Ecgtheow
10mo ago
In the "Bowling Alone" world I have a hard time getting upset at anyone who tries to salvage a tradition of communal bonding. I was raised in a progressive Christian congregation and while I'm personally an atheist I am very close with the cohort I grew up with in that church and benefitted a lot from the mentorship of older members of the congregation. Being part of an extended social network like that is really valuable especially early in life and while I attend church sporadically now if I had a child I'd be interested in finding a progressive congregation to raise them in. While I can be convinced it's pretty hypocritical I'd rather we sort of awkwardly pretend the anti-homosexuality, radically egalitarian, and anti-women in leadership parts of the Bible aren't there then stay home on Sunday and watch the early NFL games.
If MINO's succeed in amending Islam so that Mosques becomes an intergenerational book club with some meditation and singing that parrot mainstream American values that seems like a better outcome to me than the 2nd & 3rd generation Muslim's abandoning their faith tradition and using the spare time for individualized recreational activities or something.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
They liked them but didn't obsess over them, but the Tolkein legendarium became a sort of quasi sacred text for a generation of nerds and it doesn't feel like it is on that level of significance to them. The movies they're pretty obsessed with, and Harry Potter and animes I don't keep track of are pretty big with them.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Kids like wearing costumes. People who start cosplaying at like 11 or 12 because they like the costumes in the manga they read in the school library aren't in it to get simps.
It's difficult to fully disentangle any human behavior from social and status reasons, and anyone who has a hobby that's more popular with the opposite sex will have some dating advantages. Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
You're making hay over a semantic difference but my reading is that FiveHourMarathon is predicting your second paragraph is true. The point is that they didn't split up black liberals and black conservatives on the ingroup/outgroup preference test. We don't know if black conservatives might exhibit anti-black sentiment against those still trapped on the "Democrat plantations" and a pro-white outgroup bias because the authors didn't test for that.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
But certainly to be Republican has become to believe one is white, whether one is Scots-Irish, Italian, Cuban, Mayan, WASP, Jewish, Armenian or whatever else.
How do you disentangle self-identification from social treatment? Do people come to believe they are white and so vote Republican, or are they treated as whites and so believe their interests are served by the same party as white people? My sense is that back when there was more discrimination against Italians and the Irish they formed distinct voting blocs and now they mostly vote according to age, educational characteristics and urban/rural split. Is this a product of Irish people self-identifying as white, or is it a product of society treating them differently as they assimilated?
Scotts-Irish & Italians are European descended and assimilated a generation or more ago. Cubans in general are 72% European descended and the upper class fleeing a communist revolution is probably more European descended than average. Vietnamese are also refugees from a Communist revolution and they are the only Republican-leaning asian ethnicity despite not being white. Jews may be white but they don't vote Republican, I couldn't find polling on how Armenian descended Americans vote.
Age, educational attainment and evangelical Christianity are big drivers of Republican voting even among Asian and Hispanic voters. I would chalk this up to the salience of various identities rising and falling rather than transracial identification. It's not that they identify as white and vote for white interests, it's that they identify as evangelicals, small business owners, or cultural traditionalists and vote accordingly.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It'd be nice to have some stats on this, and I'm not broadly in contact with teenage girls but interacting with the younger generation of women in my family (nieces and some considerably younger cousins) I was taken aback by the interest in "nerd culture". There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit, but the rise of D&D youtube/podcasts seems to have gotten a couple of them playing 5th edition. The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Eh, I'm not sure it's a bad strategy to forge an alliance with the first generation and then try to assimilate the 2nd & 3rd generation who grow up on English language media.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I don't know why Pirghozin would take his army to a different continent where they'll be dependent on Russia's navy and airforce for logistics. He has no leverage there and no guarantee of safety.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
There's no way this is a stable arrangement. You can't get this close to successfully doing a coup and just go back to things as before. Putin can't let Pirghozin keep his power base, and Pirghozin has to know he's a dead man if he loses his power base. Why Pirghozin would take that deal is bizarre, maybe rank & file Wagner didn't want to go through with it?
Supposedly they're even leaving Rostov and going back to Ukraine? This is insane.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Wagner forces were seen entering Moscow Oblast a few hours ago. I think Pirghozin understands he has to win quickly and is rushing Moscow and betting that they can't coordinate a serious defense fast enough. I don't think either side is trying to mobilize the people to get in the streets like Erdogan did in Turkey. The public is assumed to be bystanders, the audience for communications is the other military commanders, everything will hinge on whether Pirghovin has support from any other factions of the millitary. Rosgvardia vehicles were seen with Wagner vehicles if Rostov but it's unclear if they were seized or collaborating.
I agree that the odds of the coup succeeding are small but the coup hasn't stalled yet.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
An underrated aspect of the Afghanistan withdrawal is that the U.S. no longer needs to secure supply lines through Pakistan so it has more of a free hand to ally with India against China.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Oh absolutely. IVF results in the creation and destruction (or death by negligence) of many ooctocytes and blastocysts per cycle and it requires many cycles to get a successful implantation. On a per person basis a woman doing IVF is responsible for the death of many more fertilized eggs than a woman seeking an abortion. It's remarkable that the pro-life movement invests so few resources in convincing women paying thousands of dollars and undergoing unpleasant hormonal therapy to adopt instead.
The 'life at fertilization' position casts a funny light on the reality of human biology where 40-60% of embryos die before being born. If blastocysts are human beings than the leading cause of death is failure to be born, improving access to health care that makes fertilized eggs more likely to be born could become a leading pro-life effective altruist cause. However, older couples may be engaging in reckless oocyte endangerment whenever they have unprotected sex since they are placing a human in an environment where it will almost certainly die.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I have twitter blocked on this device as a futile anti-procrastination measure but I saw that Jordan Peterson (or Mikhaila on his account) tweeted suggesting they should be naked and oiled up.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Isn't the claim there that Hallie Biden threw it in the trash (of a supermarket near a school) because she was worried he would kill himself? We have a text exchange from the laptop that sort of supports that. What would they charge Hunter with in that instance?
So going through those examples
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Paul Letts was alleged to have let people cook meth in RV's on his property in exchange for some of the meth. The police raided his property and found 55 guns, equipment for manufacturing meth, possession amounts of meth and Letts later tested positive for Meth. He didn't plead guilty and lost his trial in two days, he had a criminal history and got 57 months in jail.
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Suzanne Wilcox pled guilty after being found at a traffic stop to have drug paraphernalia and a newly purchased handgun. She got time served (five months) and two years probation
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Isca Johnson was found to have marijuana and a gun in his home, he got 21 months jail. This one is weird because it says he was part of a joint state federal operation called "Crime Drivers" which targeted people with warrants out for violent crime, but it doesn't say anything about his criminal history.
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Darion Hayne had a [Edit:] 5.7 x 28mm handgun and 5.4g of Marijuana, he got five years probation with six months home confinement.
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Your fifth link goes to the Isca Johnson one again so I'll add one Sauma Brata Deb got 12 months for illegally posessing two guns.
So just looking at these cases the most lenient sentences available to a normal drug user who illegally possesses a single gun are six month prison or home confinement and two to five years parole. In that context it looks like Hunter did better then a normal person would, but only by a small amount because the penalties for this crime are normally quite small.
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.
A relevant fact that I don't think has been established is what the typical outcome is for a drug user who says "no" to question six on form 4437 (which asks if the purchaser is "an unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana or any depressant or stimulant drug") but isn't charged with other crimes. The fighting has mostly been Democrats suggesting that since felons who "try & lie" on form 4437 aren't prosecuted it's unusual for Hunter to be prosecuted and Republicans rebutting them and saying that Hunter is different since he actually got the gun where "try & lie" felons are denied. This still leaves the question unanswered of what is the typical outcome is for a drug user who lies and successfully obtains a gun but isn't charged with other drug-related or violent crimes. Can anyone provide examples of someone who did a similar crime and compare what penalties they faced?
The Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee put forth an interesting example of a tax case that closely fits what Hunter did. Steven E. Smiff was a Florida Lawyer who didn't file taxes from 1997-2011 for the ~8 million in profits from his law firm. He paid the back taxes and got thirteen months in prison. Hunter didn't pay taxes for two years on roughly three million, paid the money back, and got two years probation in conjunction with the gun crime. Hunter's offense seems less severe since it was 1/7th of the years and 1/3 of the money, but maybe he should have done four or five months for failing to pay. It does look like Hunter got off a bit light for the tax stuff, but if that's the closest comparison a Republican congressional research team can find then the five years jail per count that The National Review suggests was never on the table.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
That's different from being a slur though. I don't think astrology is real but if someone were to call me a virgo I wouldn't say they're using a slur.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Sympathy strikes are when a Union goes on strike because of issues between a separate body of workers and their employer. For example in Denmark McDonald's refused to abide by hotel and restaurant sector wide labor agreements that were technically voluntary. So in 1988 the Danish labor movement declared a series of sympathy strikes against McDonald's
Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.
McDonald's caved and agreed to the sector wide standards and today McDonald's workers in Denmark make $22/hr.
More relevant to Finland is that in 2019 there were sympathy strikes in support of postal workers that spread throughout the transportation sector and led to flights being cancelled. I'll leave it to our resident Suomiposter to get into the details of that one but you can see how sympathy strikes can be incredibly powerful tools for unions. However they can be unpopular with the general public who don't like missing flights because the postal service is fighting over how to classify package handlers.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
The obsession with virginity is only a way to control women and their sexuality!
Isn't it though? Historically and presently in many central Asian societies they dramatically restrict womens lives in order to ensure virginity. High status men demand paternity certainty, and in order to achieve paternity certainty you have to restrict women's sexuality, and in order to restrict sexuality you have to make sure they're never alone with another man or have the mobility to go somewhere they could be alone with a man. Is there a society that does costly practice like seclusion/hijabs/foot binding to secure male virginity?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
All porn can be used as cuckold porn if the viewer imagines themselves to have a particular relationship to the performers but that doesn't mean all porn inherently is cuckold porn. You could make the same argument about basically all forms of entertainment, that watching/listening/reading about other people achieving great things must lead the audience to either delusionally imagine themselves in such a situation or spiral into inferiority and take masochistic pleasure in that inferiority.
The flaw in your argument is that you're discarding relating to a fictional character and imagining yourself in their place as a delusion not a key part of how human societies have spread knowledge and values for thousands of years. An ancient Greek could become insecure and depressed hearing about all the cool stuff Odysseus did and knowing that they'll never do anything that great, or they could be inspired by the story to seek out clever and unusual solutions to problems in their day to day life. The audience isn't cucked by the media itself but by how they imagine themselves relating to it.
Of course the knowledge and values passed on in a lot of mainstream porn are garbage because it's an audiovisual representation of a tactile experience generally aimed at the total indulgence of the preferences of one gender (usually men). You could watch what's popular in /r/chickflixxx and then go out and do some of those moves on a female partner and that would be a non-cucked way to engage with porn since imagining yourself as the man is no longer delusional.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
That may be but it still seems much harder than removing someone from a moderator position on a site you own. Plus there is very different leverage, mods want to stay on the mod list, and protestors just want to cause a vague enough disturbance that their cause gets headlines. Arresting them doesn't prevent protestors from achieving their goal, where mods you have total leverage over. This whole thing is just 'all things I don't like are the same' type thinking.
Church is a lot more about community and social network then it is about scripture and theology for a lot of people. I don't think liberal Christians sit in the pews every Sunday, bring Casserole to the potluck, and do charitable work for political clout. There was a generation raised in the church who gradually became secular humanists and I think it's better for society that they preserve community organizations like churches then abandon them in pursuit of consistency.
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