ApplesauceIrishCream
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User ID: 882
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
The degree to which "Biden is not in control" satisfies the ingroup narrative criteria for "too good to check" is extreme.
This looks to me like a rather cavalier dismissal of a substantial amount of evidence, some of which was provided in this thread.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
But there are many quality female authors, both classic and modern, who are perfectly capable of writing competent plots and characters with agency.
Already addressed.
I'm not saying you should like or even tolerate a lack of plot or agency--I agree that any work meeting your original description (or even close to it) is crap. The common modern failing is to replace the missing plot and agency with wokeness, which is why I brought it up. But you are painting with too broad a brush to say there aren't any female authors in SF/Fantasy worth reading, which is exactly what you did here:
It's a bowl of poison with a few... mediocre candies.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Motte, meet bailey. This is a very much narrower and more defensible claim--yes, the awards are owned by woke activists. "Hugo-winning" is still an unmistakeable mark of quality, but not good quality. But even if we narrow to SF/Fantasy--you originally made claims about fiction written by women generally--there are still female published authors who are not woke, or are even anti-woke. Baen is the obvious place to start; Sarah Hoyt is one example. (No promises that you'll like her writing, but if you don't, it won't be for woke reasons, and she actually likes men!)
There's also good stuff to be found outside traditional publishing, both indie and web serial, though as always, a random grab will not serve you well. The Wandering Inn is a web serial with a pseudonymous author (though I have high confidence she's female), and it's excellent. Unfortunately, "The Wandering Inn" and "limited reading time" are not concepts that work well together.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I guess I got lost in the wording, then. It was not obvious to me that naraburns was speaking about himself.
Even so, I also don't see how the idea that "Biden is not in control" particularly reflects on Joe Biden. Certainly I have a low opinion of the man from years back, but he's not morally responsible for things outside his control. On this specific topic, I am particularly irritated with Jill Biden. She's the one who married the guy, and I do not believe that this charade is in Joe's best interests. Elder abuse is an ugly thing, and that's what this looks like to me.
Eh, I'd give him a 3/10. Her? Maaaybe a 4/10. She's pretty damn homely, but that "sultry wood nymph" picture indicated an okay figure? Plus, she's 21. 4/10 might be a little generous.
( @FarNearEverywhere was certainly correct in that "sultry" is atrociously optimistic phrasing. The girl is modestly dressed, and comes off as the kind of babysitter you know won't be abandoning your kids to make out with a boyfriend.)
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
accelerationist
Are you describing FC's post as accelerationist?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I find it difficult to take the Lovecraftian take on reproduction seriously when you compare modern, first-world procedures and outcomes to the universal norms just a few hundred years ago. Hundreds of generations of women went through far worse.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
For the purposes of my analysis, I'm bucketing together two outcomes that are different, but I think are sufficiently similar for our purposes--"dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime kill him" and "dissatisfied elements within Putin's regime force him into retirement." In both cases, Putin is no longer in power due to losing control of the Russian security state, and the loss of control came from within the Russian security state. (I'm also agnostic on whether the dissatisfied elements reject what they see as Putin's military overreach or Putin's insufficient resolve--those each lead to very different futures, but share the "Putin is no longer in charge" aspect.)
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I expect that a cultural emphasis on validation, everyone-gets-a-trophy style, leads to a poor tolerance for sustained disagreement.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
There is still the following conundrum--let's say there is a speaker who believes two things:
-
"The rootless cosmopolitan bankers are conspiring against white Christians" is a statement that is literally true, ignoring subtext.
-
Individual Jews may be inside or outside the definition of "rootless cosmopolitan bankers" on a case-by-case basis; he doesn't care.
This speaker simultaneously believes both 1) and 2), and would like to express that thought reasonably concisely. How?
(As a side note, I was already aware of the anti-Semitic history of the "rootless cosmopolitan" phrase, but I also know of people that fit the facial definition. @HlynkaCG mentioned "the Davos set;" I think some of them have referred to themselves as "citizens of the world.")
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
See Dean's comment below.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Governing other people is harder than governing yourself.
Eh, I think this depends on cases enough that neither this statement nor the reverse is usefully true. It is true that very few people are fit to rule others unchecked, without becoming corrupted by having more power than is wise.
Fundamentally, what a government--any government--is, is a methodology for figuring out what rules will be enforced within a society. Absent a completely anarchic state of nature--which can exist, briefly--there will be rules that are enforced. Democracy is that class of methodologies where that authority is spread most broadly, unlike, say, monarchy, where the authority is very concentrated.
In a democracy, you get to determine the rules that your neighbor must live by. But the same applies in reverse, and hashing out what that means in practice is part of democratic negotiation such that the demos arrives at a conclusion. Can you set some questions aside, such that each follows his own path? Yes! And you really really should do that in a number of cases, history is quite clear! But the agreement to set questions aside, and not make an enforced rule, is itself a rule that may be revisited.
There are a number of ways to decorate decisions-not-to-decide, and paint "we really mean it!" on them. "This is locked behind a supermajority requirement" or "this concept is culturally set aside as special." Even then, those protections may erode, and what was once settled becomes unsettled again.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Yeah, I accidentally crossed up the ICJ and the ICC, though as it happens, the US has some issues with both. One of the difficulties with the ICJ is that it can't really bind permanent members of the UNSC, since they can just veto enforcement of its rulings.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Gnomes in the brain is an obviously crazy argument, though, whereas dementia in an elderly person is not. That has a bearing on whether the argument is sincere, and therefore whether it's an attack on Guy at all.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I am occasionally guilty of attempted cleverness, but if asked to explain myself, I am also often willing to do so at great length. So...uh...fair warning, I guess? Though if you are here, walls of text are probably acceptable.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
That sounds like a pretty clear statement by Biden.
Question: What's special about this particular statement by Biden that leads you to believe it reflects American foreign policy? It's not uncommon for Blinken or unnamed staffers in the White House to issue statements that "American policy in this area remains unchanged" following a Biden statement that is sharply contrary to the status quo.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
"the people" aren't an entity you can actually consult.
Yes, it is, and that's in fact the whole point.
The practical implementation of democracy still requires you to go around and ask all of the individuals that compose "the people" what they want.
This is not "the practical implementation of democracy," it is democracy itself.
Any government that claims to represent "the people" without actually consulting them might as well be ruling by divine right for the religion of democracy.
Pure democracy has no government layer; it's decision-making by a committee-of-the-whole, so to speak. Past a certain size, this is impractical, therefore governments exist to solve the scaling and coordination issues. They necessarily do so imperfectly, though some instantiations are better than others, in terms of their fidelity to the expressed collective will of the demos.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Imprisonment, as a punishment, is intended to restrict a prisoner's ability to commit crimes, by separating him from the rest of society and putting him under the supervision of guards. This is a direct, and intended, removal of liberty.
However, there are also second-order effects, that are not intended, but are--practically speaking--inevitable. One of those is the limitation on the prisoner's right of effective self-defense. This limitation isn't justified by the standard philosophical defenses of imprisonment-as-punishment, so in my view, the state needs to step in to replace what it has taken without justification.
You could similarly argue that if the state takes away someone's freedom, they are obliged to provide him with freedom.
More precisely, I'm arguing that if the state takes away someone's freedom without justification, they are obliged to provide him with something in exchange. In this case, if you remove someone's right to effective self defense without justification for removing that right specifically, then you're obliged to step in and make a reasonable effort to provide protection.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Learning disorders are pretty close to being a special case of an IQ differential. Someone with a lower IQ will struggle to ever be as good a doctor as someone with a higher IQ, holding other attributes constant. (Lower IQ does not directly indicate a better bedside manner, or other benefits; that sort of "fairness/balancing/whatever" is for video games, not reality.)
Affirmative action has many problems, and "less capable graduates" barely makes the list. Even if you set aside the naked racial preferences and the reputation hit to successful minorities, you still have the mismatch between students and institutions, leading to much higher minority dropout rates from institutions above their level, when they could have been successful at institutions closer to their testing levels. Testing has a tight correlation with academic performance and graduation rates; when minorities end up thoroughly dominating the lowest quintile in class, it should come as no surprise that they also dominate the list of dropouts. (Of course, when you add in predatory student loans, and the worst case scenario is "loans + no degree," affirmative action starts to look like a perfect storm of how to screw over minorities most efficiently. I guess advocates of affirmative action can rest on their good intentions?)
"Adjusting" is never free; there is always a tradeoff. Even the mere knowledge that "adjusting" is happening generates second-order effects. Sometimes the specific policy is net-positive--the tradeoff was worth it. All too often, though, the effects are net-negative, as with affirmative action.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
No, it does not matter if they are intended as jokes or not, it still builds the same meme. Especially when the schools are also rife with sincere and unironic efforts to undermine parental authority, the "joke" actually plays out as "haha, only serious."
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
If you are "shocked/saddened" that someone might disagree with you, this community may not be for you.
Your post is a central example of attempting to build consensus and trying to enforce ideological conformity, which is against the rules.
Scott's opinions are not above criticism, but this forum is for discussion and debate, not emotionally-loaded attempts at shaming.
ApplesauceIrishCream
5mo ago
The tornados that I'm familiar with do not have moral agency, and that is one of the many differences between them and humans. Is there a particular reason to suggest that Palestinians do not have moral agency?
ApplesauceIrishCream
11mo ago
The word "negro" is chiefly used by vile racists...and extremely clueless old people. The two types of people who use the word "negro" are vile racists, extremely clueless old people...and those who want to finance college for black students. The three types of people who use the word "negro" are vile racists, extremely clueless old people, those who want to finance college for black students...and parodists with an almost fanatical devotion to irony.
ApplesauceIrishCream
5mo ago
I don't think there is a plausible strategy that Israel could pursue that would result in a friendly response from the Palestinians.
However, given a sufficiently militarized incentive structure, one might be able to proceed from "negative response" to "no response." If the Palestinians are moral agents, this incentive structure could be described as the just deserts of their previous actions.
I agree that Israel is stuck with an unfortunate hand; I do not agree that they are left without effective strategies.
If those quotes are said every day, they are monstrous, because they are setting up an expectation that students should be active collaborators in shielding teacher behavior from parental oversight. Teachers that undermine parental relationships with their children are abusing both their own authority and their students.
As an isolated incident, that sort of "off-hand gag" is in poor taste. If it becomes time-worn, it is abusive.
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