Jiro
17d 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
17d ago
I don't know, does he think that Israel is a death cult against Hamas's existence?
Jiro
17d ago
A more charitable interpretation is that Muslims who don't support Hamas are rare enough that they shouldn't be taken into account when forming policy.
Nobody short of the lizardman constant means "literally no such thing" when they say "no such thing" and it's not some kind of science or math problem.
Jiro
18d 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.
Jiro
18d ago
I have occasionally mused in the last few years that mandatory national service after high school would probably improve national cohesiveness.
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.
Jiro
19d 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
21d ago
I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right.
Anything recent that seems to be the US moving to the right is a special case that bypassed the obstacles that keep the right from gaining any power. Supreme Court rulings are the biggest example, but Musk buying Twitter is another. We never see the US move to the right because those obstacles have actually gotten weaker, so I'd say that they are one-offs and don't mean the US is moving to the right.
Jiro
22d ago
When they say they were driven like a slave that's metaphorical. It isn't actually the same thing as being driven like a real slave.
Jiro
22d ago
From a game theoretic perspective China has no incentive to pick a fight over Taiwan.
Just like actual humans don't act like Homo Economicus they don't act like Homo Strategicus either. If China invades Taiwan it will be the result of internal political factions within China competing and exerting pressure, not the result of a logical decision about how best to optimize the chance of winning.
Jiro
22d ago
The implication of "towering over the rest of the world is great" is that it's based on a principle. Any such principle that doesn't outright say "and no Jews" or equivalent would approve of Jews doing the same.
Jiro
22d ago
Because slavery is done for the interests of the slaveowner and at least in theory, authoritarian parents are acting for the long term benefit of the children. And even callous authoritarian parents are not going to be as callous as slaveowners.
Jiro
22d ago
The contradiction is "towering over the rest of the world is great, as long as it's us doing it, but not when it's the hated Jews".
Jiro
22d ago
Spending a lot of recent time with higher class Africans, any benefit of the doubt that they are civilizationally capable faded.
I don't think this conclusion can be justified unless "they" is defined more narrowly than it would normally be defined in this context. I'd suggest that higher class Africans are selected for ability to retain power, which is not competency at ruling to benefit the people.
Jiro
22d ago
But Indian and East Asian authoritarian/disciplinarian parenting styles — at their most extreme — result in physical punishment and shaming without regard for “internal motivation”.
I'm pretty sure they are still associated with considerably more internal motivation than slavery.
Jiro
23d ago
I'm pretty sure that the West wouldn't give Asians preferences over whites in immigration whether the West was anti-HBD or not. Exactly who the immigration benefits is far more important than any sincere concerns about how smart the immigrants are. For that matter, you don't even need HBD to say that current immigrants should be Asian because they're higher IQ, and nobody supports that, either.
Jiro
23d ago
People here have pegged me as a HBD supporter, but actually I think a lot of HBD is exaggerated or worse. A prime example is HBD supporters claiming that African countries have such low IQ that by Western standards most of them would be mentally retarded. That's a violation of common sense and shows that something's obviously wrong with the HBD idea. The only explanation I've seen is "well, retarded people do poorly for reasons other than IQ" which is also a violation of common sense.
As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."
Jiro
24d ago
If I'm being really tasteless about this, are we sure he's not going to move on to one of the adopted with Soon-Yi kids as soon as she's old enough, given his track record?
No, because
accepting that Allen and Farrow were not co-habiting and that he was not meaningfully parenting Soon-Yi in any way
that wouldn't be an analogous situation.
Jiro
25d 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
25d 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.
Thanks. I try to be careful about specifying when I'm saying what I believe, steelmanning what some group or person on the left might say about the topic, or playing devil's advocate to stress-test a position.
Because a common dishonest tactic is to take a position that's an exaggerated version of your normal one as a test to see what you can get away with. Anything you can't get away with, you then label as a "joke" or "just getting you to think" or "playing devil's advocate". If you want to play devil's advocate, do it for a position that you don't directionally believe in. You've talked about steelmanning the opposition above, but a leftist playacting as a more extreme leftist isn't steelmanning the opposition.
Also, your "devil's advocate" position seems to contain flaws that are best explained by you sincerely believing in the position. For instance, someone taking a devil's advocate position wouldn't misrepresent Rowling's book--there's no incentive to be careless about something you don't really believe in. But a true believer has an incentive to be careless.
Jiro
25d ago
It is, because people call privileges "rights" when they support them, but they call rights "privileges" when they oppose them.
Yes, but they shouldn't.
guesswho calls this an anti-LGBT law because he's deep in the middle of calling things "rights" inconsistently depending on whether he supports or opposes them. But when called on it he denies this and just claims he's being literally truthful.
I think it's unlikely that he refers to drunk driving laws as anti-driver, compulsory school laws as anti-child, and laws against robbery as anti-minority (for a minority that disproportionately robs), even if he thinks they can be literally described that way. It's a motte and bailey where the motte is "see, that's what it literally means" and the bailey is that he's using the words to imply something negative.
Jiro
25d ago
Anyway I think you're overestimating how much in common you have with black people. Try sending your kid to a 90% black school and ask them how easy it is to fit in because everyone eats peanut butter.
I think this says more about black schools than about black people in general.
Jiro
25d ago
'Rich person flaunts the law, confident they will never face consequences' is not a very unique or interesting story. It's certainly not 'brave' or anything...
"Rich person flaunts the law" implies that the rich person gets away with crimes because they can retaliate using their wealth and connections. Rowling doesn't have judges or lobbyists on speed dial, and she's not going to contact her friends in the banking industry or the Mafia.
"Rich person flaunts the law because they have enough money to pay for a good defense, and because if something absurd happens to them, the public will see how absurd it is" is a noncentral example of a rich person flaunting the law and is more like the rich person not being railroaded than it is like a typical rich person flaunting the law.
Technically the Japanese were POC, but Asians have a weird place in the oppression stack.
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