Harlequin5942
No bio...
User ID: 1062
Harlequin5942
1mo 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.
Harlequin5942
11mo ago
(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.
Yes, the reductio ad absurdums of the alternative theories of punishment are very persuasive to me. If you go down the deterrence road, you end up with something like Gary Becker's approach: punish harshly but monitor laxly, since this is more cost-efficient as a way of deterring crime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker#Crime_and_punishment
If you go down the rehabiliation road, then it's hard to explain what's wrong with a Clockwork Orange view of crime: neuter the capacity of the criminal to commit crimes, even if they want to do so. If you say, "They need to appreciate why their crime was wrong," then this goes beyond rehabilitationism, and introduces an abstract concept of justice that is more appropriate in a view like retributivism.
Finally, there is expressivism (punishment is an expression of society's disapproval of the criminal act) but that doesn't explain why we should punish criminals, rather than any group that society tends to dislike, e.g. Satanists or Morris dancers.
Harlequin5942
27d ago
I came to similar conclusions based on reading/hearing the thoughts of Mark Noble, a neuroscientist:
https://feelinggood.com/2019/11/18/167-feeling-great-professor-mark-noble-on-team-cbt-and-the-brain/
Basically, a good rule-of-thumb in neuroscience is "what fires together, wires together." So classic talk therapy (going over thoughts again and again with an interested but passive, unjudgemental or supportive therapist) might actually strengthen neural pathways that lead to depressed, anxious, angry, or otherwise undesired mental states.
This also explains why, if possible, just ignoring thoughts like "I'm useless" or "This is going to end terribly" or "It's SO unfair!" can be remarkably effective at avoiding the concomitant emotional problems; I think there was some research on this recently. It also explains why men's "just don't dwell on it" coping strategies are associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and suicide attempts than among women, despite the ideology that "repression" is a bad thing. Men have more successful suicide attempts, but this can be explained by higher levels of aggression. It also explains research suggesting that the behavioural activation methods in CBT are the most effective, since these are focused on rapidly removing negative thoughts/habits (e.g. by falsifying your hypothesis that holding a house spider will kill you with its venom or that your old friends will hate you if you get back in touch with them).
Mark Noble argues that approaches like David Burns's TEAM therapy, which aim at rapid recovery, will be more successful, partly because they minimise the amount of time spent on therapy or brooding outside of therapy. Noble also thinks there also reasons to think that each element of TEAM (Testing emotions/therapist performance before and after sessions, Empathising with the client, Agenda-setting to deal with client resistance to change, Methods for rapid and client-calibrated recovery) has a neuroscientific basis for effectiveness.
However, even if TEAM doesn't have these properties, I think that the idea of gradual change and the elevation of emotional expression have quite possibly damaged millions of people's mental health.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
My prior is that our culture is shaped according to the preferences and interests of professional upper-middle and upper-class women. Sex toys for men becoming widely accepted would lower women's value in the sexual marketplace in the same fashion that a UBI puts upwards pressure on the lowest wage.
Not sure about that, because the men those women want don't masturbate, watch porn, or think sexually about other women. Hence, if a guy would use a sex toy, he's not desirable anyway.
Women control access to reproduction.
This is oversimplified.
Women tend to control access to sex: most men are more willing to screw a wider range of women than women are willing to screw men.
Men tend to control access to commitment: most men are more attracted by the idea of avoiding being tied down (figuratively, not literally). One of the more absurd things I see in these discussions is the notion that men are desperate to get married, have a lot of kids, and have said wife/kids impressing demands on these men's precious time. It's like when Chat GPT suggests "MOAR feminism!" as a solution for low birth rates: it's going against what I thought was basic knowledge about male/female psychological differences in humans, which has been deeply ingrained in our cultures since before the invention of writing.
Perhaps the "men are frustrated in their efforts to get tied down to a life of changing nappies and sleeping with just one woman" online memes comes from incels who think that, if only they had the chance, they'd be women's Perfect Partner, as in Futurama: "My favourite things are commitment and changing myself." "Does that robot have a brother?". However, most nerdy guys I know who suddenly started getting laid easily - myself included - played the field, like a normal guy in that position. Then, as naturally tends to happen, they found a woman that they wanted to sleep with repeatedly, developed an emotional bond, and married. I suspect that this is healthier than both the man and the woman being keen on commitment: just as sexual romance needs a partner to be seduced, marriage needs at least one partner to need to be (non-verbally) persuaded that a long-term commitment makes sense. After all, commitment is good for the economy:
Here is a list of the changes. Roald Dahl could have written a whole book of short essays about each individual change and how it's retarded:
https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds_of_changes_made_to_roald_dahls_books/
Ironically, they didn't race swap Charlie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Factory#Race_and_editing
Anyway, I can accept that new cultural products will tend to be terrible, for reasons including wokeness, but when it comes to the glories of the past, I think of us in the position of Irish monks in the Dark Ages: unable to produce, but duty-bound to preserve. So pushing back hard against this sort of thing (or indeed Puffin's past decision to put a sexualised image of a child on a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cover, on the grounds of giving it "adult" appeal, about which they have never repented, as far as I know) makes sense.
Time for sensitivity readers to modify problematic parts of Orwell?
By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. (Syme, explaining Newspeak to Winston in "Nineteen-Eighty Four".)
Put another way, the most attractive presentation of American liberalism that I know is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not radicalism, not Marxism, but FDR/JFK/apple pie and patriotism liberalism. (Less overtly, the same spirit is also made attractive in Carl Sagan's Cosmos.) Without agreeing with that vision, I can still admire it, and share some of its ambitions, including the Promethean values in TNG that help it to appeal across the political spectrum. Perhaps significantly, Gene Roddenberry (and maybe Carl Sagan) was the type who could at least recognise the value in different visions of the world, even if he thought that American liberalism was superior.
As I see it, the distinctive spirit of American liberalism is self-actualization. Tolerance, multiculturalism etc. are valuable not so much in themselves, but insofar as they enable people to pursue their higher and often idiosyncratic goals. Moderated by a stronger concern for negative freedom and/or tradition, self-actualization is also something that is important in American libertarianism and American conservativism, so there is a lot of room for cohesion among these value systems. That's why both liberal visions like TNG and conservative 80s action movies can appeal across the mainstream US political spectrum. And something like the Rocky series has cross-political appeal, even though there is a lot of political/philosophical themes where there could be controversies: the films have themes that are bound by a self-actualizing vision of "Do it yourself, for yourself, by sorting yourself and your relationships out" that almost all Americans enjoy.
The problem is that many cultures of the world do not share this vision, and the idea that you can have American liberalism among any cultural group is an item of faith rather than knowledge.
(Incidentally, I'm not American. View this as an alien's interpretation of your culture.)
Argentina has very limited credibility to offer concessions to anyone. Even its people have lost faith, e.g. in its currency. It is a worthless sinkhole for development aid, taking billions from the IMF and refusing to implement reforms:
“In the last few times that the fund has been involved in Argentina, it has always tried to push some of the reform agenda Argentina needs, but that has always failed,” Monica de Bolle, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said during an interview with Marketplace’s Sabri Ben-Achour. “That story has just been repeating itself over and over and over again. It’s like a ‘Groundhog Day’ type of thing.”
https://www.marketplace.org/2023/06/02/how-argentinas-economy-crumbled/
For almost 100 years, Argentina has moved between left-wing populist stupidity and right-wing populist incompetence. China can act as a predatory lender, and like other predatory lenders, take advantage of their borrowers' lack of alternatives. The only sensible reason for China to invest in Argentina is to milk Argentina's geographic and political (UN vote etc.) resources dry.
We can have a free, fair, open, educated society in which women and kids aren't threatened every time they walk a street or attend a school, or we can let women vote and participate in the workplace.
Does "We" mean men, or do you think that removing women's liberties is compatible with a free society?
As for safety, I'm living in a massive, diverse, multicultural city where families can hang out safely in amazing public parks late into the night, and a hot woman can walk down the darkest, dingiest alleyway at 3 am in the morning without as much as fearing being cat-called. On the other hand, it's also a society run by rich people unprincipled enough to work with commies, whose main legitimation from the socially conservative masses is that the police will be badasses if someone does as much as play loud music too late at night in a ghetto, and even the dumbest semi-disabled old man can (and probably must) get a job sweeping leaves under the supervision of a pedantic harpy or something similarly simple in those amazing public parks.
In short, there are many social models, but there isn't one which is both free and massively restricts the freedom of 49% of the population.
I agree with you that modern society is overly empathetic, but this is a trend that goes back to the 18th century, as the intellectual classes began to promote the idea that benevolence is the ultimate virtue. It predates the decline of patriarchy and organised religion, and it's at least as notable in e.g. the upper echelons of the Catholic Church hierarchy (all-male and all-religious, more or less) as in a multi-gender corporate boardroom.
Additionally, as I recall personality psychology, the vast majority of men are about as empathetic as most women. The aggregate differences are at the margins, e.g. highly trait-disagreeable people are overwhelmingly men.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Ukraine is basically North Korea at this point...
This doesn't harmonise with your complaints about the intellectual laziness of others. "Putin is literally Hitler" and "Zelensky is literally Kim Jong-un" are both intellectually lazy takes.
Humanity 1. The NGO is "SOS Humanity", a German organisation.
The new Italian government is arguing that the host countries of these organisations should agree to take in some of the migrants who are being picked up at sea.
SOS Humanity argues that any migrant whose ship capsizes etc. and gets rescued by them has a right, under the law of the sea, to be taken to the nearest safe port. The incentive effects that this creates are obviously monstrous: you can go anywhere, provided you can do so unsafely. NGOs will make every effort to help you get into the country you want, provided that your boat sinks and the lives of e.g. your children are threatened...
It's like offering a child toys and candy every time they drink bleach.
The Italian government must be very careful, because the last interior minister who tried to reduce mass migration over the Mediterranean is now being prosecuted for "kidnapping" migrants and could face 15 years in jail for his actions as minister...
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
I think that this is oversimplified. Being attractive as a woman takes a lot of willpower (not eating a lot in the modern world), work (applying make-up is not easy) and money (clothes, make-up, perfume, hairdressing etc. are not cheap).
And there are innate things as a man that can make people more pliable to you. For example, I am fairly tall, broad-shouldered, I have naturally very good skin, a prominent jaw, and all my hair in my 30s. These make life easier for me as a man, but I didn't have to work for them.
Not all societies are created equal, and there are varying degrees of misalignment. If I look at a woman in lust, I am clearly sinning and am condemned; but at least my desires are in alignment with God's ideal. It is only the object of my desires that is inappropriate, as being attracted to my wife is not only not a sin, but is a key part of a relationship that is a representation of Christ's love for the Church. Same-sex attraction is more disordered as both the object and the desire itself are misaligned. Transgenderism is completely disordered: the object, desire, and self are all misaligned.
This sounds like ranking sins, which is commonsensical and popular in e.g. Catholicism, but hard to reconcile with ideas like the Divine Command Theory of ethics. If what's wrong with sinning is disobeying God, then committing adultery in your heart is bad in exactly the same way as raping and murdering a baby. There's no moral sense in which you are better or worse than the cruellest, most perverted person you can imagine; the only possible difference of moral significance between you and a baby-raper-killer is that God may have chosen (and I stress "chosen") to save you from what you morally deserve. Focusing on e.g. the difference in harms is swapping the DCT for something like consequentialism or care ethics.
(I leave aside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelagianism and non-DCT metaethics as interesting but very widely condemned by Christians.)
If Jesus or the Bible had provided a comprehensive ranking of sins with varying degrees of sinfulness, then it's obvious consistent with a Christian DCT, but as you know that's not the case.
Societies that venerate increasingly disordered behavior will inevitably sink into corruption and decay.
I think that this is the better option for what you want to say. Even if all sins are equally sinful, you can still coherently argue that different societies have different propensities to sin vs. redemption. A hardline Christian DCT fan can still reason in a consequentialist way about maximising the probability of redemption and minimising the probability of sins.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic
How are you using the word "you" here?
I have never subscribed to a consent-only sexual ethic.
Harlequin5942
10mo ago
Based on my experience of Ukrainian women, a lot of conservative motteizeans might find those women TOO unwoke.
As I understand it, the standard Christian position is that nobody deserves salvation, but God sometimes grants it. So the Christian answer is that there is no reason. Whether that is satisfying is another debate, but it's an important aspect to understand if one is going to understand them charitably: from a Christian perspective, God is not morally obliged to save anyone. In fact, from a Divine Command Theory perspective, the very notion of moral obligations for God is a category mistake, like a moral obligation for the number 11. God behaves morally not because he is obliged to e.g. keep his promises, but because that is what a supremely benevolent being does. In contrast, from a Christian perspective, a supremely benevolent being does not necessarily save anyone from the consequences of their nature which he created.
else Brexit would have falsified it
It took multiple constitutional crises (including a proguation of parliament, which many regard as undemocratic), a general election in 2017 where parties promising won over 85% of the vote, the biggest defeat of those parties ever in the 2019 European election when they reached deadlock over Brexit (and 30.5% of the vote for the Brexit party, a completely unprecedented rise for a new party in UK political history), and Labour losing their MP in Bolsover.
It also involved setting up internal trade barriers in the UK, against the wishes of most people in Northern Ireland.
You can’t expect the state to act on every whim of the populace.
True, but it is typical that if the state seeks a mandate from the populace in a referendum for X, it doesn't choose to do X even if the referendum goes against X. Can you imagine what would have happened if the Remain side had narrowly won the referendum, but the Conservatives implemented Brexit anyway, saying that membership of the EU was unworkable? Or even had a second referendum a few years later, saying that the Remainers had misunderstood the issues?
Still, even if you argue that Brexit was a transient and uninformed whim, it's still not comparable to the public's desire for less immigration, which is a very persistent preference in the UK, and many other EU countries. The problem is that, at least on this issue, democracy has been ineffective as a means of incentivising politicians to act in accordance with that preference. I think that this is a general flaw with democracy: people generally vote for candidates, who come as package deals, and who can afford to change parts of that package after the deal in order to appeal to special interest groups who are better organised than most voters.
You might argue, with Churchill, that "Democracy is awful, but it is the worst system of government, save for all the others," but that's a prima facie argument for less government, not more democracy.
Harlequin5942
1mo ago
Ah, well, then I'm sure you have some other, non-consent reason why children can't have sex. That's fair enough, but it's a bit surprising considering your comment that I responded to. There, it seemed like the pertinent question (which is the only question to the consent-only folks) was about consent
Your confusion seems to be because you are missing the distinction between "inability to consent is a sufficient reason for children not to have sex" with "lack of consent is a necessary condition for sex to be wrong." It may help you to do some work on pen-and-paper using Venn diagrams: for example, you see how "All non-consensual sex is wrong sex" is logically distinct from "All wrong sex is non-consensual sex."
Similarly, that consent is one pertinent question in sexual ethics doesn't imply that it's the only question.
I also suspect that even many people who sometimes say, "As long as it's consensual, it's fine," actually make exceptions for things like "power dynamics" and "developing bad habits," but I'm not interested in rationally reconstructing their views.
Harlequin5942
5mo ago
It is the possibility of smashing their idols, of redacting and retracting the belief in liberty, equality, and fraternity.
It's not clear to me that those aren't the value of the American right, at least since they kicked the Royalists up to British North America. The differences between the mainstream American right and the mainstream American left are marginal:
Liberty: The right tends to put more emphasis on negative freedom rather than positive freedom. There have been times when, on social issues, the right has been sceptical of particular cases of negative freedom, but the basic assumption of the US right has almost always been individualist rather than paternalist; things like the Religious Right and the anti-woke movement have to justify themselves in terms of "This person's exercise of liberty X actually affects our liberty Y," which is fundamentally different from, "God says no" or "The man in Whitehall knows best."
Equality: Equality of opportunity (not in the silly sense of an equal chance, but in terms of equal legal rights and no unjustified discrimination) is the ideology of just about every last American. American conservatives might argue about the existence of certain types of discrimination or whether some particular case of discrimination is justified, but equality has always been integrally part of the American right's ideology, if not their practice. Of course, there will be the aberrant Nietzschean, Dominionist, Blood and Soil nationalist etc., but they are as alien to the American right as a working class Stalinist in the US left.
Fraternity: The US is unusual in being founded on an ideology (classical liberalism) and with the supposition that religion, ethnicity etc. are personal and/or local, rather than an integral part of the federal state. Trump is fraternal with gay people, trans people, hispanics, blacks etc. Some of his best friends are black. Some of his biggest supporters are hispanics. Friendship across race, religion, and "lifestyles" is as American as apple pie, and as American conservative as loving the US military, which itself has been multiracially fraternal for as long as most people can remember.
As you suggest, for the terminally online, it might seem like a different kind of conservativism had an ascendency in 2016. However, in fact, Trump and Trumpism was just mainstream US conservativism with balls. The average Trump supporter is as fundamentally opposed to reactionaries, Nazis, and the like as the average Hillary supporter.
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
Would male sex toys being widely used be a problem for that?
This is starting to sound like the noncentral fallacy, and perhaps a particularly bad version of it. "I can stretch the meaning of X to include Y, therefore I can extend judgements about central cases of X to Y" is not a good argument.
Is a woman wearing makeup to attract men "bargaining" too?
I think it's possibly a factor, I don't think that it's the dominant factor.
GDP per capita in Sub-Saharan Africa varies from the $400s (Somalia, Sierra Leone, the Central African Republic etc.) to $6500-9000 (Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, and Botswana). That's higher than some European countries (Albania, Azerbaijan, Armenia). Let's rule out Gabon and Equatorial Guinea as examples of GDP being misleading, since their actual "development" in any normal sense is pathetic. Let's also exclude South Africa as only recently an African-governed society. That still leaves Botswana as a huge outlier. Botswana is (a) overwhelmingly African and (b) its most important resource is diamonds, which is very badly correlated with development elsewhere. So a lot of the variance between Africa and the poorer parts of Europe can be explained by other factors - including Botswana's relatively good economic, political, and social policies.
Africa is a basket case, but so was China until recently, despite high IQs. Additionally, the European or East Asian genetics for IQs have presumably not undergone any massive transformations in the past 500 years, but the discontinuity in the rate economic development with all of previous economic history is huge.
At most, a genetic tendency to high IQ would be comparable to a natural resource. That can be good! For example, Norway has been able to turn its oil into extreme economic development. Venezuela has not. Countries with very limited natural resources have done well. Botswana has done well with a low IQ level by global standards, though IIRC Botswana's IQ is rising relative to the rest of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the better childhood nutrition that comes with development.
I don't know of good evidence that the full awfulness of Sub-Saharan African development needs to be explained by IQ, rather than historical factors (it's hard to imagine Liberia ever being a great comparative success when you know its history) or policy factors (Africa had the misfortune to become independent in the heyday of socialism, dirigism, and Cold War power politics that led even the democratic countries to support dictators).
Harlequin5942
1yr ago
very few men engage in hard physical labour as their primary source of income, no one bats an eyelid at a woman drinking beer or wearing jeans, women pursuing careers in STEM are generally encouraged to do so by their peers and mentors, it's not seen as embarrassing if a man knows how to bake (or a woman doesn't).
But these are all examples of historical gender norms (though I doubt there was ever a physical labour-income norm for men) not contemporary norms.
Harlequin5942
2mo 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.
Good higher-order thinking.
I suppose you could wonder about why they are doing this. My own pet theory, which I'm not sure about, is that Going Woke is a way to handle creative bankrupcy: if you have nothing else to say, raceswap. It's similar to saying that your film is "about family" when it's just a mesh of committee-approved special effects and kewl moments. Rings of Power was just a notable example of this failing, but it still probably helped them ceteris paribus, because they had literally nothing else to do.
But even fewer people would care. I am a fantasy fan and I didn't even know that WoC had any LoTR franchising rights until I saw your comment, mainly because I have zoned out of any new LoTR stuff for nearly 2 decades, because it's boring, committee-driven, and safer than a child whose parents make him wear a crash helmet before he goes on a climbing frame. Why focus such greyness when, with the magic of the internet, I can enjoy insane 1980s fantasy works or batshit mythology from all over the world?
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