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
9mo ago
I think the old concept of masculinity is less benevolent than you're construing it. If women are dependent on men to provide the necessities of life and physical protection then men hold substantial power over women. Without doing a massive cross cultural study I think it stands to reason that the physically stronger member of the relationship who provides the calories/income gets their preferences catered to more than the weaker member who in a pre-industrial world would be pregnant and physically dependent on their partner for prolonged periods of time. Cultural norms surrounding relationships evolved over centuries where men had substantially more power than women.
What's happened recently is that first industrialization and now the shift towards a service sector economy has largely equalized economic power. Guns and the modern state reduce the value of a husband's physical protection, and the gender wage gap is pretty minimal once you control for career choices. Feminism's defection from the old marriage bargain is only possible because the old marriage bargain was produced by a difference in economic power that no longer exists.
My read on this is that the masculinity influencers are pushing for a return to the old bargain under an individualist framework. Go out and make so much money and become so physically powerful that there will be something approximating the pre-industrial power differential and you can get a young wife who caters to your preferences. Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less. Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think Yud is messing up badly and making AI concerned people look crazy. I"m more pro-rationalist than most people I talk to and there's so many leaps in his theory that it's hard to get normies to make. His own little ingroup venerates him and he's done a good job of persuading them but once this becomes a real technology where money and improvements to people's lives are at stake he's gonna get shredded in the public arena by people actually good at this.
As a semi humorous aside the obvious correct tactic for AI doomers who don't think we're on the brink of FOOM is to try to do an AI false flag attack, get GPT-6 to blow up a building or something and try to launch a Global War on Terror style response.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think it's just classic American 'prudishness' about nudity. Only 1/50 parents actually objected to nudity being shown (the other two objected to not being informed) and as soon as he's interviewed the Board Chair goes off about larger theoretical issues of parental rights and how they're definitely not showing David to kindergartners (it was sixth graders). In a normal political environment an art teacher failing to send out a permission slip they normally send for something like David doesn't seem like such an organizational failure you'd need to fire the school principal.
My guess is there was a long standing disagreement between this principal and the School Board Chair and he seized on an insignificant pretext to oust the principle. Or, this chair board is so into right wing education politics that he kind of jumped at the chance to do something and overreacted to a pretty minor incident. The left isn't the only group capable of purity signaling or expensive signals of ingroup loyalty. I would expect some overly censorious decisions about what minors should see to emerge from right wing educational institutions, even if it leads to ironic results like a "Classical School" not showing David.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I used to have chronic gas and then I eliminated garlic and onions from my diet and have no issues. It's not something I would request anyone cater to at a 100 person gathering but when I'm with close family we saute garlic and onions separately and then everyone else adds them to their portion. I have an uncle with similar stomach issues who can only eat extremely bland foods and just caries his own packed lunches to most things and my sister can't handle dairy.
My guess is that a sizable minority of the population would be better off if they identified certain foods that gave them issues and then removed them from their diets. The recent culture war on this issue seems more like classic left-right divide over whether the community at large should bear the responsibility of providing for people with specific dietary needs or if the people with those needs should be responsible themselves for bringing their own food or only eating from a very small selection of dishes at large gatherings.
At very large scales and very small scales this isn't an issue. The grocery store can carry non-dairy ice cream for my sister, my family won't put onions in because they care about me and are willing to cater to my preferences. The issue is the norm for midsize gatherings where you have too many specific dietary requirements to justify preparing separate dishes in each course for each requirement.
A non-central objection: minstrel shows were one of the dominant entertainment formats in American during the 1800's where drag is subcultural. Drag is a tiny percentage of the entertainment options available to contemporary women, where it would have been one of the few available to black audiences and performers. Women also have a lot more commercial power and ability to create their own entertainment media than slaves did. It would be much more surprising for contemporary women to make up the majority of an audience for an entertainment format devoted to mocking them, then it would for some black people to have attended minstrel shows.
Straight men are the most underrepresented group among drag consumers, and my guess is they're not less interested in mocking women than women are. If the audience for minstrel shows had been entirely Irish immigrants, black people, and contained very few native born white southerners that would indicate something pretty weird was going on.
I googled "most followed beauty YouTubers" and depending on what list you look at gay men like James Charles, Jeffree Star, and Bretman Rock are somewhere in the Top 10. Gay men might be overrepresented in their audiences relative to their share of the population, but these aren't minor figures, these are some of the most successful people in the world at selling makeup to women. As you pointed out with the gay male 'gal pal' stereotype there seems to be a large subset of women that enjoys male performances of femininity and I don't know how to prove this but I strongly suspect that they don't find them demeaning
My core question is, what do you think the women who enjoy drag understand themselves as doing? These are usually young, pro-LGBTQ women who probably self ID as feminist, do they think drag performances are true reflections of how women are, that women are ridiculous, and mocking women is fun? I'm not a woman but I googled why women like drag queens and in this thread a female commenter says "it's a laugh at a performance of femininity not at women".
That makes sense to me. Drag queens are extremely technically proficient at make-up and they don't try to look like attractive women. They take a product meant to make women more appealing to the male gaze and exaggerate it to the point of absurdity. I don't think the idea is that women are ridiculous, the idea is that the performance society demands from women is.
Edit: I guess the way I'd put it is that I suspect what is being mocked in drag is not women but the performance women are expected to do in order to appeal to straight men. This is why gay men find it amusing because they are not attracted to women and so they find women's performance. Absurd. Some straight women are also alienated or frustrated by what they are expected to do to appeal to straight men and so also find a mockery of these expectations. Amusing. Straight men for the most part. Quite like what women do to appeal to them and are there for the group that is least interested in a mockery of it.
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
The Peterson work they picked to go underneath the eifel tower is not one of the violent ones. It's based on some 1400's Italian book where a lovers kiss wakes someone from eternal slumber. If you don't project ideas of racialized dominance on the stylized white and black figures it's a sort of romantic piece with people dancing around the central couple.
The violent ones are shown in galleries to precisely the sort of person likely to develop an overly intellectual view of art.
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
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
Trump's conduct here is bizarre, what is the upside of retaining these documents? Why consent to being recorded and then say "hey rando, check out these top secret invasion plans I definitely didn't declassify." Why lie to your lawyers about moving the documents? If you're willing to not just "accidentally" misplace some classified documents, but defy a subpoena to return them why be so sloppy? Why not have Nauta photocopy them and return the originals?
I can buy that Alvin Bragg's indictment was a politically motivated hit job advancing a novel legal theory, but I just can't see that with this. They gave him an out when they asked him to return the documents and he lied to his lawyers about returning them all. This isn't the clever deep state ensnaring Trump, this is him agreeing to be recorded showing classified military plans to some writer. It's either idiocy or some genuine belief that he's above document retention law.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I that scene it's not as if they're not prepared to enforce compliance and totally bluffing, they're just not prepared to enforce compliance on Marlo Stanfield. If Bubbles tried to steal something the security guard would have stopped him without a second thought.
Marlo takes two Lollipops he could easily pay for while looking the guard in the eyes. He's signalling his power and his ability to flaunt the rules and personally disrespecting the security guard. The security guard knows Marlo can have him killed on a whim, he's scared to look him in the eyes and says 'he's not stepping to" Marlo, but him having pride as a man means he can't let the slight to unanswered. He's not asking Marlo not to defect, he's not trying to get the lollipop's back, he just wants to be recognized as a working man outside "the game" who isn't going to interfere with the gangs but shouldn't have to tolerate such clear disrespect either. And Marlo of course says no, it's the other way.
One of the running themes in The Wire is that the code of honor that allows drug dealers to exist alongside the community is in decay. Omar takes pride in never robbing a citizen, he's gunned down by a child. They shoot at his mother on her way to church. Avon's generation might have stolen, but they wouldn't have personally humiliated the security guard in doing so. Marlo is the next generation, he's more ruthless and has people killed constantly for vague suspicions or minor slights. The system that no longer exists isn't state and federal law, it's the norm that people outside "the game", especially "citizens" are to be left alone and not really interfered with.
I'm confused about your reading of the Good Samaritan Parable.
The Samaritans aren't the friendly neighboring faith to Jesus's jewish audience, they're the heretical near outgroup. The Jews had demolished their temple in the previous century and in Jesus's time the Samaritan's profaned the temple mount by scattering bones on it. The parable is given in answer to a questioner asking 'who is my neighbor' that they should love as themselves. Before the heretical Samaritan helps the injured man, a priest and a levite refuse to help him, possibly because they value ritual cleanliness so highly they don't want to touch the man who may be dead. Jesus ends the parable by asking which of these is the injured man's neighbor.
Casting the hated heretic as the merciful unexpected neighbor rather than the high status fellow Jews suggests a broadening of the boundaries of who is a neighbor we are commanded to love, not a limiting of it to co-religionists.
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.
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.
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 houses pick 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.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Are Mr. Beasts new videos with Chris diatribes about the concept of gender, or is it just the same stuff he always made but with an awkward looking two months of HRT transwoman in them now? The most recent "Beast Reacts" video has Chris and she and some other guy just react to trick shot videos, maybe they talk about gender ideology in another video but I'm not willing to watch much more of their mind numbing content.
I think 2rafa's comment about finding MTF people 'grotesque' is the real explanation. There isn't some disagreement about gender theory here, people just don't want to look at a non-passing transwoman do replacement level reactions to trick shots.
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
NFL players take the Wonderlic test during the draft and as an avid NFL fan no one talks about it as a meaningful indicator in interviews or analysis. You can look up QB Wonderlic scores they vary wildly Peyton Manning got a 28, Mahomes got a 24, Brady got a 33, Harvard Grad and style icon Ryan Fitzpatrick got a 48.
I would expect the correlation between general intelligence and outcome to shrink if you're only sampling people who are dramatic outliers at a very narrow subset of intelligence. Which is to say that I don't think it's IQ rising to the top.
QB is an odd position where your chances to actually get experience in live reps is pretty limited. There are only so many snaps in practice and during games and only 1/22 people involved can practice that skill. You can get better at throwing and watching film but the key skill of reading defenses from the pocket is hard to acquire without organized large scale practices that require 21 other players to not be QB's.
For this reason it seems totally plausible to me that there's an early filter in QB development, where kids trying to play QB for the first time are going to be outcompeted for practice snaps by kids whose parents could pay for them to start playing football earlier or to attend football camps. Or who just had parents who could coach them up enough that they could win the initial practice snaps and improve.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
LGBT Twitter people usually equate "wanting to kill gay or trans people" with anything that might increase the probability of suicide, i.e. social exclusion. Exterminating trans people is used in all sorts of contexts where the meaning isn't rounding up and killing them but preventing them from transitioning socially or medically. To be exceedingly generous; if a country legally banned a body modification ritual like circumcision you can see how that might be
(hyperbolically) equated with the extermination of the Jewish faith since future generations would not be able to participate in a central ritual of membership but it would be pretty different from literally rounding up and killing Jewish people.
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.
I think less toxoplasma if the shooter is FTM because the right-wing narrative of FTM is that they're deluded female victims not masculine aggressors. If the shooter was MTF all hell would break lose.
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
Russia has no reasonable fear that NATO would launch some sort of land invasion of their internationally recognized territory because they have nuclear deterrent. America theoretically being able to put nuclear missiles closer to Russia doesn't erase that deterrent. Proximity of missiles mattered way more in 1962 when nuclear armed submarines and ICBMs we're just getting started. Also in the post WWII era there was this thought that winning a nuclear exchange was a thing that mattered, where now I don't think there's any Foreign Policy goal the American public would be willing to tolerate once city getting nuked in order to accomplish, so as long as you can credibly threaten that you're safe.
Russia has a totally reasonable fear that NATO is in the process of turning them from a global super power into an impotent commodities provider. But I also think it's totally unreasonable for Russia to expect to remain a regional hegemon in light of it's economic weakness. If you insist on trying to dominate part of Europe with an economy smaller than Italy's or Brazil's you have to use force or skulduggery because you're not outcompeting the EU on trade deals. If you could frame America & NATO as foreign colonizers to unite against maybe you could do it, but former SSR's are the strongest supporters of Ukraine precisely because they see Russia as a threat to dominate them not as a force to protect them from outside powers.
If Russia is determined to dominate it's neighbors internal politics without the soft power to compete with America or the EU then it is resolving to use force eventually.
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.
I used to be a token progressive on here but then I left because I took shrooms and decided hiking was a better use of my time than arguing on the internet.
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