Jiro
1yr ago
the west's classical paradigm of an excellent human life: to be a wise, cultured, orthodox Christian gentleman.
If the classical paradigm of an excellent human life requires that you not be a Jew, I want no part of it.
I'd expect the typical reasoning of 'Only do it to the smallest of outgroups', but given how demonstrable it is now that such reasoning does not hold when we are trying to uphold broad principles for big populations...
I'm surprised that you think "only do it to the smallest of outgroups" would be a useful description even when that's sort of what Google did.
Search is at least partly supposed to be a popularity contest. If the group that says something is small, what they say should be underemphasized. If the group that thinks it's true is small, that's another reason to underemphasize it because if there's 99% agreement that it isn't true, Google should be treating it as false and people don't want to search and find false information.
There are plenty of conservatives out there, and the truth of conservative beliefs is an active dispute, not something 99% of people take the same side on. But Holocaust denial? There are few Holocaust deniers, and no truth to Holocaust denial. Not returning results because Holocaust deniers are the "smallest of outgroups" is the proper thing to do here.
Jiro
2mo ago
It's not a thing you can change by just modifying a few conditions. The only meaningful way to get rid of the advantage of being a trained lawyer is to find an opponent who's also a trained lawyer or equivalent.
This incessant insistence on "if you REALLY were serious, you'd do it at a time and place and under circumstances of my choosing" is as annoying as rationalists insisting "if you REALLY were serious, you'd bet money".
Jiro
9mo ago
Applicants are advised that essays about niche topics unfamiliar to admissions officers are strongly preferred.
How could this ever be possible?
Jiro
11mo ago
How does "mocking" an idea somehow become more "anti-Catholic" than criticizing it? And, tell me, what exactly does "anti-Catholic" mean? Surely, if it is objectionable, then it must mean something more than mocking ideas; it must mean saying something negative about people.
By your reasoning here, an outright racial slur is not anti-(a race).
Jiro
1yr ago
What we're seeing with NARA is not the deep state continuing its politics by other means. It's the visceral panic of a bureaucracy realizing it has a blind spot.
What we're seeing is the deep state continuing its politics by other means, but then finding that it can't put the genie back in the bottle and make sure that only the desired target got punished. Some bureaucrats didn't get the memo that an everyone-is-guilty rule was supposed to be used for selective prosecution. Instead they applied the rule fairly, which made everyone guilty.
The fact that they went after Biden doesn't mean it's not the deep state, it means that the deep state screwed up.
Jiro
1yr ago
"People of color" still includes Asians, who the left often wants to exclude.
Would you demand that someone not rent to gay people, or otherwise profit off of gays, if they can't bear to watch gay sex? If they can't bear to watch an operation, do we forbid them from being operated on?
Squeamishness is not a source of morality.
Jiro
8mo ago
Only a certain kind of literalist on the Internet thinks being wrong "about everything" means literally every single thing, rather than being wrong about major implications in typical cases.
"They are literally right that Jefferson is racist, but they are wrong in what this implies about how we should treat Jefferson" is, by normie standards, being wrong about Jefferson.
Jiro
1yr ago
One of the things that (to me) makes Christianity not horribly oppressive is that hey, we don't have to try to atone for this inherent sin we can never get rid of.
That assumes that becoming Christian isn't itself horribly oppressive. I mean, you're telling me that in order to get rid of this original sin I not only need to convert out of Judaism, but I have to accept a whole bunch of doctrines that seem to be intellectual nonsense, such as transsubstantiation, the Trinity, and the doctrine of original sin itself. Then I need to accept what God says about gays, birth control, abortion, and every other issue that your church is stuck with.
Atonement would be nicer than that.
Jiro
1yr ago
Ukraine is an unusual example not because it's one of the few wars short of World War II that's good versus evil, but because it's one of the few ones that's clearly good versus evil. All the factors lined up in such a way that both political parties in the US and evey foreign country that isn't authoritarian itself are all on the same side of the war.
Holocaust denial got the most clicks. But centrists don't like that so they want it banned. So screw any principle or fairness, I should just have my way because 'reasons'.
Right now Google is infested by SEO spam and SEO spam, of course, gets the most clicks. By your reasoning, Google should be sending people to the SEO spam and should not try to get rid of it in search results. It "gets the most clicks" because Google promotes it, you cannot use the clicks as a reason to say why Google should promote it--that's circular reasoning.
Holocaust denial is neither something that many people want (since they want truthful things and it's false) nor something that many people produce (since it comes from an extreme minority). So Google should in fact be not showing it prominently in search results that don't specifically ask for it.
Funnily enough, that's how the people banning 'conservative' stuff think. They see a tiny portion of the population.
"It's a tiny percentage" is false for conservatives and true for Holocaust deniers. That's a big difference; being true or false actually matters.
Jiro
10mo ago
Why not?
Because it's inherently engaging with the series on a very superficial level.
Is it possible that they're a fan of the series anyway? Sure, but it's not the way to bet.
Jiro
1yr ago
"Didn't realize" begs the question by assuming that the position that someone "didn't realize" is the truth. We have a rule against consensus for this reason.
The national anthem is political in the sense that anything is political. Playing a game on artificial grass could be interpreted as support of the plastics industry and some player could claim that actually, the team has made a political statement by choosing to play on plastic grass, and that he's merely refusing to participate in politics by refusing to play on it.
That's not what "is political" means. The national anthem is controversial only among an extreme minority of people, and to the extent it is, most of the controversy involves opponents ascribing meaning to singing it that supporters don't. The national anthem is also something that has been used in sports for so long that it deserves the benefit of the doubt--it's always been there, nobody's bringing anything in. This isn't true for Pride themes.
Jiro
1yr ago
The only people who'd care about this, ignoring the lizardman constant, would be some members of the old left who think anything the US does overseas is bad and that the FBI is always bad anyway. Yes, it has Twitter cooperating with the FBI, but they're cooperating with the FBI to do the kinds of things that are actually the government's job to do. There's a big difference between the FBI doing this and the FBI using Twitter to interfere with domestic politics.
Jiro
1yr ago
Sexual material is being discussed or otherwise involved. It's only specifically LGBT because the people who've tried it have usually been LGBT, not because it wouldn't count if they weren't.
Jiro
8mo ago
It's not trivial, but it also isn't an automatic win. "Racism is evil, so now that we've established that Jefferson is racist, you'd better not mention him in a positive context ever again unless my side approves of it" is not legitimate. And that's what "Jefferson is racist" usually means.
The people who most loudly criticize self-ID are usually LGBT-unfriendly on various other issues.
The people who most loudly criticize it are LGBT-unfriendly on other issues because an LGBT-friendly person has a lot more to lose by being accused of bigotry than a LGBT-unfriendly person, who's probably lost all that he could already and whose remaining friends and family won't care about the accusation. This situation is of trans supporters' own making.
Maybe a lesbian woman is capable of teaching kids, but what if she makes it sexual?
It doesn't work in reverse unless the lesbian's environment is controlled by rightists who can easily make such accusations stick against even innocent lesbians.
Whether someone "literally wants us dead" is a fact-specific question. Even if not many people on a side literally literally want you dead, there's the question of how often and how directly a side says they want you dead, whether they encourage or discourage this rhetoric, and how much bad faith that rhetoric indicates.
It's not a foregone conclusion that, by this standard, the right and left equally want each other dead. If you ask a conservative why he thinks liberals want him dead, he's probably going to point to statements that are fairly close to "all conservatives should die". If you ask a trans activist and the trans activist points to suicide rates, that's not the same kind of thing. Even if neither side is likely to go on a shooting spree, so neither side literally wants the other dead, this isn't the same kind of "wants us dead" and is not symmetrical.
The left saying that conservatives "want us dead" is related to the strategy of demanding that victims must be listened to and their wishes must be obeyed. So you get things like "the right doesn't want us to do X, and that may result in people dying, so they want us dead". You don't see this much on the right.
I think the core idea that the Protag had been extensively and personally wronged by the villains and thus wouldn't give a damn about destroying a mere physical possession was completely valid. A human being was killed, and you're more outraged at the destruction of a tiny little portrait?
This is a torture versus dust specks argument. The Mona Lisa benefits a huge number of people by a tiny amount each.
Jiro
1yr ago
Remember that a good and just world is one where...
This sounds like trying to build consensus. Why should I "remember" something that I don't think is true?
Jiro
1yr ago
I think this sort of thing comes in degrees. Nobody outside the lizardman constant seriously thinks the overall effect of the red Army in Latvia was liberation. A significant number of people in your scenario probably think the policy was sincere but ineffective, or that a particular Confederate monument was commemorating what is written on the monument and not commemorating slavery.
Lab-grown meat strikes me as like deciding that it's evil to draw pictures of Mohammed, but if you use a special light refraction method, you can have something that looks sort of like Mohammed but doesn't count as a picture for religious purposes, so Muslims lobby for use of this method and dozens of scientists spend millions of dollars figuring out how to get people to accept this method instead of normal photography.
IP itself is a government creation. So the question is not "does WOTC have a right", the question is "are we happy with the government giving them this right". I'm not happy with it.
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