Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Could you elaborate on what specific harm showing an anatomically correct sculpture to sixth graders does to them?
The reasons we don't want to show actual pornography are varied. We don't want to encourage kids that young to have sex by showing it to them. We don't want them to conflate the exaggerated performance of sex in porn with normal sex and have them immitate it. And we don't want them to think adults showing them pornography is normal and prime them for future abuse.
I think a group presentation in the context of art history is distinct enough from some creepy dude showing you porn alone that it's not priming children for abuse. It's not a sexualized performance or a depiction of sex children are likely to immitate. It's possible 11 year old straight girls and gays boys will experience arousal at the sight of a naked male body for the first time and seek out other depictions of naked men, leading them to engage in sex too early.
I don't think David is so fake it's impossible to become aroused by looking at him, the healthy male body is normal site of arousal for women/gay men, but he's not designed to be highly arousing either. He also expresses the Renaissance ideal that the human body is a beautiful creation of God worthy of veneration and is undeniably important in art history. The school's policy of letting parents decide through permission slips whether the harm of potential arousal at the sight of a healthy male body outweighs the educational value seems wise and it's important to note that only 1 parent of the fifty kids actually objected to his inclusion, the controversy is that they didn't issue the permission slips like they did in years past.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Conservatives are mad about drag queen story hour and that's just reading a book not doing a dance. There's a lot of ambiguity in determining whether a performance is sexualized and it's reasonable not to trust a political movement that doesn't think you have a legitimate place in public life to draw those boundaries in a fair way.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
You can't argue about what causes someone to experience revulsion so it's not really a good basis for public reasoning in a democratic society. Especially if you're going to make the case that the state should do something to curtail someone's individual autonomy you generally need to ground it in the prevention of harm.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think it's much of a defense of Matt Taibbi's credibility at all that he's willing to critique Musk for doing something that would limit the reach of his main income stream.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
#2 Is straight up witch-hunt logic. Defending yourself by saying the sculpture David is non-pornographic does not suggest you were on other occasions showing kids pornography.
These are all the cognitive biases that goes into cancel culture just pointed the other way. If someone assigns Huck Finn should we assume there is some part of them that loves making kids read the n-word? If you become hyper-vigilant for any signs of secret child molesters/secret racists then this becomes the terrain on which institutional politics are fought.
Only 1/50 parents actually objected to showing David and they fired the school principal not just the art teacher. My money is that this is some internal conflict between board and principal and they used this as pretext because right wingers are in a frenzy about this stuff right now.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think The Last of Us is almost right wing in that so far it's largely about the necessity of restricting your circle of empathy to an extremely small group of found family. Many Left wing projects rely on group solidarity and extending empathy to the other but all large scale cooperative groups in TLOU (so far) are authoritarian and dysfunctional and the main character eschews involvement with them in favor of protecting his (found) nuclear family.
Heck, even the gay love story in Epsiode 3 takes this form. Nick Offerman's as character is sitting on a tremendous amount of resources that could presumably be used to help others but him fencing it all off so that he can live in comparative luxury with his lover is heroism. There's even a bit in Offerman's character's letter to Joel about men finding purpose as protectors (of specific individual not a group), which is a conservative value.
I don't think the creators of TLOU are ideologically right wing, just that the post apocalyptic genre plus individualistic culture lends itself to that sort of story. A small set of characters set against the world of fascists and raiders is more compelling than a large commune of reasonable people figuring out how to do agriculture and rebuild generators in the post apocalypse.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The Civil Rights Act was passed by democratically elected legislature, the 101st was deployed by a democratically elected president. People have had fifty years to organize a majority to overturn the civil rights act and it remains broadly popular. It was legally imposed by the majority of the country on the South for sure, but why did the rest of the country support it?
It's interesting we've switched from 'politics is downstream of culture' to 'culture is downstream of politics' and politics is just whatever elites decide.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If you put a transgender person alone on a space station and give them HRT they're still going to have experiences aligned with their gender identity. How they experience emotions, sexual arousal, and some of their personality characteristics are going to become more closely aligned with the gender they identify with. On the obvious stereotypical stuff, trans women will find it much easier to cry, trans men experience more arousal in response to visual stimulus.
If you put a white person on a space station and let them increase their melanin levels are they going to have any experiences that constitute 'the black experience' or are part of black culture in the U.S? I would think not, because those experiences are inherently social. Perhaps they might have to change their skin care routine, but that doesn't seem a comparably large change in internal subjective experience.
That is to say that melanin is constitutive of race almost entirely because it's a flag that indicates how others should treat you socially. Gender is both a social cultural experience and an internal psychological one.
It makes sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to the gender I identify with than my birth sex, so I would like to occupy the social position of my gender identity and take hormones so my internal experiences and body align more fully with that gender". It doesn't make sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to a different race" because I don't think races have unique internal psychological experiences outside of social treatment.
As you point out with the case of pregnancy there are going to be all sorts of things where trans people have experiences that are wildly atypical for someone of the gender they identify with. Obviously criminalization of speech is bad and I oppose that. But if someone says to me: "I think my internal psychological experience is closest to a man's and I would like to occupy the male social position and take testosterone, but the only way for me to have biological children is to become pregnant and so I have chosen to do that please refer to me as a man" I would do so.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Matthew 25:34 NIV
"Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
I can see there being a theological implication of a homeless criminal saying he had nothing to eat or drink and being publicly strangled to death by a former soldier. He may have posed such an imminent threat to others that his killing was justified self defense but that wasn't in the viral video that provoked the response.
There's a lot of reasons but I'll focus on a crude materialist explanation; Industrialized societies are are less zero sum than agricultural societies. Agricultural societies under malthusian conditions are very zero sum. Any land that your group isn't farming is a limit on the population of your group. If you look at the Free Soil Party in the United States, the concern of Midwestern whites about slavery is not that it is unjust oppression. It's that white plantation owners are going to use black labor to take land in the west that could go to white yeomen farmers (it's not just that but that is part of it).
Some of the earliest anti-discrimination measures(Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee) come out of world War II and the need to utilize black labor in the American defense industry. When the pressures to be efficient get turned up you can't afford a luxury belief like segregation. Don't confuse discussions of the costs of wokeness' and affirmative action with the idea that total segregation is somehow more productive.
There are some places where there is really intense zero sum competition in industrialized societies. Unions had a complicated history with segregation I don't have time to get into here. But overall in an industrial society there's a lot of mutual benefit in economic growth and moving people from picking cotton in a feudal system to making steel in some of the world's most efficient factories is a good way to increase growth.
South Africa is the one society that kept segregation intact through industrialization and whites there are obviously in a different position from other anglo colonies in being the minority of the population.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Those Prediction Markets are predicting the Republican nominee not the general election. It's totally plausible Trump is extremely popular with the Republican base and not popular with the general electorate.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yes, and you can explain that as either a) the government is really bad at getting black kids to study and really good at convincing them to chop off their genitals or b) the state isn't actually very influential over either and culture/genetics is the driving force in both cases.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The cancel culture debate isn't about whether people can have private conversations it's about people's rights to speak from various platforms. Speaking from a platform isn't a private transaction between person A & B, it involves the approval of whoever owns the platform. Consumers and employees play a role, as they can boycott or stop working for platform owners who use the platform to promote things they think are harmful. That's not physically preventing person A from Person B, it's just creating an incentive structure for the platform owner to deny person A from using their private platform to talk to Person B.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I'm not defending the quality of her work or saying it's the only kind of writing female sci-fi authors can produce. I just suspect the modal fiction purchaser in 2023 is a woke woman and the publishing industry reflects that. This is a counterpoint to a lot of other spaces where wokeness is a top down imposition.
The only 2023 Hugo nominee I've read was "Babel, or the Necessity of Violence" and that's a female written alt-history that basically endorses terroristic violence against civilians in a colonizing empire. I'm solidly on the left and I found the extent to which the author's politics made the plot predictable disappointing, though it's definitely not a "sit around and talk" novel. The magic system was a pretty cool idea though.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Did he do fraud? He plead guilty to failure to pay, but not evasion. They're not alleging he set up some illegal shell companies to hide his income, just that he didn't pay what he owed.
The game theory about how to punish attempted fraud vs. late payments seem meaningfully different.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
That's why there's overwhelming demand for takes on gay and trans movement are top-down indoctrination and not an aspect of the true dominant ideology of our time, individualist consumerism.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
That's a bad test of independence. If most major news organizations ran such a piece the people responsible would be removed or disciplined just for being unprofessional.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
At 20k it's still not very consumer facing, so it has low signalling potential and therefore low culture war potential. Maybe some rich people will do some tourism and we'll get a 'White Lotus' season on the moon so the educated class can sneer at the upper class while envying them. The blue tribe is anti-carbon emissions but they'll still fly to see family on the holidays. If there is a ubiquitous consumer use case like that people will use it, but I don't think there will be.
Whatever industrial and communications use case exists will be the most important one and that won't have big culture war implications.
Ecgtheow
6mo ago
There's two ways to approach this, you can try to reduce capital's share of income or you can try to spread capital's share of income more evenly through society.
Spreading out capital's share of income is conceptually easy. Just have some sort of wealth/inheritance/income tax that puts money into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, every citizen gets a non-transferable share and receives a dividend. Over time the Sovereign Wealth Fund becomes a larger and larger share of total investment capital and most of the capital share of national income is spread evenly among the population. There are myriad political difficulties in funding the SWF and the population would have to resist the temptation to drain the fund rather than live on the dividends, but conceptually it's pretty simple.
Solving r>g seems harder. You can artificially reduce r with taxes but that discourages investment. You can try to ramp up g, and obviously more economic growth is good, but reliably producing new technological breakthroughs so that we return to 20th century rates of growth seems unlikely.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I assume you're implying she's some sort of sex worker by calling her a "dancer" which would normally be a reasonable assumption but the article says they met when she was a movement coach on one of his movies. Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's not rhetorical sleight of hand, it's a disagreement about the burden to respond proportionally that falls on people who are provoked.
The logic is that you're only allowed to use necessary and proportional force in self defense. If someone else throws the first punch in a bar fight you can fight back and claim self defense, but if you start stomping on their unconscious body it's clearly not necessary. If someone throws an empty beer can at your head and you pull out a gun and shoot them that's not proportional.
The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.
Your Autobahn example is not comparable because it reduces the whole thing to one moment where there's a life or death choice comparable to justified self defense. The people in the subway car had other choices, they could have endured having trash thrown at them, the man could have used a less dangerous hold, he could have stopped squeezing slightly sooner.
I live in California, I am annoyed regularly by a particular homeless man who lives near where I work and I have had fantasies of doing violence to him. I think it will be tragic if the guy who inadvertently killed him spends significant time in jail. But I don't think it would be good to have a legal code that says you can choke someone out if they throw trash at you and if you happen to do it a bit too long and they die well then there's no consequences.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think Emett Till's murder is comparable to contemporary murder by a jealous husband. Roy Bryant did not make an attempt to conceal his identity when he abducted Hill, and the people Till was staying with did not resist his abduction. My guess is that they did not believe that Till would be killed, that he would be abducted and whipped but let live. That is what J.W. Milam would tell a journalist their intentions were afterwards in his published confession in Look Magazine (though the FBI doesn't think the timeline he laid out there works given the distances he would have had to travel) It is also what the lawyer for the prosecution in Till's trial would say was the appropriate punishment for his transgression. Bryant and Milam were not even indicted for kidnapping even though they had confessed to it before the trial.
This suggests that there was a social convention that white men could abduct and non-lethally punish black men and boys. If they had just kidnapped and whipped him they would likely not even have been charged. Murder crossed a line such that they were tried, but an all white jury would still acquit them.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
It'd be pretty shocking for Russia to have a 4:1 casualty ratio in their favor and for the war to be going this poorly for them.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah because Conservatives want to treat trans people as their sex at birth and the idea that HRT changes human behavior to be more in-line with the gender they identify with brings into question their preferred policy of putting trans-men on T in bathrooms with cis-women and trans-women with breasts in men's bathrooms.
Also if trans-men are dangerous because they're on T, then aren't cis men just as dangerous?
Crime, and especially murder, is incredibly concentrated in specific areas of American cities. Unless there's another 115th North East Street right next to a 115th Terrace in Kansas City, the shootings appear to have occurred in the Nashua neighborhood south of Cunningham near the I435/Highway 169 Interchange. Nashua is ranked in the top ten safest neighborhoods in Kansas City, the 4th best to buy a home in and has a murder rate per 100,000 residents of 4.6 according to Niche.com, though they lump Nashua together with Gashland which is slightly further south.
Now that's a website designed to help people
buy housespick schools not represent crime statistics, maybe things have changed since whenever they got their data. Well here's a local news affiliate's map of homicides for each year. Notice how murders are overwhelmingly concentrated in the southern part of Kansas City. In 2023 they don't show any north of the Missouri River and Nashua is ten miles north of that. On the 2022 map I count seven murders north of the Missouri River within the I-435 loop, with most of them close to the river. The closest shooting to Nashua was two miles away and sounds like a domestic dispute (woman shot in her home after neighbors called cops due to disturbance, suspect immediately arrested). In the area bounded by I-435, 169 & 152 containing the Nashua neighborhood the KSHB homicide map shows a total of six murders since 2015. The Gas Station shooting you brought up was at East 35th & Prospect 20 miles south of where this shooting occurred.Society was not collapsing around this guy, he lived in a safer than average neighborhood with good property values. Opinions can differ on whether or not it's reasonable for an octogenarian to arm himself before talking to a strange teenager at 10pm, but the old man's perception of threat should not reasonably have been based on the crime spike south of him.
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