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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I never claimed that this is actually the argument that blue-hair campus activists used, historically, to argue for censorship; only that they could use that argument, and it's not clear how you would refuse it on principled ground while allowing the argument against drag queens. The Schelling fence around free speech can only be reliably drawn around all speech, including speech that is optimised to make you imagine sexual scenarios that you find highly uncomfortable.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
1d ago
I think sex has always been the weakest link of free speech in Western societies. There was a long-standing fragile cope with the "know it when I see it" "rule" for porn, but the bottom line is that once sex starts becoming involved, even the most principled free-speech advocate runs out of tolerance for views that go against their preference. Being a drag queen is "speech" in the same sense that performance art is (it is meant to convey something), but it is speech that evokes the horror of the object of your sexual desire being replaced by a male caricature of it, so you label it "indecent" and invoke the right to not be exposed to it. What is the principled way to distinguish this from an argument that speech for any political system that relates to human sexuality at all is likewise "indecent" as it may invoke sexual horror in those who are repelled by some aspect of the system's programme? If you can be protected from disgust at drag queens, why can't a blue-hair campus activist be protected from disgust at Christians?
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
With all that said, ostensibly nationalistic people like Leo Kearse who think zionists are a natural ally are simply wrong.
Well, I would go even further and say that for the true nationalist, there can't be any allies, because allies who would never help you when it is against their own interest are not allies at all but just entities that your interests temporarily happen to align with. An ally has to help you even when it goes against their own interest, which, if they are nationalist, is the interest of their nation. Once you enter that slippery slope, though, you will probably not stop sliding until you end up in global liberalism all over again: if the principle of being a good ally can override the interest of the nation, who is to say there aren't other principles that they could consider?
Instances of nationalists claiming to have an ally are either expedient lies, or enemy-of-my-enemy delusions. With Zionists, it is probably the former on the Zionist side, and the latter on the gentile side, as gentile nationalists had their minds broken by fighting against Muslims and human rights proponents and Israel is the most celebrated scourge of those groups globally.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
3d ago
Which is why, in the first place, she can't just say "a man who espoused violence," she has to emphasize his racial identity, she has to establish that he's white: What Kind of Man Is He?!? A White Man! It's really simply plain racism.
Would you say the same to right-wingers who complain about the race and national background of criminals/suspects being left out when they belong to a left-favoured group? Because this complaint really just looks like plain old culture war stuff that both sides run on to me: make bad acts by the outgroup and good acts by the ingroup stick, but insist on individuality for the converse.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
4d ago
I'm not sure how much I should comment since I have only heard about the movie second hand, but I imagine that "all bad things that happened are 100% his responsibility and exactly what he wished for" is an easy way for the director to defend himself from accusations that he is making excuses for a male character that by all accounts the feminist set considers problematic and evil. In arguments-as-soldiers-verse, complicating details that water down the perfect narrative are enemy bullets.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
5d ago
Well, isn't it convenient how unlike the others, every time the USG does something for ideological reasons, it happens to make economic sense too. If we invade Cuba, they (and we) are actually better off!
More concretely, I think many ideological opponents would rightly charge that orthogonally to any questions whether the USG's ideology is actually superior to that of NIMBYs, Putin and Maduro, there is some dynamic going on that could be glossed as
The world has two ideologies, A and B. X-ists will cooperate with X-ists and tend to defect against other -ists, but especially harshly punish other -ists that coordinate against X or convert away followers. Some of the surplus generated by all X-ists is siphoned off to the Pope of X. Currently, 80% of the world is A-ists.
without any reference to the contents of A and B (and A happens to be "global elite capitalism"). Network effects mean that being A is advantageous, and expanding the reach of A is locally advantageous for A-ists, while punishment means expanding B is locally disadvantageous for everyone in B and network effects mean it is disadvantageous to leave A for B. However, defined like that this is obviously a coordination/equilibrium problem: if the percentages flipped everything above would hold with A and B swapped, with the only difference being that the Pope of A loses out and the Pope of B gains. You can't flip the percentages without traversing a deep trough of immiserating first yourself and then everyone, though.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
· Edited 6d ago
Well, to be a bit more critical, I think it was almost impossible for him to attach his name to complaints about Arday and not make it sound like a "see, what did I tell you about black people in academia" is implied. It's not even clear to me that Arday's suicide was actually decisive beyond hastening the process; Cofnas might well have been a dead man walking the moment his position evolved from "DEI means more black people are in academic positions than should be" to "DEI means (...), and I have a super flashy piece of anecdotal evidence that even normies will have heard about", and the only reason he was not fired immediately is that people with media savvy realised that doing so at that point would just serve to introduce his position, paired with a shiny anecdote, to normies who otherwise would not draw any conclusion from this event beyond "huh, some obscure egghead turned out to be a fabulist, who could have known".
To the point, I feel like I saw a lot of articles about Arday that mentioned Cofnas but were remarkably quiet about his views, when someone like him would normally never get a media mention without mandatory denunciations. I think they did not want a "black person sucks, and this guy who said black people suck called it" story; "black person hounded to death, and this guy who said black people suck caused it" is fine though.
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Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6d ago
If this culture war has one side, who is the other? Silicon Valley, billionaires, etc, seems to be the obvious answer here.
I would imagine "geopolitically-minded elites", more generally. There is no cosmic justice that would ensure the nation that protects its plebs from pollution, noise and unemployment will ultimately come out ahead, and it is quite plausible that China would eventually overtake the US in the AI race simply because they do not need to concern themselves with such things (or at least have more High Modernist solutions available to deal with them, like expropriating and resettling whole communities away from good datacenter locations). There are plenty of people who are more interested in the US as in some entity that has continuity with it winning than are interested in the good fortunes of every or even most of its residents.
I do think a "freedom of speech + freedom from exposure" set of norms is conceivable, but doing that in a principled manner, too, would require deep changes to how societies are organised. You do get at a key problem in suggesting that the town should decide (because you can't unify one individual's freedom from exposure with another's freedom of speech and his audience, if all three+ of them have to share a space), but (1) why is the town the natural unit and (2) would the results you get really be that much more satisfactory for anyone, if acceptable exposure were fully devolved to towns? You would get quite a lot of blue towns, in which drag queens and Democratic politics are considered decent but Christianity and Republican politics (all rape PTSD triggers!) are not, and red towns, with the converse; and many of them would have a pretty large captive minority of people with their speech much more constrained in practice than it is at the moment.
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