Harlequin5942
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User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Gay marriage has not opened the way to any age gaps that weren't already allowed between men and women.
Right, but that had entailed legalising sex between adolescents and fully developed men. Whether it's "normalised" it is more debatable, though, since normality /= legality.
If you call that pederasty, then we've already been living in the age of general pedophilia and been fine with it.
This is conflating attraction/sexual activity with adolescents with pedophilia.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there
They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) it's not the same thing as not wanting to have sex. I definitely wanted to have sex when I was 11 (and pre-pubescent). A cat in heat wants some sexual activity and doesn't particularly care with what. The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.
Not a historian, but my understanding is that people have been saying 'if you allow my opponent to do the thing I dislike then pedorasty will be normalized next' for literal centuries and have never been correct.
Depends on how you define pederasty. In the UK, 16-21 year olds were initially regarded as children for the purposes of gay sex, when the latter was legalised. This was lowered to 16-17 year olds, because of course 18-21 year olds. Finally, it became legal for a 50 year old man to have sex with a 16 year old boy in 2000. By definition that's not legalising pederasty in the sense of "sex with an underage boy" (but in that sense, neither would legalising sex with a 5 year old boy) but it is legalising pederasty in the sense of "sex between an adult man and an adolescent boy." It also happened via a classic slippery slope process: first male homosexuality, then male homosexuality between full legal adults, and finally male homosexuality between full legal adults and schoolchildren.
Personally, I don't have a problem with that, but it would be dishonest not to acknowledge that the social conservatives were right in this case. True, a 50 year old man with a 16 year old boyfriend will face social problems in the UK, but no more than a 50 year old man with a 16 year old girlfriend.
Still, I agree with your overall point. In general, human disgust instincts against pedophilia and pederasty seem to both stronger and be more linked to ethics than those for male homosexuality. I find male homosexuality nauseous, but I have no moral objection to it. And many people, even normal people, don't find any sort of homosexuality disgusting or more disgusting than e.g. anal sex in general.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Putin ordering Navalny to be killed doesn't make a ton of sense given he posed no immediate threat
I think that Putin's thoughts are sufficiently inscrutible to not make judgements based on your attempts to empathise with him. For example, Putin may have used Navalny's death to send a signal to oppositionists ahead of the presidential elections - "Don't cause trouble, this is my show." Or he might not.
Killing an opposition leader is certainly the type of thing that people like Putin are likely to do.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
If you have to lobotomise an AI to get it to be anti-racist, what does that say about what you have to do to people to achieve the same result?
Perhaps blank-slatism on the Left and faith in implicit bias training etc. is a lucky boon for free thought.
People's attitudes towards AI "safety" may be informative about what they would do to human minds, if they had the chance.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I agree. Also, JCVD was never that successful, certainly not successful on the scale that Marvel/DC are pursuing. Arnie and Stallone were very successful, but usually only in films that hold up well. Terminator 1/2 and Rocky stand out as notably original films that were entertaining for a mass audience and yet offer food for thought, despite all the muscle on screen.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Do you know what was widely enjoyed by male audiences, with positive reviews, fond memories, and enough cultural cachet to spawn respectful memes and callbacks?
Jean Claude Van Damme movies.
Can you give 5 examples, please?
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I had a friend like that at high school. Basically stuck at an 11 year old's level of mental development, though he was more like a 5 year old at the start of high school. (Adolesence seems to have done him a lot of good.) With a ridiculously good family and presumably some government help, he's been able to hold a steady job through all of his adult life, a very happy long-term romantic relationship with an autistic woman, and enjoy a diverse range of interests (biking, video games, anime). Many non-disabled young men don't do so well.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Meanwhile, female autists are more heavily socialised into following neurotypical norms and thus present in a neurotypical manner, so they do not register as being autistic.
Autism = male may yet change. In academia, a lot of women I know have embraced autism as an identity (along with ADHD) and talk a lot about it, especially when explaining why they are falling short of being Hyper-Achieving Boss Bitches, and why they should have special accommodations. (Female) autism seems to be more acceptable as a public explanation of shortcomings than anxiety or depression, even though the latter are presumably more widespread. In contrast, I don't see male autistic academics talk about it at all in even semi-public forums e.g. Facebook.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Oddly enough, some Midwestern women still seem very German to me, even the younger ones. Partly this is physical appearance, but also certain almost indescribable mannerisms, such as their quiet and careful speech. In contrast, I have never met an American man who seems German, even if he looks like something out of a "Visit Niederdorla!" catalogue.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
I myself would likely need to take directions from the Pope before the POTUS.
Which has historically been an argument against Catholic immigration in many countries, including in the US. Then again, the Pope can't even get Ireland to do as he asks, so this is not a plausible problem today.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
The host of the British version of The Apprentice started off as a market seller and became a billionaire or something like that, and he was even made an actual Baron, but he’s still ‘working class’ in a way.
For example, his crest is a reference to the football club he supports, and some wordplay with his very unaristocratic second name (Sugar). That's probably the way of having heraldry that would get you least mockery in a Cockney pub.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Either Trump is critically destabilizing the region by allowing US sales of advanced Air Defence systems to Poland, publicly entertaining the possibility of Ukraine Joining NATO, and undermining the Russian economy by increasing US energy exports to Europe. Or he's secretly in Putin's pocket. Which one is it?
That would be quite the inconsistency, if I'd accused Trump of doing the former.
In either case the Russian military has been revealed as a paper tiger
Given massive US support. And even with that, Ukraine is far from winning.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
The problem with this take is that by the summer of 2015 Russia had already annexed the Donbass and Crimea in all but name, or have you forgotten all the talk about "friendly green men" from 2014?
Russia didn't begin mass issuing of passports in the Donbas until 2019. This was exactly to avoid Ukraine viewing it as an annexation, to leave open the possibility of reintegration into Ukraine with a Yanukovich-style president. After all, from a Russian perspective, it's preferable that Ukraine has as many pro-Russian voters as possible. The problem for Putin was that reintegration and voluntary realignment into the pro-Russia camp was no longer a plausible outcome by 2022.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Interpreting the war in Ukraine as a sign of Russian strength and capability is quite the contrarian take.
Indeed, but it's not my take: "It's not so much that Russia is stronger than Europe, it's that it's crazier. Someone willing to fight can dominate a room full of equally strong people who aren't."
Russia has shown that it's aggressive. It would have been successful if Trump was president, because Trump is more favourable to Russia/Putin than Ukraine/Zelenskyy. That's why RT etc. likes Trump and dislikes Biden. And I say that as someone who also dislikes Biden.
a flat open nation
A flat open nation that has had massive aid from the US. Assuming that sort of assistance, I also have little worries about Russian expansionism, but the question is whether Trump would be true to his word and be less supportive of the Ukrainians etc.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Huh? And what further preparations would have been deemed sufficient? Because we're aware of the extent of preparations made before the 2022 intervention, and they turned out to be, well, more or less laughable, at least in the Northern areas of operations for sure. I mean surely the Russian state had at least the same amount of resources and troops available in 2018 or 2019 as well.
They were inadequate given how much resistance the Ukrainians offered, but that wasn't anticipated in Russia.
Fair enough. That said, this is the same Russian regime that, according to the mainstream interpretation, successfully manipulated the results of the Brexit referendum and US elections of 2016, and colluded with Trump. Surely it was within its means to manipulate Poroshenko or get him replaced by someone more pliable, to let Russian puppets gain positions all over the Ukrainian state apparatus, and to collude with Trump to rob Ukraine of US assistance! And yet Trump did the opposite, by allowing the supply of lethal military aid to Ukraine in 2018, which no other US administration had done before. Something doesn't add up.
"Manipulated" is ambiguous. (I'm criticising the mainstream interpretation, not you.) It's plausible that Russia has attempted to clandestinely influence all sorts of events in the West. Whether they were successful or decisive is a separate question.
I don't favour the mainstream interpretation and there are even some things about Trump's foreign policy that I like, such as wanting other NATO partners to perform more of a role in the alliance. It's also tough, because Trump is probably better on Middle East policy than Biden from my perspective - that's an area where the US should tread quietly, but still be supportive of Israel, just as Trump favoured. At a domestic level, I'm also closer to him than to Biden, but I'm not American, so US domestic policy affects me less than its foreign policy.
I also don't think that Trump has colluded with Russia regarding Ukraine, at least not directly. As you say, his actions are inconsistent with that. It's just not a priority for him.
I suggest that his position might have something to do with no longer being in power.
I don't see any reason to think that Trump is being insincere about his policy views on the Russia-Ukraine war. In fact, I think that Trump is rarely untruthful, as opposed to misleading. He might give an impression like e.g. the Wall is a bigger priority for him than it actually was, but he really did want it, and he really did try hard to get it; it was just that he wasn't willing to fight for it as hard as some people expected him to fight, which is different from him promising to fight that hard. His relationship to the truth is more that of a salesman than an outright liar like Donna Brazile or Bill Clinton.
In 2016-2020, Russia hadn't even prepared for annexing the Donbas, let alone invading Ukraine. Russia also had hopes of reversing Euromaidan. After all, Poroshenko was unpopular, Zelenskyy was an unknown quantity, and Ukraine had performed a similar reversal from West to East after the Orange Revolution in 2005. Invading Ukraine would guarantee that such a reversal would not take place.
By 2022, Russia and its Donbas puppets were militarily, politically, and administratively prepared, while Zelenskyy turned out to be just as much of a problem for them as Poroshenko.
Trump's reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine would have been to cry a few tears for the Ukrainians, praise Putin's savvy and genius, and provide less support for Ukraine than Biden has done, and hope to appease Putin by encouraging Ukraine to cede the territory that Russia wants. We can predict all that, because that's what Trump's position has been on the Russia-Ukraine war.
I am no fan of Biden, but it's irrefutable that Trump is far softer towards Russia than Biden. This is one reason why many people like Trump! Trump's policy towards Russia has always been appease, withdraw, and sincerely pray to the Almighty for the victims of the consequences.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
Russia is not going to dominate Europe, force of arms or otherwise.
It's in the process of conquering the second largest country in Europe and would have succeeded if Trump had been president.
It's not so much that Russia is stronger than Europe, it's that it's crazier. Someone willing to fight can dominate a room full of equally strong people who aren't.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
True. And for those areas that weren't, there was relatively little racial mixing going on. Even among whites, denominational distinctions segregated society in ways that are very unfamiliar to modern Americans.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
2/3. Brezhnev was sodden and had developed a massive tolerance for alcohol. Andropov was fairly sober, as far as I know, but he did die of kidney problems and as a KGB-adjacent man he would be very good at having embarassing details hidden. Chernenko's most notable achievement was that he was the only one who could outdrink Brezhnev and was a good drinking buddy for him; thorough years of heavy drinking in his native Siberian winters, Chernenko seems to have developed such a tolerance (and almost constant state of being mildly tipsy) that he was apparently never visibly drunk. Chernenko was also a heavy smoker, which led to his death from emphysema.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
new multi-racial societies boils over
The US hasn't been even close to monoracial for a very long time. About 17% of Americans in the 19th century were black.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
A sufficiently large number of conjunctions of single-case hypotheses of the "bloxor x is greeblic" regenerates the problem. I put it in terms of proportions for familiarity's sake, but formally it's easier to understand the point if you consider Boolean operations on the elements of partitions, and note that in Bayesian epistemology the sample space is assumed to be closed under Boolean operations.
Harlequin5942
2yr ago
To tie it back to wokeness, wokeness is designed to distract from and cope with this structural reality. Say you have 10 graduate students in a chemistry program and there’s a job for only one of them at the end. You’re engaged in a Malthusian struggle, fistfights over beakers and Bunsen burners. Then somebody says something slightly racist or slightly inappropriate. What a relief – you can throw that one person off the overcrowded bus! That kind of phenomenon is perfectly natural, and could be avoided with more growth.
There is some truth in this, but (a) there really are true believers of hardcore wokeness in academia, I've known many, and (b) even for the cynical people jumping on the bandwagon as part of a status game, it's explanatorily weak to say that they do so out of status competition; the challenge is to explain why wokeness rather than any number of alternative possible status games.
Here is an expanded explanation: wokeness appeals to people who are low in orderliness (and thus love accepting LGBTQI2S++ identities) and have strong maternal instincts towards those they perceive to be marginalised. These people are attracted to progressive spaces, like academia, teaching, journalism, or social work, especially where they can be compassionate towards diverse and "interesting" people like students. The fact that these jobs are free from "obscene profit-making" helps too. And even though many people in these areas are not true believers, they are sufficiently agreeable and partisan to try and appease the true believers, especially because not doing so can be bad for their careers.
That I, doing Bayesian math about some bets against you, will leave you poor and destitute in the long run, unless you're using Bayes too.
It's possible to set up some types of games where this is true, as well as some types of games when using Bayesian math can lead to disasters. See this paper for a pretty simple example of how setting up the game in a way that Bayesianism looks good is more complex than you seem to think: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40210799
If you're thinking of conditionalization as part of "Bayesian math" and alluding to diachronic Dutch Book Arguments, the problems here are particularly vexing. See here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-020-00228-1
Richard Pettigrew, who has a background in both mathematics and philosophy, has done a lot of great work on these issues. Here's a brief and relatively simple introduction: http://m-phi.blogspot.com/2018/10/dutch-books-and-conditionalization.html
Basically, the literature thus far has been a long series of failed attempts to squeeze Bayesian epistemological juice out of pragmatic rocks.
What do you want to use instead of Bayes for the record?
The task is underspecified and hence so is your question. Can you explain more?
My point is not that the poors are always instinctively right. My point is that they have well-honed instincts for when someone is trying to take advantage of them, and the usual Bayesian reasoning like the above rightfully triggers it, even if they don't have the concepts or the introspection to communicate to us what was that, that triggered them.
My point is that a Bayesian megamind is entirely justified in asking the yudkowsky what fraction of his prediction came from the data, and basing his bet amount on that, and grumbling about the yudkowsky being useless if he refuses to answer.
I agree.
Huh?
One strand: Bayesians tend to be subjectivists, so symmetric priors are only a personal decision. Another strand: imprecise probabilists (like set-based Bayesians) tend to deny that any additive prior is mandatory (and perhaps not even permissible). Another strand: frequentists are critical of the whole Bayesian enterprise; note that criticisms of frequentists' positive claims are beside the point here.
Of course, all those criticisms of symmetric priors (as mandatory) might be wrong, but it's not true that symmetric priors are controversial, even among people with apparent expertise in the relevant mathematics and logic.
You might say, "Well, obviously if I asked you what the probability of heads is with this perfectly ordinary coin, you'd say 50%." However, we are both far from lacking any evidence with respect to that coin, and "The probability is 50%" can be interpreted in all sorts of different ways, e.g. a frequentist would want to interpret it in terms of hypothetical frequencies in a mathematical model of the coin tossing; some Bayesians would interpret it in terms of degrees of evidential support; other Bayesians would interpret it in terms of degrees of belief; some Bayesians would interpret it in terms of the degrees of belief that a rational person should have given the evidence...
Indeed. I think it's a pretty unreliable way to make inferences about what happens in politics. Not coincidentally, it's often how conspiracy theorists reason.
Yes, my point is that doubting that Putin had Navalny killed because it's hard to think up a motive is weak evidence, especially because it's easy to be biased - someone looking to condemn Putin can overrate the plausibility of such motives, someone looking to exculpate Putin can spend minimal time actually trying to think up possible motives. When someone says, "I can't see how..." I usually initially doubt that they looked very hard.
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