Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
1yr ago
When does it become farcical to you?
I don't like it, but I will grudgingly refer to someone using "they/them" pronouns if they really insist on it. I absolutely draw the line at neopronouns, however.
Folamh3
1yr ago
"This Could Be Love" - Alkaline Trio - the chorus is a list of numbered instructions.
Folamh3
1yr ago
"The Number Song" by DJ Shadow is a series of sampled count-offs from different songs.
Folamh3
1yr ago
"Firestarter" by The Prodigy - the lyrics are a list of traits possessed by the speaker.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I routinely encounter dating profiles where the bio reads something like "If you're a Tory/voted Leave/support Brexit, swipe left" (in spite of the fact that I live in Ireland - the Republic, not the north).
The uncharitable interpretation of women who write things like this is that their thought process is something like "I could never have anything in common with a man who voted for Brexit, so us going on a date would be a waste of both our time." Which is a worldview I don't agree with.
The charitable interpretation is more like "Even if I did get along with a guy who voted for Brexit and found him attractive, I still couldn't bring myself to date someone with whom I have a fundamental value difference."
I suspect that a lot of this is really insincere signalling, however, and most of these women would hold their nose if they met a guy they really liked whose politics didn't align with their own.
Vice had an amusing article about conservative men trying to pass themselves off as woke in order to get with woke girls.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I work in the events industry. Over the course of the last four weeks we hosted two conferences.
The first was a medical conference attended primarily by medical professionals who interact with sick, elderly and otherwise Covid-vulnerable people every day.
The second was a tech conference attended primarily by software engineers.
Guess which conference had a mask mandate in place, extending to building staff in addition to conference delegates. The answer may surprise you!
Note that there are no legal masking requirements anywhere in my country: you're not expected to wear one in banks, on public transport etc., and most people don't bother. Likewise, my employer dropped its mask requirement for employees months ago. The mask mandate in the tech conference was imposed at the request of the client. It seems that virtue-signalling hypochondriacs are far more common in the tech industry than in, you know, medicine.
And I'm not really that mad at the client for requesting that delegates and staff wear masks. They can do what they like. I'm a little mad at my employer for acquiescing to this request. It's not simply a case of "the customer is always right", they aren't going to acquiesce to every request. If we were hosting an event for the Saudi embassy, and the ambassador requested that all female staff wear hijabs, I assume my employer would tell them they were out of their minds. It seems that masking requirements still lie within the Overton window, even for people who don't adopt them personally.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I'm something of a "reverse doomer", in the sense that I was pleasantly surprised when my country dropped the vaccine passport and all masking requirements. For much of 2020-2021 I thought the West was speeding at a breakneck pace down a slippery slope into a China-style social credit system, and was relieved to see my country pull back from the brink.
I still argue with pro-lockdowners a lot about the efficacy of lockdowns as a virus suppression method (arguments which tend to get very heated very quickly). At some point in the argument they usually come out with some variation on the following: "What are you still mad about? You got what you wanted, the lockdown's over."
No I did not get what I wanted. The lockdown may be over, but the general consensus in my social circle (and, from what I can tell, among thought-leaders and policymakers) is that lockdowns were a necessary evil without which Covid deaths would have been at least an order of magnitude higher. It will not surprise you to learn that I disagree with this belief absolutely. People have learned the wrong lesson from lockdowns, and they've stubbornly ignored the growing mountain of evidence coming from e.g. Sweden, Florida etc. indicating that it was always entirely possible to manage the pandemic without shutting down the country and destroying one's economy in the process.
Yes, the Covid lockdowns in my country are over and are exceptionally unlikely to be reinstated for this pathogen or any variant thereof.
What I'm worried about is in five years' time when the next pathogen arrives, and everyone thinks "well, lockdowns worked last time, guess we've got to do them again."
Folamh3
1yr ago
From the old place:
Single-cause fallacy
Media articles are quick to describe negative second-order side effects as having been caused "by the pandemic", when the effects in question clearly have no causal relationship to the Covid-19 virus whatsoever and are exclusively caused by the measures instated in reaction to the virus (including lockdowns). [By way of analogy, it would be very misleading to claim that cancer causes baldness. Chemotherapy causes baldness, and chemotherapy is used in response to cancer, but it is not the cancer itself which causes the baldness.] This is an abdication of responsibility, as it tacitly assumes that governments had no choice but to instate lockdowns, restrictions and other measures in response to the virus - when in fact they did have a choice, and the policy decisions they actually made should be expected to pass a cost-benefit analysis, just the same as every other government policy.
Note that if governments can't be held to account for the negative effects of lockdowns/restrictions because their hands were forced, this obviously implies that they can't take credit for the benefits of these policies either.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I don't know if this is a reputable source or not: https://dailycaller.com/2022/09/16/migrants-desantis-vineyard-massachusetts/
Folamh3
1yr ago
Oh, I was wondering where this quote originated from.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I'm no expert, but what little I've heard about QAnon sounds like the most deranged rantings about the Bilderberg Group/Elders of Zion/NWO dialled up to 11.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I've argued with feminists on this point, and they've used essentially the same argument as is widely used to explain female underrepresentation in STEM i.e. women are naturally just as strong and fast as men, but the patriarchy systematically discourages them from pursuing physical activities, so they never develop the relevant skills.
I don't want to Chinese robber the entire movement: most feminists I've met personally are well aware that men are stronger and faster than women for biological reasons.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Coincidentally now that you mention it, the other day Quillette published an article about the controversy surrounding trans women competing in female disc golf events.
https://quillette.com/2022/09/28/is-this-the-lia-thomas-of-disc-golf/
Folamh3
1yr ago
I saw a shitpost the other day on 4chan in which some anon argued his litmus test for whether he was speaking to a stupid person or not.
Essentially, if he makes a statement like "Asians are shorter on average than Caucasians" and someone rebuts "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"", then he knows he's dealing with an unintelligent person.
It's staggering the number of people I've met - people with Master's degrees, people who've succeeded in their chosen fields - who seem completely unable to grasp the concept of averages and distributions. There are so many people who hear a statement like "on average, women have lower sex drives than men" and interpret it to mean "literally every woman is less horny than literally every man, there is not a single woman anywhere in the world who is hornier than a man". Like, the idea of outliers is built into the concept of an "distribution". The entire concept of an average presupposes that there are members within that set which fall above and below it.
It's incredible to me how so many people think that "but I know an Asian guy who's 6'2"" or "I'm a woman and my sex drive is way higher than my boyfriend's" is some kind of "gotcha".
Folamh3
1yr ago
I particularly hate the term "BIPOC" because, by definition, the ethnicity or ethnicities which are indigenous to a given country vary from country to country. The ethnicity which is indigenous to Sweden are white Swedes, and yet in this context the term "indigenous" is only ever used to refer to non-white people.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I don't know if this has any bearing on your sentiment, but the author of the short story is a cisgender woman.
Years ago I had a sort of harebrained thought, that one's support for authoritarian policies might be inversely correlated with one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm. That is to say, if you believe that you are well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself and one's family as a personal responsibility (e.g. "we don't call 911, we call the coroner"), and will hence tend to skew libertarian on the political compass. Conversely, if you believe that you are not well-positioned to protect yourself from harm, you will tend to view protecting oneself as a responsibility for the government, and hence tend to skew authoritarian.
I think it's fair to say that the current dominant iteration of Western left-liberal politics has a visible authoritarian streak, with their support for lockdowns and vaccine mandates, their hostility towards unfettered free speech, their concomitant support for online censorship etc. you've all heard this before. Conversely, the dominant iteration of Western rightist politics is more libertarian - most visibly seen in the hands-off approach to Covid taken by Republican states in the USA, but more broadly in their support for unfettered free speech.
Hence, my theory would predict that people with a low self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm will tend to lean left (because the current dominant iteration of left-liberal politics is authoritarian-leaning), whereas people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves will tend to lean right (because the current dominant iteration of right politics is libertarian-leaning). Note that this is entirely contingent and downstream of which way the wind is currently blowing: if the dominant strain of left-liberal politics was libertarian, it would attract people with a high self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm, and vice versa.
Who tends to think that they are well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Gun owners, martial artists, bodybuilders - in other words, young strong men. Who tends to think that they are not well-posed to protect themselves from harm? Old people, people with physical disabilities (the former two groups among the most vocal supporters of lockdowns, for understandable if misguided reasons), physically weak men, and women.
What's the mechanism? Certainly testosterone is linked to a greater propensity for risky behaviour, so it's plausible that individuals with a higher concentration of testosterone in their bloodstreams would tend to have a higher self-perceived ability to protect themselves from harm. One data point: administering testosterone to Democrat men allegedly causes a rightward shift.
This is very much a half-baked theory that I'm keen to develop further, and I'd be eager to see data backing it up or contradicting it.
Note that this is only self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability.
Folamh3
1yr ago
My comment was not intended as a "boo outgroup" comment. While I have misgivings about the authoritarian leanings of many Western left-liberal parties/movements, I also think many libertarians are completely nuts, and I'm glad not to live in a country in which gun ownership is common. If someone I know hung this poster on their house, I'd think they were a lunatic.
the authoritarian position is hardly the sole province of those on the left
I never claimed it was and I don't know why you're implying that I did. I made the much narrower claim that, in the West, hostility to free speech is more commonly found among left-liberal parties than right-leaning parties. This does not remotely imply that left-liberal parties are the only parties which are hostile to freedom of speech, in the West or elsewhere.
And, btw, here is a paper that weighs against your hypothesis.
Thank you, I look forward to reading it.
Folamh3
1yr ago
With "Build the Wall" on the right and "Give me your huddled masses" on the left?
I think it would be reasonable to classify Bryan Caplan as a libertarian, and he supports open borders. I'm not sure if you could strictly call Objectivism a subset of libertarianism, but certainly Ayn Rand is an influential figure within the libertarian school, and IIRC John Galt's speech contains a passage where Galt says that the only functions of government should be to protect citizens from threats from without (e.g. foreign invasion, which I take to include secure borders) and threats from within (e.g. murder and theft at the hands of one's fellow citizens), and the government should otherwise leave well enough alone.
How do you square this with ACAB stickers on the left and Thin Blue Line flags on the right?... Those all seem to be cases where the "right" broadly speaking is asking the gub'mint to protect them, and the left is saying just let it happen we can handle ourselves.
I'll concede that Thin Blue Line flags on the right is a wrinkle in my theory, but I don't think ACAB stickers actually contradict it. Yesterday I was binge-reading a bunch of articles about the defund/abolish the police movement in 2020, and as far as I understand it, supporters of the movement generally don't think "just let [crime] happen we can handle ourselves". They rather tend to support abolishing the police in favour of delegating a large range of social functions to social workers, case workers, psychologists etc., as opposed to pure laissez-faire state-of-nature existence.
I'm increasingly convinced as time goes on that there are like maybe 25 libertarians in the entire USA, and everyone else just adopts libertarian talking points when it is convenient to their preexisting tribal commitments.
Well, it's a spectrum, not a binary. There's a big difference between "we don't need police at all" and "we do need police" and "we need police and they should be legally empowered to do anything they so choose to stop/prevent crime". My half-baked theory is that where one falls on the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum will be inversely proportional to one's internally perceived ability to protect oneself, so people who believe that they are very poorly equipped to protect themselves from harm will be very authoritarian, people who believe that they are very well equipped to protect themselves from harm will be very libertarian, and everyone else will be somewhere in the middle, proportional to said self-perceived ability.
No one who is a Trump supporter is also a Libertarian, that is just flat out incompatible.
Agree.
Not necessarily. As I said, the determining factor is one's self-perceived ability to protect oneself from harm, which can obviously be radically skew of one's actual ability. I think the average 19-year-old man is actually able to protect himself from harm far better than the average 75-year-old man, but this says nothing about their relative self-perceived ability to do so. Considering that Zoomers report vastly elevated rates of mental distress than older generations, there's no contradiction in the idea of a fit and healthy 19-year-old man who believes, contrary to all objective evidence, that he is helpless to protect himself from harm. What you end up with is a virgin vs. chad meme, with a fit and healthy 19-year-old man who is scared of his own shadow*, in stark contrast to a 75-year-old man with a host of comorbidities who refuses to stop smoking or wear a seatbelt.
*not a strawman, I personally know several people meeting this description or something approximating it
A friend of mine is engaged to a trans man. This trans man changed the name they prefer to be addressed by like three times in as many years.
I get that trans people prefer not to be deadnamed and I try to address people by their preferred name whenever possible, but really, beyond a certain point you're getting into Puff Daddy/P. Diddy/Diddy/Puffy levels of absurdity.
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