often a step away from the Great Leader
I don't want someone elected president who is a poor leader. There's an extremely fine line between a great leader and a Great Leader and you'd have to be better at articulating the difference before I'd seriously consider that a claim that someone is the latter to be anything but a boo light. (And if by "Great Leader", you mean "a lowercase great leader, who is divisive", I'll laugh.)
I am referring to the fact that «If not Trump, then who?» is literally one name-swap away from the slogan Если не Путин, то кто? (If not Putin then who?) which was, in this exact form, the symbol of faith of nascent Putinism.
This is a poor argument. Similarity of slogan proves nothing.
And you can't have a slogan "one name swap away" in another language because your ability to word the translation differently gives you an extra degree of freedom when doing comparisons.
because he's not that despised
Trump is not despised in a vacuum. He's despised because any red who had a noticeable chance of winning and took too many red positions, in the age of social media and leftist control of conventional media, would be equally despised.
And this is the political equivalent of the heckler's veto. It makes no sense to oppose someone because his opponents hate him.
Jiro
1yr ago
I thought an interesting question was posed:
I've seldom seen "just asking questions" done more directly.
Jiro
1yr ago
Somebody with severe life-impacting autism who is happy day-to-day as a result of simply not comprehending their condition and having relatively simple needs & wants.
The answer to that is "utilitarianism sucks". This is not the first time utilitarianism has produced bizarre results because it can't handle blissful ignorance.
Jiro
1yr ago
Even I know that it can be phrased using the word "whom", or have the word order changed.
Jiro
1yr ago
If that was used to give people steroids in a performance-enhancing yet restrained physically nondamaging way - why isn't that possible?
Because it's not in the Navy's interests to limit the dosages to nondamaging ones. It's in their interests to give SEALs dosages of steroids that maximize the immediate usefulness of SEALs to the Navy, even at the cost of bad long term effects. So that'll be what they do.
Jiro
1yr ago
You are saying "this is clearly a woman" because you're redefining "woman", not because this person is actually passing. The clothes and hair just change the situation to "really weird person that doesn't speak and looks like a woman at first glance, but something feels wrong about them".
Jiro
1yr ago
-1 troll.
IQ is perceived as a themotte subject by the sneerclub crowd far more than it really is. A long IQ post, especially if it mentions HBD (a term that a random person would not use, but that Sneerclub is aware of), is probably fake. Nobody actually discusses IQ like that.
Also, I absolutely don't believe that post was written from scratch to post here.
If you go to the site without logging in, and then log in, it shows no new posts even if there are. At least I think that's what's going on; it's hard to tell what I'm doing different from last time. If this is the cause, my guess is that it would be using the last visited time from when you last visited even if you weren't logged in.
Edit: It's happened enough that I'm sure that's the problem. The last visited time should not be updated if you aren't logged in.
Jiro
1yr ago
"Bad behavior" is a tricky thing. Never using your automobile for anything that isn't absolutely necessary reduces your chance of dying, but we don't say that it's immoral to treat someone for injuries suffered when they drive to visit their relatives for the holidays and get in an accident.
In other words, pretty much any "behavior" has an effect on your life expectancy. Claiming that we shouldn't treat people for medical problems related to their behavior is equivalent to saying that we shouldn't treat them for anything at all except a few edge cases.
The argument "they're imposing a public cost by their behavior" is really an argument against all publically funded medical treatments--that is, publically funded medical treatments are bad because they create incentives to restrict behavior, not the other way around.
Jiro
1yr ago
I don’t think there is a principled, objective stance where William Gibson is a better writer than Octavia Butler
There isn't a principled, objective, stance for every pair of authors you are comparing, but there is for some. You can't really say whether eating at McDonalds is better than Burger King, but they're both better than eating sewage.
There's also the problem that if you're choosing authors by wokeness, you're inherently going to have things which are bad by other standards, because those things are no longer your top priority. You may occasionally get lucky and find a good one anyway by chance, but you're no longer really selecting much for it.
But then…can I at least have my own awards convention so that I know which books from this year aren’t utter crap?
https://www.dragoncon.org/awards/2022-dragon-award-ballot/
The 2022 con is over but they haven't announced the winners yet as far as I know.
Jiro
1yr ago
There have always been political books on the list, but they weren't quite as common, and when they did appear, they had a variety of political opinions, not just all woke--the current diverse Hugos lack actual diversity.
Jiro
1yr ago
Humans are bad at compartmentalizing. Willingness to cheat in a case where there are no rules against it is associated with being willing to cheat when there are rules against it.
Jiro
1yr ago
the heroine thinks she has a flaw because of this event
That's one of the prime characteristics of a Mary Sue. The author's not willing to create an actual flaw for the character, so it's "I blame myself for this thing I'm not responsible for", "I don't realize how awesome I am", "other people don't realize how awesome I am", etc.
Jiro
1yr ago
Sure, it isn't literally grooming. But it's a metaphor that points out the similarities--it has children being pushed into sexual things by adults.
And I rarely see criticism saying "It's not grooming, it's just adults treating children sexually, so call it something else". Usually, when someone says that it shouldn't be called grooming, they're trying to deny that it's sexual or inappropriate at all.
If you really object to "grooming" because it's inaccurate, but you aren't just doing this to keep people from having a way to talk about it at all, you should suggest something people can call it instead, without being too euphemistic. I can't think of anything; any phrase that fits would be as objectionable as "grooming".
Jiro
1yr ago
If it's fine for adults to see, and - let's say - nobody's almost naked, then it's probably fine for children too.
This is absurd. The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to or participate in sexual material, even sexual material which doesn't involve naked people, is widespread.
Jiro
1yr ago
I would agree that "I am only fighting as a warrior because of my rage and I should be doing something else that I have more honest motives for" counts as a flawed heroine. But my confidence that a major American producer these days would have such a plot is close to zero.
Jiro
1yr ago
Prominent news stories from the past week should count as common knowledge. Past some point, asking people to give references is just filibustering them.
This is just argument-by-appeal-to-social-taboo.
It may help to think of it as "argument by Chesterton's fence". Before you can reject it, you must understand why it's there.
My argument is, essentially, that "abusive" has no more content than "bad", and attempts to smuggle in unproven connotations.
"Abusive" means "bad thing done to someone by someone else who has power over them". I am not convinced that "teachers have power over children" is an unproven connotation.
Jiro
1yr ago
The argument already is rejected by society as a whole, though.
If it was, it would not be necessary to hide these things from parents.
The thing debated isn't "teachers have power", the thing debated is how bad sex ed/drag story hours are.
You claimed that "abusive" meant nothing more than "bad". This isn't true. It is a specific subclass of bad. Pointing out that it doesn't mean all bad things within that subclass does not change this.
phallicy
yet to reach its climax
two-hour wank sessions
you have ejaculated these cues
Come on. This post is about as real as the Mouse Balls memo.
Please don't feed the troll.
Jiro
1yr ago
True, and I'm afraid this isn't likely to change anytime soon. Thread collapses are the same way, at least for now.
This is also a problem if you're ever logged out. You go to the site, it updates the new comments date, then you log in. The new comments shows you new comments since you last visited the site, which was a second ago when you visited before logging in, so there are no new comments.
Even if it can't track between browsers, it shouldn't update anything if you're not logged in.
Jiro
1yr ago
If I'm not logged in, it doesn't show that there's anything new at all, it just prevents it from showing anything new when I do log in.
The comparison to social justice destruction of monuments is obvious, but not, I think, very good. The monument as described has a blatantly slanted spin to the point of being insulting. If any Southern monument says "This monument is dedicated to Robert E. Lee, who fought bravely to keep Negroes free, for being occupied by the North is true slavery" or something like that there would be a much better case for destroying it than most Southern monuments.
Furthermore, the successor state to the one who put up the monuments is engaging in war based on similar rhetoric to that written on the monuments.
Just about nobody will make such an argument openly, because it wouldn't be convincing. If they make it sneakily, it's not a good argument because it's sneaky. So while this is possible in theory given a certain kind of mistake, it's a rare edge case.
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