Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1yr ago
I'm indifferent to ethical veganism for the exact same reason I'm pro-choice - I think there are vanishingly few animals who are high enough on the ladder of self-awareness that their lives are morally meaningful. I would decline to eat octopus, and prefer dolphin-free tuna out of an abundance of caution.
I find it very difficult to imagine what sort of logical process brings a person to a point where they care about the suffering of a weeks old chicken, but not a 39th week human fetus.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
From what I have seen, there are pockets that are overwhelmingly positive, which makes it jarring when they suddenly start discussing the soul-rending drama happening elsewhere that they're mostly all aware of or to some degree involved in.
I noticed the same thing, and was considering making a post. At this point, just assume that the Hugos are entirely a bluecheck award.
More interestingly, it really stood out in the /fantasy discussion that no one was willing to point out the near total sweep by the ladies. It's kind of eerie, to see something that blatant just go unremarked. I thought about pointing it out, but I expected I would just get the comment deleted and a mod warning.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
My guess is that this sort of thing is just as common in the right as well, but I just don't see it because I'm a leftist who's mostly exposed to leftist things.
I think this particular failure mode is less common on the right for two reasons: age and tangibility.
For age, there are a couple of relevant saying. "Everyone is conservative about what he knows best", and "A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality". I think the general motto of leftism could be summed up as "Why don't we...", while the general motto of conservatism would be "Oh, that's why we don't!" I think just by virtue of being older, conservatives are more likely to have had a relevant personal experience, for example a job that was actually impacted by a strike.
And that ties into the tangibility point. I often see leftists on reddit engaging in cargo cult thinking that seems in the rough ballpark of "Stores are places where food happens, and people have to work at them because billionaires are mean." I think the warehouse workers and stockers who know firsthand what goes into keeping food on those shelves are very unlikely to be politically active enough to be anything-ists. So we have these online discussions that are dominated on that side by people who don't have extensive work experience, and have negligible responsibility experience, in the sense of being the person who has to get the job done no matter what.
It's very easy to confuse cause and effect when you live in a world of words and abstractions and never encounter what Big Yud would call Final Responsibility. Compare that to the plumber in a MAGA hat, who lives every day in a world where the water runs or doesn't by his own ability to manipulate reality.
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1yr ago
Keystone Clown Contest Part 2: Ischemic Boogaloo
See here for the last discussion of the Hoodie Ogre vs the Huckster Healer.
In Our Last Exciting Episode...
Mehmet Oz, in an effort to look like a real person, went to a grocery store and was caught on camera complaining about the price of crudités, which is apparently New Jerseyan (or maybe Ottoman) for "uncooked vegetable platter, maybe with dip". So Fetterman did the obvious thing and ran ads and had a fundraiser about how obviously elitest and out of touch it is to use (forgive me) Fr*nch words for common things.
Fetterman’s campaign said it had raised more than half a million dollars off the viral video within a day, including more than $65,000 from a sticker that has the phrase “Wegners: Let them eat Crudite” on it.
Oz's people clapped back with this banger
“If John Fetterman had ever eaten a vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke and wouldn’t be in the position of having to lie about it constantly,”
(Speaking as a man who once spent three weeks on the "all cheesesteak diet" and learned a painful lesson thereby, eat your vegetables.)
Again, Fetterman's people did the obvious thing and harshly criticized Oz for this failure of decorum. Many variations on "Imagine your doctor making fun of you."
So, the next point of contention to come up is the debates. Team Fetterman initially tried to use the mockery about his stroke as a reason to dodge out on them altogether,, to which Team Oz published this vicious list of concessions
Doctor Oz promises not to intentionally hurt John’s feelings at any point.
We will all allow John to have all of his notes in front of him along with any earpiece so he can have the answers given to him by his staff in real time.
At any point, John Fetterman can raise his hand and say “bathroom break!”
If the topic of his pardoned murderers comes up, we will allow extra rime for him to explain that second-degree murder is “not as bad as first-degree murder.
We will pay for any additional medical personnel he might need to have on standby.
(Incidentally, "lying liberal Fetterman" is a terrible mocking nickname. I never thought I'd long for the days of Shady Katie McGinty. I wish I could find one of the ads that really hammed up the nickname, but they don't seem to be on Youtube.)
Team Fetterman is obviously outraged.
Ok, more serious face on.
As of now, the first debate was supposed to have been on Sept 6th, and didn't happen. Fetterman has committed to one debate, but not until mid-late October, which will be weeks after early voting starts. Team Fetterman has been flipping stories about his health issues, from downplaying it, to "almost died", and now it's purportedly some minor auditory processing issues. Some people covering him have expressed concerns, including the Pittsburg Post-Gazette. Fetterman has only had some brief interactions with the public or reporters since his stroke in May, heavily supervised. The ads he's been bombarding the Philly market with are supposedly made with pre-stroke recordings. His current speaking is.... not great. This issue, and Oz campaign ads hammering Fetterman on his progressive crime policies may be working to Oz's favor, as Fetterman's lead seems to be more like 4-5%, down from 11% a month ago.
But at least he's got the Snookie vote.
Now I wish I'd delayed until morning; this was a much better write-up. It's interesting to see the difference in ad spending in different markets. I don't think I have seen a single pro-Mastriano or pro-Shapiro ad, just a few attack ads on Mastriano. Comparatively, Fetterman and Oz are both running tons of ads. Oz has a mix of positive and negatives, highlighting his medical experience in the former, and Fetterman's "weak on crime" policies in the latter. The affiliated PAC ads run hard on "CRAZY LEFTIST JOHN FETTERMAN", which makes me think someone saw the same thing I did in regards to John playing coy games with his party and positions. Fetterman's ads are mostly negative, going hard and explicit on the Othering - one of the common ones literally uses the phrase "He's not one of us." If the parties were flipped, we'd be having a national conversation about how Fetterman is an open white supremacist - but the accusation still has plenty of truth to it.
Edit: Speak of the devil, just saw a new Fetterman ad portraying him as tough on crime, brief pause in gun deaths in Braddock, yadda yadda. I guess the attack ads were having an effect. The new ad has a much more "PA accent" than any of the others I've seen, FWIW.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Is taking a child to a strip club abusive? Is encouraging a 9 year old girl to get up on the stage and twerk around the pole while grown men throw dollars at her abusive?
We might quibble over the term "abusive", but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?
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1yr ago
Conversely, I think the reason it's such a potent rhetorical weapon is that it comes pre-targeted. The cases where I see it being deployed are instances of people specifically organizing or supporting things where the accusation is plausible. No one is firing the weapon at, e.g. union organizers, or workplace feminism writers. It always comes up in circumstances of sex stuff targeted at children.
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1yr ago
Given the focus on his "soft on crime" stances and spotty work history, I would have gone with Feckless Fetterman.
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1yr ago
I think there's a lot more involved there, when we consider the realm of "obvious and predicable next steps". One of the common gotchas I see coming back from leftwingers is to point out that children's beauty pageants are similarly creepy, objectifying, etc. But this is firmly in the category of "not the rebuttal you think it is", because I've heard mountains of scathing criticism of child beauty pageants for exactly those reasons. And while I doubt Honey Boo Boo's mom is trying to rape any kids, it's a common refrain that the adult male judges at these events look like a portfolio of "caught with 56 terabytes of CP" mugshots.
The point at which we normalize kid drag shows, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those events.
The point at which we normalize teachers having confidential sex talks with kids, obviously pedophiles are going to flock to those professions.
Church leaders, boy scouts, sports coaches, karate instructors, tutors, etc, etc. We've spent decades building up a corpus of best practices to ward off the opportunities for people to take advantage of kids. If you want to validate a child as trans, it seems very obvious that you can do that in ways that don't sexualize nine year olds, or otherwise trigger Youth Protection Red Flags. Demanding that vast corpus of best practices be set aside because "bigotry or something" is wildly suspicious. Even the people who aren't doing anything directly wrong, who would never do anything directly wrong, have a responsibility to be aware of how they might be enabling other people who are and will.
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1yr ago
They used to stalk us but banned linking us because it exacerbated their collective inferiority complex was too cliche and easy.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
What is the appropriate age to bring your children to The Motte?
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1yr ago
It's basic. The whole place reeks of "medium fish in a small pond" syndrome. People who concluded they were brilliant because they could dunk on Uncle Jim on Facebook. Banning debate makes it easier to keep up the pretense and protect the ego.
The rules have always been about sincerely assuming the best of your ideological opposites,
This is not an unlimited line of credit, and this community is not new. This is ground we have trod countless times before; of course there are grooves. For a similar example, claims about the 2020 election being stolen don't get unlimited intellectual charity; we had a more-or-less fair hearing and the stronger claims mostly failed to justify themselves.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Reminds me of Irritant's Law from the Practical Guide to Evil.
“Irritant’s Law: inevitable doom is a finite resource, and becomes mere doom when split between multiple heroic bands. Nemeses should never simultaneously engage a single villain.” – Extract from ‘The Axiom Appendix’, multiple contributors
If the world runs on drama and irony, flooding the field to undercut any particular instance and rob it of all power is a viable strategy.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Remind yourself that anything you do is just a first draft, so it's ok if it sucks.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I would just like to note that "entities violently fighting each other for control over an area" is something that doesn't happen in an area ruled by a government, unless you live in a country currently at war.
Yes, that's just called a civil war. The whole point of the comparison is that the organizations we normally recognize as governments are the ones who have a successful monopoly on violence.
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1yr ago
I believe that "the progressive actors are acting with the earnestly held belief that they are making the world a better place" is more true than false, but because of a couple of edge cases I prefer the weaker "the core SJ movement >99.9% believes SJ is good and conservatism is evil".
What is the point of this sort of comparison? I'm sure the religious fanatics who were burning Pokémon cards and Harry Potter Books thought they were making the world a better place. People didn't send their kids to gay conversion camps to make the world worse. The Taliban think they're doing the right thing by forbidden women to learn, the Soviets and Nazis thought they were making the world better with their atrocities.
No one is a villain in their own story. Everyone thinks that their beliefs are good and result in good things. But specifically calling for generosity in regards to SJ on this seems particularly perverse, because as an ideology, SJ emphatically denies that generous goodwill to anyone else.
And it seems double-perverse given how much of SJ appears to be upper-class double-think games, e.g. the numerous times Darwin has expressed annoyed confusion that people keep trying to take SJ ideology literally and seriously, instead of just knowing that it's tribal-signaling mouth-sounds.
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1yr ago
My point is more that SJ as an ideology is so optimized for conflict theory that it's adherents begging for the protections of mistake theory is somewhere between cute and contemptible. Say what you will about fundamentalist Christianity, but it does still contain memes about loving and forgiving your enemies for they know not what they do. SJ as a meme/ideology, OTOH, is more purely specialized as a weapon, which makes it more valuable to people who want a weapon, either because they just enjoy attacking or they want the weapon to win status games.
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1yr ago
I believe (haha) beliefs are anticipations,
So, another question would be "Do SJ proponents behave like they expect their purported beliefs to be true?" How do they react to proposals for empirical experiments? Do they welcome tests in the earnest belief that their purported expectations will be met? Or do they play invisible dragon games?
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1yr ago
there's not a lot of career advancement happening there.
No, but there is an awful lot of vicious backstabbing, glorifying in bullying, and petty status games. There was an archive of an article posted over at the Other Place a few months back, detailing how SJ spread like a daemonic taint through the Glee fandom because it was a useful tool for fangirls of one character or ship to attack fangirls of other characters and ships, and rapidly spiraled into a deranged race-to-the-bottom of everyone preemptively trying to brand each other as toxic and problematic for liking certain characters and ship as a First Strike defense against being branded toxic and problematic for liking other ships. SJ is like a Daemon Weapon of Toxic Femininity.
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1yr ago
WPATH Standards of Care
That seems to be from 2012. A lot has changed in this discussion space in 10 years.
If including transwomen in a women's sporting division is undesirable to some, then another league that only allows cis-women could exist alongside it
This is literally already the case, and the entire point. Sports have an "open" and a "women's" league, and the TRAs think that sectioning off the women's league for cis-women is intolerable bigotry.
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1yr ago
Sports usually include an age cutoff. There is a bit of room for finagling there, but usually less than a year, which isn't going to swamp the intra-year variance in size. That said, I literally made this decision for my son, keeping him in preschool an extra year to make him one of the oldest in his grade instead of the youngest, against the outraged squawking of the teacher's on his mother's side, and I am very happy with that decision.
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1yr ago
or would the right if it actually gained back power censor in a much more strict and comprehensive way?
Maybe. But the left is already defecting from their own claimed norms of the last century, right now, and show few signs that they wouldn't go much harder if they could.
Do we know how this new system will handle 2k comment posts? And is there any way to change the number of comments that load?
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