ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
To defend my level of charitability, I didn't actually present it as a summary of any section of the article. I said that I had commonly heard other people use an argument that treated sex like tennis in other arguments and that this setup reminded me of those arguments. The author of this article seems to think that transitioning is a very significant decision, often irreversible, and generally much more grave of a choice than deciding to quit competitive swimming. However, she does liken the two in one feature - both choices forever close off vast swaths of alternate possible worlds. And on that ground, she argues that we should let people make the choice.
I'm remarking separately that how seriously we consider things like sex are is often highly variable and unfortunately seems to vary within particular individuals depending on what type of argument they're wanting to make. We have no indication from this article concerning how serious the author thinks sex is in any of the settings I discussed. Nevertheless, all those areas still have in common the feature of making choices which shut out a variety of alternate possible worlds. I think the point I was kind of trying to grasp at is that we do need to think long and hard about the seriousness of the choice in question and a variety of other theoretical characteristics to come up with any sort of consistent rules for how far we can get just by observing that making choices shuts off alternate possible worlds.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
"Picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer," is the phrase that came to mind when reading your comment.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Here is the raw link: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-12-04/whose-income-do-you-pay-taxes-on
I'm not sure the state of the paywall, any free articles available; I always view his column on archive. Good luck!
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
As with most things finance, Matt Levine might not be the absolute best, but he is the most hilarious (...and is pretty darn close to the best in any event).
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I don't know, but I don't think @Gillitrut's response will be, "I'm not worried about it, because my team controls everything."
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Being deceptive about facts is trickier.
This was pretty clearly presented as a factual question with a claimed factual answer. You were anti-science if you even thought that maybe it wasn't an obviously true brute fact about the world. This is why I think the potential for backlash is much higher and potentially more damaging to the already-abysmal state of our discourse. It's a meme at this point that when the left wants a political victory, they are not opposed to just making up facts, stamping them with the label PravdaScience (TM), and anyone who disagrees is just too stupid to read a book. It poisons society's truth-seeking mechanisms and does, in fact, lead people to just throwing up their hands and thinking that if Science (TM) is this bloody wrong all the time, they might as well just never listen to it. The even more recent, tangible example was the "masks don't work" noble lie. It took almost no time at all for everyone to realize that it was a straight factual lie, and the discourse never recovered. People simply turned their back on the whole concept that we could make factual conclusions based on solid evidence and that they could guide our decisions. Once you realize you've been duped, rational or not (depending on your definition of rationality), an extremely common game-theoretic response is to simply raise a middle finger to anything and everything the lying liars ever say again and simply reject the validity of their claimed methods outright.
If I wanted to salvage the argument above, for example, I might argue that one's inability to change one's orientation or gender identity by will
This wasn't really the argument, though, because it probably wouldn't have led them to the same political victory. Everyone knew that this was never the standard and wasn't going to be the standard going forward, because there are all sorts of desires/beliefs/what-have-you that people have that they can't seem to just change by will that we don't sacredly protect via pseudo-Constitutional magic. They had to enough of the bald factual lie out there in people's minds... this was "critical", the article says... in order to force through what they had so desired.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Thank you for your honesty. I have to ask, though, do you worry at all about any future backlash? That if people realize that the whole thing was a lie, an intentional one, purely for convenience sake to win a political battle, and that they were the dupes who fell for it... they might get angry and start not believing the other things you say in the public discourse?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I think the intersection between the set of people who adopt natural law and the set of people who adopt a consent-only sexual ethic is possibly the empty set.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I don't see a lot of emphasis on safety/reversibility. Like, there's one line in a parenthetical toward that end on one particular, but there's also:
The possibility that children might make irreversible decisions on this particular question that they later regret is, for many people, simply intolerable. Transition, to borrow a phrase, should be safe, legal and rare.
We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?
and
According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2020, more than 44,000 people between the ages of 13 and 19 got a rhinoplasty, the most common surgical cosmetic procedure performed on teenagers. Thousands of kids went under the knife for chest surgery — 3,200 girls got breast augmentations and 1,800 girls got breast reductions, while 2,800 boys had surgery to remove breast tissue from their chests, presumably to help them conform better to their gender identities. Indeed, many if not most of these often irreversible interventions on children’s bodies are designed, in one way or another, to help children feel better about their appearances in a way that is inescapably bound up with gender.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
You're preaching to the choir when it comes to the dangers of that type of censorship power, but censorship powers and the cultural/political dysentery they produce don't really hit on what was claimed:
How can you be richer than other people? You can have more wealth than them, or you can take resources and opportunities from them. Currently the elites are all in on the latter plan, not even secretly, pods/bugs/own nothing is a tired meme.
Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline "Born This Way? Born Which Way?" It is a tour de force of Current Thinking on all things sex and gender, covering trans issues as well as sexuality. Given that the title is so evocative concering the topic of my recent AAQC, I feel like I can't help but comment on the current state of affairs. Let's start with the history of thinking on sexuality, since that's the closest link.
For gays and lesbians, social acceptance and legal protection came as Americans learned to see sexual orientation as an innate and immutable characteristic. When Gallup first polled on the topic in 1977, just 13 percent of Americans thought gay and lesbian people were born that way. Now roughly half do, and in many ways it hardly seems to matter anymore. The frenzied search for a “gay gene,” a very 1990s preoccupation, has petered out. Believing gay people had no choice but to be gay was a critical way station on the road to accepting homosexuality as just another way of being in the world, and no one talks much about it anymore.
And later:
...like many queer people, I had many different romantic entanglements in my youth, and had I not met my wife in college it is not impossible to imagine that I might have ended up on another path. I certainly did not experience myself as being born any particular way.
Among people of my generation and younger, it isn’t all that uncommon for women who were once married to men to later in life end up in partnerships with women, and I certainly have known men in gay relationships who wound up in straight ones and vice versa. These people seldom describe themselves as having “lived a lie” in their previous relationships. I think most of us know intuitively that sexual orientation is not binary, and is subject to change over the course of our lives.
Finally:
We ended up with the born-this-way model because of the tension between the seeking of rights for an embattled minority and the broader search for liberation. But this tension is ultimately dialectical — it contains the seeds of its own destruction.
She words it differently, but the conclusion is basically the same as what I had said - it was importantcritical to force people to believe in Dogmatic Position so that political victories could be won, but in the Year of Our Lord 2023, basically no one even bothers defending it anymore; they don't have to! The political victories have already been enshrined.
Unfortunately, that's about all that the article really says about the "born this way" narrative and the political history around it. Fortunately, it hits on quite a few other notes that are highly related to things I've thought about and said for a while. The article opens:
When I was in sixth grade, I made a decision that changed the course of my life. I decided not to try out for the middle school swim team. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but it was. As a grade schooler I was a standout swimmer — strong shoulders and back, and well-muscled legs that powered me through the water with ease and speed. I was disciplined, obsessive. My form was excellent. My coach saw potential.
Had I stuck with it, my life might have turned out pretty different. I might have been a popular jock rather than a lonely weirdo. I might have become a varsity athlete who won admission to a top college rather than a barely graduated teenager who had to take remedial math at a community college to scrape my way into a not-very-competitive school.
And soon after hits the high note:
We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?
Man, I can't even blockquote it without thinking about how many domains this thinking touches on. I'm sure it's been remarked on here, and I feel like there was an SSC/ACT post or some other significant post here where people ruminated on life choices, regret, and the human condition of our walk through a garden of forking paths, where every choice we make closes off an infinity of alternate possible realities. Like, this is so core to the the human condition that it's hard to imagine subjects that it doesn't touch on. Nevertheless, I can't help but think about the hot button ones - abortion, consent, child sex, and economics.
Abortion
Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.
This is used to argue that abortion should be totally fine, and the only people who disagree are some crazy folks who still think sex has some meaning or implies some responsibilities/consequences and apparently want to punish women for basically playing a game of tennis.
Consent to sexual relations
We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.
Regardless of how annoying/stupid/unprofessional you think it is, basically no one would argue that it should be criminal. But we absolutely would if it was sex! It seems to be significantly different.
Child sex
When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.
Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.
Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:
[A]s categories, we experience [race and gender identity] in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances.
A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.
Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.
Economics
I don't have a better subtitle for this section, but my thoughts here are background shaded by the free market, Marginal Revolution style economics, which emphasizes that it's important to let people make choices, even ones that they end up deeply regretting. "Capitalism is not a profit system; it's a profit and loss system," they say. You have to let people choose to try things that may succeed and make them a boatload of money... but which may also fail and lose them a boadload of money. This is often justified by placing a possible governing agent in a position of ignorance - you just don't know ahead of time which choices are going to be spectacular failures and which are going to be spectacular successes. Pushing in an even more libertarian direction, many folks want to say that we should just let people do the most harmful of drugs, even though we can be 99.99% sure that it is destined to end in pain and hardship. The article wants to have a sense of this for individual gender choices. 'You know what? Even if they regret it, we need to let them choose, because we're in a position of ignorance.' The article begins concluding with:
I understand the impulse to protect children from regret. The fantasy of limitless possibility is alluring — who wouldn’t want that for their child? To forestall, for as long as possible, throwing the switches that will determine your destination in life, is tempting. But a life without choosing is not a human life.
Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.
Closing Thoughts
I don't have a nice tidy bow to put on this package. I have my personal beliefs1, but I don't have a nice clean way to just directly put together a story connecting these things in a way that will please any particular reader with their own inclinations on the various questions involved. Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains. I don't think it's "just the outgroup", either. I think we need careful work and reflection across problem sets to help people understand where their positions are sounding hypocritical and why there are serious, huge problems here that are fundamental to the human condition. Reductive slogans aren't going to work. "Shut up and mouth these politically-acceptable words or you're an X-ophobe," isn't going to work.
1 - If you must know, I think the transgender ideology is near incoherent philosophically and anti-science biologically; I think abortion is wrong regardless of whether sex is like tennis; I don't subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and therefore don't think the question is of all that much import for whether children should be able to have sex; I generally lean pro-profit-and-loss capitalism and less drugs.
Just yesterday, I mentioned that a variety of more rural Canadians that I met on my last visit to the area all expressed some form of concern about their "culture changing" with respect to significant immigration. I didn't have great examples, because I'm still mostly an outsider to them.
This morning, my wife shared this with me. The Moncton city hall has, for the last twenty years, displayed a large menorah around Hanukkah. That tradition ends this year. The city cited "separation of church and state" as the driver of their change of course, as if something in the legal landscape has changed in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. Spoiler: nothing in the legal landscape concerning separation of church and state has changed in Canada in the last twenty years concerning public displays of religious symbols. The city is getting mostly derided in social media, and a common talking point is that they're putting out this claim while, at the very same moment, prominently displaying all sorts of Christmas decorations.
So what has changed? Here is where I have a little bit of insider exposure. I don't have public sources for this, and so I'm not actually even sure of how accurate it is, but it's the story "on the street". Basically, there's not that many Jews in the area, anyway, maybe a couple few hundred, but they've been there for a long time. Part of the community. Part of the culture. On the other hand, the sense was that circa ten years ago, there was almost no Muslim presence whatsoever. I was told that ten years ago, the only mosque in the area was really just a small house that had been repurposed. Since then, massive amounts of immigration from Francophone North Africa. They've come with a predominant religion and, well, different cultural understandings. This is what seems to have changed.
Obviously, the cherry on top of what's changed is October 7. It's tempting to think that that is the only thing that's changed, and even if they didn't have all the immigration in the past several years, the city of Moncton would have made the same choice. However, I can't help but be reminded of the old quote about how you go broke two ways: first, slowly, then second, all at once. It's hard to detangle the two.
EDIT: I realized after posting that I wanted to mention something else that was in my mind, but never figured out how to include it. It's that, culturally, they're bloody Canadians! Their culture is obscenely polite and accepting of others, other cultures, and multiculturalism generally. They're more than happy to let people do all sorts of their own cultural things, and general tolerance skews quite high. They're really of the "we can all get along" mindset. This is one of those things that seems to be cracking as they struggle with new situations that they find themselves in, and seems to me to be one of the reasons why they're so confused about these changes occurring in their own midst.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
They certainly have faces and names, though. Do you know those names? Or are they just shadowy figures that you could imagine being "out there" somewhere?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
A couple comments up, kicking off this chain, this was said:
How can you be richer than other people? You can have more wealth than them, or you can take resources and opportunities from them. Currently the elites are all in on the latter plan, not even secretly, pods/bugs/own nothing is a tired meme.
That is just the claim currently being considered.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
the supervisor at ICE will point out that he has no authority to arrest the EPA guys even if they were doing something wrong — which he doesn't think they are — and so he's not going to issue illegal orders to obstruct Federal employees in performance of their duties, in response to illegal orders from a would-be dictator.
The supervisor at ICE is also a redneck with a big ass truck.
It doesn't matter who Trump (or DeSantis, or any other Republican president) orders to enforce his attempts to remove the disobedient bureaucracy — FBI, ICE, or anyone else, none of them will obey. Not one. The "separate agencies" are all one big, singular machine, in lockstep, and not one part of it will turn against the rest on orders of a Republican.
Frankly, dude, you're delusional. This is a clear hallmark of someone who has lost touch with reality. This is precisely analogous to how everyone on the left worked themselves up into an insane tizzy when Trump became president the first time. "What if he just does this?! What if he just does that?! What if he ignores the supreme court and and and and just orders a nuclear strike because he's grumpy?!" Your delusions about literally millions of people across thousands of agencies being one singular machine in lockstep are exactly on this level of crazy. I'm thinking that you don't need to reason through things on an internet forum; you need meds... or a primetime show on MSNBC.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I'm still an outsider to them, so I wouldn't try to claim that I really know. I do know that they just have a different way of doing things, a different feel, than what I'm used to in the US. More chatty, less rushed, more personable. I think they would probably express a sense of, "We know where our people we come from, what our people we went through, and we all have a somewhat similar outlook in life that is informed by our long history of experience in this place." But again, I can't really say much beyond that. I didn't interact with a lot of immigrants directly in the time I was there; like I mentioned, we were mostly in the homes of friends/family. I did notice a lot more folks that didn't visually seem to fit in when we were out and about, at least compared to when I had visited pre-COVID. Even a silly example like people wearing heavy winter coats and hats in the middle of the summer. But mostly, I would say that I don't really know what they mean, and I didn't really poke and prod too much.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
If they do it, he can just bring in security from one of the other agencies
Who are just as captured and will side with them against a Republican president.
Let's start here. Trump needs to replace the security at the EPA, because even though they're literal nobodies who were hired on contract from the private sector on a "lowest cost" basis and don't come from anything like the same political milieu as deep state EPA, for some reason, I guess due to having interacted with deep state EPA for long enough on the job, they're riled up into a frenzy and are just refusing to obey orders.
Trump goes to ICE and says, "Some fucking lefties at EPA who want to take your big ass trucks from you need to be taught a lesson, and I'm giving you the authority to take over security at EPA." Do you think that some rednecks from ICE will "obey"? Do you think that the current lowest cost contract security at the EPA will physically fight them?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
My wife's family is from a more rural part of Canada. We went back to visit not too long ago. They're building apartments everywhere out there, all for the immigrants. All sorts of pockets that used to be empty now have a bunch of big apartment buildings and a small number of shops that are popping up nearby to serve them. Most of the people I talked to were natives, friends of the family. Everyone is definitely too polite blue to say anything outright negative, but in nearly every single conversation I had, it came up at some point. I wasn't bringing it up. But there would almost always be a moment where they'd kinda hesitate, think about what they're saying, give a little breath almost as if, "I'm not sure I'm quite allowed to say this, but I'm going to word it this way, and maybe it'll be okay," followed by some form of, "There are a lot of immigrants now. Especially since COVID. The local culture is changing. It's not the way it used to be anymore." They're not saying the follow-up, "...and I think that's bad," but I repeatedly got the impression that they sure were thinking something like that.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
The #Resisters suffer from a coordination game. This is especially difficult, because the firings will likely be one-by-one and entirely focused on the upper/mid-upper level of the bureaucracy. People whose names you don't know. "The most heavily Democratic departments are the EPA, Department of Education, and the State Department, where about 70% of employees are registered to the party." So, Trump sees that, say, the EPA is #Resisting in implementing the EO and slow-walking the naming of new Schedule F positions. EPA has 15 upper management presidential appointees with Senate confirmation. I can't easily find a simple number, but they have a bunch more that are just straight political appointees without Senate confirmation. No one has even remotely suggested #Resistance on the level of, "When Trump fires the old political appointees at this level and appoints new ones, we're going to #Resist, lock the new guys out of the building, and physically fight against security to keep the other guys coming in. Oh, plus, BTW, we need to infiltrate whatever organization manages their pay system to keep the paychecks going (even though that's likely housed in some other agency that just does it for a variety of them)."
So, what does Trump do? First, he goes to his 15 Senate-confirmed appointees and says, "Yo dawgs, you need to file your TPS reports or I'm going to fire you." Do those Senate-confirmed appointees file their TPS reports? If so, problem solved. If not, he starts firing them. Maybe one of the nine sections controlled by an Assistant Administrator is the only one who doesn't file their TPS report. Trump fires him/her or asks him/her if the problem is another political appointee within their section. Fires whoever the problem is. Each of these people almost certainly can carry out the duty of listing the new Schedule F slots pretty much on their own, if they have to.
But okay, you say, the #Resistance will come when Trump fires the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information. Everybody in the Environmental Information department is up in a tizzy and is using every tool in their toolbox to prevent the Assistant Administrator from filing his/her TPS report. Two things to note. First, the Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information is already a bloody Trump appointee! It was already someone that Trump picked to do that job! How many #Resisters are going to fight security to protect a Trump appointee?! This is a position that has been a political appointment for essentially forever; this is a position where no one across the upper management of the entire civil service would claim can not be simply fired and replaced by a new appointee. Second, #Resisters in other agencies or outside government have no bloody clue who this person is. They have a horrid coordination game to play. They have to somehow coordinate enough people inside and outside the agency to all simultaneously put their necks out in open defiance of the way things have always been done, they way that they're claiming to argue is the way it should still be done, but that they're all going to simultaneously literally be willing to fight security to keep one nameless Trump appointee over some other nameless Trump appointee. Gimme a freaking break. Ain't no chance. You'll see some ridiculous article in the Times about "trouble in the EPA", as Trump is "endangering the future of the climate" by futzing with some no-name at the EPA, but there is zero chance that you're going to coordinate that many people to physically #Resist to protect one upper/mid-level Trump appointee that everyone acknowledges he can just fire and replace.
If they don't do that, problem solved. We have a new Assistant Administrator for Environmental Information, and that new guy files his friggin' TPS report. If they do it, he can just bring in security from one of the other agencies, take his pick from the most loyal, and either the current security guys (probably literally nobodies who were hired on contract from the private sector at the "lowest cost", drawn from a very different portion of the population than EPA upper/middle management) will physically fight them to prevent them from taking over security for the building or, again, problem solved.
The only reason why there was ever the chance of having as much hullabaloo as the FBI director had was because (a) for better or worse, everyone knew who Jim Comey was, so they could reasonably coordinate around an individual they trusted, (b) they had at least a fig leaf of the idea of independence in the position from the statute, and (c) they had the rhetoric of an independent investigation into Trump, himself. They won't have any of that here. They would have to simultaneously show up to violate the law, risking prison for themselves, in a huge coordination game, to protect some nobody upper/mid-level Trump appointee. Ain't no bloody chance. The TPS report will get filed, even if the head Administrator (also hand-picked by Trump) just has to write the names of positions on the damn TPS report himself. If anything, it gives the top Trump appointee the chance to target anyone in the organization who gives him even a whiff of #Resistance. Then, when that lower-level guy gets fired and replaced by a new Schedule F guy, the #Resisters will have to play an even worse coordination game for an even lower-level nobody, all putting their own cushy jobs (and possibly their freedom) on the line.
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I see. You seem to have just imagined me saying something about my personal beliefs. Moreover, you have some weird post-modernist idea that your perception of my beliefs/identity has some bearing on the validity of the form of my argument. Also, you struggle with "greater than or equal to".
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
I definitely won't take any objections from you in the future as being made in good faith.
That makes two of us.
I've given you the opportunity to explain where you perceive unfairness, and all you can do in response is be smarmy.
Let's work step-by-step. What was your complaint? And what was my response?
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
Mod hat is as mod hat does. Praise be to mod hat!
ControlsFreak
2yr ago
So, uh, what do you mean when you speak of "an overwhelming preponderance of evidence"?
Your monologue was pretty orthogonal to the question at hand.
I think the usual argument against such arrangements is not anything to do with the seriousness of sex or anything. Instead, it's about theft. Your boss is often also an employee of the company that is employing you. You're being paid to do work for the company, not for your boss. If he's getting you to do personal benefits purely for him, then some of your compensation (or hypothetical compensation that would need to go to your replacement in order to attract an employee into that position) would be misappropriated to his benefit rather than the corporation. Of course, principle-agent problems are everywhere, we can't always root out every de minimis misappropriation of benefits.
That said, we can widen the scope and even remove the personal benefit aspect without difficulty. Suppose the boss really wants to improve team cohesion for the team underneath him. He doesn't even think he needs to participate; maybe it would be better for the employees to build some camaraderie without any supervisory presence. So, he contracts a company to provide equipment and set up a little tennis "experience" that his team goes to, without him. There is still a lot of pressure for all the individual team members to go. Here, there's no misappropriation going to his personal benefit. I would again think that people might find this annoying or off-putting, but I can't imagine the response would be anything remotely like the outcry if he set up an event where the team (without him) went to a strip club... or an "orgy experience".
More options
Context Copy link