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このMOLOCHだ！
14d ago
It may be the most sensible if you are sufficiently (classical) liberal, but there are many topics for which most people are no less bothered (or even more bothered, in the "I can handle this/don't get off on this, but what if this gets seen by someone more gullible/degenerate than me?" way) by the prospect of a consenting third party receiving the content as they are by being exposed to it themselves. Pick your poison: CP, loli, gore, racism, porn, pro-homosexual or -transgender content, "misinformation"/worldview reinforcement for the outgroup...
It's like the old "Is there someone you forgot to ask?" meme.
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17d ago
Do you see a positive correlation between water filter users and people who like homeopathy, as the most central and unobjectionable instance of environmentalism-adjacent body purity beliefs? I don't know anyone who actually uses a water filter apart from myself and a US techno-liberal friend (of the "geoengineering + nuclear power environmentalist" persuasion), but based on having lived in the German heart of the anti-nuclear movement for a long time, I would wager that to their eyes a water filter looks less like a tool for bodily purity and more like another incomprehensible corporate high-tech gizmo adulterating the natural and sustainable goodness that is tap water. Going against your gut feeling regarding what is natural already amounts to a failure of maintaining purity.
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24d ago
I picked up Phoenotopia: Awakening for a healthy discount on GOG the other day, and my impressions a few hours in have been very positive. It's an absolute pity that the game does not seem to be doing well commercially having been out for about 3 years at this point, and the developer already reckoned with it being a dud.
As for its strong points - I feel like it has captured the magic of the golden era of SNES action-adventures in a way that no other game I've seen come out in recent years did. The market default in "indie" right now is just too slick, too optimised, too hyperstimulating, too obviously raised on the same set of dime-a-dozen gamedev talks, and developer resources allocated so rationally that the moment you deviate from the intended path all you get is square tileset-default placeholder rooms and uninteractable NPCs. This game, on the other hand - colourful but not obnoxiously saccharine, rough without being clunky, combat well-restrained by a stamina system that sabotages button mashing and few flashy effects (reviewers compare it to Secret of Mana, which I think is apt), nicely animated and teeming with detail that feels like it's there because the developers were stuck with the game for long enough that it precipitated out naturally rather than because they needed to meet an "n interactables per area, m side quests of at least 15 minutes" quota. It has cute graphics, a Chrono Trigger overworld, SoM combat, Cave Story physics, Zelda puzzles, and fun and quirky NPCs.
Relevantly for this forum, this manages to be a "quirky" that is not at all the modern kind where the quirkiness is equal parts catechism and political shit-test. More generally, the entire trope palette the story is painted in feels like it's taken straight out of the '90s, as if the last 25 years simply didn't happen. This includes the mundane (
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24d ago
The purpose of this forum should not just be to write/dump your ideas on the big truck, but also to read/engage with others' ideas (and then respond). Single-issue posters presumably also don't respond to things that don't align with the one issue they care about, except in order to relate them to their single issue (otherwise this would be sufficient to mark them as not being single-issue). The limit point of this is a community that has no reason for staying together at all, as it is fragmented into a number of issue subcommunities that only really want to talk to among themselves, who at best just get into each other's faces (would the parent poster be happy to have to dig up his JQ-posting among a pile of recurrent posts about whether subobject classifiers are really the best way of capturing set-like behaviour, and whose only interaction with the JQ is that occasionally they inject some post like "very interesting, btw did it occur to you that there is a category-theoretical interpretation of Jewish mtDNA?" into the JQ threads?) and more likely actively disgust each other (since rather than category theorists we would just get an array of different ideologies that find each other vaguely smelly).
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28d ago
Let him who has parented naughty children with IQ around 135 cast the first stone.
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29d ago
Setting up a self-sufficient homestead is not even particularly expensive in the modern US if you’re not picky about location and willing to work very very hard, so one wonders why so few of these fantasists seem to do it!
So where would you do that? In the continental US, you can't escape the Sword of Damocles of a something-studies graduate coming along and saying that your homestead is built on stolen Indian land, or the law school graduate coming along and finding some tax code or ADA regulation that you can get extorted over, and nowhere on Earth can you escape the environmentalist arrogating to himself the right to regulate how you eat and heat and breathe lest your sinful vapours sully the planet. Sure, these events might be unlikely/trifling/easily worked around, and it's not like space is without its perils. I'm still sure that a big part of the visceral appeal of the frontier is the idea that you can actually escape this and go somewhere where nobody can argue that you owe them anything, because many people's psychology is such that losing their house to unfeeling nature is bearable in a way in which losing their house to a smug and self-righteous sentient being is not; and conversely a large amount of the opposition to it seems to me to be carried by lazy rationalisation (wasteful! won't help you against the gamma ray burst anyway! why don't you start in the deep sea!) for what is really a visceral aversion against the same (because there is no greater hubris than plotting to escape the great web of obligations).
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30d ago
I don't know about that. If I try to think of particularly low-agreeableness/insubordinate peoples, the ones that come to mind are marginal ethnic groups like Chechens and Borderers, who historically tended to be brought to heel by adjacent empires with superior state capacity enabled by having access to a deep pool of soldiers and bureaucrats.
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1mo ago
Let a hundred flowers bloom :^)
(Seriously, the BLR mainly seemed to nurse people's basest CW instincts when it existed, polluting the culture of the whole community. It's like saying you want a civil workplace but then add one notice board on which people are allowed to post smut and insult their colleagues without repercussion, and then expecting the rest of the workplace will stay civil.)
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1mo ago
Is weeding out those who have trouble with resolving the confusion towards "whatever the overwhelming societal consensus backed by the local monopoly on violence wants me to believe" a bug or a feature? Society's wheels are greased with a million falsehoods, oversimplifications and truths that are too hard to verify for the vast majority of people, and not all of them are as memetically reinforced as this one. Perhaps having a conspicuous honeypot (which I'd also estimate to be in the third category, even if some cosmetic details may be fudged, which only serves to raise its attractiveness) is better than letting the compulsive contrarians advance through society and wind up somewhere where they can do real damage.
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1mo ago
I was considering making you one in mspaint, which sounds silly until you realise nobody else is really in a position to compile an accurate chart either, with an unknown number estimated around 4 million having left the country, and drafts and combat losses being kept secret by the government. It doesn't seem particularly fruitful to continue this discussion either way, since it seems to me that you don't want to be persuaded otherwise. (What is even the notion of "looking the same" you are using? Can you not conceive of a scenario where a country commits more atrocities than another while producing less of whatever signal you claim to see in population charts?)
You haven't answered the question about what you would consider sufficient evidence. If you can't conceive of any evidence that would change your mind, what you have is an article of faith rather than rational belief.
But they would make the Jews all leave the area and depopulate the area of Jews.
Meanwhile, RIA Novosti is reporting that about 46% of students in the annexed part of Zaporozhiya region (Melitopol etc.) have indicated that they want to be taught in Ukrainian rather than Russian in the coming school year (apparently they were given a choice). Commenters and Russian milbloggers seem to be absolutely up in arms about this, and I don't see any reasonable grounds to assume it's made up (it doesn't even seem to be reported for a global audience in English?). Does that sound like a successful depopulation campaign to you?
(For reference, 2004 polls indicated that the entire region, including the unannexed parts further north that light up as less russophone on Wikipedia's map, had about 52% Ukrainian speakers. On the balance the map makes it seem like their numbers might have actually increased.)
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1mo ago
Surely the only things that you could detect from such a chart are births that didn't happen and generations that had an unusually high death rate (presumably military deaths, which you'd expect to be concentrated in draftable males). Neither is an indicator of ethnic cleansing, and in the case of Ukraine it is not even clear how Russia would be in a position to do that or how you would detect it (since they didn't manage to actually capture any predominantly Ukrainian part of Ukraine).
What would you consider sufficient evidence that US wars are no less harmful to civilians than Russian wars?
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1mo ago
Someone
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1mo ago
The razing of Mosul alone seems to have a median estimate of around 10k civilian deaths, with the entire Iraq war estimated at around 300k in 10 years - and let's not get started on Vietnam. Wikipedia stats on Afghanistan seem to amount to 3k in three months of American bombing, up to some guessing 20k in a year, which is a very close rate to the 18k in 1.5 years being bandied around for Ukraine.
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1mo ago
Afghanistan
The presumable problem there was always deployment of US personnel, not equipment and costs. Are there examples of the US suddenly abandoning an important geopolitical project that can be sustained with inanimate resources alone?
They don't have any supplies to accumulate
They do, though, from the West. Figures from around June place total US military aid alone at around $50 billion since the start of the war, which is in the ballpark of Germany's annual military budget (80 billions or so), with the latter presumably mostly paying for Germany's much more expensive human element. (Ukrainian military still gets paid Ukrainian wages and benefits!) This is not even including the other Western backers; Germany gives its own military support at about $20 billion, and I'm struggling to find a good cumulative figure. With the tone you are taking, it's hard for me to interpret your non-mention of it as being anything other than phatic speech to cheer on the Ukrainians.
(For full disclosure, I went to look for figures and found that the number of tanks Ukraine was given so far was much lower than I had thought. I figure I've multiple-counted single batches as they were talked up before actually being delivered.)
naval capabilities, far strike capabilities
It seems that Ukraine is already close to successfully denying the northwestern chunk of the Black Sea to Russian surface ships, and yesterday they successfully struck an airport in Pskov like 600~800km away from the Ukrainian border with drones (800km if we don't assume they risked flying through Belarus).
and it will be them attacking, Ukrainians would never dare to break the peace and risk jeopardizing the Western support
I remember the exact same line being used in the context of the pipeline attack last year, perhaps even by you, to argue that it could not possibly have been the Ukrainians. Now most Western newspapers are freely carrying reports that it seems to have been the Ukrainians. Do you see any sign that Western support is in jeopardy because of it?
Ukraine can do whatever it wants. To the extent this is possible, Western end-user media will bury any reports on it (such as when they firebombed a university in Donetsk a month ago); if this is impossible, they will claim that the Russians did it themselves no matter how absurd (as with the pipeline and the repeated cases of anti-personnel mines being fired into Donbass cities last year); if this too fails, they can concede that Ukraine did it and still people will nod sagely and be like "well, they are being invaded by an overwhelming power that does not adhere to any principles after all" (as with the pipeline now). Claims to the contrary, that there is any threat to Western support from actions that Ukraine takes against Russia, should be furnished with evidence.
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1mo ago
Here's a good parallel: "democrats will never tolerate gang shootings: they hate guns and anyone who uses them" In practice, we get decriminalized gang shootings combined with ever more aggressive laws against legal gun owners, because it turns out the hatred wasn't directed at the guns and violence, but at the (white, male) gun owners featured in their anti-gun propaganda.
Not a good parallel - in the scenario I painted, the beneficiaries of any such policy would still be straight white males, who by pure force of statistics are the majority of pedophiles. It would be more akin to republican gun owners realising the loophole and joining suburban gangs en masse, which they won't do only because of their distaste for the company they would have in those suburban gangs. Sex with minors is generally a small group activity, not subject to that issue.
Which of those modes do you see happening here? Because I see a lot more anger from leftists here about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" than I do towards pedophiles.
That's just saying that they don't participate in your current moral panic about it. There is a lot more anger from leftists about "election deniers" and "residential school genocide deniers" (...here? Who here believes in the latter so firmly as to get angry?) than about union-busting at the moment too, but rest assured that leftists are firmly against union-busting.
I'm unconvinced about either side of this argument (stopping now would make Russia's long-term trajectory look better than Ukraine's; continuing means the conditions will favour Ukraine more and more).
For the former, on one hand I'm not convinced that American support (and really that's the one that matters the most) would dry up so fast, considering the endurance the US has shown in unpopular and not particularly televised campaigns since 1945 (and I think supplying Ukraine is still much cheaper than Afghanistan was, all these years); and Ukraine's main problem right now seems to be that it's "kept on its toes" and can't actually catch a break to accumulate supplies and temporarily swing the balance, whereas being able to save up even from a much slower trickle in peace for a few years (specifically in the domain of air defense, where the problem is not so much the cost as the absolute low amount and production bandwidth) would solve this. On the other, Russia's economic sprezzatura has to crack eventually, and I don't think that nominal sanctions relief (which I doubt would be executed in any more good faith than the grain agreement or Iran's nuclear deal) will be enough to reverse the downwards trend. I would therefore actually expect that in 5 years, a rested, rearmed, hardened and sure-footed Ukraine could roll over a Russia that is possibly torn apart by hyperinflation and internal instability.
For the latter, I think that after Ukraine's resilience surprised most Western commentators in the opening days of the war, everyone has way overcorrected in the other direction and is now assuming that it's silly or likely Russian psyop to insinuate otherwise. I actually think that the mechanisms determining a society's will to fight and die are obscure, and the channels by which we would gauge them are even more encumbered than usual, and it's not at all impossible that Ukraine could one day just suffer from a sudden vibe collapse and fold. The human losses are getting more and more painful, and I hear another mobilisation wave is being prepared; and at the same time the West is playing the dangerous game of snorting its own supply regarding Ukrainian motivations, which may result in a critical misstep if too many people honestly believe that it's safe to remain noncommitmental about EU membership out of internal considerations (say, only promising NATO). From a Russian perspective, holding out for this chance, however slim it may be, seems as reasonable as anything in its current situation.
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1mo ago
My reading of the conversation is that I was arguing that it is not tactically advantageous for the "anti-pedo" camp to tie its disgust-signalling and demands for punishment to the relevant sexual preferences rather than the relevant acts. To this, you responded that you personally want to shun those with the preferences regardless of any concrete acts, and this "isn't really avoidable" (meaning that you think there will be many others like you?). In context, I assume that your intent was to argue against my thesis - that is, you think that you/many wanting to shun those who have the sexual preference is an argument in favour of coordinating disgust signalling or concrete punishment against it.
My retort is that this argument would prove too much - either you are in fact okay with the adult-oriented heterosexual examples that I listed, or you are not (your most recent reply indicates the latter). In that case, however, consistency demands that you consider it an equally strong argument for censuring/booing/jailing normal heterosexual men for their orientation.
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1mo ago
I'm not sure what this example is saying. Is this to say that you would you be okay with your perfectly vanilla heterosexual male relative changing your wife's, or a hypothetical 18 year old daughter's, underwear? Or, if not, do you think this is evidence that they should be jailed or removed from society in some other way, rather than just not letting them do that (resp. not letting your diaper fetishist relative change your infant's diaper)?
But MAP not being persecuted or prosecuted is not sufficient to actually enable pederasty. We're quite comfortable with letting people have sexual orientations they can't legally act upon otherwise (the morbidly obese and disfigured, incels, and even the vast majority of MtF-seeking-female), and I'm not convinced that dangling some sliver of hope before those groups ("well, theoretically, if you became really rich and beautiful, you might find someone who will consent, one day... it's not impossible...") makes so much of a practical difference. Why not just defend the line that children can't consent? The virtue-ethicist transference which seeks to bring the hammer down on MAPs and assorted anime lolicons and amounts to "the problem is not that children are subjected to sex by adults, but rather that adults get off on children" is quite counterproductive here because it does in fact turn a problem that's beyond a defensible line (necessity of consent + non-recognition of consent given by children/societal lessers) into one whose only defensible line (society can wield violence to align your beliefs/mental state to norms that are set by the right wing) has already long collapsed.
(I note that uncharitable voices on the left have also long benefited from the natural suspicion that right-wing virtue ethicists also buy into the converse of the virtue-ethicising of pederasty condemnation: i.e. that if the adult is not getting off on the sexual interaction with the child, it is no longer such a big deal, and hence may take a backseat to other preferences. There's a general sense among the left that right-wingers are reticent about state meddling to disrupt abuse which may be motivated by power more than pedophilia, be it intrafamilial or in the "suspiciously sexualised punishment at Jesus camp" class, which inoculates left-wing parents against right-wing think-of-the-children arguments.)
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1mo ago
I take the point that I made that assumption, but I still don't think that it's correct to extrapolate present trends to expect a normalisation of pederasty. The direction of change is clearly not as simple as "away from right-wing morality" - we are not seeing murder becoming acceptable or mainstream, and I don't think zoophilia is getting there either (even though it would be such low-hanging fruit if you just wanted to offend conservatives), though the carrying principle may be switched from sexual taboos to animal welfare. Therefore, a priori, the details of the concrete activity matter - a model like "right-wingers hate it, therefore left-wingers will eventually push for it" does not have sufficient predictive power. In the case of pederasty, there are enough features that set it apart from the activities that have been made acceptable by the left-wing drive that I don't think you can just put it on the same trendline:
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the existing taboo rests on the idea that "consent" by the child is unavailable or invalid on principle, as opposed to the pattern, memed as "A: I consent; B: I consent; GOD: I don't", that previous normalisations overcame - in other words, there was no principal objection that, say, out of two gay men, one of them could not competently consent to gay sex because he was not mature, unencumbered and responsible enough to be trusted with grasping the consequences;
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it goes against a countervailing tendency to shelter children/tighten parental control over them more, out of security considerations;
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the main beneficiaries of a legalisation of pederasty would no doubt be straight men (who already exhibit the greatest variability/jitter and a well-documented preference for youth), and the left-wing ethos strongly defaults to limiting this group's sexual self-actualisation, rather than enabling it.
What are the forms of legalised/normalised pederasty that could plausibly slip by these three? It seems to me that a NAMBLA-style "legal when gay only" version would be exceedingly hard to sustain with the present memetic complex (and anyhow would collide head-on with the third point above with the first publicised case of a Discord lothario who has the rule engineering mindset to ask his 12 year old to become a boy on paper). I could imagine a weak version along the lines of it being systematically tolerated in the case of trans perpetrator + blessing of the legal guardians, but that seems like a case where the delta-damage that can be done by the systematic tolerance over the baseline of having that sort of guardians and environment is not particularly big. (Also, children's lives being ruined by bad guardians is a problem that society seems to have resigned itself to leaving largely unsolved apart from the occasional bandaid solution.)
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1mo ago
we've had it hammered into us that conversion therapy doesn't work, is a fraud, is torture, and should be illegal, then are we supposed to believe "it doesn't work at all except in this one instance of a new sexual orientation"
I think this understanding fails to model low-decouplers properly. A high-decoupler might indeed see the $currentyear belief system and think that there's a glaring unprincipled special case ("conversion therapy doesn't work... except for pedos") at work that is only waiting to be regularised. Meanwhile, I think, for the low-decoupler, the principle has never changed: things are either simultaneously evil, in violation of principles, wasteful, ineffective and fraudulent - or simultaneously good, in line with all principles, efficient, effective and honest. You could consider this an instance of the just-world fallacy, or simply affect-loading as the main and only way to make pronouncements about the real world. "$orientation conversion therapy doesn't work" was never intended to be the scientific statement, orthogonal to questions of morality, that you imagine it to be: it simply means that $orientation belongs in the good-effective-honest cluster and interfering with $orientation belongs in the bad-ineffective-fraudulent cluster. Any social debates being had, and any shift of public opinion, is not about eggheaded technical arguments regarding techniques but only about where the line between good and bad is drawn, and there I don't see any significant qualitative shift having happened in previous years. The last big Chesterton Fence that broke down in the western theater of the good-bad assignment battlefield was the loss of Christian authority, and I don't think we're getting back to that anytime soon; if you are serious about stopping pederasts, you probably should be more concerned with fortifying a new line. (I think that the liberal principle of bodily non-compulsion - which seems to have stood strong enough that the push for "you must sleep with trans women" fell completely flat - and some reinforcement of the idea that unrelated adults are by default sexually exploitative towards children and so children can't consent would be sufficient.)
Look at trans rights movement - for whatever genuine people are out there, isn't it strange how all of a sudden male-identifying violent rapists suddenly found their true inner womanhood when it was a question of going to jail and which prison they'd be put in?
I reckon this to be a sideshow entirely driven by the circumstance that approximately nobody actually has the slightest stake in what happens in women's prisons, and so the whole issue is a convenient side-stage to fight proxy wars for the conflict that actually matters (similar to how so many people with an opinion on Trump appear to have a strong opinion on Orbán, without necessarily even being able to point out Hungary on a map). I don't think the pederasty case has the same potential: many more people actually have a stake (by virtue of having children), and at the same time it doesn't have the shape of any live CW battle that it could serve as a substitute for (since all "can A have sex with B?" battles are currently cleanly resolved in favour of yes or no). (During the brief heyday of NAMBLA, the latter condition was not yet met, which is why the pedo question managed to get some air.)
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1mo ago
How big do you figure was the movement at the time? If the "LGBTQI2 movement" went from being 1% of society of whom 50% were pederasts to being 50% of society of whom 1% are pederasts - as one may expect to be the case if the movement could be modelled as providing a home for all that are sufficiently far from the conservative ideal of sexual orientation, with the distance threshold steadily going down - then this simultaneously call into question the "wokes are crypto-pederasts waiting for their time to strike" narrative many right-wingers seem to want to get out of this historical observation, and whether we can generalise to assume that the movement will step back from another putative overreach, given that there is now much less room for further growth and hence dilution.
To be clear, I agree with your stated position here - it's just that I have grown cynical about the willingness of people, even those who are vocal free speech maximalists, to stick to the principle when faced with speech they find particularly disgusting or threatening to their tribe. Would you be okay with removing obstacles to consenting parties sharing all entries in my list above?
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