Jiro
5mo ago
The history is too recent. It is like expecting Latvians or Poles to not want to destroy statues of Lenin.
I don't buy this. I'm not going to go to Italy and demand that the Arch of Titus be destroyed as an affront to the Jews. Past a certain amount of time, these monuments are historical and should stay. It's been over fifty years since the civil rights era when black people had enough political power that they could reasonably make a move to destroy monuments to their oppressors. At this point any monuments that are left should be off limits.
I won't say that this is a troll, since themotte has seen real people with such an opinion and it doesn't matter that someone is a new user when the entire site is new. On the other hand, this is certainly an inflammatory post without evidence, and doesn't belong here for that reason alone. Even though it does show some "evidence", the evidence is for something extremely narrow; the general claim
The answer is that excavations would be extremely hazardous to the false narrative that's been created and weaponized,
makes a very broad inflammatory claim that is not supported by the evidence provided, even if you were to assume it's true.
(And Nazis tend not to report evidence accurately anyway.)
Jiro
7mo ago
This is little more than a suggestion that the index would be more accurate if it discounted a woman's earned income somewhat in order to account for the possibility that a woman with no earned income might recover from her husband.
You keep talking about how any problems with the index are just inaccuracies. I wonder if you'd accept that excuse for something on the other political side. "Yes, we're exaggerating the number of third trimester abortions, but that's just inaccurate". This kind of inaccuracy is deceptive. It's not excusable just because it's an inaccuracy that doesn't call the whole thing into question--at some point, inaccuracy does call the whole thing into question.
But I am often surprised that people are surprised that yes, orthodox Christians do in fact believe you (yes, you) are going to go to hell if you do not accept Jesus Christ. Yes, that means they literally believe every last atheist and Muslim and Jew and pagan and Hindu and Buddhist is going to burn in hell forever. (And a lot of the Protestant denominations include Catholics, Mormons, and JWs in that bucket.)
Publically stating such things is an applause light often meant to express contempt or condescension towards people of other religions, even when rationalists ignore that and treat such claims as logical propositions. It's like going on record in public saying that your opponent's children are ugly and his toupee looks fake. The fact that you actually believe these things is not why you said it.
Jiro
7mo ago
That's the equivalent of "I met a poor person who genuinely needed a car, and the US budget is obviously able to handle giving out a car, so we should buy cars for every poor person who needs a car."
Even if the immigrant isn't a criminal and can get a job at a reasonable salary, the problem is the country only has resources for a limited number of immigrants. Because the drain on resources is distributed as a zillion dust specks, if you peer at any specific example it will always seem like that particular example couldn't possibly drain enough resources to matter, no matter where you put the limit. But cumulatively, doing that ends up meaning completely open borders and no limit at all.
Or in other words, the sympathy for the individual immigrant is a concentrated benefit, while the drain on resources is a distributed harm, so it's always going to look like we should add just one more immigrant because we don't balance concentrated benefits and distributed harms very well.
Jiro
3mo ago
But other Christians are willing to say "the Westboro Baptist Church is crazy and we don't believe what they are saying is true". This doesn't happen for trans issues.
Jiro
1yr ago
An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.
"It's not the thing you are using as a scapegoat" inherently means blaming something else, but it's wrong to describe that as "suddenly concerned about".
If plagues were blamed on Jews poisoning the wells, and Jews said "wait a minute, bad sanitation by Christians is a better explanation", you wouldn't ask "why are Jews suddenly very concerned about Christian sanitation?"
Jiro
9mo ago
Except Narnia isn't just a children's tale. It's about faith all right--it's a metaphor about religion and God. "People have actually been to Narnia, but they reject it anyway" is a close match to a common Christian strawman of atheists: that atheists have enough evidence to believe and they just refuse out of sinful arrogance.
And Lewis is too smart a person to not recognize that "people have been to Narnia but they still don't believe" matches this Christian strawman. If it's there, Lewis put it there on purpose.
Jiro
8mo ago
Except that the "approval" part is only half of it.
In the real world, proclaiming that nonbelievers go to Hell is hostile to nonbelievers. Yes, they want other believers to approve of the hostility, but describing that as wanting to garner approval leaves out the important part.
There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls.
-
This is distorted by the fact that most fanfiction period is written by women and girls, so it's not evidence of the gender ratio for the fandom itself.
-
I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.
-
The woke trend is clearly not what appeals to them about Star Wars. Look how few of them have Rey as a main character, for instance.
-
Since many of the writers are kids, "I watched it as a kid" isn't ruled out. Are they still going to be fans come next year?
Jiro
9mo ago
Firstly, they're the SOTA today, anyone wanting to bet that GPT-5 won't be another leap ahead within a couple years is welcome to take it up with me, I could use the money.
I don't bet. And actually, someone independently posted pointing out that most LW-style bets are irrational from the point of view of profit motive and are signalling.
Also, they said the same thing about self-driving cars. It turns out that the last bit is a lot harder to get right than the first bit.
However, there exists a strong in-built inhibition in humans against killing other human beings. In normal times, this inhibition allows society to exist as we know it. In times of war, it is a hindrance. This inhibition is suppressed by stripping the enemy to be killed of his humanity, i.e., by demonizing him or describing him as a rat, cockroach or some other disgusting animal.
This reasoning would be okay if treating the enemy as animals applied only to this specific enemy and didn't normalize that behavior under any other circumstances, such against Russians in other time periods, innocent people associated with Russians (see also: Japanese-American internment), or other ethnicities, or against cultural elements (such as destroying the statue of Catherine the Great). Needless to say, humans don't behave like that.
It also reduces your credibility. If all your enemies are called monsters, you won't recognize actual monsters. Believing in the Holocaust was harder than it should have been because fake reports of German atrocities during World War I were on people's minds.
Jiro
8mo ago
The sentiment is hostile. You don't need to believe Hell exists in order to understand that someone louldy proclaiming that you're going to go there probably doesn't like you very much.
Jiro
1yr ago
Consumers discriminate by price heavily in air travel because it's extremely hard to compare anything except price on more than a crude level. And a lot of that is because the airlines themselves have tried to deliberately obfuscate anything that you could compare airlines on.
Also, the government has regulated away some things that airlines could otherwise compete on. You can't get an airline without a TSA check.
Jiro
1yr ago
Especially on the motte there have been a lot of recent concerns about 'grooming,' which as a thread below mentions is an extremely muddy and useless term. In my opinion it should be tabooed from these discussions.
I find that "groomer" here is usually used to refer to adult authority figures and sexual situations, which is a lot narrower than you say.
"Taboo your words" is not supposed to be used to deny people the vocabulary to discuss something. If you don't like "groomer", what word should be used instead?
Jiro
2mo ago
By that reasoning it's fine to bar him from taking part in any job whose name starts with the letters Q through Z. After all, even with that restriction there are many jobs he could take.
But it's totally arbitrary. Why do we have an interest in preventing someone from taking some jobs just because they refuse to put themselves in physical danger by going to Russia?
Jiro
8mo ago
"Living well is the best revenge", "don't let them live rent-free in your head", "you're just letting them hurt you even more", etc.
If your enemies tell you that you should do something for your own good that straightforwardly helps them and harms you, that's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling. Some of the biggest proponents of getting rid of grudges are the people who are targets of grudges, who should be ignored for this reason. Someone who you have a grudge against probably isn't very interested in your mental health overall; why should you listen to them on the one subject where they have something to gain?
And combine this with sour grapes--when you can't have something (in this case, defeating the group you have a grudge against), you tell yourself that the thing you can't have really isn't all that great. Sour grapes is a form of bias, and it may be a coping mechanism, but it isn't rationality.
Jiro
10mo ago
Future victories are vastly easier now than they were in Dec 2021.
Seriously? Do you think that next time the Canadian government tries this, it will be ruled unconstitutional and lead to no serious penalties for the protestors?
Jiro
4mo ago
Presumably those schools have fewer people trying to push the limits of the policy.
You can't assume that teachers are going to follow these policies in good faith, which is why we can't have nice things.
Jiro
8mo ago
The proper conclusion is "Jefferson was a racist, but not all racism is as bad as you think it is". But "racism isn't as bad as you think it is" is a taboo position, regardless of its truth. Robinson knows this, which is why he built the questioning around racism in the first place, and which makes it fundamentally dishonest.
Jiro
2mo ago
The obvious reply to that is "why do Asians do well?" Shouldn't it take hundreds of years for them to catch up too? (Of course, Asians weren't quite as disadvantaged, but I wouldn't say they had a hundred year head start either.)
Jiro
5mo ago
Incidentally, I still repeatedly see the bug where trying to post something at a level that would produce a more comments prompt results in the post actually being accepted, but seeming to hang and never refreshing the screen.
Also, we don't seem to have a thread for forum bugs.
Jiro
1yr ago
I'm not sure this counts. Fried chicken and watermelon was a known stereotype long before woke existed.
Should I be more upset that performative outrage is carving holiday-based dietary restrictions into the public consciousness?
If the school celebrated the day by staging a mock robbery to celebrate Black History Month, on the grounds that crime is black culture, and someone complained, would you call that a "holiday-based theater restriction"?
Wizards of the Coast, who own Dungeons and Dragons, have been in the news lately because their OGL 1.1 was leaked. The OGL was an open source-like license, originally from 2000, which allowed people to create D&D-related works and which was supposed to not be revocable, as confirmed by its drafters. WOTC is trying to revoke it by using a clause referring to "authorized" versions of the license and claiming to have de-authorized the earlier license. The new replacement license requires giving 25% of your revenue to WOTC, makes you send a copy of your content to WOTC which they can then publish for free, and they can revoke it at any time making all your products instantly unsalable.
After backlash from fans, WOTC officially released a 1.2 license instead, which has similar problems, but worded a bit more subtly.
The culture war element comes from this clause:
I hope the problems with this are obvious to everyone here. I absolutely don't want a world where people with the wrong political beliefs can be barred from producing game materials. But every objection I've seen to this clause by fans has been a twenty Stalins objection: WOTC has produced discriminatory material in the past and can't be trusted to do this properly. There have been calls to have WOTC outsource this to an independent tribunal. Just, take it out because even people with unpopular opinions should be able to put them in games? No, nobody believes that.
(Links are trivial to google, but it's hard to find a site that has everything correct all at the same time, and is up to date as well, and also engages in trustworthy journalism in general. This EFF post at least covers part of the initial controversy, though you'll have to follow links to see what's in the license.)
More options
Context Copy link