment event as intrinsically torturous, due to proximity to crowds. Doesn't mean it's never worth it, but the positives better be high enough to outweigh the significant figurative torture.
Either that, or it all counts, and as such all fans of sexualized anime are actually pedophiles.
Of course, vanishingly few sex-negative folks or "wokes" believe this, but, like basically all "woke" criticism of any media, it's a convenient tool to reach for when one wants to criticize some piece of media that they dislike in a way that appears to be based on anything other than arbitrary personal preference.
Arguably, this is the very phenomenon happening with Blood Rain, as Stellar Blade, like other East Asian semi-realistic video games such as Capcom's Resident Evil or Square Enix's Final Fantasy, uses a stylized anime-inspired visual style in terms of character design, rather than going for actual human-like realism. The first game actually featured a support character named Lily who actually looks very similar to Evie in terms of hair and facial features (some have speculated that Evie is the child of Eve and Lily, which wouldn't be impossible given the technology of the setting, but also, seems both way too on the nose in name and out of left field in the relationships) and was also commented on as appearing younger-looking in part due to the anime-inspired style.
07mk
6hr ago
Agreed. As near as I can tell, progressivism is 100% a who/whom ideology.
Perhaps the same could be said of all ideologies.
The thing that gets me, though, is that progressivism specifically is supposed to be not about that, because it's specifically supposed to be about progress (as the name might imply). Which means progressing away from the old, bad way of figuring things out based on tribalism and moralizing and such, and instead using our modern, enlightened tools to figure out what the best things are. Unfortunately, it seems like there are like 30 progressives who try to think like me and about a billion witches bitches tribalists who simply use the stated principles of progressivism to launder in their own tribal opinions as the Officially Good Beliefs, almost always without conscious intent or even awareness.
07mk
6hr ago
That makes me think this is another one of those self-reinforcing cycles, as more and more males lack ability to partner up with women after they enter adolescence due to women being more and more likely to reject them, more and more of their sexual experience is limited to solo activity with porn, which is more and more generated via popularization of both anime and AI, which will be shaped based on what they found attractive when they first started watching porn, which is getting younger and younger, which results in women being more and more likely to reject more and more young men due to their judgment of their preferences.
07mk
7hr ago
Unfortunately, that's not really an option for people who are bad at consciously lying, even before you take into account that my sex and race are sufficiently low status enough in the woke hierarchy to negate the positives of being bi. After all, the notion that "gay men are the whites of the LGBT community" has been around for at least as long as the term "woke" has been popular to describe this ideology, and bi men aren't too far off from that. And as much as I wish it were not so, my looks also are nowhere near sufficiently good enough to counteract all that, either.
07mk
7hr ago
I'm still a feminist sex-positive progressive. There are dozens of us, dozens! Unfortunately, we're all in hiding, so perhaps it's accurate to say that we all disappeared when the SJW/wokes took over.
07mk
7hr ago
The pressure to return artifacts has declined because of Peak Woke, not because of the specific connection of the Benin Bronzes to slavery.
This seems akin to arguing that the reason the water level dropped over the past few hours isn't because of the gravitational effects of the moon and the Sun on the Earth, it happened because of low tide. Taking for granted that Peak Woke being in the past is a thing (I must admit, there are enough witness accounts to make it plausible that in some places, some of the time, some of the most extreme of the woke effects have somewhat receded, even if my personal experience isn't concordant with it), it being in the past is something that happened due to many things that happened between then and now. I don't think anyone can truly know exactly what and how much each specific event went into the recession from Peak Woke, but it seems plausible that scratching the surface of some woke cause and finding previously-unseen facts that are embarrassing to the woke was a major part of it.
07mk
8hr ago
Discretionary sentencing should be with respect to the severity of the case details, not with respect to whether the judge feels like sending us all a message
I don't know about this specific case, but my general understanding is that when a judge is said to be "sending a message," it is always understood to be specifically because of the severity of the case details, and the "message" (deterrence) is specifically about making sure the rest of us understand that if we commit some crime that is specifically as severe in the details as this particular case, then we could expect such a severe level of punishment.
07mk
1d ago
Could be, but it's not about the hypocrisy. It's the fact that the exact same arguments, principles, and underlying ideology are invoked each time. It's a reflection of the fact that the arguments are disingenuous, because they're fundamentally based on unfalsifiable faith-based claims that can be picked up when someone dislikes something and then dropped when time proves something popular and well-liked.
07mk
1d ago
I'm only against those last 2 to the extent that they provide incentive to production. To whatever extent that they don't (e.g. perhaps existing images that were pulled from some FBI evidence locker), it's ridiculous that possession or distribution would be illegal. Unfortunately, it's one of those legal fights that doesn't seem possible to win, though. It's also hard to parse out exactly how much the extents involved here are, and some actual studies and models might be valuable, but I don't know if such scientific research exists for this kind of material.
Some people argue that the original victim is re-victimized each time the media is seen; I find this ridiculous as well, as there's no magical link between the markings on paper or pixels on a screen and the original person from whom the light was reflected and captured by a camera. In terms of the harms to the person who consume such media, I believe each individual is responsible for the harm that comes about from their choice to consume whatever media. If we were in a situation where so many people eschewed such responsibility that it was causing societal problems, I could see the argument that being illiberal in this case is worth the tradeoffs, but I don't think we're there, and I'm skeptical that we'd get there.
That said, who knows how fast society will change in the near future thanks to AI accelerating everything, and short-form social media content causing massive amounts of distributed media production by children. It's not a ridiculous concern, but one that I still think is wrong.
07mk
1d ago
Back in those days, one either called Mr. Moviefone for showtimes - please say the name of the movie you’d like to see, now - or just took pot luck when showing up.
Wow, I never knew that Moviefone had gotten voice detection. Back in my days, it asked you to punch in the name, and presumably the Moviefone database had mappings of the first few digits that corresponded to letters of the common movies out at the time.
I recall Uwe Boll being a somewhat household name among gaming nerds in the 2000s due to him directing a number of video game adaptations, including House of the Dead, Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark, and even Far Cry. By all accounts, all of these films were incredibly awful (I never watched any), and he was reportedly barely more than a scammer who took advantage of Germany's laws around tax breaks around filmmaking or something to earn a living while pumping these out. He also famously challenged negative critics of his films to boxing matches, at least one of which actually happened. I don't remember the results, but I recall watching some grainy footage of the fight.
Culturally, it seems pretty clear that right-wing media is the subversive, rebellious one right now, even moreso in the filmmaking industry. Given that, it's perhaps unsurprising that what seems like such overt right-wing propaganda is made by someone who's generally been rejected (for quality, rather than any political reasons) by the industry like Uwe Boll. The western film by Ben Shapiro's company which starred Gina Carano, who was kicked off of Star Wars over some, IIRC, right-wing tweets, also come to mind. Thing is, with AI, the costs of producing films is going down very quickly, and so I have to imagine it's only a matter of time before a lot more films with this kind of messaging and this level of production value come out. With that democratization, it won't just be right-wing but all kinds of propagandistic Hollywood-level feature films that will likely come out from all over the spectrum. Should be exciting to see which ones end up winning out, if any.
There's the whole distribution-control as well, of course. Democratic governments have been locking down the Internet more and more, so maybe we're in for ideological filtering of feature films via distribution in the future that's just as strong as it is now via production. I'd hope that Twitter can act as a release valve, as well as torrents, but the latter are too niche, and the former can be censored or brought to heel if governments are motivated enough.
A better defense (IMO) for radical speech, is that even overall “bad” speech has some “good” parts, and you need those to prevent stagnation and decay (like inbreeding). For example, this site has a lot of opinions I disagree with, but occasionally I discover some important fact or argument I didn’t notice before, which aligns with my values (changing my object-level, like policy, opinion).
I agree with this, but also, the fact that you're presenting this at the end of your comment as some alternative or niche defense of free speech in part because the generic "pro-free speech" American normie wouldn't automatically recognize it makes me pretty depressed and reinforces my pessimism about the state of ideological/political discourse in America. When I was growing up in the 90s-early-00s going to hyper-blue/Dem/progressive schools in hyper-blue/Dem/progressive areas of America, this very point was taught to us as one of the - if not the - primary bases for supporting free speech. Literally everyone is biased, literally everyone has blind spots, and so the only way to avoid following biases down a cliff or being crushed by a steamroller coming in from our blind spot is to have many diverse people with diverse perspectives and diverse biases and blind spots be free to speak their opinion without fear of retribution merely for the contents of their opinions, to better mitigate our biases and cover our blind spots. Even so, it was clear that it would never be truly perfect, that it was just the least-worst option. This is also one of the bases of the scientific method and peer review. The thought that the very hyper-blue/Dems/progressives that championed this would turn out to be its most effective killers never occurred to me as a child or even as a very young adult, though by the time I was in my late 20s, it almost flipped to being almost obvious.
Now, there are many failures that led to this happening, but one thing I've noticed is that a lot of people seem to refuse to think recursively. In terms of free speech, we know for a fact that we're all, individually, biased; as such, if we are to judge what sorts of opinions are "within the bounds of free speech" and which opinions aren't, we will helplessly, inevitably, gratuitously, and likely moralistically, falsely judge opinions that we are biased against as being out of bounds, even though, in fact, they are within bounds. As such, no individual or even particular group of individuals can be trusted to make that kind of judgment call. This is why I want opinions that I personally find hateful, evil, pathetic, and even harmful to be spread openly and without any fear by the genuine opinion-holders. The positive contribution to dialogue and society at large comes from the very fact that I and people like me can't read their opinions without shaking and having to suppress our urge to shut them up.
Another aspect is the psychological finding* that fans of teams tend to judge even playing fields as being biased against them, and ones that are biased in favor of their team as being even. As such, if I genuinely want an even playing field, I must seek a playing field that appears biased against my side. This is one reason why I try (try - I'm imperfect) to steelman and to privilege opinions from people who I viscerally or Pavlovianly find, again, hateful, evil, pathetic, harmful, etc., and believe it's the responsibility of anyone who wants to get at truth to do something similar. Refusing to do such on the basis that it's hard or doesn't feel good makes one little better than a blind partisan. I must admit, I'm probably a blind partisan due to cowardice in most contexts.
* The replication crisis does put question to this, but in my biased mind, I believe that this would be one of those findings that would actually come out to be true or true enough if, in the future, psychology researchers were able to gain enough credibility to conclude such a thing from their research.
The non-wokes are upset because they wanted EVE, and Evie's assets are comparatively tame. And at least some of them (including Asmongold) agree she looks too young as well.
As best as I can tell, there's like 2 non-wokes complaining about Evie replacing Eve because she's got a more boyish style and attempting to manufacture consensus to the effect, and everyone else is happy to have another sexy and hyper-sexualized female protagonist in a AAA video game industry that has been leaning away from that. I'm a huge fan of the first game, and the Stellar Blade subreddit which I check pretty often certainly has been close to 100% positive.
Funniest part to me, though, has been the entirely predictable reaction by the "wokes" to memory-hole their reaction to Eve (only 2 years ago!), which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their reaction to 2B, which had itself involved an attempt to memory-hole their predecessors' reaction to Bayonetta.
In terms of Evie's looks, many people have pointed out that young women in their 20s or late teens who look like Evie aren't all that uncommon in Korea and other East Asian countries, with women in their 30s and 40s looking like that not being unicorns either. I've seen at least a couple of cosplayers dress themselves up to look like her with convincingly similar facial features, though with filters and AI, it's hard to say how real those are.
07mk
1d ago
There is no "steelman" for pedophilia, unlike for racism (freedom of association), sexism (traditional gender roles), and homophobia (traditional sexual morality).
There absolutely is, and, somewhat ironically, it was something pushed by the pre-"woke" and even pre-"SJW" progressive leftists certainly in the late 00s. I still see some of it now, with the woke-natured push to retire that word and replace it with Minor Attracted Persons.
The steelman is pretty simple: pedophilia is a sexual orientation like any other, a sort of innate characteristic of someone that they're helpless to change, and finding something attractive doesn't imply actually doing anything to fulfill that attraction. As such, pedophiles deserve compassion, not condemnation, along with the structures to help them never make their attraction come to fruition in a healthy, non-shameful way. This wasn't a popular topic of discussion, but it absolutely was one among college leftists when I was a college leftist, involving things like future realistic androids or future VR experiences. I remember listening to a friend who was a psych major talking sympathetically about some therapy recording with a pedophile he heard in class, and how that man was clearly in pain and suffering due to his helpless feelings of attraction, which he knew he had to suppress.
Blood Rain, of course, is a video game that uses computers to generate imagery by modeling a virtual world, so it's pretty akin to the VR experiences mentioned above. Assuming that Evie were actually child-looking (a judgment I disagree with, but that's irrelevant here), it's perfectly defensible to have a game that overtly sexualizes her, and plenty of people have indeed defended such a notion.
07mk
1d ago
When someone posts an account of rape dogs being used by a group the median Motteposter finds sympathetic, we get posts explaining why trained rape dogs are almost certainly physically impossible. (In this case, probably correctly). When someone posts an account of rape dogs being used by a group the median Motteposter finds unsympathetic, we now have two people trying to defend the plausibility of rape dogs.
Who are those two people? I see just zeke5123a responding to your statement about rape dogs, and neither defended the plausibility of rape dogs. The point was pretty clearly to call out the reasoning that went into claiming some sort of equavalency in the plausibility of IDF rape dogs versus Pakistani rape gang rape dogs. Whether or not the latter is particularly plausible or even more plausible than the former is neither here nor there; it's the reasoning used to conclude that that's being criticized.
And I recall that there was actual discussion about the plausibility of IDF rape dogs when that was posted, with some people concluding that it was implausible, but at least one poster writing paragraph after paragraph about why he found the reports credible. That's what's supposed to happen when you attempt to rationally discuss something. Different people have different perspectives and they make their arguments, hopefully rationally. And when arguments fail at rationality or seem otherwise biased or unreasonable, others are supposed to call out that failure with the full confidence that their criticism of the reasoning will not be falsely interpreted as an attack on whatever object-level position is being discussed.
Be the change you want to see in the world Motte.
07mk
1d ago
My gut feeling would be the obvious - that a rape dog in an organisation with a tradition of dog training is less absurd than a rape dog in an organisation which eschews dogs ownership for religious reasons.
My gut feeling is that, for most people, the higher barrier that prevents them from having rape dogs is their dislike of committing or enabling rape, rather than their inability or dislike of training dogs.
07mk
2d ago
So it stands to reason that making it harder for women (and people in general) to secure student loans would reduce their attendance rates and would organically, downstream of that, lead to more relationships, marriage, and children.
That's simply not going to fly, for as long as people believe in blank statism. Unfortunately, the belief in blank statism has been self-reinforcing, due to policies under its belief leading to less competent people getting elevated to positions of status and power, leading to less rigor and more nonsense being taught as true, leading to more people believing in blank statism. Unfortunately, the beatings will continue until morale improves, or until enough of society is destroyed enough such that no one has the energy to carry out any more beatings than necessary to fend off starvation for one more day. I have no idea how to escape this cycle outside of maybe pinning my hopes on AI actually enabling fully automated luxury Communism, but that's a long shot.
This is why I've said that if I were to become emperor of Earth, one of my first decrees would be to outlaw all demographic-based statistical analysis, under penalty of summary execution, with all civilians being deputized to carry out this punishment. It probably wouldn't be enough to fix it either, but it seems like less of a long shot than AI saving us.
07mk
2d ago
I would say it's reasonable to expect an illustration of reasoning you disagree with to be a somewhat plausible application of that reasoning to a somewhat plausible scenario.
I would say it isn't reasonable, because that's actually not engaging with the reasoning. The thing with reasoning is that it's an abstraction that explains the interaction between real things, not an expression of real things in themselves.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I have long been sceptical of "intersectionality" and related ideas, but it's never led me to oppose trans people as a whole. If people share bad arguments in favour a position, or if bad people share arguments in favour of a position, that doesn't imply (in the sense of logical implication) that the position is wrong.
You seem to be implying that I "oppose trans people as a whole," which is plainly not evident in the comments that I wrote here (or anywhere - because I don't oppose trans people as a whole or even in any meaningful way - I oppose certain types of trans activists in their specific activism). It's also not that bad people make bad arguments in favor of a position, it's that the only arguments in favor of a position are bad arguments (whether they're from bad people or not is neither here nor there; some of them are bad, others aren't, but they all engage in bad reasoning when making these arguments).
07mk
2d ago
The tone of the entire paragraph certainly suggests that you disagree with what you have dubbed "dualism".
That suggestion you notice is accurate; I certainly do disagree with dualism in general and this form of dualism specifically. This doesn't imply that my statement:
e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.
is a statement of complaint about some real events, rather than an illustration of the reasoning being explained.
If you don't mind sharing, what made you change your mind?
A combination of a lot of things, many little, a few big. The big/overarching ones would be: being tired of how much motivated reasoning I had to engage in; reading primary sources of the most highly-regarded "scholarship" that underpins intersectional feminism and realizing that there's no there there; noticing the complete lack of self-awareness by the supporters of the ideology in analyzing their own motivations for believing and supporting the ideology (i.e. searching for self-serving reasons that explain one's genuine belief in the ideology), which extended to punishing people for attempting to be self-aware themselves. This led me to conclude that this truly was a secular religion that was faith-based to its core, with, at most, one grain of truth (i.e. people sometimes treat other people unfairly due to their biases) which had already been incorporated into basic liberalism for decades anyway.
The one thing I've found that works is combination of being family + regular interaction. If you ever figure out how it could be done to non-family, I hope you'll tell me!
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