Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, in a fantasy where they are in control and can stop at any time. Actual rape is not like that!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Sure, but my point is that inferring that people wanted to fuck their step siblings by their consumption of such porn would be a bad inference. Feel free to exclude stepcest porn. What fraction of women who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their fathers? What fraction of men who watch daddy/daughter porn want to fuck their daughters? I think the percentage is very low in both cases.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
Generally the point of unions is to try and rebalance the allocation of surplus generated by production more towards workers than it would otherwise be. The reason companies makes things (in an economic sense) is that things are more valuable post-production than the constituent parts were pre-production. There is often an imbalance of power between employees and employers (especially when the work force is large) that can enable employers to capture a very large (perhaps total) share of this surplus. Unions exist to try and ensure workers capture more of the surplus generated by production, generally by making it more difficult for employers to fire employees. This is more effective in higher-skilled industries because the costs to mass-replace employees are higher but it can work in low-skill professions as well thanks to legal protections.
Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?
No, definitely not.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Given that I know absolutely nothing else about you (maybe you're ex-special forces and have in fact killed lots of people before), the idea that you would enjoy or get some kind of pleasure out of a lethal competition is actually a reasonable inference.
Can you clarify what a "reasonable inference" is here? At least in my case it's definitely false.
It won't be totally accurate, but we're talking about inference here rather than divine revelation - "this is likely" is just fine for that particular bar, and the inference gets more accurate the more information you volunteer about yourself.
Sure, what I'm saying is P(wants to be raped | has rape fantasies) is, like, < 0.0001. A very small fraction of women who have rape fantasies would actually enjoy being raped.
I've spoken to multiple women who actively told me that it was a sexual fantasy of theirs and asked me to be more "rapey" with them. Maybe my proclivities just lead to me encountering more women of a certain type, but c'est la vie. But as for the actual question you'd have to get a lot more specific, because asking whether they would enjoy being raped is like asking if they'd enjoy eating food - the precise details do in fact matter. And in my experience, people do actually want to experience their sexual fantasies, even if they would prefer/only do so in a matter that doesn't have severe consequences for the rest of their life. Hell, there are women who actually set up and arrange "consensual non-con" orgies in the rationalist community.
I feel like this paragraph evinces a misunderstanding of what is bad about rape. Rape is not bad because rapists are rough or sexually aggressive. Plenty of women enjoy those things in a consensual setting. Rape is bad because of the lack of consent, the loss of control, and uncertainty about what is going to happen. Even in CNC scenarios the parties have generally agreed in advance what is going to happen, who is going to be involved (and how), and should have a safeword to call the whole thing off if it gets too intense.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Your inference is incorrect. In fact, sometimes in these games I'll make a quicksave and just go on a rampage murdering innocent people. Do you think I'm some aspiring mass murderer now? What does this fact tell you about my proclivity to killing actually innocent people?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I can't believe this needs to be said but people fantasizing about something and people actually wanting that thing to happen are different. Incest porn is a very common genre of porn, for example, but I am skeptical the people who watch it would actually want to fuck their family members (I certainly don't). People have fantasies about all kinds of things they don't actually want to do.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Women don't just read fiction about this, they actively enjoy it, create it and seek it out. Hell, they frequently talk about how much they enjoy it in public!
I feel like it is important to note that "it" here is still fiction! I play video games that involve killing dozens or hundreds of people. I enjoy it, I seek it out, I talk about how much I enjoy it in public. Can we infer I want to kill or would enjoy killing dozens or hundreds of people on that basis?
The inference gets a lot less absurd when you look at the real world context here, and you can even use this knowledge to make accurate predictions about women's preferences (i.e. they prefer it when men do not ask them for explicit consent for every single physical escalation).
I encourage you to ask any women you know if they would enjoy being raped and report back how it goes.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
Spending any time talking to anti-Semites will teach you that one of the major causes of anti-Semitism is the behavior of organizations that claim to be acting in the interest of the Jewish people. Therefore, I've suspected for awhile the ADL knows that its "efforts" to fight anti-Semitism make people more anti-Semitic, but are okay with this outcome, because it means more funding for them.
Feel like this requires a hidden premise that the ADL's actions increase anti-semitism on net. Taking some action that reduces anti-semitism by X but increases it by Y where X > Y is a perfectly rational thing to do from the perspective of wanting to reduce anti-semitism.
Having accepted this premise, something else occurred to me recently: why assume it's just the ethnic grievance organizations doing it? What if most organizations that claim to be fighting a problem are indifferent to the problem at best and actively stoking it at worst? Do environmentalist organizations push to warn the globe faster? Do AI alignment organizations push for more powerful AI? This is an open-ended question, but it's something on my mind and I'd love to know you guys' thoughts.
I think you should not assume this about any group, you should demand evidence. It seems to me "this group is opposed to the thing they loudly say they are opposed to" is a more parsimonious prior than "this group is secretly indifferent to/in favor of the thing they loudly say they are opposed to" approximately 100% of the time.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I agree with you and Stock that, ideally, there is no moral judgement or condemnation but, as Stock's article points out, there are a lot of people who think otherwise. I view the backlash to Giambruno as less about his particular intent and more an attempt to create social pressure against the moral condemnation interpretation on the belief that some observers would interpret his comments that way. I think such advice also often comes across as condescending to the recipient, especially if it's something they already know.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
It is absurd to infer that women want a thing to be done to them because they read fiction about it being done to other people.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I imagine if the inquiry is able to put together a very strong case (there already is a very large amount of evidence — the inquiry will need to find a bit more hard evidence and put it together) republicans and even some democrats will be forced to vote to impeach.
Color me skeptical. What is the evidence, not currently known, that this inquiry will find that will convince the currently skeptical Republicans and Democrats to vote for articles of impeachment?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
A few news articles I've read have mentioned that McCarthy announced the inquiry without a vote of the House because he thinks he wouldn't have the votes to get it to pass. The article you linked even quotes a Republican who says they'd vote against it. If McCarthy doesn't have the votes to even open an inquiry I'm skeptical he would have the votes to actually pass any articles they had drafted. It would be a pretty amusing end to this that Republicans spend all this time investigating Biden and aren't united enough to actually pass the articles that are the result of that investigation.
Somewhat amusingly Politico reports there's a Trump era Office of Legal Counsel memo that claims federal executive agencies can ignore subpoenas in impeachment inquiries unless those inquiries are opened in response to a vote of the House.
This gets at something of a personal peeve of mine in discussions (especially culture war or political discussion more generally) where generalizations over groups come with a lack of quantifier for the group being generalized over. This might seem pedantic but I think it's important because quantifiers can cause a generalization ("Street sweepers are bad") to range from the trivial ("There exists at least one bad street sweeper") to the absurd ("Every street sweeper is bad"). I think a lot of motte and bailey arguments boil down to two people interpreting the same statement with radically different quantifiers. This is especially the case when there is a lack of charity on either side. It is very easy to read statements by your political opponents in the most absurd way and unclear communication enables such misunderstandings.
I think one problem with this analysis (that is illustrated by the factory worker example) is an unstated assumption that an individuals marginal value or net contribution is some property of the individual that is somehow fixed over time. All humans start out as net drains on society (in the form of infants) and develop our abilities in various ways to be more or less productive. How productive a member of society we end up being is not just down to our personal characteristics but also other social and economic facts of the society we exist in. As in the factory worker example the marginal value of the 5th worker (whoever they are) is very high but the marginal value of the sixth worker (and more) is very low. Our contribution to society is not purely some individual thing, but also a function of the decisions and positions of other people in society.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
True, and I fully support this, but that right doesn't neccesarily extend to minors, does it?
I am not actually sure how far such rights extend to minors. I would think they have some right to do so, but probably not extending to pornography.
Kids under a certain age still aren't permitted to watch R-rated films in theatres without a gaurdian so far as I'm aware. (I guess the distinction here is that this is enforced by the MPAA and the theaters, not the government.)
This is an important distinction in constitutional law.
For the sake of discussion, let's say the technical issues you talked about are solved and age verification can be done. I'm not certain how forbidding minors from viewing porn impinges on the free speech rights of adults. The entertainers are still allowed to make and distribute their entertainment. Timothy and Susan can still consume said entertainment, even if Little Timmy and Suzy Jr can't. Is the argument that requiring proof of age has a chilling effect on consumption?
From a constitutional angle I don't think solving the technical issues changes anything, at least with respect to this particular law. The judge's holding was not primarily about the impracticality of implementing age verification, but of the various exceptions in the law that seemed to undermine the legislatures stated purpose in passing it (exceptions for websites whose content was less than 1/3 pornography, for example).
Now, we can imagine a law that is also better drafted. Perhaps since we have solved the age verification problem we can extend the law to also cover social media of various sizes and search engines and so on. Would this hypothetical law be constitutional? It would still be a content based restriction on speech so it would still need to pass strict scrutiny. The court has already found the government has a compelling interest in restricting minor's access to pornography (first prong). I think it's at least arguable that putting the burden of age verification on websites that serve the related content is the least restrictive means (third prong). This brings us back to tailoring (second prong). Is this law sufficiently narrowly tailored? Certainly it's more tailored than the original law. This is probably a complex fact based question that turns specifically on how the age verification works and false positive/negative rates and similar questions. I don't have a strong belief about how exactly it shakes out without more specific facts.
As far as chilling effect, a chilling effect is generally an argument advanced to demonstrate that a law burdens some exercise of speech. It goes to the question of whether a law is infringing on a fundamental right. In this case I think the law is straightforwardly burdening exercise of a fundamental right (the whole purpose is to erect a barrier to its exercise) so I don't think a chilling effect analysis would take it any further.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I agree, I was adopting the assumption of the OP I was replying to for the purpose of illustrating the issue of perpetuating the model. I think frats and related hazing are excellent examples for "some people who are bullied come to see it as normal behavior to inflict on others."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I don't see any reason to expect that all people subject to childhood bullying will have a uniform reaction to it. Surely some people subject to it will come away more empathetic for people in symmetric situations. Undoubtedly others will come away thinking such behavior is normal and appropriate, the only problem is to make sure you are not the one on the receiving end.
There's also something of a question of the sustainability of this practice. Say we have cohort C_0, whom all are bullied as children. As a result of this bullying they all sympathize with the victims of bullying and will not bully another person. Where do we get the people to bully some future cohort C_1, so they will develop the same sympathy? Do we teach the people in C_0 that, actually, they need to bully the people in C_1 because the bullying is ultimately for the good of the people in C_1? So childhood bullying is Good Actually? That seems like quite the opposite of the message we wanted to send!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I can't put my finger on why, but this feels Kafkaesque in its logic here to me. "Your law isn't doing enough so it's an overreach." I'm almost certain if Texas had put in requirements about social media or search engines, the court would have struck that down as being overreaching. Lawyers, help me understand why I'm wrong here.
Since the court found the law implicated a fundamental right (freedom of speech) and constituted a content based restriction on speech (it limited access to speech based on its pornographic or sexual content) the law was only constitutional if it could survive strict scrutiny. One of the requirements of strict scrutiny is that a law be "narrowly tailored" to achieve a "compelling government interest". The requirement for narrowly tailoring means a law cannot be either too overinclusive or too underinclusive. Too overinclusive is obvious. If your law prohibits a bunch of speech you have a compelling interest in regulating but also a bunch of speech you don't have a compelling interest in regulating, it is constitutionally problematic. Too underinclusive is less obvious. The reasoning from the case the court cites (City of Ladue v. Gilleo) is that underinclusive regulations undermine the rationale for the government's compelling interest. If the government is interested in preventing minors from seeing sexual materials online why is it permissible for them to see it on Bing or Google but not other sites? It starts to look like the government's rationale isn't really to prohibit minors from seeing sexual materials but rather to punish specific companies that host sexual material, using this compelling government interest as a pretext. Quoting City of Ladue:
Exemptions from an otherwise legitimate regulation of a medium of speech may be noteworthy for a reason quite apart from the risks of viewpoint and content discrimination: They may diminish the credibility of the government’s rationale for restricting speech in the first place.
I don't really think age restrictions are unethical. I certainly don't buy that they're too difficult to implement, since gambling sites require age verification and have been able to pull that off. (Web devs, help me understand why I'm wrong.)
I think there are a few crucial distinctions.
The most obvious one is that gambling websites require you to transfer them money in order to actually gamble. Almost certainly this makes them subject to Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering regulations that require age and identity verification (since they are a custodian and transmitter of your money). Key here, though, is that as long as you don't gamble on these websites you don't have to do any identification or age verification. You can go to Draft Kings right now and nothing stops you from browsing their website, even if you are underage. Laws like Texas' want porn websites to require proof of identity to even visit the site. From a technical perspective it is much easier to require someone to provide proof of identity to make an account than simply load a website, unless you tie those things together.
Another angle is that restrictions on access to pornography implicate fundamental constitutional rights in ways that restrictions on gambling don't. There is, as far as I know, no constitutionally recognized right to gamble. There are constitutionally recognized rights to watch videos, read works, and otherwise consume media. Even if that media involves sexual titillation. There are exceptions for obscene material, but material deemed obscene is a pretty narrow slice of pornography.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
My impression is that the idea of being "out" to some groups of people and not others is pretty common in the LGBT community. For example, you might be "out" to your friends (or some subset of friends) that you are trans but not "out" at work (maybe because you're afraid of some kind of discrimination). The way this works in practice is that people who know you are trans use your preferred name and pronouns only if you all are in mutual company that's aware you're trans. If you're with people who don't know that you're trans, the people who do know are supposed to treat you as if you weren't.
Applied to this situation I'm thinking the idea is that teachers and other students would use a trans students preferred name and pronouns in interpersonal interactions (which are largely invisible to parents) but not in official reports and communications. The students in question are "out" to their teachers and peers, but not their parents.
I'll also add that I don't think has to be a specifically trans thing (though obviously it is in the OP). I can imagine some student named "Robert" who prefers to go by "Bob" for whatever reason. Said student prefers to be addressed as Bob but is aware their parents hate the nickname "Bob" so they'd prefer teachers and reports use their given name so as to avoid parental ire.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I guess I don't think that the presence or absence of consent is only determined by some explication of its presence or absence.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
A little bit of both I think. I generally think touching without consent is bad but the sexual or romantic nature of mouth-to-mouth kisses makes it worse. I agree that social facts about what kisses convey are relevant. I deny that social facts about the propriety of kisses are determinative of whether there has been harm.
I don't understand how you credibly commit to defending Taiwan's independence immediately after abandoning Ukraine in what seems like a pretty symmetrical situation. Is the justification that we need Taiwan economically in a way we don't need Ukraine? But the article also commits to expanding domestic industrial capacity so we no longer need Taiwan. I don't know how, as the Taiwanese government, you read this any other way than America's independence guarantee having an expiration date in the near future.
Meant this to be a reply to the OP...
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
I guess my evaluation of the degree of harm it does isn't dependent on the degree of social acceptance of the behavior. I appreciate that other people's evaluation is different but I don't understand why that should change my evaluation. Granted that Luis was raised in a time and place where it was more acceptable. His subjective feelings of its permissibility seem to go to explanation, but still not justification.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
2yr ago
So why is a head-tilt on a first date ironclad evidence of implied consent, but not the lifelong bond between a man and his loving son who he raised from infancy?
Because the head tilt is (by assumption) done consciously and deliberately to signal one's desire to be kissed. I am allergic to the notion that some kind of background relationship creates a condition of implied consent, but admittedly that is probably because my reference class is situations where that implied consent is used to override more conscious nonconsent which is not happening here.
I just refuse to believe that the wife of the man who kissed her before she went to work actually believes she has been "harmed" in any way. And I don't think this is because she really has been harmed, but has been brainwashed by society or the patriarchy or whatever to believe that she hasn't - I believe that, in the act of a loving husband kissing his sleeping wife (who adores him) before he goes to work, no harm has been done. It's a victimless "crime" i.e. not a crime at all.
I agree that the wife in question doesn't have a subjective experience of harm, and not for reasons of brainwashing or anything like that. I also don't think a subjective experience of harm is necessary for one to be harmed. Take another low stakes example: I am substantially late (say 30m) to some kind of activity with my friends, delaying them. Even if none of them subjectively thought of themselves as harmed by my lateness, I still think of myself as having harmed them (in a very small way) by wasting their time. I think there are lots of small ways people harm each other (in the sense that it would have been better if they did otherwise) that are also small enough that even simple reproach1 might be too much of a punishment.
Insofar as part of the point of a union is to protect workers from abusive or unsafe work environments that would seem to apply just as well to government employees as private employees.
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