We could say things like, the outcome of your legal case doesn't really depend all that strongly on what your lawyer or the prosecutor thinks of you.
Just like parents don't affect their children's outcomes much, unless they're abusive, lawyers may not affect the outcome fo the trial much, unless they're abusive. The civilian who knows nothing about lawyers and certainly nothing about you personally, has no idea if you'll deliberately lose the case because you think he's unsympathetic, or even just give in to the prosecutor because you don't care about the case. So he lies to appear more sympathetic.
Jiro
1yr ago
This is where I pause for the ritual teeth-baring at the 'only a few crazy kids on college campuses' notions; it's all very well for the child of middle to upper middle class parents, attending a good college, to protest about their right to sixteen piercings and three abortions; they're going to end up okay and go on to a career in activism from student activism which ends up with them in nice, PMC professional positions. It's the lower middle-class to working class kids who imbibe these notions, end up with sixteen piercings and three pregnancies, and are most definitely not going to go on to the PMC salaried position who are the ones ending up in trouble).
That's the definition of a luxury belief.
Jiro
1yr ago
There has to be a way to get the vulnerable out of those situations without falling foul of the two extremes of "your kids are dragged away from you because little Johnny showed up to school with scratched knees" and "you can literally torture a child to death because the case fell between the cracks".
That's textbook anarcho-tyranny.
Taking kids from a law-abiding parent is much easier than taking them from a guilty one. The law-abiding person has probably never tried to navigate the system before. They're probably going to assume good faith on your part. They're not going to threaten you or pull a gun on you, they're not going to lie, they're much more inclined to do things like let you into their house. They have jobs so they can't just flee town.
Jiro
1yr ago
That's just a semantics question over what "bad" means. You can say "hurting someone in self-defense is always bad, but sometimes it is the best option" or you can say "hurting someone in self-defense is not bad" and you're really saying the same thing.
Have you tried praying with a humble heart?
What makes you think he didn't?
I'm amazed that religious believers still try to get away with this. If you told me that you didn't want to vote for some presidential candidate, and I said "well, you just aren't open-minded enough to consider that what he's saying may be true", that would be considered rude, or worse. Yet somehow religious believers get to attack nonbelievers by suggesting that they'd believe if only they were humbler. How would you react to a Muslim saying that you reject the truth of the Koran because you're not humble enough?
Jiro
1yr ago
They also don't like Jews and Asians, period. And it's not that hard to notice.
Jiro
1yr ago
It's not like @Cimafra, @BurdensomeCount, @Hoffmietser, @SecureSignals, or our old friend Oakland Et Al. have been particularly shy about their motives.
Of course some people who espouse HBD are basically white nationalists. And some aren't. You are treating them as one homogenous group.
It's not even very hard to tell the difference; the white nationalists don't like treating Jews and Asians as intelligent.
Jiro
1yr ago
Meritocracy doesn't need any explanation whatsoever for why differences in abilities exist.
The problem is there's already an explanation: there aren't really any differences in abilities, you're just discriminating. And that explanation is enough to get you to pay massive fines or go to jail.
Jiro
1yr ago
What exactly is a "clever loophole"? If I go to a supermarket and only buy the loss leader product, am I using a loophole while following the letter of the law, since the supermarket expects to profit from people coming into the store for the loss leader and buying other things? What if I need to travel to Atlantic City for personal reasons, so I take a casino bus where they give me $10 in free coins, get the coins, and not bother gambling with it? (I've actually done this.) If I'm black but can pass for white, it's the 1950s, and I use a segregated lunch counter, am I exploiting a loophole, since I know the owner doesn't want me there?
Jiro
1yr ago
If I encounter someone who has done their research and seems generally intelligent, I sincerely wish I could hand out a pass that both indemnifies me from some medicolegal risk if they were to take less than ironclad advice, and also lets them access more experimental therapies without the headache of FDA waivers in terminal cases and so on.
Intelligent patients can be a double edged sword. A smart enough person can read up on a treatment, decide they want it, and then think of "the doctor wants to make sure I understand the consequences" as an obstacle that needs to be solved not by trying to understand anything, but rather by picking the right words to get past the obstacle. And the smarter they are the more they can convince the doctor they've really thought it out without actually thinking it out.
Jiro
1yr ago
Did Ted Kaczynski care more about the environment than either Bushnell or anyone posting here?
You have no business deciding how much another poster here cares about something. My hypothesis is that Bushnell cared little about himself, rather than cared a lot about the Palestinians. Certainly you have no reason to believe it with 99.9% confidence.
Jiro
1yr ago
I think that argument has been quietly dropped since Oct 7.
Jiro
1yr ago
(tldr for kids who decide to be trans they see <.1% of the trans content they see at school, they get it from the internet, the school plays almost zero causal role in them deciding to transition).
I think the worry is not necessarily that the school starts it, it's that the school enables it by their policies. Schools allowing children to socially transition, keeping information from the parents, etc. could be a lot more influential than just seeing content.
Jiro
1yr ago
Imagine that Caleb is not one person but the "Caleb Union" which contains ten people but otherwise has exactly the same skills, together, as Caleb does in the original scenario. The union is so strong so you can't break them up or hire them partially.
Given what you think a fair distribution of profits between Arthur and Caleb is, how should profits be distributed between Arthur and the Caleb Union?
Jiro
1yr ago
the current trans rights movement is much smaller than the gay rights movement was in its heyday
"Smaller" means different things in an era of social media, combined with universal media approval. Fewer people, maybe. Less influence, no.
Jiro
1yr ago
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids.
That doesn't work, because "trans women are women" means treating them as women for the purpose of sports, prisons, bathrooms, etc. Treating gay people as married doesn't mean letting them do any controversial things. And having your child decide one day that they're trans is a lot bigger problem than having your child decide one day that they're gay.
Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
If you loosen the requirement to "CEOs are social justice allies but can be any skin color", we're already getting that. We just end up with CEOs who crush unions, roll back regulations, lobby for tax cuts for the rich, and still promote their ideology in everything they can get their hands on that doesn't personally disadvantage themselves. The guy in charge of Google Gemini may not literally be a CEO, but he's a person in charge of a project at a big corporation, and I'm sure he's not going to start a campaign in support of unions at Google, but the project itself was DEI enough that even regular media can notice.
Jiro
1yr ago
He used a similar tactic at Reddit
Not according to that link. That link is a user speculation (labelled with a sarcastic JUST KIDDING, which doesn't mean that he's kidding, but does mean that it's something he thinks happened, not something he has evidence for.)
Jiro
1yr ago
Whether a set of complaints is a social problem, and in general whether a set of complaints is something to take note of, is a fact-specific thing.
The wrong way to look at this is to say "it's a complaint, and every complaint is just as good or bad as every other complaint that sounds grammatically similar", which is what you've been doing.
you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.
That's absurd. You are able to do things that affect, or at least incentivize, other people's actions. You can also change inanimate things which cause problems that are not nontrivially any person's fault.
Jiro
1yr ago
The specifics absolutely do matter. It's easy to find and notice examples of women blaming problems on feminist reasons. When they do, society approves of it and doesn't question it. These two factors make it matter to point it out.
You can't find more than one Donald Trump doing it, and when you do, the media won't defend him.
Jiro
1yr ago
You say "even Trump" as though that makes the idea stronger when it actually makes it weaker. Women blaming problems on feminism is something of note because more than one woman does it and more than one member of society supports them doing it. The fact that Trump specifically does something means little in this context; Trump is one person.
Jiro
1yr ago
I couldn't watch Gunslinger Girl. The whole setup with older men mentoring young girls to do weird things, even if in this context it was assassination, seemed too close to grooming for me.
In practice, "preselected with being unsatisfied" isn't going to mean "every single one is unsatisfied", it just means "being unsatisfied is disproportionately likely". You may be personally satisfied despite this being true.
I could describe your allies back then, and the people who you agree are going to far now, in the same way: They're trying to advance the cause of oppressed groups, especially racial and sexual minorities.
I admit it's a matter of framing, but it looks from my point of view that it's all the same direction, even if they expanded their definitions of "oppressed groups" and "advance the cause". It's true that they've gone from supporting free speech to opposing it, but that's a change in tactics, not a change in principles, even if you have principles.
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