4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
<3
User ID: 355
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
11hr ago
I would care significantly less what they did if I weren't forced to be complicit in it, by way of taxes if nothing else (which also forces me to in fact be okay with some amount of being blown up by Arab terrorists in revenge, because per my own morality I do deserve it); but yes, I do in fact think that a 1:100 valuation, especially from a capable state, is an unacceptable defection against peaceful modernity as I envision it. In my ideal world, every state brazenly implementing such a value function in favour of its own citizens ought to be ganged up on by everyone else, until only countries that assign reasonable value even to foreigners remain. ((1) I'm not sure what sort of ratio I'm okay with; (2) I'm happy if all of Israel's enemies are next, should they prove that they still have such a preference function after Israel has been obliterated. Israel at least has provided circumstantial evidence that their relative valuation is not confined to a handful of countries.) Think of Russia/Ukraine as the usual comparison case - in the case of those two countries, neither actually dares to "treat their enemies as enemies" in the Israeli fashion, because they know full well that being the first to do so would invite massive Western retribution (if Russia does it) or at least a nearly as fatal downturn in Western support (if Ukraine does).
As for (1), it's not just the US. (I'm not American! The USS Liberty episode was just the starkest display of cuckoldry I could think of, and probably more compelling to our American majority.)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
15hr ago
Unless you really do sign up to the deontological "the bad thing is people getting off to CP", I don't see how this even sketches a slippery slope that actually ends up somewhere bad. How do we get from "CP is decriminalised, but actual sexual acts with children are as illegal as they always were" to any greater prevalence of the latter? You have to contend with at least one great counterexample, which is that simultaneously with depictions of graphic violence (and even compelling simulations of engaging in it) becoming ever better and more widely available, actual violence is on the decline.
Gay marriage fell so fast because the underlying moral taboo (on gay sex) had collapsed many decades prior, following the collapse of either moral framework it could be derived from (Christianity, dominant masculinity). The condemnation of sex with children rests on a different framework (rejection of children's moral and contractual autonomy), which I don't see as declining at all - in fact, if anything, with rampant safetyism, trigger warnings and coddled college students, the principle that some are too young and innocent to manage their own affairs is ascendant.
Well, I'd peg Iran as a good case of "bad guys who are in the right". I don't have much love left for the Islamic theocracy they are running and think there are many ways in which they deny human flourishing for no good reason at all, but also it seems clear to me that they have more of a popular mandate to run the country than anyone else does, and in particular they came to power as a sort of last-resort response to all sorts of alternative attempts of running Iran were tried and turned out to be more unjust.
As for Israel Bad, let me present an abbreviated case that Israel is in fact Bad. Really, in my estimation and value system, it is hard to think of a state entity that is more unambiguously evil: they stole land to build a murderous ethnostate (the last part already being bad in itself, if you subscribe to a certain brand of humanism); take, take and take from even their so-called friends while repaying the friendship with perfidy and treason, and use their extensive influence network to gaslight the friends into not even being able to coherently respond to said perfidy; and, worst of all, they come to be among the worst purveyors of hypocrisy and double standards anywhere to cover up for their actions, which I see as an attack on the idea of standards and rules, and civilisation built upon it, itself. If an Arab kills one random Israeli, they tell us, this is an atrocity of the highest order, retroactively justifying every abuse that not only this Arab but the grandfather of his cousin thrice removed was subjected to; if an Israeli kills a hundred random Arabs, this is maybe a little excessive and you really wish they would exercise restraint but of course their right to defend themselves should not be questioned? Those hundred probably included a lot of people who felt vaguely positively about the Arab who killed one Israeli before? Even their very founding myth does this - their target demographic suffered the great injustice of being murdered and expelled for the sake of someone else's ethnostate, so they will gloriously murder and expel an entirely unrelated people to get their ethnostate. The median Israeli, furthermore, seems about as complicit in this as any citizen can be complicit in the actions of their country - few other countries are as affluent, polyglot and well-connected, and I figure any Israeli who wanted to leave would be welcomed with open arms in most of the Western world. Certainly, if I were Israeli, I hope I would have the integrity to either leave or else accept any retribution that comes my way with the serenity of a repentant murderer on death row.
I think having the worst version of their standards applied to themselves is the most appropriate punishment for purveyors of double standards. Israel contends that 55k dead Palestinians (80% civilians) is a just response to 1.2k dead Israelis (68% civilians) (Wikipedia figures). If against all odds Iran came through and successfully applied the same ratio to them, I would not think the world became a better* place, but it would be hard to shake the feeling that it became a more just one, in the ruat caelum way.
*I do not reject the argument that net suffering even for Arabs in Israel (let alone net disutility for its Imperial Citizens) is lower than net suffering for Arabs in self-governed countries, but find it irrelevant. I wish for people to have the right to be governed by their own choice and consent, including the right to be governed badly.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
"Should have" to what end?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
Ah. Well, apart from the obvious dimension that it is edgy sacred-values trolling, in her case it really doesn't sound so much like particular sympathy for pedos as like a sex worker's spin on the usual lesswronger affectation of "I am still resentful about my childhood and think everyone like me should have been allowed to fast-forward to my adult life as a kid"? The standard version is everyone from Pope Scott I to >half of this forum arguing for abolition of mandatory schooling.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
Well, with that one, I concur with the argument. Fight me?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
I would put these in the "edgy sacred values trolling" (see below) and/or "America" category, which for me makes sense given that I'm currently (back) in a country where the age of consent is 14.
This doesn't sound like "pedo stuff" so much as the usual exercise of pissing off normies by asking them to trade off sacred values (the concept has been floating around the LWsphere for a long time, I thought there was a canonical SSC citation but couldn't find it). I think parsing "so is A or B more sacred, in a contrived scenario where you have to choose between them" as "I want you to profane against both A and B" is just part of what sacredness feels like from the inside.
(Probably in fact here B is just considered more sacred, so it just loses in the same way "kidneys for money" invites the "you are an evil cannibal turbocapitalist" attack)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
I don't think I noticed that, somehow. What sort of "pedo stuff" are we talking about, on the spectrum from toddler rape to the American "that bikini pic? She was 17 years and 364 days old, you monster"?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
I'm going to stake a plot in the currently undervalued quadrant of "she is not attractive, and her presence is a net positive for the ratsphere". Her data posts are up there with the old okcupid blog in terms of interesting information nobody else dares to collate, and, well, perhaps it's my first-year 4channer programming showing through but I ultimately still feel that that which can be destroyed by trolling should be.
The Motte is in fact the first rat-adjacent space in which I have noticed how much seething hatred she seems to inspire in certain quarters. It seems... hard to determine why it's so extreme, but at the same time totally unsurprising that it is there? After all, she has consciously and openly built her social status by entering a community of nerds starved for female attention and selectively dangling hers before them, making a show of being simultaneously promiscuous and picky to come across as the stereotypical "slut who will sleep with everyone but you" to almost everyone simultaneously, with echoes of the circle crusher trope as well. On top of that, her audience includes a large number on the alt-right~trad larper spectrum (see this very forum), whose role compels them to reach for the KJV vocabulary when facing people in her line of work, as well as redpillers who seem to take particular offense at the "rational camgirling" of her oeuvre that is essentially gender-flipped redpill advice (under the men extract sex = women extract resources homomorphism), and few people enjoy having the UNO reverse card pulled on them.
For the record, though, I've actually always enjoyed her posts, and would be sad if there are no more. I always kind of assumed she knew what she was doing and was just okay with the rock-bottom agreeableness lifestyle, so did anything actually change (The ranks of the white knight guard thinned too much? The haters became more numerous or determined than before?) or should I read this as her having somehow managed to remain in denial about the reaction until now?
This was a genuinely gripping read, and I am once again updating my understanding of the SOTA upwards. That being said, I can't see a bunch of humanities-aligned Oxford dons being too impressed with it on its own merits - the rhetorical bombast feels a bit too on the nose, like prose written by a strong student who on some level is still marvelling at himself for being able to write so well and can't quite hide being proud about it. This impression is amplified by the occasional malapropism* (ex.: the use of "profound" in the second paragraph) which seems to be a problem that LLMs still struggle with whenever trying to write in a high register (probably because the training corpus is awash with it, and neither the operators nor their best RLHF cattle actually have the uniformly high level of language skill that would be necessary to beat the tendency out of them with consistency).
Do you know how Gemini generated the essay exactly? Is it actually still a single straight-line forward pass as it was when chat assistants first became a thing (this would put it deeper in the "scary alien intelligence" class), or does it perform some CoT/planning, possibly hidden?
*In self-demonstrating irony, "malapropism" is not quite the right word for this, but I can't think of a word that fits exactly! Rather than actually taking into account what exactly, in this context, wishing for the advisor to become foolish is more of than wishing for the advisee to drop dead, it feels like just picking, from among all vaguely positive choices of A in "not X, but something more A", the one that is most common (even if it happens to just denote the nonsensical "deep").
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
I'm obviously not your immediate interlocutor, and I don't think BLM should be dismissed as something like mere "pressure release" - but still, attacks on legislative bodies seem to be in a fundamentally more severe category to me. It seems foundational to representative democracy that legislative bodies are to serve as a sleeker and more efficient representation of voter preferences as expressed by the act of voting, and any attempt to subvert this by subjecting representatives to pressures other than "how will the voters vote in the next election" is threatening that very foundation. Meanwhile, our political system as I understand it does not make any particular promises about police representing anyone at all. Therefore, trying to use violence on legislators to get them to act in a particular way is worse than trying to use violence on policemen to get them to act in a particular way.
This is not a Russell conjugation; I am very happy to consider the leftish-perpetrator examples of this post to be worse than J6 (which was honestly a relative nothingburger as far as threatening legislators goes).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
I don't think it's particularly useful to argue about which of the two protests-turned-riots(?) has more merit - my point is just that they are sufficiently different that blanket accusations of hypocrisy towards anyone who judges them differently make no sense.
It's perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are sacrosanct but largely autonomous devolved subunits of the executive like police are fair game (they represent nobody and have a lot of leeway in how they act), and it's also perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are fair game (they are supposed to be the people's bitch) but police are inappropriate targets (they are wageslaves doing a hard job and owe allegiance to some command superior, not the people).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
I'm genuinely confused as to why you would say that, since in my eyes the factual claims I made shouldn't even be particularly controversial. Could you restate what you think my claim is in your words?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
Comparing those three to Jan 6th (or even seeing them as strictly worse, considering the clear murderous intent) seems fair to me. That doesn't mean the LA stuff is.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
Well, I think that pretending that the seat of one of the branches of government is nothing special just so you can equivocate is special pleading. If it's so non-special, why do protesters not storm it more often? Manifestly, doing so would shut down a central government function that pisses a lot of people off, and guarantee eyeballs in a way that torching some random police station in bumfuck nowhere won't.
Other countries also hold that legislatures are special: in Germany, for example, where there is otherwise a fairly strong right to public protest, there is a special cutout prohibiting assemblies in a certain radius around federal and state legislatures and the constitutional court. This has been in place since 1920.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
It is a strain to compare a large protest which involves people obstructing and assaulting law enforcement to a large protest which involves people breaking into the country's main legislative building. Whatever you think about the severity of either, they are firstly surely quite different in nature, and secondly the former is quite common across Western countries while the latter is very rare.
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
Fine, replace "conservatives" with "everyone who is not declaring allegiance to Team Trans". It really doesn't seem important to the hypothetical what the exact boundaries of C are - I'm just positing, as a counterexample to what seems to be @Primaprimaprima's argument, a contrived scenario in which the conjunction of things he needs to be impossible is actually true, namely that trans women exist in just the same way as they do in reality, progressives are a sort of perceptual mutant set that really can't distinguish trans women from cis women at all, and yet there is a trans movement similar to the one we are in fact seeing.
There are in fact real examples of what seems to be discrimination over nothing at all, and opposition to that discrimination by people who do not have any understanding of the discriminated-against set except by way of "they are the ones that are inexplicably targeted for discrimination"; and I don't think the Cagot truther would have an argument in saying that the people fighting against anti-Cagot discrimination must actually have a model of a real non-Cagot good Frenchman, because they need to be able to distinguish the real humans (non-Cagots) from animals that simply desire to be humans (Cagots), or that "if non-Cagots and Cagots were identical you'd imagine they would at least be accidentally on the side of non-Cagots a few times". Note that I am on some level agnostic about whether Cagot discriminators have a point; for all I know, the Wikipedia article could be progressive propaganda and they might actually be a lineage of evil sociopaths that would put all of European racists' usual boogeymen to shame. I still default to being for equal rights for Cagots, and I have no more of an understanding of what sets them apart than the wiki!
Of course, you could say that yes, the hypothetical progressives and real Cagot rights campaigners actually do have a clear sense (in extension) of who are the Cagots/transwomen, even if in intension their sense is different - the anti-trans team thinks transwomen are definitionally men who claim to be women, and the pro-trans team thinks that transwomen are definitionally women that the anti-trans team claims are not women. The resulting consensus definition winds up being exactly the same, even though I don't think this is what @Primaprimaprima would consider an "accurate model of reality".
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
There isn't a consensus sorting of everyone into male and female either, though of course there the disputed set is much smaller (consider the case of that Algerian boxer, Imane Khelif. I do not believe in transitioning or self-id and do not consider any transwoman I am aware of an instance of the class "woman", but I would genuinely struggle to assign them to one of the categories based on what I have heard).
Either way, this should not be relevant - transwomen are in general not saying something that amounts to "there is a fuzzy boundary between men and women, I understand I am somewhere near it, but I contend that on the balance of evidence I should fall on the 'woman' side", but rather "whatever the boundary between men and women is, I am a reasonably central example of the category 'woman'". OP essentially has to contend that the latter is something that is transparently false to his camp and ambiguous to progressives, i.e. whatever notion of women they have is so weak a separator that it can't even refute what to conservatives is a claim that a central example of a man is actually a central example of a woman. OP proposes that the test that evidences this is that they cannot provide a verbal definition of "woman". However, I would argue that the reason people fail to do this is the real or imagined fuzzy boundary of the category - progressives would also have no trouble identifying what they call a definitional core of "unambiguous women", but this would look like "phenotypical women not asserting they are not + progressives in good standing asserting to be women". The same situation holds for the category "black" for either side, where both agree on central examples, the boundaries are fuzzy so few would be comfortable defining an exhaustive predicate and committing to it, and yet neither side is okay with transracialism (central-example whites asserting that they are central-example blacks).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
Compare to a hypothetical progressive definition of women:
-
if they look unambiguously female
-
if they look ambiguously progressive, claim to be a woman and at least one woman agrees they are a woman (recursively)
Of course you might be tempted to argue that parentage is somehow more solid as an axis of identity conveyance than being part of the same society, but this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.
On their side against whom? Transwomen? Do you think "I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity? Consensus men (men as defined by progressives \cap men as defined by conservatives)? I'm pretty sure they do side with cis women against consensus men much more than a few accidental times; let me know if you actually need examples.
(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).
I don't follow this line of argument. Imagine a world in which progressives could not distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen at all, ever. In this world, what progressives would see is essentially that there is a subset of women that a large part of their outgroup inexplicably asserts are not real women, and wants to treat badly. Assuming that progressives have no issue adopting the term "trans" for this subset that the outgroup inexplicably discriminates against, how would this not be fertile ground for a "trans movement"?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
5d ago
I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.
In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".
The difference is that WWII land loss mostly affected belligerents, who had legitimate beefs going back centuries. Israel was built at the expense of Arab villagers who didn't really do anything to anybody. If you get injured in a mass brawl, you can't just go on to maul a random bystander and excuse yourself by saying that everyone in the mass brawl you just came out of suffered injuries.
I mean, they are clearly working on it. South Africa, generally recognised as pretty evil, always was minority-European.
Would it fix the problem on the Israeli side? They have already also grabbed parts of Lebanon (more, recently); how do we figure there would be a real limit to their quest for Lebensraum?
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