Corvos
1mo ago
I’d say the good thing about python is it lets you do just about anything. Any attributes of an objects can be called at any time, you can pass anything into any function, etc.
The bad thing about Python is of course that it lets you do just about anything.
Corvos
1mo ago
This also brought me completely out of the experience. There are mods to fix it but I haven’t got around to trying them.
Corvos
1mo ago
I didn't particularly mean my explanation to be insulting to feminism, I get why they were annoyed by it - from a certain perspective, it sidelines one sex and stereotypes it at the same time. But at the same time, the gender of an unknown person is either male or female. There's no particular insult in having a conventional default, any more than it insults 1 if your binary values default to 0.
Corvos
1mo ago
I was expecting a very light buzz, not to check out. Stuff is so potent now and it's quite cheap. I'm fairly experienced with drugs but this caught me by surprise.
Just musing: is this a success for capitalism, in the way that the drive for efficiency and efficacy produced aspirin from willow bark? Or a failure, because the new enhanced product isn't actually what the majority of potential customers want, and may taint the old product? Now that the production process for cocaine is known, nobody gets to buy coca leaves to chew for their mild buzz.
Corvos
1mo ago
In the past, this would just be 'he' unless there was context otherwise in which case you guess in what's now considered a sexist, stereotyping way (if you are talking about someone at an embroidery club 'she', if you are talking about a general 'he' etc. etc.). Feminism didn't like this, creating the subsequent problem.
Corvos
1mo ago
Thank you for the detailed breakdown. I see that the letter of the law regarding child abuse is much more detailed - as it should be, given the greater importance of children and the sad ratio of corpse abuse : child abuse.
In the spirit of contrarianism, I will point out that if, say, my friend moved abroad and didn't speak to his elderly mother for years, I would consider him to have 'treated her badly' in standard parlance despite and precisely because of the lack of any positive acts. 'Treatment' may be a term of art in law and have a slightly different meaning there though.
Corvos
1mo ago
(2) The legal issue of whether a person can be guilty of abuse of a corpse by simply leaving it alone (rather than a more typical situation of fucking a corpse or dumping a corpse out of the back of a van) is unintuitive. I would not have expected it to come out this way after reading the statute.
Without knowing anything about the relevant law, it makes sense to me that you can abuse a corpse by leaving it alone in the same way you can abuse a child by leaving it alone.
Partly this is because a corpse is treated sort of like a living thing from a spiritual point of view. We treat them as having certain feelings, or at the very least as having the relatives and dead person's feelings attached to them - it is tragic if they are mutilated or forgotten, we want to lay them to rest in a nice place, etc. Like books or an abandoned teddy bear, a corpse is not just a corpse.
Partly this is because a corpse is, in a much more awful sense, a living thing. An ecosystem. Which is going to go very badly if you don't care for it appropriately.
Corvos
1mo ago
Agreed, that’s what I was implying really. So it’s only ‘sort-of’ legal in the UK.
Corvos
1mo ago
I can't empathise with this at all. I would rather see everyone happy (even in less that dignified circumstances) than dead. Obviously neither of these are my preferred outcomes.
Corvos
1mo ago
I don't have personal knowledge, but it's not quite that simple:
In Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland), the act of engaging in prostitution or exchanging various sexual services for money is legal,[2] but a number of related activities, including soliciting in a public place, kerb crawling, owning or managing a brothel, and pimping, are illegal. In Northern Ireland, which previously had similar laws, paying for sex became illegal from 1 June 2015.[3]
Taking money after having sex with someone seems to be legal, but the activities required to enable such transactions at scale are not legal. Certainly we have no red light districts that I'm aware of, and I have never heard of anything from anyone I know ever describing any interaction with prostitutes in any form.
I'm sure it happens, but it's furtive and not in the public eye.
Corvos
1mo ago
I don't really know anything about the history of Britain in Afghanistan, but it's worth noting that the Empire tended to operate on the Roman model - the incoming Brits put and keep an appropriate member of the local royal caste on the throne, we help keep things orderly, we invest to some extent and we make various rather one-sided trade deals.
The Americans (and probably the USSR) were hamstrung by being explicit regime-changers rather than 'you can keep things basically the same as they were, with us technically on top but generally hands-off'.
Corvos
1mo ago
Yeah, I was thinking it’s very Toxoplasma of Rageish. Like, if I wanted to pick/manufacture the perfect heroine and villain for my long-planned rising, these aren’t the ones I’d choose.
An academic work and various articles I read 10 years ago when I was trying to write a novel on witchcraft. I'm afraid I don't recall the name but it was regarded as being the top work at the time.
My understanding was that the consensus had settled (note weasel words!) on 'most victims of witchcraft accusations were men, witch-burnings were much rarer than lyncings, witchcraft accusations are best thought of as spontaneous riots rather than having much to do with religion or politics'. But that's all I've got to back it.
The only thing I note about the article you linked is the first paragraph:
While both men and women have historically been accused of the malicious use of magic, only around 10–30% of suspected witches were men by the 16th and 17th centuries. (Emphasis mine)
Perhaps we are discussing different periods? Doesn't seem likely though. At the risk of going ad-hominem, I'll admit I have limited trust in a blog post by the University of Cambridge from 2023, whose main citation is an article in Gender & History. For myself I’m going to say that this is epistemically undetermined for now :)
Corvos
1mo ago
To go viral, one assumes. Then you sell the story, plus when you sell your services as a content creator you can point to when one of your videos was literally world famous, etc.
Corvos
1mo ago
The majority of people accused of witchcraft were men, and it wasn't organised, it was local disagreements and hatreds escalating into lynchings. These were almost always halted when anyone with any authority outside the village found out what was going on and put a stop to it.
Corvos
1mo ago
Gentlemen can buy knives, chavs can't. No need for ID. Class discrimination is what made Britain great.
Corvos
1mo ago
The transcript in that video is really weird, though. Her words are aggressive, but he keeps saying variations on, 'yes, yes, show the knife'.
It could be 'get the knife again, I want the world to see what you were threatening me with' but coupled with the weird way she's holding them (face on to the camera, maximum display, minimum threat) and his background as a 'digital artist' I would not be at all surprised if he's paying her.
Corvos
1mo ago
I was all ready to be impressed with the Mail for actually doing some investigative journalism & finding some facts, and then
Despite rabble rousers such as Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk suggesting that the man who filmed it was a small boat illegal migrant, we can reveal Fatos has lived in the UK for four years
Oh gosh. Four years. How could we be so mistaken?
Corvos
1mo ago
At least in the UK, things were kept reasonably orderly in part because the police were usually local and knew everybody, and because they were freer to make assumptions about who was up to no good.
When you have to apply the laws completely equally and show no evidence of prejudice, the laws are going to have to get a lot more onerous and specific.
Corvos
1mo ago
You joke, but I’ve known some very brown farm labourers. 60 years of all-day tanning with do a lot. Though they were Japanese and not super-pale to start with.
I was joking! But if it amuses you go ahead by all means :)
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