Jiro
26d ago
Are you trying to say that the accusations are so shaky that they couldn’t have been anything other than a bad faith attempt by the Swedes to get hold of Assange?
Intelligence agencies are perfectly capable of using their influence to trump up charges that may not stand up in court, but look plausible enough that you can't prove bad faith in advance. Your standard here is a blank check to the intelligence agencies to get anyone they want.
The accusations might have been in good faith, but they also might not, and the possibility that they aren't was substantial.
Jiro
14d ago
the one actively attempting to enter the de facto designated area intends to harass the people in the area
I'd say it's not. The protestors have no right to have a defacto designated area. You can't "harass" by interfering with something that someone doesn't have a right to in the first place. If you enter a bank while someone's robbing it you aren't intending to harass the bank robbers.
Jiro
27d ago
The term "Holocaust" didn't come into popular use until the late 1950s.
Here's a Churchill reference. Of course it doesn't use the term, but it's about the holocaust.
Jiro
1mo ago
My rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly.
Free speech is "my rules".
Speech restrictions for conservatives is "your rules, unfairly".
Speech restrictions for everyone is your rules, fairly".
The best choice is still to be principled, bu the second-best choice is to at least apply the speech restrictions to some of the left as well.
Jiro
1mo ago
I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum.
I would not. It's the moderation equivalent of not putting BLM protestors in jail because they're on the side of the left.
Justice should mean equal treatment. If equal treatment leads to disparate impact because one side commits more crime, so be it.
Jiro
9d ago
The Law of Undignified Failure as described there seems to sound more like the Law that Not Everyone's Boo Lights are the Same.
The fact that someone is doing things with negative emotional valence to you and that you are therefore scared should be irrelevant. Military weapons are supposed to kill people; marketing them for their ability to kill people is not undignified unless you have preexisting negative attitudes towards the military.
Jiro
11d ago
A funny thing though is that on the right, this emotion has long been mixed with something that is very different: an extremely powerful and (mostly) closeted, emotional-sexual complex with overtones of father issues. The anti-egalitarian right has a strong streak of closeted mostly-homosexual eroticism that revolves around dominance/submission.
People see homoeroticism in things like this for the same reason they see it in pretty much every anime, TV show, and movie under the sun that appeals to the right crowd. Can you prove that Harry Potter isn't secretly in love with Draco Malfoy?
Jiro
19d ago
This dovetails with @naraburn's post about the Pokemon Go avatar changes being designed, apparently, to challenge conventional beauty standards- especially the sub-question in that thread regarding a conspiracy to promote ugliness. That conspiracy exists, in its declaration that there is no Noble Physiognomy, and our attractions are just manipulated by White Supremacy.
"Conspiracy to promote ugliness" in that context is mostly about women, so it doesn't apply here.
Jiro
14d ago
That would mean that he's a Jew who supports Israel. If you want to claim he's a "Zionist", you're going to have to explain how you distinguish between that and a Zionist.
"Zionist" isn't a swear word meaning "anyone who wants Israel to exist".
Jiro
25d ago
Taking rights away from a mentally ill person should require an adversarial hearing where the person accused of being mentally ill has the right to bring evidence, cross-examine witnesses, etc. If there hasn't been such a hearing, and the law otherwise allows the boy to have a gun (which it sounds like it does), requiring people to keep guns away from the "mentally ill" person is just a roundabout way to circumvent gun rights.
Nobody would accept a ruling that forced the boy into involuntary confinement without a hearing, even if failure to involuntarily confine him meant that he could, and eventually did, kill someone.
Jiro
1mo ago
Agree that trans women are women and deserve all the rights and respect of any other woman, and I'll happily agree that we should shelve the question of hermtaur surgeries for the next 50 years or so.
The justification for "trans women are women" is the same as the justification for hermaphrodite surgery.
Jiro
28d ago
"I was only following orders" is something we as a society have learned through hard experience is no excuse. People may not relieve themselves of responsibility for doing bad things on the grounds that someone else hired them to do the bad thing; and even if they're hiring you to do it to themselves, it's your responsibility to refuse if they are not of sound mind when they hired you. You don't have the option to say "judging them to be of unsound mind is none of my business"--it informs the propriety of your own actions, for which you bear responsibility, which makes it your business.
Jiro
19d ago
People who are not weird Internet guys think action and inaction have different moral valences.
A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is
Nobody would call a law against drunk driving an "anti-driving law" even though it restricts driver behavior. (And that's actually a better example because only drivers can engage in drunk driving, while it's possible for a non-trans person to try to play in a female-only sport.)
Women wearing trousers/pants were once upon a time regarded as "that is men's clothing" but now we accept that "no, it's women's clothing too".
We accept women wearing pants, but women don't wear pants in the context of getting sexual excitement from being women who wear pants. More generally, there's a difference between wanting to wear something of the opposite sex as clothes, and wanting to wear something of the opposite sex because it's from the opposite sex.
Jiro
18d ago
It may be the whisper network distorting the idea that computer operators were female.
Jiro
1mo ago
Insect welfare is what you get when you take ideas seriously, but normies have the ideas a lot without taking them seriously. Normies who "believe in animal welfare" don't take the idea seriously. Even vegetarians don't treat seriously the ideas that lead to vegetarianism. Actually believing the things the normies are saying and taking them seriously leads to this mess.
(In this case I don't think even rationalism would support letting the insects live. Insect welfare falls out from animal welfare because the sentience of an insect is small but there are billions of them. There are not billions of insects in your apartment, so the disutility of killing them is low even if you take animal welfare seriously. I would agree that this sounds more like OCD.)
Jiro
26d ago
Technically the Japanese were POC, but Asians have a weird place in the oppression stack.
Jiro
1mo ago
those types know full well that the medical system will respond with transition, everyone knows that.
No they don't. They may think "well, I don't know if trans is correct for my kid, I'm sure the doctor can figure it out". They'll assume that the doctor would act like a professional and diagnose based on objective standards that might say yes, but might say no.
The "they take all our jerbs!" refrain against immigration is fundamentally selfish and rent seeking.
I'm beginning to see why Ayn Rand got a following. The world runs around people acting selfishly. EAs may claim they should give as much of their income as they can for malaria nets. Non-EAs earn money for themselves and their families. Yes, not wanting competition from immigrants is selfish. So is saying "you should hire me for this job over the other applicant" whether immigrant or not. So is spending money to buy yourself ice cream instead of donating it. So is saying "I really would like to keep my kidney even though someone else can use it more than me."
Maybe your parents told you "don't be selfish" growing up, but kids are told simplified versions of things. Look out for your own interests.
Jiro
20d ago
"Enshittification" doesn't mean "turned to shit". It means "turned to shit because of user, and later business, lock-in".
Jiro
27d ago
most adults who go on hormones are happy about that,
Going on hormones and then believing that hormones are bad for you seems like it would be unlikely because of the sunk cost fallacy.
This hasn't been how it's worked in Russia.
Also, the usual moral hazard of forcing people to work for you and not letting them quit.
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