Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
"She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling."
This passage is modified to:
"She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck."
The sorts of thinkers that a child should be reading - in the revised editions, at least, where Elizabeth Bennet is an engineer ("Better than Brunel, they say!") Jane Bennet is a badass lawyer, and Georgiana Darcy is Black. Jane is rewritten to have more sass, while Elizabeth is rewritten to stop being so mean. Mr. Darcy is rewritten to be a better role model for men: modest, empathetic, and socially competent. The story is about how Elizabeth and Jane can have Pride, while Mr. Darcy enjoys lessons from them about the importance of not having Prejudice.
The Oakleys are a queer collective of artists who are travelling to California to escape the prejudice of dumb rednecks. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea will be the Wise Latinx Woman and the Sea and of course she successfully brings the fish back in the end, because women can be just as good fisher-persons as men and other genders.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
But why would that happen?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I have spent a lot of my time in neckbeard libertarian circles, so I have heard a lot about cryptocurrencies in the past 10 years.
I made an early decision that I would not touch them with a bargepole for the foreseeable future. No subsequent event has made me regret that decision.
I like my investments like my taste in paintings: safe, traditional, and matched to my low time preference.
Harlequin5942
9mo ago
I'm not stretching the meaning of 'bargaining' here at all.
You don't think it's stretching "at all" to extend it to interactions with no agreement on sufficient conditions for the exchange, articulated negotiations, or legal enforcement? And from a political or commercial context to a romantic one?
It doesn't change the fact that most men have to learn that just being themselves isn't good enough. They need something more. Which is where the entire self improvement become masculine and worthy crap comes from.
But I totally agree with your first two sentences and I don't know what the third one means. My complaint is that thinking of "You have to work hard to gain the romantic approval of others" as "bargaining" is trying to generate a specific emotional response by including the former in the latter category (which, sure, you can do with the right defintions) where the archetypal form of similar bargaining would be e.g. prostitution or arranged marriages.
Kind of. She's leveraging what she already has.
She's amplifying it, granted. But that doesn't make it bargaining.
To help elucidate a bit, a part of the frustration monetarily successful women have described in media is that they want to be able to bargain for a better man than their looks could command but can't since a lot of men don't care about their money. I.e. their money has no bargaining power over the men they want. So they write articles about how men are intimidated by successful middle aged women or whatever.
Why put it in terms of "bargaining power", rather than "men are largely indifferent to money in a partner, at least for deciding whether to have sex with them"?
(Maybe it also extends to whether they consider women to be marriage-material, but the evidence I have seen is about women's sexual success. And some of that has been dubious e.g. relative frequency of simultaneous partners, but that presupposes that a sexually attractive woman is more likely to have multiple simultaneous partners, something I don't know to be true. Sleeping around seems to require attractiveness on the part of men, but desperation is a sufficient condition for even unattractive women.)
Harlequin5942
10mo ago
He implemented some reforms, but the overall situation was still awful in 2016-2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Argentina#Data
Also, the inflation target was raised by 5%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/28D
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
Art only has to inspire emotions in people.
Is that true?
If we could inspire the same emotions by taking the relevant pills, would art be redundant?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Also dont have sex with any woman who you have "power" over in your department.
I would just say "woman in your department", for the reasons you suggest later: PMC people in the US seem to strongly frown on workplace relationships. It's quite a contrast with European academia, which in my experience feels like a badly written porn film half the time.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I think there are some trends that might help conservatives in areas like Hollywood. China is increasingly important for making a profit with films, games etc. The Chinese government insists on Family Friendly entertainment, while comic book hero-style stories are what Chinese audiences apparently likes from the West.
One precedent is 80s action movies. Home video, plus a Hollywood system that had grown sceptical of indulging "genius" New Hollywood directors after flops like Heaven's Gate, led to the production of a lot of conservative-leaning action films. Think Cobra, Rambo, Red Dawn, Conan the Barbarian, Red Heat, Death Wish etc. etc. Even Aliens has a heroine who is appealing to both conservatives and liberals: the warrior mother is a figure in conservative iconography that goes back centuries; her violence stems from protective maternal instincts that conservatives laud, and she confronts men only insofar as they are weak. Similar women are a stock figure of Western culture, at least in Northern Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Douglas
There's also e.g. the Rocky films from that period, which are some of the best examples I know of traditional working-class American conservative values: nobody owes you anything, work hard, respect your elders, family comes first, don't forget where you came from, stand up for yourself etc. These values are popular among high-orderliness people in pretty much every culture, including China.
Of course, as some people here have already noted, the problems for conservative culture production seem to be more supply-side than demand-side. However, I think that 80s action has lessons here as well. Stallone wasn't consistently a big star until the 80s: Rocky and Rocky II were exceptions in a career of failure and disappointment. Ahnold, Dolph, Church Norris, etc. came from outside the standard Hollywood system. Charles Bronson was a salty veteran and Michael Winner (the Death Wish director) was a sleazy Limey:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=efl5pFTFnBU
So a conservative director looking to make an action movie should try to make something Chinese friendly and go outside the box for the star, e.g. a wrestler, MMA fighter, or boxer as the lead.
If you're arguing that "contemporary" gender norms are far more open to the point that androgyny (or something approximating it) is the rule rather than the exception, then that's literally the exact point I was arguing in the article.
No, the evidence you cite is just as consistent with a change in gender norms. That doesn't mean that gender norms aren't still present and clear to people.
Huh? Surely you accept that, for most of human history, the overwhelming majority of men earned their income through physical labour (e.g. coal mining, carpentry, assorted agricultural activities, tree felling etc.).
Right, but was it a norm, let alone a gendered norm? If you look at great admired male figures in most of human history, like Achilles, Jesus, Odysseus, Gilgamesh, Heracles, Caesar, King Arthur, Alexander, Buddha, Confucius, Socrates... They are distinguished mainly by just about everything except earning an income through physical labour. Fighting? Yes. Doing something physical in an adventure? Yes. Working down a mine or fixing a wheel? Hardly something for great men to do.
Among intellectuals Aristotle thought that men doing physical labour belonged with women and children in the political hirearchy: not fit for citizenship. The normative life for Aristotle was that of a leisured aristocrat, not some proletarian or peasant. Physical labour could be used to keep oneself fit and virile, or monastic labour to get closer to God, or to get out of some sticky situation (see Heracles) but it wasn't something that you were supposed to do to earn a living of all things!
"Diminishing marginal utility" is a misonomer. Economists tend to assume that the marginal utility of everything is diminishing, relative to previous units. (Heroin and the like may be exceptions.) The issue is the marginal utility of money vs. other things. In modern utility theory, money has no marginal utility as such; it only has marginal utility relative to an alternative. And utility is typically defined by modern theorists in terms of relative preference, rather than a psychological state of pleasure etc.
If there is a diminishing marginal utility of money, then why do so many poor people buy lottery tickets and otherwise gamble in games with negative expected value?
Moreover, low socio-economic status is associated with high GE [gambling expenditures] (Davidson et al., 2016; Salonen et al., 2018a). To date, a limited number of studies have investigated the relationship between GE and receipt of social security benefits (Worthington 2001; MacDonald et al., 2004). A Canadian survey showed that households with income support were less likely to gamble. With the exception of one jurisdiction, households that received income support spend a lower proportion of their income on gambling. (MacDonald et al., 2004.)
Studies conducted in different countries have shown that although high income groups spend more on gambling, lower income groups contribute proportionally more (Beckert & Lutter 2009; Canale et al., 2016; Castrén et al., 2018; Roukka & Salonen 2020).
Assume that people gamble for the pleasure of taking risks. If there is diminishing marginal utility of money, why would the marginal value of money relative to this pleasure be low for poorer people?
Also, don't middle class and richer people save a higher proportion of their incomes than poorer people? Do they value maintaining their period-to-period monetary assets, relative to their incomes, more than poorer people?
Also, diminishing marginal utility on average is also very different from it being universal. Otherwise, why would many very rich people still work similar hours to poorer people? You can postulate that the former enjoy work, but that's ad hoc, as it doesn't explain why they would prefer paid labour.
I'm not saying that there is increasing marginal utility of money. I'm saying that it is really isn't obvious that money has diminishing marginal utility, even on average.
Harlequin5942
9d ago
You need to consider demand for relocation as well as supply in the analysis. The expected gain in 1500 AD from moving from e.g. West Africa to Europe, given the risks and the relative differences in quality of life, were pretty small compared to the expected gain from moving in 2024. It wasn't like Europeans were fighting off hoards of African immigrants. And in 1900, what would the average African villager going to do in places where they don't speak the language, don't have much marketable skills, don't have immunity to local diseases, and don't have a welfare state to use?
In the Imperialist period, the transfer was the other way: hordes of European economic migrants swarming to the Americas and Africa.
In the UK, a lot of the black immigration was driven by things like African nurses coming over for work after 1945, during a period of labour shortages in the UK.
I would say that the key factors were (a) the Great Divergence in economic prosperity between the West and the Rest, due to the rise liberal capitalism in the former; (b) differences in population growth, and (c) better information transfer, so that even poor Africans could know that the poor in the West enjoyed a better standard of living.
Restrictions on immigration, with a few exceptions (like the White Australia policy) were less important than the above factors, I think.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
I'm definitely not a fan of the Divine Command Theory, but I think you're being unfair here. Why not posit a difference in degree of disobedience? Surely murdering someone is more disobedient than committing adultery in your heart.
What's more disobedient about it? Both are breaking God's commandments.
On Matthew 22, the key term here is magos (μεγας) which is used in the New Testament to mean largest or highest in rank, just as "greatest" is ambiguous in English. One clever thing about the commandment Jesus gives is that it is both largest in scope (every violation of every other commandment is an instance of it) and rank. If humans truly had complete faith and love for God, then they would neither commit adultery in their hearts, nor murder.
Note I'm not saying that this is common sense, but just a natural implication of an unranked DCT.
I think the better question is why you'd give your own interpretation of Divine Command Theory any time at all, given the many times in the Bible when it's explicitly contradicted.
Oh, that's just teasing! Don't be so coquettish, show the goods.
Harlequin5942
2mo ago
You mean, why can't children and animals consent to acts they lack the mental capacity to understand?
Before you ask, no, I don't think that retarded adults with childlike levels of understanding of sex can consent to sex. Nor do I think that children can consent to e.g. "have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents!" So neither of the reductios you have mentioned so far are worrying for me, but as I've indicated, I'm probably not the type of person you were addressing above, which was why I was curious as to whether you were addressing me when you used "you" or you were using it in some hypothetical/indirect sense/whatever.
There's also the problem that 50-50 is not actually a neutral probability, if you're a coherent Bayesian and you don't have an ultra-simple sample space. For example, if I think that the probability of each possible bloxor being greeblic is 50%, then I am committed to thinking that the probability that 70/100 bloxors being greeblic is 0.004%. So my "neutral" prior commits me to extremely strong confidence that the distribution of greeblic among those 100 bloxors is not 70!
If I set my prior for each bloxor being greeblic to 69.5%, then it is approximately neutral with respect to 70/100 bloxors being greeblic. But now I'm obviously far from neutral with respect to any individual bloxor being greeblic.
This is one of the limitations of Bayesianism as a formalism: it can model neutral belief with respect to any individual partition of the sample space, but not all partitions of the sample space. So, Scott is just wrong and frankly hasn't understood the mathematics, given his statement "If you have total uncertainty about a statement (“are bloxors greeblic?”), you should assign it a probability of 50%," since this norm implies incoherence, but coherence is a fundamental Bayesian norm.
Put briefly, what Scott is saying requires that you reject Bayesian epistemology/decision theory. I haven't read the whole post yet, but I would be surprised if he realised that.
This isn't an adult forum (or a mature one - we're thoroughly immature, much of the time) but basically just dating Ukrainian women in various parts of Europe, where I work. Unlike other Eastern European women I've known, who were thoroughly Twitterized culturally, the Russian, Romanian, and Ukrainian women I have known (intimately or casually, with a sadly small sample of the former) have been anti-abortion, trad or moderately trad about gender roles, racially insensitive (including towards other Eastern Europeans, e.g. gypsies and Albanians) and softly anti-Semitic. Often Christian in a vague, spiritual way, e.g. sexually liberated and suspicious of clergy, and just as into Asian mumbo-jumbo as Christian mumbo-jumbo.
Personally I liked them because they were forthright, insensitive, and really, really liked debating, which are the top personality traits in a woman for me. I happily date both conservative and progressive women with such personalities, as long as they don't mind me speaking my mind and they don't hide their own opinions. And, while Eastern European women often drink too much, they are also very often good at not eating too much, and I like tall/slim women.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Is this a matter of interest in things vs. interest in people?
Anecdotally, I have dated several women in tech, and all of them were in UX development. Obviously, that's not completely representative, but my impression is that women in tech are either interested in people or using coding as a means to an end (like a good income) whereas my male friends in tech are much more thing-orientated and interested in e.g. coding as a puzzle game (as well as setting me up with hot/smart women in tech, for which I'm grateful!).
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Is someone not a cannibal if they only eat human flesh once a year?
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Humans are in control everywhere.
We exaggerate our control, especially our ability to act with predictable effects. I mean, if there's one thing that I hope people take away from covid, it's that nature can still bite us hard. Even if you think that covid was a big deal as a medical problem, it could have been a lot worse, and a fortiori it could have been much much worse if you think that it wasn't such a big deal. See also climate change, where (a) there is a lot of natural variation and (b) even the part that is due to human action is barely modifiable by human design due to political reasons and lagged effects.
We impact ecosystems. Our control of them is limited, unreliable, and extremely unrobust.
Harlequin5942
8mo ago
I think affluent African parents are more relaxed about their kids marrying white than many Asian (especially South Asian) and Arab/North African parents, possibly for cultural and religious (they're usually Christian) reasons.
And because parents, like women, tend to be hypergamous, and a white son-in-law is higher status than an Asian/Arab/Indian/etc. son-in-law.
Harlequin5942
9mo ago
Where the accuracy or utility of the terminology is disregarded due to it being too vulgar.
Not too vulgar, but as potentially misleading. For example, simply changing the denotation of a word doesn't automatically change its connotations. Hence, one's reasoning can be affected by associations with a word's old reference.
what are you insinuating my argument is when I use the term 'bargain'?
Well, you said:
"You can't be 'masculine' when you have to bargain with women for access to their genitals."
Well, if "bargaining" specifically means something like handing over money for sex, then certainly masculine traits are irrelevant to the sexual encounter. A femboy, a coward, a dishonest man etc. could do that.
But it seems that you also want to say that anything a guy does to make himself (more?) attractice is also bargaining:
"You are bargaining with the hypothetical woman when you decide to become a tall guy working at Goldman Sachs to garner her interest. You bring being tall and having money, she brings whatever."
However, the connection between masculine traits and attraction becomes more integral here. For example, most women find the ability to obtain resources as more attractive than the mere possession. A trust-fund baby is less attractive than a self-made man, because the latter (if the wealth was acquired honestly, not purely by chance etc.) can provide under a wider range of circumstances, e.g. the loss of his wealth. And if you think of your own (platonic) difference in regard for the two men's characters, it's at least because of the masculine traits required to obtain wealth are admirable, whereas the luck required to be born into wealth deserves no admiration at all.
Similarly, you want to say that a woman who buys and uses make-up to attract men is bargaining. However, in that case, feminine traits (delicacy, attention to the comfort of others etc.) are also usually relevant to the success of the woman, in a way that isn't the case in archetypal bargaining, e.g. a woman who gets a hot husband by her family offering a big dowry.
The extension of "these behaviours aren't really masculine/feminine" seems to depend on the claim that there are bargaining for sex, which is true if you stretch the scope of 'bargaining' far enough. However, it doesn't follow from that subsumption of these behaviours into the category "bargaining" that we can infer that they have the properties of archetypal cases of bargaining for sex (or companionship or whatever). The problem is that such non-sequitur inferences are very tempting due to the connotations of "bargaining", even given an explicit change in its reference.
You're right to make the analogy with "sexual marketplace", which is misleading for similar reasons. I have been in brothels and I have dated, and while there are similarities, it's a reciple for loose thinking to refer to both as "sexual marketplaces". Devoted as I am to capitalism and economic analysis, I'm more devoted to rationality and clear thinking, which are harmed by expecting that the associations (descriptive and normative) of words will change simply as a matter of broadening their definitions.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I think it's fair to note that the worst didn't happen
Not the worst, but a significant step on the slope. "What if a rapist identifies as trans and wants to be transferred to a women's prison?" was one of those steps on the slope that we weren't supposed to think about.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
getting their basic needs met
But love is not an adult human need. A baby will die if nobody cares for it, but incels aren't babies. At their best, AFAICT, they are possessed by a powerful false belief that they aren't loved if they don't get sex from (the right kind of) woman, and that the world is awful if they aren't loved.
So inceldom has a lot to do with neediness, but not to do with basic needs. Just because someone is needy, it doesn't mean that any of their needs (for survival, happiness, a meaningful life etc.) is not being met.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
All of these are quite clear examples of more disobedience.
But all of them are punished in exactly the same way, according to traditional Christianity. So while there is more disobedience, it doesn't seem to make a moral difference: someone who commits one sin is treated by God exactly the same as if they've committed them all.
You conveniently ignore the second part of that, which is loving thy neighbor. I agree that all sins violate the first commandment, but not all sins violate the second, so why, according to Divine Command Theory, is it explicitly placed above all other commandments?
If all other sins (breaking of God's commands) are implicit in the first commandment, then it isn't.
You should at least address both of my examples before accusing me of not providing enough. Jesus explicitly says that judgment, mercy, and faith are "weightier" than small tithes; a strong implication that obeying such commandments is straightforwardly more important.
That's one possible interpretation of the text. However, the text itself is not a contradiction, since it's not clear that Jesus is saying that these are more morally important, as opposed to e.g. important for spiritual development (the context is condemning the religious practices of scribes and Pharisees.
I'm interested in why you think DCT holds any weight at all. What evidence is there for it?
Biblically? One advantage is that it (allegedly) explains why a benevolent Father would punish his children in a lake of fire for the slightest infraction of his will, excepting grace. More generally, it neatly answers the Problem of Evil which otherwise perplexes the Bible (Job in particular; the Jews' efforts to explain their suffering in spite of being God's people; Jesus's partial revelation to humanity) as there is no separate standard of morality by which God can be judged. On a DCT view, God being anything other than perfectly good is a category mistake. This is not so much grasping one of the Euthyphro Dilemma's horns as try to ride it off into the sunset.
Harlequin5942
2mo ago
Ok, what is the nature of the mental capacity that they are lacking?
Not sure what you mean by "nature" here. Do you deny that children, in general, have weaker abilities to understand the implications of their decisions than adults, in general?
Is there something about sex that requires a different type of mental capacity than what is required for children to consent to the variety of other things that they can consent to?
Yes, probably quite a lot of things, but one major respect (which I alluded to with the example of becoming a heroin addict, and which I later suggested with the example of transgender interventions on kids) is the gravity and breadth of the moral implications. A child consenting to buying sweets without parental supervision is a less serious decision than a child choosing to have sex. This is one reason why parents, as a general rule, should have a lot of social and legal authority over children. Why doesn't that authority extend to choosing to let (or require) children have sex, without the child's consent? That's a good example of where a consent-only ethics (or legal doctrine) falls short and something like a harm or corruption principle does work.
Can you help explain the theoretical mechanism to me and to the professional philosophers who have written entire books on this topic, but seem to have just missed the super simple and super obvious way of doing this?
(1) There's no reason to expect it to be super simple and super obvious.
(2) In many (all?) of those professional philosophers, they have various background moral beliefs that (a) lead to implications they don't want regarding pedophilia/pederasty/etc., but (b) they'd rather hold onto at least most of them. You correctly alluded to some examples, e.g. their desire to avoid being X-ophobic or (perhaps worse for some people) being regarded as X-ophobic. As you might have guessed from my presence on here or my comments on how I find male homosexuality physically disgusting, I'm less worried about that than a lot of people.
(3) Professional ethicists are seeking a level of rigour that is neither required for law, nor that I expect from my own moral beliefs. It's akin to how I don't need to know professional physics or engineering to do DIY. If you're aspiring to that level of rigour, then great; I only hope you don't have better things to do with your time than working out really carefully why it's wrong to have sex with children.
Government intervention may not be necessary. If there's a big surplus of new capital due to AI efficiency, that means that there is more to invest in things that AI can't do right now, like manual labour. Or the government could use additional corporation tax revenue from AI productivity to cut social security contributions, which would lower the cost of employing humans.
The main government intervention would be the gastric by-pass surgeries required to get many Americans fit enough to do manual labour, but personally, there are only a handful of white-collar jobs that I have enjoyed more than manual labour. Not that the WORK was more enjoyable - most work is not "passionate", contrary to what bullshit cover letter say these days - but it was easier to turn my brain off and have mental energy in the evenings to play games, spend time with friends, or read.
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