Jiro
11d ago
He would simply point out that there is no example in history, with the exception of the few brief periods in which Israel has existed as an insular sovereign political entity, in which Jewish people have had the power to openly privilege themselves as a dominant racial group at the expense of other groups. Whereas there was a period of several centuries wherein white people — conscious of their whiteness and the way it made them different/better than other people — had both the means and the willpower to travel around the world establishing states in which they were made the supreme/privileged race and others were treated as less-than as a result.
And even people who weren't white nationalists could look at that and say "motte and bailey".
He can claim that abolishing whiteness is a technical term that doesn't imply any racial hostility. But saying "I don't really mean X" when there are plenty of people in your coalition who do mean X is indistinguishable from giving them cover and encouraging them even if you pinky swear that that isn't really what you mean.
His argument is that the independence of US territories is unconstitutional because the Constitution denies some powers to the states and independence implies granting those powers, and because the Constitution applies to the states and making them independent denies the inhabitants their constitutional rights.
The former argument should fail because the Constitution actually says "state" and territories that are granted independence are not states. The latter argument wouldn't apply to the Phillippines because the inhabitants were not US citizens and not born in the US. He just handwaved away the Insular Cases and he claimed the inhabitants of the Phillippines were born in the US, which wasn't true.
Note that the argument isn't actually originalism.
Jiro
5d ago
Another Stalin-related example of how political cults of personality work is a demand that you follow the personality's line even if they make complete u-turns.
"50 Stalins" uses Stalin as metonymy. It isn't about actual Stalin, and the fact that people behave in a certain way in relation to Stalin (and have to to stay alive) doesn't make that what "50 Stalins" is about.
Jiro
22d ago
I can count on one hand the number of minutes per month I'm delayed by a cyclist. On the other hand, every time the Penguins or Pirates play a weekday home game I'm treated to at least ten minutes of extra sitting in traffic so a bunch of suburbanites can treat themselves to a night of overpriced disappointment.
You need to figure out the amount of delay per cyclist and per driver, not the total amount of delay. The total amount is skewed by the much larger number of cars.
I would bet that if all those people went to the ball game on bicycles, your delays would not get any shorter.
Jiro
11d ago
How could that happen without massive disparate impact lawsuits? (Unless they're not really similarly situated--different cities, different professions chosen, etc.)
Jiro
14d ago
Minority outcomes have shifted very little in any positive directions.
I think "not being a slave" is pretty positive.
And Iran is not at war with China, so China can do this.
If Iran wants Israel to stop, they can negotiate peace.
Jiro
12d ago
The jobs feminine women perform don't care about three year resume gaps if there's a kid involved.
Wasn't one of the big complaints of feminism when it started that such jobs did care about the gap?
Jiro
10d ago
If they're lower in cognitive ability they aren't similarly situated. And if they have a different major they certainly aren't.
Jiro
25d ago
If Argentina can cause inflation by mistake, and Japan wants inflation, why can't they copy Argentina?
Jiro
25d ago
this would be too convenient since "genetics matter" is a known non-progressive moral precept.
That's all right, I'm not a progressive.
The other difference between this and defining "woman" is that people who disguise themselves as other races are not really an issue, and the equivalent for women is. If a lot of white people claimed to be black and tried to look black, the definition would no longer work.
how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people?
-
if they look unambiguously black
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if they look ambiguously black and at least one parent is black (recursively)
If the autist is not able to tell if someone looks unambiguously black, there is nothing you can do.
This fails if someone is wearing a good disguise. But that's a general problem with determining anything by sight. This problem also applies in obvious ways to the trans issue.
Jiro
23d ago
If you say "it's okay for the AI to do as poorly as a poorly performing human", you'll end up concluding that even an Eliza program can do better than a drunk human who can barely type out words on a keyboard. And if you say "the AI only needs to exceed a top human at a few tasks", then a C64, which can run a simple calculator or chess program, would count as a general AI.
People are not cherrypicking. What they are doing is like the Turing test itself, but testing for intelligence instead of for "is like a human". People asking questions in a Turing test can't tell you in advance which questions would prove the target is a computer, but they have implicit knowledge that lets them dynamically change their questions to whatever is appropriate. Likewise, we don't know in advance exactly what things ChatGPT would have to do to prove it's a general intelligence, but we can use our implicit knowledge to dynamically impose new requirements based on how it succeeds at the previous requirements.
Saying "well, it can write, but can it code" is ultimately no different from saying "well, it can tell me its favorite food, but can it tell me something about recipes, and its favorite book, and what it did on Halloween". We don't complain that when someone does a Turing test and suddenly asks the computer what it did on Halloween, that he's cherrypicking criteria because he didn't write down that question ahead of time.
Jiro
27d ago
"Scientism" is itself a sneer, and insofar as it means anything, is usually a false accusation claiming that people worship science or use science when they should be using feelings instead. Of course since its actual meaning is vague, anyone who uses it can deny meaning what they are using it to to mean and there's no way to prove them wrong.
Jiro
28d ago
the dominant religion of Scientism
There are a couple of phrases which make me discount pretty much anything people are using them to say. This is one of them.
Is it? Most people don't behave as if marriages are transactions (in a nontrivial sense). For that matter, they don't behave as if children are property. People who do treat marriages as transactions and children as property are frowned on and considered disturbed and even criminal. You can in some literal sense use those terms but that ignores the emotional attachments people have to spouses and children, which massively affects behavior.
Also, some of your conclusions don't seem to match the real world. The average woman in favor of abortion isn't more likely to be progressive because they have the least to offer other than sex and children. Being progressive is associated with having the most to offer--they're likely to have university degrees, journalist positions, etc. Housewifes are more likely to oppose abortion.
You also seem to think that the belief about whether fetuses count as people is for all practical purposes completely downstream from other considerations. But it's obvious in the real world that religious belief in the personhood of the fetuses is a huge source of opposition to abortion, not the effect of it.
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