Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Good points.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I mean, sure, but isn't that sort of like me saying 'you're confusing cancel culture with progressivism, all bad things proceed from the former and all good things proceed from the latter'?
That could be a perfectly legitimate claim, if you can independently distinguish the two, as people can distinguish anti-communism and McCarthyism. If you conflate the two, you end up jarring with usage, e.g. George Orwell, Sidney Hook, and other anti-communist socialists become "McCarthyites."
As far as I know, there's no equivalent reliable quantitative data on the prevalence of child sexual abuse in the past. However, I'm no expert.
Note that "no equivalent reliable quantitative data" does not entail "We have no idea about the prevalence."
Also, I should clarify that my claim is that it's misleading to have a simile that presupposes that the changes in prevalence over time are analogous, not that we know the differences in prevalence are comparable. In particular, we don't have good reasons to think that the prevalence of child sexual abuse was lower e.g. in the 1970s, and we know that the prevalence was high. Whether it was higher or lower than today would require reliable quantitative data that isn't available AFAIK.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Was it enough of a restriction to illegitimise extrapolations from its stability to the stability of other democracies?
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Saying that we're guarding against it more, therefore it is less likely too happen, is like saying "can you imagine how many burglaries there must have been in the past? people didn't even lock their doors back then!".
But we have evidence that sexual abuse of children was rampant in the past, especially in the immediate wake of the Sexual Revolution. I suppose you might think that we have lots of Jimmy Saville-types around right now, but then that's the claim without evidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Savile#Sexual_abuse_by_Savile
In contrast, we have a lot of statistics on burglary that suggest it followed the same rise-and-fall pattern as most other crimes, for reasons that are still not understood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Property_Crime_Rates_in_the_United_States.svg
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
To put some numbers on these claims, UK ratings for the 2022 specials were the worst in the show's history, not even taking population growth into account: https://guide.doctorwhonews.net/info.php
You are conflating McCarthyism with anti-communism. Anti-communism won, but not because of McCarthyism, and the distinctively McCarthyite features (trying to root out communist subversives in government, anti-communist loyalty tests, blacklisting communists) are completely outside the mainstream of US politics. For example, the House Un-American Activities Committee is gone and would be regarded as an intolerable infringement on American values if it was restored, at least as an anti-communist institution.
You also say "some textbooks." Don't you think that "almost all" would be more accurate?
Marx certainly seems to have had some sympathies:
Till heart’s bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.
And less directly:
Worlds I would destroy forever,
Since I can create no world
and
So a god has snatched from me my all
In the curse and rack of destiny.
All his worlds are gone beyond recall!
Nothing but revenge is left to me!
I shall build my throne high overhead,
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark—superstitious dread,
For its Marshall—blackest agony.
which eloquently expresses a certain kind of Satanic sentiment.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Yeah, but the people who lost the war were Ludendorff and Hindenburg, Prussian Junkers both.
That wasn't how a lot of Germans saw it at the time. The noble German army had been "stabbed in the back" by the elites.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
You're allowed that motte.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Exactly. Hamas is the government of Gaza, Fatah of the West Bank. There is no "Palestinian government" or functioning "Palestinian state," any more than there was a "German government" with civilian authority for the Allies to negotiate with in 1945 after Hitler and Goebbels killed themselves.
(There was the Flensburg government, but like Hamas, it lacked general authority over the territory it claimed.)
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Yes, it's not currently an option, but it's an example of a hypothetical solution that is not a standard Two State Solution.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
A culture war angle is in some of the comments here: LLMs are being developed under the conditions of matching the constraints from one side of the culture war.
Arab Israeli citizens have a right to vote, work, and move around freely.
Gaza and the West Bank are "apartheid" in the same sense in which Germans couldn't freely choose to work, move around, or vote in the US, UK, France, or USSR (but then again, neither could Soviet citizens...) after WWII. The German state had ceased to exist. The Palestinian state has never begun to exist. Palestine is occupied (in a very hands-off) way by Israel because there is no government of Palestine.
This is one of the problems with a "Two State Solution," which I favour. How do you have a two state solution with only one functioning state? You can say "Israel could take a more hands-off approach" so that a Palestinian state can emerge, but that's a lot to ask of Israel, given that Palestine is full of militants trying to kill as many Jews as possible.
The Allies allowed Germany to emerge from WW2 and even supported the development of German state institutions, but only AFTER Germans had stopped trying to kill the Allies.
So the best road to a Two State Solution, AFAIK, is Palestinian militants surrendering armed conflict and recognising Israel, on the condition of Israel at least permitting (even perhaps aiding) the emergence of a Palestinian state. I would also be fine with Jordan and/or Egypt taking over the West Bank/Gaza, under conditions of full recognition of Israel.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Jews would still exist without the country of Israel
COULD exist, if the Arab majority allowed it, and didn't e.g. revert to the policy that you quoted.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
because Palestine regards all of Israel as Palestinian land
Palestinians do, but there is no Palestinian government, so attributing intentions to a Palestinian state seems wrong. Of course, this adds to your point about the meaninglessness of "Jews settling on Palestinian land." There is land where people who identify as "Palestinians" live, but there is and has never been a "Palestine" (in the contemporary sense) to have land as Palestine. It's only marginally less misleading than talking of Utah as "Mormon land."
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
So if you are not for Zionism you are for genocide.
Not sure that you meant to say this...
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
It's also, when probed, what is denied by many (most?) self-identified "anti-Zionists." Obviously, there are other anti-Zionist positions, e.g. Israel should not expand beyond its current borders or Israel should offer citizenship to Palestinians (perhaps just those in the West Bank and Gaza, perhaps those beyond as well who can prove ancestry). Those are bailies for anti-Zionists, though in my experience many of the more knowledgeable ones (typically Arabs) are quite frank that they just don't want Israel to exist.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Russia is expected to ramp up to 2 million per year in the next couple years
That would be disastrous for Russia if it's true, given the rate they're burning through their artillery stocks. However, you should take into account the possibility that Putin may be able to divert more of Russia's economy to shell production.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Glad to see that someone got the innuendo!
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Definitely. I spent many years not appreciating GT, despite a strong interest in other parts of economics.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
It's a weird backwards Prisoners Dilemma where both prisoners admit to a crime they both didn't commit and explicitly ask for the maximum sentence.
In game theory, this can be a case of pluralistic ignorance, where people's preferences aren't successfully articulated and people end up agreeing to a suboptimal outcome:
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
So either it ended up being very sex negative, adherents would have to wait for a long time to get married and have sex, or, more likely, the kids would get tired of waiting and drop the religion
And, moreover, it meant that conservative Christians had to regard their sexuality (not just sex, but also masturbation, thinking about sex, being attracted to someone etc.) as dangerous for a large chunk of their lives - in the case of Catholic priests or monks/nuns, their whole lives. That naturally attracts people who tend to be frightened, ashamed, or otherwise maladjusted with their sexuality. They won't be all of the community, but they'll be a big chunk of it.
This reached an extreme in some cases (I have a gay ex-Catholic monk friend and he said that being in the Catholic clergy was a never-ending banquet of repressed or de facto open lovers for him; it was very hard for him to come across a straight monk) but it's an issue even in Christian youth groups, unless they go heavily down the early marriage route to provide an outlet for divinely approved sexual urges. The well-adjusted evangelicals/devout Catholics that I knew growing up were all married by the time that they left university at 22, even if they didn't have children until later.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
It "coerces to freedom" as Ryzard Legutko put it. You can live how you like, as long as it's not "discriminatory" and doesn't imply that some ways of living are better than others. You can choose any color of Model T you want, as long as it's black. You will not be judged for your choice of indulgence, but you will be judged harshly for questioning whether it is right to indulge.
That's one of the norms in modern liberalism/progressivism, but there are others, e.g. equity and compassion. The more someone tends towards "progressivism" in my sense, the more that these other norms dominate over liberty.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. Why would not be possible to simultaneously be selfish and do something out of fear? Can you speak more plainly?
Sure, I just wanted to go step by step in constructing my argument.
If selfish people can act out of fear, including secular fear (i.e. not just the threat of divine punishment or the promise of rewards in heaven) then the secular conservative can think that a secular conservative society is possible in principle, despite people being selfish.
In practice, many of them have had a tragic vision and thought that it wasn't possible. In the case of David Stove, for instance, I think it was he thought that a society made up of people who think like him is impossible because people tend too strongly towards irrationality:
Unlike Muggeridge, however, I do not believe that rational thought is a danger to humanity, in the long or even in the medium run. Whether a society of atheists could endure, was a question often discussed during the Enlightenment, though never decided. If the question is generalized a little, however, from 'atheists' to 'Positivists,' then it seems obvious enough that the answer to it is 'no.' Genetic engineering aside, given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win. You could as reasonably expect a thousand unbiased dice, all tossed at once, all to come down 'five,' say. There are simply far too many ways, and easy ways, in which human thought can go wrong. Or, put it the other way round: anthropocentrism cannot lose. The jungle will reclaim the clearing (even without heavy infestations of conservationists), darkness will beat the light, not quite always on the local scale, but absolutely always on the large scale.
(From "What's Wrong with Our Thoughts?")
Do you have reliable evidence (not just particular examples of women being involved in moral crusades e.g. Prohibition) for this view?
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