5434a
3mo ago
I've read most of the replies and I wonder if it doesn't boil down to unwillingness to entertain anything short of a perfect case. If a vegan can't provide a watertight case for how turning vegan will generate ideal outcomes on all aspects under consideration then their argument is irredeemably flawed, and if their argument is flawed it can be rejected wholesale and we can all carry on as we were. And of course The Motte is a filter for people who live to pick holes in arguments (cue "no we're not!").
What if vegans could show some net benefits at below net cost to you? Would you/we recalibrate not to eating a fully vegan diet, but simply eating less meat? Or does it have to be the once-and-for-all slam dunk that settles the matter for ever?
5434a
11mo ago
Is/ought, plus game theory. Women will always have an unfair advantage in this arena because men will always gain an advantage by handing this advantage to women. The man who boycotts the ladies night at the bar, or any other low stakes garden variety simpery, out of offence to his high-minded egalitarian principles will lose out to the pragmatic man who accepts the phenomenon and potentially uses it as a pivot to open a conversation and flirt with those women. ("You women get half price drinks? Nice, that means you can buy me two! No? Ah, so you're a hashtag trad wife. Cool, I'm more of an equal rights feminist. A very thirsty equal rights feminist with an empty glass. Oh okay I get it, maybe those dodgy pick up guys were right about women after all. Hold on a second, are you a pick up artist girl? No? So where did you learn your undeniable skills? In that case I guess it must have come to you naturally. Naturally blessed with half price drinks. Imagine that." Or something significantly smoother and less terminally online, I don't know).
5434a
7mo ago
The Motte is a poorer place without posters like yourself providing a measure of counterbalance to the not uncommon tendency around here towards doompilled paranoia.
5434a
9mo ago
Both the state and the public fail in their own ways, and it can be due to legitimate difficulty or cynical dishonourableness.
A simple example is speed limits. We accept a state regulated limit on our freedom to not drive faster than say 70mph so that our journeys are safer than they would be otherwise, and at the second order they're more efficient too (less road closures due to pile-ups). Our freedom was reduced in exchange for those benefits, but we retain the greater freedom to change or remove that limit via the democratic process. Yet some people still choose to defect from something as easy as not speeding.
There's a difference between failure to deliver on the social contract and failure to honour it. Say we gave the police £200 to patrol a motorway and eliminate 100% of speeding. They would inevitably fail to deliver, point out it's not a realistic target and reasonably request an increase to the budget. But if we gave them £200 million and there was no improvement in their performance it would be reasonable to assume that they're not trying.
On the other hand say we offered a homeless person a subsidised house so that they could get back on their feet and become independent. If the house was cold, damp, and next to a factory pumping out toxic smoke they might have understandable grounds to reject the deal and go back to sleeping rough in the posh part of town where the air is sweet and the begging is easy. But if the house was plain and adequate with access to suitable work nearby and it turned out they sold the copper and then turned it into a combination knocking shop and trap house it's hard to justify trading away more social goods of state expenditure and the loss of potential responsible residents to enable further defection.
In short the rights and privileges we experience as freedom come with responsibilities and associated costs. We, as public and the state, are free to renegotiate the costs and benefits rather than suffering them by diktat or anarchy but we are responsible for exercising good faith in upholding the agreements. The N-word screamer wants the freedom to defect at will and neglects to realise his stance implies other people's freedom to blast a combination of spam advertising and malicious slander back at them. The anarchist/libertarian neglects that zeroing out the state monopoly on violence and legitimacy re-opens a competition which leads back to where they began only de facto instead of de jure.
5434a
9mo ago
It's not moral authority, it's regular authority. A tyrannical monarch could write a law that says "all gold belongs to the king" with no reference to morality.
I don't understand what you're driving at, if you'll pardon the phrasing. My starting point was that we're not free in the west/democracy, we're free-er, and that there is no radical freedom where we can do whatever we like under any system or lack of system. That's omnipotence.
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions
Certainly I did not.
I feel this is straying further from my central point but what kind of christmas cracker cereal box licencing body grants licences that don't require abiding by the rules? It doesn't make sense to me. If they don't require abiding by the rules what's the point of a licence? It would be no different to not needing one. The first rule of licence club is "you need a licence". The second rule is "if you don't have one you're not authorised to do it". The third rule is "if you break the rules you lose your licence; refer to rule two".
5434a
9mo ago
You and all the other drivers tacitly accepted those conditions when you applied for a licence to drive on the state's roads. You're free to walk at whatever speed you like.
The democratic sausage machine aspires to the freedom to be user serviceable, the other sausage machines don't. It's not like you can get away from the butcher.
5434a
1yr ago
The openly intentional result of what you're calling her sexism is that biological men are excluded from using the services of the rape crisis centre that she funds despite those men calling themselves women, ie trans, and so is plainly Trans Exclusionary. More accurate would be to say that she doesn't believe a biological man can be a woman, which is to say that she is a trans denialist. She doesn't hate transwomen (the transphobia charge), she simply doesn't recognise "transwoman" as a meaningful category.
Calling it sexism is similarly trans denialist as it casts the question solely in terms of objective biological sex, which trans ideology takes great efforts to escape from by introducing the subjective frame of gender.
One major reason radical feminists and other trans denialists deny transgenderism is because it requires not only that women identify with and express their gender but that doing so is what makes them women, and by extension not doing so diminishes their womanhood. A woman who becomes a radical feminist because she's been treated like shit by men, often in part for not being very feminine, while also being vulnerable to all the disadvantages that women suffer will rightly bristle at the implication that she's less of a woman, particularly when it's coming from men.
5434a
16d ago
Go to www.chatgpt.org/chat, you won't have to sign up or log in. Then type in the box.
5434a
1mo ago
I think you're being overly cautious and perfect's-the-enemy-of-good but fair play, you've considered that suggestion and it doesn't work for you. All I'd say is that for any bootstraps enterprise to work you're better thinking of it like a penniless illegal immigrant would approach it, ie bending the rules, delay spending until you've got the work assured, bargain hunting for materials, and starting with the small jobs no one else wants.
Magic man repairs, maybe? That looks like a basic/niche kit could fit in a backpack, there's no end of broken shit for free you can take home to practice on and then throw out again, and people pay top dollar to avoid redoing expensive work. Just an idea.
My underlying point was that identifying practical issues and potentially overcoming them to achieve a material result is more productive and stimulating than reading a book, writing a song, lifting some weights or listening to a preacher. It's about finding something external to focus on that you can effect a direct meaningful change upon. Admittedly that's a lot harder if you need it to be profitable but it's potentially more rewarding too. Chin up.
5434a
4mo ago
How do you retrain your brain to say ‘although you think you’re winning, you need to reset the rules of the game’?
Impose a change of routine on yourself so that you can't idly default into your unsatisfactory habits. I guess the simplest one would be to power off your networked devices for a time, maybe say for two hours after dinner. Then find out what your now unoccupied mind prompts you to do instead. Maybe you tidy up. Maybe you fix something you've been putting off. Maybe you go for a run, or start writing, or start the prep for tomorrow's meals. All fairly mediocre, but still a switch from passive to active. Or maybe you start planning your personal Hock.
Mediocrity isn't going to reject itself.
5434a
4mo ago
Hindsight is 20/20 and "easier said than done" notwithstanding... At the risk of being a back seat woodworker I'd redo the front panel and make it cleaner and simpler by replacing it with a cover flap, maybe with just the volume knob exposed. Faster and more practical would be to make a new flap on top of the existing control panel and avoid having to alter too much of the finished work. Just seems a shame after making such a good job of the power/turbo buttons.
5434a
4mo ago
That's what I mean, half of those are already mainstream or bordering on it and the other half are either radioactive or some form of retreat or exhile from the whole arena of sex and relationships.
5434a
8mo ago
Despite not being a parent myself I have a solid sympathy with the idea that you're not really eligible for real grown up status until you're a parent. The difficulty is that making parenthood the benchmark is that it would accord a teenage single mum higher status than a childless man like myself while incentivising the creation of yet more teenage single mums, so I added the educational criteria to tilt the balance back to a range of more long term pro-social outcomes (promoting stable relationships, increased fertility rates, parental responsibility/discipline). Totally unworkable in practice anyway as it would never get support, people would be anywhere between their 30s up to their 70s or even 80s before they were granted status.
Fight 10 different guys in a row, five minutes per round, with 5 minutes of rest in between each round.
It's a reasonable idea, definitely more feasible, but that's 100 minutes in total. By the 10th fresh opponent you'd be a sitting duck, especially if they're preparing/prepared for the same trial. Presumably the guys in question are your peers? Seems unfair to fight older or younger opponents. Then again maybe participating as one of a younger-than cohort of opponents would be good preparation and pre-qualification for the initiation and act to rebalance the advantages.
standardized tests that try to capture the would-be adults' actual understanding of the world and the implications of entering certain kinds of contracts and relationships
I think I would have understood enough on an intellectual level to have passed such a test at age 13 and then promptly spent the next ten years learning the same lessons the hard way. Analysing it at a remove isn't like knowing it in your bones the way you do after you've been through it, so I think the tests would have to embody a strong practical element somehow.
5434a
9mo ago
I concur with your criticisms but would push back against the doomerism of inevitable failure. While many people misunderstand the concept of freedom intellectually most of them get it intuitively and don't count themselves as suffering unjustly for the restrictions against selling their own children into slavery, dumping their rubbish in the road or using racist language. It's not perfect, it will never be perfect, but there's many ways it could be a lot worse. It works best when people act responsibly.
My point is freedom is not all or nothing, it's how much and who decides. The freedom fetishists are engaged in binary thinking: Freedom vs oppression, self vs everyone else. Of course they want freedom for themselves. Their error is missing how oppressive it would be if everyone else was free of restrictions too. Your presumably rhetorical wish of living in a ball-busting autocracy is a mirror image where it's oppression for everyone else with significant cost to your own freedom. You can walk the streets at night but you will be required to report for assigned work in the morning.
5434a
10mo ago
Beeps were made even worse when I bought a humidifier that has polyphonic beeps just from the knowledge that there's another way. Instead of the flat monotonic beeep it chimes a piiing with the decay and everything, like a digitised rendition of flicking a china bowl. At least our washing machine has a volume setting, the microwave is brutal though and doesn't have a "2" button to try out your suggestion.
I'm just thankful I don't work in a hospital.
5434a
1mo ago
Outdoor. Cat shit might be the one thing that smells worse than dog shit and unlike dogs you can't let the cat out for quick shit and then call them back indoors.
5434a
4mo ago
When you say "unacceptable or indefensible," do you mean you knew you were in the wrong? Or you knew that, even if you could verbalize your feelings, they'd be rejected or torn down by argument?
To spare you a long rambling post I wrote: Yes. But there's many more reasons to not say anything, an important one of which is feeling that either I can't find the right words or the words I can find would only make things worse. However in reference to the question at hand the motives are all either neutral or defensive.
In a nutshell avoidance or conflict aversion of one form or another is a much more probable cause than passive aggression.
When you're being given the silent treatment, is it unwise to ask why and seek reconciliation? You are, in a sense, rewarding the behavior.
On balance if you're confident that's what is happening and you want to reconcile then perhaps it's best to take the bait and cut to the chase. But if someone has backed off because they feel imposed upon then following them around making further impositions will only make them back off further, or drive them towards adopting a mode closer to active aggression. For a teenage boy I'd assume they withdrew in response to feeling imposed on in some manner rather than ignoring you to "get you back", but there's always exceptions.
5434a
4mo ago
What are you counting as silent treatment? It could mean making a point of pretending someone doesn't exist, or it could be expecting someone to proactively reach out more than they're interested in doing so, or it could be badgering somebody who then retreats without satisfying your appetite for their input.
I could have been accused of all three at points. In the first case it would have been simple carelessness and taking someone for granted rather than a conscious tactic to upset them. In the second it's just disparate needs for reassurance. The times that I most remember consciously choosing to be silent were when I didn't fully understand myself and so couldn't say what I felt, or I did understand myself and knew that my position was either unacceptable or indefensible, or a combination where I knew my position was unacceptable but couldn't understand and express why I held it even if I wanted to. In that aspect I'd say it more closely matched "their words don't matter" rather than "act like a brat", but it assumes that sufficient words are available to be said.
What was I hoping to achieve? Distancing myself from what I felt was unpleasant and uncomfortable or insurmountable. Simple defence. I was never trying to make anyone else feel bad ("pushing back", even if passively), and I still can't fully wrap my head around the idea of both wanting to make someone feel bad and imagining that not talking to them is the way to do it. Passive aggression relies on baiting someone into questioning what they did wrong. Either they come to agree that they did something wrong and address that, or they're forced to accept the frame in order to deny it whereupon they can be attacked directly (actually obliquely). But it depends on them taking the bait, which depends on them caring, which depends on them noticing.
5434a
6mo ago
I have no idea, that's the question isn't it. But if you can entertain the idea that there are women who aren't doing as well as they could because some women are social fuck ups too then it stands to reason there should be practical measures they can take to improve their outcomes. It could range from acknowledging the fertility window, to the poor dating prospects for single mothers, to making an effort to understand what most men want and don't want, through to basic stuff like how to flirt (put the damn phone down!), how to write more than three words on a dating site, and, like I said about PUA, what not to do.
Somewhere out there are women who think that collecting rescue animals, wearing dungarees, spending all day on tumblr and exclusively using photos of themselves in a group of 8 isn't hurting their chances. Moaning about the fact that men like looking at naked women on the internet isn't helping them. Neither is holding on to the idea that there's an athletic, high achieving career focused man who is yearning to take a single mother and her children on an all expenses paid round the world adventure, if only he'd hurry up and find her. "Men are even worse than you thought" is not what they need to hear. Otherwise they'll fall into the MGTOW cope trap where they spend 24/7 thinking about how awful the opposite sex while claiming they've forsworn any interest in them.
5434a
7mo ago
The ASMR style stethoscopic mic'ing reminds me of the exaggerated grotesque Foley effects in Ren & Stimpy.
5434a
9mo ago
Dig. Find something, or just one aspect of something, that you like and follow its tracks backwards to find out where it came from, then find out what else came from that person/team/place/era/tech/genre.
How are you finding your media currently? The idea that going to a shop and talking to people is a foreign experience makes it sound like you're fairly young and have grown up scrolling through Netflix and Spotify.
5434a
9mo ago
once you're free you can choose your own name and your body will look like you want it to look
That's inside the matrix when they acquire elevated privileges and start adding arbitrary code. Outside the prison they look worse and have an artificial port in their body.
5434a
11mo ago
Hexstatic - Rewind. Ticks the simple, fun and danceable box, ticks the audio-visual video synchronisation box. Might be a bit too retro in its references to Speak'n'Spells, Space Invaders and Kung Fu films that were already explicitly retro when it came out in 2000.
I think that many people have missed the point of the western conception of freedom and view it as an end in itself. The people who want to scream the N-word don't seem to realise that the ultimate freedom they extol is freedom that requires they build a fortress in which to scream it. It's the freedom to defect while overlooking the implication of being unprotected from being defected against. Suffer what wilt be done would be the whole of the law.
The freedom we have in the west, or at least the concept, is that we have the freedom to choose which compromises we make on our liberties. That is, we can (theoretically, imperfectly) exercise some choice in which personal freedoms to trade away for a greater social gain. It's a quid pro quo.
The trade-off isn't the problem. The failure to deliver (cynically, the failure to honour) the deal is the problem.
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