FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
Your example requires 4th order effects? I think anything past 2nd order starts to get into low probability land
This seems totally orthogonal to whether positive/negative rights are meaningful. You are arguing that on net, the activist's behaviour is bad for their cause, which may be true.
But I am just pointing out that the decision to not go along with their demands counts as a violation of a negative right. Because that specific 4th order effect I gave is a negative right that is being violated.
FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
Sorry, I mixed up positive/negative rights there (I have edited my comment to correct this)
But you can just reframe positive rights as negative rights, e.g.
- Positive: Trans women have the right to use the women's locker room
- Negative: People have the right not to be excluded from locker rooms on the basis of their sex
And just generally, "I have a right to X" --> "I have a right to not be deprived of X"
FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
Both are virtuous in the sense that the problems would go away if most of society adopted the habit of exercising their right to walk around public spaces. There would initially be lots of rapes/muggings, but then there would be a backlash and something would be done to get rid of the evil predators.
When people instead opt to just avoid those areas, they cede those areas to the predators.
And on an individual level, the predators would now actually have committed a crime they could be charged for (instead of just being menacing but legal)
Perhaps we mean different things by virtuous. I use virtuous to mean pro-social behaviour - there is no requirement for some sort heroism or struggle (but it includes stuff like that too)
FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
They can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think @quiet_NaN is being literal with the hypothetical here.
As in, what if a normal woman literally decided, against common sense, to walk around in a bad part of town at night in a miniskirt alone? (Sometimes it is nice to go on a night walk, and she likes her miniskirt as an outfit)
So there is no crime or even unwholesomeness involved at all on her part (I don't think this is a good analogy for Pretti though)
FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
Well actually negative rights is a pretty defined concept.
I disagree - all "positive rights" can be reframed as negative by considering nth order effects.
The argument the activist gave was a bad one - as you said, he could just not go to the party.
But what about: Corvos was encouraging society to view David Bowie as not a bad person, undermining feminism / "rape culture", and making it more likely for people to vote for right wing things, making it more likely for laws to be passed that oppress the activist. Therefore Corvos was infringing on his friend's negative rights.
FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
This is perfectly normal politics. These are simply table stakes. Government is about making people do things with the threat of violence. Which people, and why, are left to be determined by the people.
I agree. It's just that when activists bring up this true fact (at least, the part about how their side is being oppressed), I think the honest (but very uncomfortable) counter-argument is: "yes, I do want to oppress you and restrict your rights, not because I hate you, but because each of our respective rights infringe on the other's"
But WC's characterisation of "if your speech in an abstract sense might harm others in some abstract way" seems to imply the opposite - that political speech doesn't cause harm to others. I am arguing that it in fact does.
Democracy is supposed to be an alternative to murder and war, so when someone participating in Democracy as intended gets murdered for it, it's far beyond the pale.
Agreed, and I think that description definitely describes Kirk. To me, Pretti doesn't count under this, because he committed a crime, was resisting arrest, and just generally not speaking peacefully (excluding nth order effects) like Kirk was.
But to leftists / liberals, these sorts of "0000001mm away from their faces" struggles with LEOs is seen as an integral part of Democracy ("ACAB" - so it is important to constantly antagonise them to make sure they know it's not okay to ever overreach), in the same way conservatives would view people like Kirk making speeches even when parts of the speeches might come across as offensive.
And YoungAchamian is pointing out that both of these are technically legal, and to their own side, it is the right and proper way to do things, and to the other side it violates the spirit of Democracy, if not the letter.
FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
My understanding is that the legal system draws a distinction between "move, I want that seat" and "hey nigger move your bitch ass or I'll rape your ugly retarded mother,"
You've changed the hypothetical completely - originally it was someone being verbally offensive, and was talking about their own rape. Now your hypothetical person is trying to forcefully displace someone from their seat. Neither of these (not even the more banal "move, I want that seat") are okay to say - and I would be open to a self-defense argument there.
but it certainly is a sign of poor judgement.
Sure. But I disagree that poor judgement in this case amounts to any level of guilt. Even though we live in an imperfect world where crime occurs, we should avoid blaming people for being victimised to avoid legitimising crime.
Breaking into a private biker bar and shouting "rape me pussies." Yeah... that one is your fault.
If you break into a private establishment, then yes, things become grayer. I am okay with actual lethal violence in that case, and might even overlook rape - just on the principle that once you trespass you essentially forfeit all your rights.
But again, this doesn't map to the original hypothetical, because "the bad part of town" is not private property (not even at night), and the public has a (pro-social) right to be there.
...but at some point people need to understand that their actions have consequences and they become part of the blame equation.
Only if those actions are inherently bad (like breaking and entering, obstructing the duties of law enforcement, etc), if they are good/neutral, then the only people to blame are the criminals who enforce these wholly illegitimate consequences.
Yeah man, sometimes if your speech in an abstract sense might harm others in some abstract way
I did not follow the guy, but looking at his Wikipedia page, he advocated the following:
- Banning trans women from using women's locker rooms
- A ban on trans gender-affirming care ("We must ban trans-affirming care — the entire country...")
- The right for people to burn Pride and BLM flags.
- Not wearing masks during COVID
- Criminalising abortion
I have worded the above very carefully, to reflect stuff he literally said (as opposed to things that could be reasonably inferred, like "I believe marriage is one man, one woman" -> ban gay marriage)
The mechanism is not "abstract". He directly advocated for society to do things that would deprive certain people of (EDIT: positive) rights. Nor is the harm "abstract" - it is a form of harm to not let trans women use the women's locker rooms, prevent them from getting hormones, not letting LGBT people live in a society where no one burns pride flags, etc
This logic cuts both ways, e.g. the trans activist's words attempt to deprive him of the right to live in a cisheteronormative society. But this logic is sound (both ways)
I'm not really going anywhere with this, because this sort of thinking basically ends with endless conflict. I can't think of a better practical option than just tabooing this sort of inference. But I do want to point out, for the sake of epistemic clarity, that it is not as simple as you claim.
FlyOnTheWall
2d ago
Echoing my comment to @ThomasdelVasto:
As a more immediate note - if you wear a gun in front of cops you have certainly behavioral responsibilities that he did not meet on multiple occasions.
Agreed. The cops are doing an necessary job, so there is a tradeoff between exercising your rights and obstructing them from their duties.
...he did it while wearing a miniskirt and making racial slurs and daring people to assault him. This certainly doesn't ethically clear any rapists in full
It doesn't ethically clear the rapists at all. Unlike LEOs, Criminals are not a necessary part of society, and no one is ever has "behavioural responsibilities" to avoid provoking them to commit crimes. Actually it would be especially important to make sure the rapists were prosectued to the full extent of the law, to make it clear to everyone that it is never okay to commit crimes, even if someone verbally offends you.
He would also be a guilty party for being hostile and antisocial (but his guilt would be dwarfed by the rapists')
These people are explicitly trying to provoke violence. That would be like if a super hot woman walks around a crime riddled area in a bikini repeatedly telling all the men how horny she is and that she bets they'd like to get some of this.
If a woman walked around anywhere and told men "how horny she is and that she bets they'd like to get some of this", then I think she should get in (mild) trouble for some kind of public indecency (and maybe she should also get in trouble for wearing a bikini )
If she got raped/assaulted/etc, then the blame would fall solely on the attacker(s). In fact, assuming she did get victimised (and not just a bunch of disgusted looks for being obscene), she would actually be acting virtuously.
When law-abiding citizens make the selfish (but completely understandable, given modern progressive attitudes to crime) decision to just avoid "crime-riddled areas", "no-go zones", etc, it helps hide how bad those places are: whilst an actual crime incident is objective and legible in statistics, it's much harder to quantify this sort of "latent" crime which would have hypothetically taken place if someone had walked down the street at night alone, but didn't happen because they predicted that and stayed away instead.
People should walk down the streets anywhere, at anytime, no matter how vulnerable and/or sexually alluring. And the police should come down hard when a criminal preys on said person. And if a criminal keeps doing the same thing, they should be permanently removed from society - they aren't Minecraft mobs who naturally spawn whenever there is a low population density.
I think the actual distinction between Pretti and the miniskirt hypothetical is that ICE fulfills a necessary role in society, so there is a tradeoff to be made in letting them do their jobs vs preventing overreach. There is no such trade-off for a criminal.
... especially from liberals. "So... basically you want an underclass of underpaid, easily exploited labor with no real rights so your grocery bills will stay low?"
I disagree this is in conflict with the liberal (i.e. pro-illegal-immigrant wellbeing) position.
Allowing the illegal immigrant to stay in the country is clearly in their interest. No matter how bad the conditions are, we know this is a good deal for them, because their revealed preference is to stay in the country as an illegal.
They are only "underpaid" relative to a legal citizen. But the liberal isn't able to give them citizenship - so trying to get society to look the other way and let them stay is the next best thing. And ditto for exploitation.
In general I find this line of thinking - in which it constitutes "exploitation" to give someone in a really bad situation a kinda bad option - very odd. See also:
- It is morally neutral to just not help some random homeless woman (we're both doing it right now)
- It is (extremely) virtuous to give her money, no-strings-attached, so she can get off the streets and back on her feet.
- It is villainous (worse than just not helping at all) to do the above via hiring a prostitute. Even though she prefers to make the trade, this constitutes "exploitation".
The end result of this logic seems to incentivise avoiding interacting with suffering people at all.
“IQ scores by ethnic group in a nationally-representative sample of 10-year old American children” by John G.R. Fuerst, writing as “Chuck” on HumanVarieties.org, May 2023
In a 2023 paper, Mr. Fuerst tried to rank the intelligence of children across ethnic groups. But the sample size for the vast majority of groups was far too small to draw meaningful conclusions.
The sample sizes are indeed pretty small for most of the races: only 7 / 30 have sample mean std error < 1.0 (I am referring to the raw M column):
- Many adjacent ranks are close to random guessing (IQ(Chinese) > IQ(Japanese) w.p. 64%)
- And multiple testing makes this even worse (I didn't choose to compare e.g. Chinese vs Japanese before looking at the data)
But... there is an obvious and natural comparison to make, that pretty much everyone on either side would have in mind before looking at any specific data: Black vs White! The sample sizes here are 1.5k and 5.9k, so the sample mean error is less than 0.5. And the M difference is ~40, so actually the data does "support" HBD (given the sd gap here, it feels like understatement to say "supports" as if we just found p = 0.03 or something)
And in fact, as a bonus: there are 30 groups, and 2*norm_cdf(-4) * nCr(30, 2) = 0.02, so if we only take 8sd gaps as significant, we can make all the admissible comparisons simultaeneously with 98% certainty. The data supports, e.g.
- IQ(Chinese) > IQ(Dominicans) (Despite samples sizes of just 81 and 38)
- IQ(White) > IQ(Central / South American)
and many other comparative IQ statements (but not all, this is a pretty conservative analysis: IQ(White Cuban) ?? IQ(Black Carribean)) that would be completely obvious to some random redneck guy.
But the sample size for the vast majority of groups was far too small to draw meaningful conclusions.
If he'd just made a more nebulous claim like "[the] NIH Toolbox battery is fluid-intelligence loaded." (like the original paper itself conceded!), this would have been much more debatable. But instead he told a straight up untruth.
I just cannot think of a charitable take here, it seems to be a mixture between:
- McIntire is pretending to have expertise / understanding he does not have. It sure seems like he skimmed the paper, saw Chuck's disclaimer "Bear in mind that the sample sizes are often small and so the corresponding estimates are imprecise", and then changed "[some] estimates" to "[any] ranking" in his head, because they are related concepts.
- McIntire understands what the data implies, but he is running cover for the "good guys", saying random stuff like this to trick normies for the greater good (I can get behind this kind of thinking to an extent, but this brazen level of deceit feels too far)
FlyOnTheWall
29d ago
Well, sure - if he actually lied, and in fact had non-consensually made them do it, then yes it would be uncontroversially bad (because rape, irregardless of victim age, is bad)
No, I do not uncritically accept a convicted pederast's version of exactly how his act of child molestation transpired. It rather alarms me that you, apparently, do.
I concede it is very possible he lied and only gave a warped version of events to his wife to soothe his guilt. I was originally just assuming he told the full truth, since he was confessing to a crime, but I realise that sometimes even when people admit wrongdoing, they only admit to parts of it.
But this feels like a dodge - certainly what the defendent described as happening could happen. And it seems that everyone views even that as wrong. Would you be okay with it if the defendant provided objective proof that it was consensual? (e.g. by a video recording)
FlyOnTheWall
29d ago
I find it hard to believe that the behavior depicted in this particular case would inflict any permanent psychological harm on the children involved
This really isn't helping the impression that you're being a little oblivious here.
I think you are confusing 2 things:
- Thinking this kind of thing causes permanent psychological harm
- Thinking that many in society believe (or say they believe, to avoid repercussions) this kind of thing causes permanent psychological harm
I assume TK is aware of (2), but he is contesting (1). It does not seem at all obvious that this action, where there was not only consent, but the children actively engaged in the behaviour themselves, suggesting they enjoyed it ("...then allowed both children...") - would actually cause permanent psychological harm.
FlyOnTheWall
29d ago
Firstly, in the hentai, the acts described/drawn are entirely fictional, whilst this case actually happened in reality (and actually even the hentai stuff is controversial - see the debate on loli/shota and AI child porn)
And regarding whether this sort of thing is actually that bad (as you have argued in your defense downthread), you said:
It isn't as if he caused severe injuries to the three-year-old by inserting his penis into her vagina
There are 3 pretty standard arguments for this:
- It causes severe psychological harm to the child
- Children are (definitionally) unable to consent, so any child-adult sex is auto-rape.
- Sexual degeneracy like this harms society because it screws with the social fabric (though this argument is only made by right-wingers)
This case actually seems like an excellent counterexample to (2). Indeed, prior to this hearing about this case, I was only open to considering the possibility of young children (~6yo+) being capable of consent. But this seems like a very clear example of non-verbal consent from toddlers ("Defendant then allowed both children to lick the honey off his penis.")
And I'm generally pretty skeptical on all of those points, and suspect anti-pedosexual sentiments are driven in no small part by irrational disgust towards unusual sexualities.
...that being said, this is the Friday Fun (i.e. no culture war) Thread. And so you shouldn't really be bringing up this question (which, irregardless of how reasonable the response is, does evoke an offence/disgust response in many readers), even by proxy (but you could totally bring it up in the CW thread, and I encourage you to do so)
As I said, there will be some kind of backlash when lots of innocents are victimised, and their stories are told. I think somehow this would lead to the problem being solved (e.g. by increased police patrols in the area) - and I'm advocating we shouldn't blame the victims for this, because that makes society more accepting of the crime.
And I'm coming at this from the angle of how the whole of society should operate, as opposed to one-(wo)man operations where someone walks around as bait and executes street criminals.
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