JulianRota
2yr ago
I've saved this fascinating Reddit AskScience comment which I think is relevant. The hypothesis proposed there says that exposure to modern language during infancy is a core part of the development of basically the ability to think at all ("modern" here meaning any human language from the last 50k-ish years). If that's true, it would be impossible to reverse the changes brought by learning language, and thus probably impossible to really forget it.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I think that the distinction between beliefs and identity is a lot more arbitrary than you are trying to say. Is there any objective way of saying any particular thing is one or the other, aside from motivated reasoning?
If you "identify as trans", then that means you were born as a normal biological man or woman, and at some point, you decided you would feel better if you were the opposite sex. So maybe you decide to dress and adopt the style and mannerisms of the sex you believe you should be. Maybe you decide to do some more drastic things such as take hormone treatments or get surgical alterations. Maybe you decide to change your name and get people to call you the new name and pronouns. Maybe you decide to try to live life as your desired gender, including such otherwise ordinary things as using bathrooms and playing sports. Exactly what makes any of those choices/decisions an "identity", and anything a red tribe / conservative decides to do to express themselves a "belief"?
It also sounds disingenuous to me to blame all violence against conservative speakers and activists on college campuses on them "trying to be as deliberately offensive as possible". College is ostensibly a place for exploring many different possible belief types, yet on many occasions it seems the mere existence of any conservative who doesn't care to spend 3/4 of their time apologizing for supposed wrongs that they haven't actually done is considered "offensive".
And since when is wearing a police uniform a political act? The police are ostensibly there to preserve law and order. Blue Team desires to see them as the bad guys due to cherry-picking a relatively modest number of bad acts that they think were not punished decisively enough. In what other contexts is it legitimate to tar a large group of people and an entire profession due to accused bad acts of a small percentage of them?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm not sure entirely, but I do find it amusing that the catchphrase for blue-collar workers put out of work to "learn to code". Now it seems more likely that the laptop class are the ones whos jobs will be rendered obsolete. Should we run around telling programmers (like me), project managers, lawyers, salesmen, etc to "learn to plumb"? Making an AI bot that can do plumbing work seems a lot further off than replacing or at least greatly reducing the value of those white-collar professions.
JulianRota
2yr ago
One thing I find mildly irritating about the janny thing is that the prompt only shows up on thread/comment views. If it wants me to janny, I don't know it until I click into a thread I was interested in reading. Now it wants me to go off and rate posts, and when I'm done, it sends me back to the front page, and I have to go to the thread that I actually wanted to read again. Not a huge deal, but it could be solved by having a prompt show up on the site front page too.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I don't have one, but a friend of mine does, and I've gone on a few road trips with him. The SuperCharger network is pretty nice in the northeast US at least and makes road trips reasonably practical. But note that you'll have to plan around making the SuperCharger station on time. The built-in navigation software helps with the details, but it does mean you're somewhat constrained on routes. And charge stops will take around half an hour to an hour - a bit long even for a relatively slow lunch.
The touch-screen only controls may be annoying, as you can't fiddle with the radio or climate control settings by feel. I get the idea a lot of manufacturers are doing that now though. The auto-opening and closing doors seem a bit gimmicky to me, though they seem to do the job.
JulianRota
2yr ago
If that ever becomes the case, the Constitution would have been entirely subverted, the Government would be no longer legitimate, and I would support the armed overthrow of the government and all institutions participating in or complicit with the maintenance of that power.
JulianRota
2yr ago
The "political activism" part was referring specifically to:
The trolls also tested out ideas like photoshopping MAGA hats on celebrities like Ariana Grande, and posting fake Clinton ads with the logo “Draft our Daughters” to trick people into believing that Clinton wanted to send young women to war.
Which apparently, according to the article, went to prove that they "weren't really joking".
Yes, this was a conspiracy charge. IMO, the large distance between what was actually done and any vaguely plausible claim of actually influencing an election makes this a blatantly partisan hit job. And IMO, the fact that they must have known it would look like this and made no attempt to make themselves and their campaign look more neutral says that they did it on purpose, that the goal was a chilling effect on Conservative activism.
If I start a chat with my 3 best friends where we talk about how funny it would be to trick Democrats into voting wrong, but never actually do anything, is that a crime in your opinion? What if we were all Democrats and we thought it would be funny to trick Republicans into voting wrong?
What happens when the next Republican President is as enthusiastic and skilled at lawfare as the Biden administration seems to be and start making these kinds of charges against Democrats?
JulianRota
2yr ago
I've read a decent number of books from that series. IMO, much of the political development reflects the somewhat oddball politics of Eric Flint himself, at least in this day and age. He seems to be a more classical socialist, who identifies with the actual working class, in contrast to most of the modern self-proclaimed socialists who seem to consider them icky commoners to be despised. The attitudes WRT racial and religious tolerance, the place of women, etc displayed seem to be pretty typical IMO of 90s-era Red Tribe blue-collar workers.
It does come off as a bit of fresh air IMO compared to most contemporary casual fiction.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Like what? That article actually makes me more convinced of my position:
A key witness for the prosecution — a notorious troll with the screen name “Microchip” — was allowed to testify anonymously. ... Microchip, who testified he began working for the FBI in 2018, pleaded guilty to conspiracy against rights last year. As part of his plea deal, he agreed to testify against Mackey and help the FBI in several other cases.
So they jacked up some other internet troll with the same type of bullshit charges who probably couldn't afford good Federal Defense attorneys to protect himself and forced him to testify against others or face prison time, and conveniently gave him anonymity, which sounds like a Sixth Amendment violation to me.
“If a single voter was tricked, the government would have called that person as their first witness,” he [the defense lawyer] said.
Sounds like a good argument to me!
Prosecutors presented a string of witnesses, including a Clinton staffer and the owner of a text message marketing company.
It doesn't say exactly what kind of testimony any of these "witnesses" offered, but I can't conceive of how it would be relevant to the case. What do Clinton staffers and text message marketers know about this person's motivation or the results of his campaign?
The only thing that could possibly be vaguely relevant to the case is:
They showed pages of group chat logs where pro-Trump trolls discussed how to make the text-by-vote images look convincing. The trolls also tested out ideas like photoshopping MAGA hats on celebrities like Ariana Grande, and posting fake Clinton ads with the logo “Draft our Daughters” to trick people into believing that Clinton wanted to send young women to war.
Exactly what did they do to "make them look convincing"? The rest sounds like normal political activism that both sides routinely practice to me. I'd have a pretty high bar against finding anything like this prosecution legitimate, and I have yet to see anything that comes anywhere near that.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I do agree with OP that 4900 possibly lost Democrat votes in NY
I don't see any reason to take this claim by the prosecution at face value. All they know is that 4900 numbers texted that number. How many actual individuals does that represent? How many of them are registered voters somewhere in the United States? It's trivially easy for anyone anywhere to get basically unlimited phone numbers in any area code. Did any of them refrain from voting conventionally because they actually believed that this was a way to vote? Were any of those people actually aware of the correct way to vote? Have any of them successfully voted in any election in the past? As far as I know, the prosecution did not make any attempt to prove that even one actual person who was registered to vote and plausibly would have voted correctly genuinely believed that this was a correct way to vote and did it instead of voting correctly.
JulianRota
2yr ago
As I recall, there's a long history of people on both sides of the aisle posting jokes/trolls to try and trick the other side into trying to vote on the wrong place, day, method, etc. As far as I know, this is the first time anybody has ever been prosecuted for it. I percieve this to be blatantly partisan political prosecution, since it's obviously a joke, and many Democrat activists have done similar things, and as far as I know, there has been no attempt to charge any of them with such crimes.
Even if we bend over backwards to the point of breaking spines to be charitable and assume the people driving this prosecution are neutral parties only looking out for the good of the republic, they would have to know that this would be perceived as blatantly partisan in these times. If that was truly their motivation, they ought to charge a couple of Democrats for doing similar things at the same time to avoid any perception of political bias.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I'm highly skeptical anybody answering that survey actually knows how to design nanotechnology.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I got -5.38, which apparently makes me
Toe-in Rat, 50-70th percentile. You probably play board games, know what prediction markets are, and maybe occasionally read a blog or two. Not really a full-fledged rationalist, but their world is next door.
I suppose I do occasionally read a blog or two. I don't have any interest in board games. I know what prediction markets are, but don't have any particular desire to participate.
JulianRota
2yr ago
There's a bunch of these sorts of videos going around, but I actually don't think they mean as much as the people highlighting them want them to mean. They all intentionally edit out all mention of the actual work they've done in favor of coffee, lunch, workouts, etc. But honestly, we all do most of that stuff, if maybe not quite as glamorously. We have no idea how hard she's actually working or to what extent she's actually accomplishing useful things.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I've been reading The Foreigner Group by Carolus Löfroos. It's evidently somewhat infamous as being written by a Swedish man who volunteered for the allegedly Nazi-aligned Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine during 2014-2015, well before the time of the 2022 Russian invasion.
It was initially set to be published by Ian McCollum's Headstamp Publishing. Ian is a fairly mainstream source of firearms trivia, and his imprint mostly publishes books about various intricacies of firearms manufacturing and history. Apparently they for some reason agreed to publish this book, then a bunch of people flipped out (I've never seen it specified exactly who flipped out or what specifically they did) and they cancelled it. It's now being published by the considerably more heterodox Antelope Hill. I'll refrain from taking a position on them, you're welcome to take a look at what other things they publish if you want to.
Anyways, I'm about 2/3 of the way through it. For all of the furor, I haven't seen anything all that remarkable yet. It's a moderately interesting tale of a man who volunteered to fight in a somewhat poorly-equipped informal formation in a mostly low-intensity and undeclared war in eastern Ukraine. The author seems to have suffered some reputational issues in Sweden due to his volunteering. I haven't yet seen the book express any opinions about racial issues, Jews, or pretty much any political issue aside from opposing Russian expansionism and imperialism. The author does liberally refer to thinks he doesn't like as "gay", but it seems to me to be more of a 90s-style meme than actual hostility to homosexuals. I don't really see anything here worth cancelling over.
JulianRota
2yr ago
This seems awfully vague for a post claiming that somebody did the math wrong. If you believe it's wrong, why don't you run through exactly what the wrong calculation is, why it's wrong, and how to do that calculation correctly? I suspect whatever you're alleging will fall apart when you do that.
As a simple issue, yes of course the actual Earth is not flat, and the entire surface is not bathed in sunlight 24/7. These seem likely to be simplifying assumptions to me. If you wanted to calculate the amount of energy that the Earth received from the Sun, then it would in fact be a very reasonable idea to model the Earth as a flat disc constantly facing the sun. The amount of energy that the Earth actually receives from the Sun should match this model pretty well, since it accounts for the actual effective area facing the sun on our roughly spherical and rotating Earth. Your objections aren't novel, you just haven't noticed or accounted for the fact that they're intended to cancel out.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I would be inclined to agree with the sibling comment - gangbangers, Sicarios, etc do commit lots of violence, but almost entirely towards rival gangs or drug dealers. It seems pretty rare for them to hassle ordinary people. Many such organizations have existed for long periods of time in local communities and rarely get significant pushback from those communities. Many of them even take the law into their own hands to an extent, dealing out street justice to petty thieves and nutcases when the police are slow to act.
JulianRota
2yr ago
The Feminist movement has successfully moved towards calling a lot of things that are very different in my mind rape. So it depends on the nature of it. If it's a highly violent stranger-in-the-bushes thing, then I'd default to believing it. That's what most people understand as rape. The feminist movement seems to move towards considering romantic misunderstandings between people who know each other as rape with very low standards though, so I default to not taking that seriously without some level of knowing one or both parties and having hard evidence of the situation. It doesn't matter to me the status of either of the individuals.
I suppose my actual standard in a situation that started voluntarily takes into account that men are expected to take the initiative in the great majority of all romantic encounters. This will inevitably go wrong sometimes. So IMO, no harm until the woman has expressed clear and unambiguous desire for it to stop multiple times and the man still refuses to stop. And that would have to be solidly proven - both sides have motive to lie in this situation, and having recordings is going to be pretty rare. This leads to (as advice to women), if you really definitely don't want to get physical with a guy, don't let him buy you a dozen drinks and then go up to his room with him alone. Doing the above doesn't mean you're obligated to let him do whatever he wants, but it's pretty obviously a situation with high potential for misunderstanding, and I'm going to have high priors against believing any claim that you were violated in a way that deserves legal recourse.
Regarding Biden and Clinton, I also can't help but notice that there's a highly partisan coding here. The progressive movement wants to completely ignore Clinton's well-known history of violent rape, and ignore Biden at least doing lots of highly inappropriate groping. But they want to sink Trump for the "grab them by the pussy" remark, and Kavanaugh for allegedly doing something inappropriate at a high school party decades ago which nobody had heard a word about until he was nominated for the Supreme Court.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I have a friend who works full-time doing prop management for a TV series in New York. It seems they have a union and everything. Basically, there are multiple significant sub-industries around things like props, set selection and prep, casting and management of minor actors and extras, wardrobe and makeup, etc that are required to put on a good production. They mostly don't exist right now outside of current media centers, and it's an expensive pain to work without them, transport expertise in, or train up new crew, so not a lot of production happens outside of the established areas.
Though on the flip side to that, I believe the Breaking Bad franchise made some waves by doing most of their production work in Albuquerque.
JulianRota
2yr ago
Very typical Reddit unfortunately.
I gotta admit, the thing that most pushes me towards anti-feminist Manosphere type of thoughts isn't anything about actual real-life interactions or sex life - it's the palpable seething contempt on display in places like that towards any man who get it wrong, where getting it wrong is basically defined as anything any woman doesn't like. It seems to me that you can't win with these people, they always want you destroyed no matter what you do. So tell me again why I should push for the promotion to positions of higher power and status of people who revel in displaying how much they hate my guts and want me to die broke and alone in a gutter somewhere? I guess I should just take it on faith that they probably won't actually do that, at least not to me, or not right now.
I don't really want to feel this way, but it's hard not to when you're exposed to this sort of thing.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I did watch both The Wire and We Own This City. I enjoyed WOTC, but I think it's definitely a step behind The Wire.
IMO, part of what made The Wire great is it showed the good and bad of everything and everyone. Some cops are dirty or assholes, but others are good police, working hard to take bad people off the street. The urban drug dealers might be being subjected to some level of abuse by the police, and sometimes actually do good deeds, but they really are murdering people in their own neighborhoods by the dozens and employing children to sell basically poison on the streets. Some of the parents in these neighborhoods are good people trying to get by in a tough neighborhood, while others are willing to sell their childrens' food for more drugs or demand that their children become drug dealers to bring in money for them while they do no work. Criminal defense lawyers are of course necessary, but damn sure they knowingly pocket a whole lot of drug money, help out with money laundering, and basically request people to be murdered.
WOTC over-focuses on how bad the GTTF and a few specific cops are and basically ignores everything that caused them to be that way. Okay, they're corrupt and abusive, but most of their targets really are drug dealers, and we don't get to see what other bad stuff these drug dealers do. Arresting actual bad guys who don't want to go to jail is necessarily violent and unpredictable, but if you show the police that they will be randomly fired and prosecuted for any violence that doesn't go perfectly right, then of course they'll start refusing to do anything. But the show pays no attention to this dynamic and just portrays the cops as lazy jerks for not wanting to get out of their cars. The Feds are of course perfect angels trying to root out the evil police corruption, but who cares that they aren't really doing anything about the 300+ murders a year and rampant drug dealing.
JulianRota
2yr ago
What the "rigged" narratives claim about the system doesn't necessarily result in one party wiping the floor with the other every time even if it's strongly true. After having been the case for a long time, the machines of both parties adjust to the system and obey the rigger's desires to a much greater extent than they ever do the voters they are supposed to represent. As such, they may continue to trade wins back and forth a normal amount of times, yet somehow never actually enact policies that are strongly desired by their bases.
Say, that sounds an awful lot like what both political parties are actually doing. Even aside from how the Trump phenomenon has affected the Republican side the last few cycles, don't forget how mad much of the Democrat base seems to get that they keep getting standard machine politician candidates like Hillary and Biden for their presidential candidates rather than anyone more exciting.
JulianRota
2yr ago
To the meta point, I had been thinking it might be nice to have a thread for media reviews, perhaps weekly or monthly or something. The idea being, any sort of media, whether books, TV shows, movies, video games, whatever, which may be of interest to the community, but perhaps not quite enough to justify a thread of it's own, and not seeming to quite belong in any of the other regular threads.
JulianRota
2yr ago
I just finished David Simon's Homicide, and looking to read The Corner next.
I enjoyed it and found it easy to get through. It's notable IMO that it's really more of a slice of the lives and culture of the Baltimore Homicide unit rather than a proper true crime story. As an accurate slice of real life, there's no particular rhyme or reason to which crimes get solved and how fast. Some get solved right away, some after weeks or months of careful investigation, and a number never get solved at all, and there's not much relation to what extent you might say the victim had it coming.
IMO the most interesting aspect was how certain aspects of the system seem to work against itself. For ex, why are police and forensics people so reluctant to ever admit any sort of error or mistake? According to the characters in the book at least, it's not so much because they're arrogant jerks, but because any admitted error or mistake will be brought up by defense attorneys in any future case they're involved in, which will leave the jury less inclined to believe them.
I think the conservative position on the bathroom thing is more accurately stated as "I (as a biological woman, or husband of one, or father of a young daughter) do not feel comfortable having biological males in womens' bathrooms with (me, my wife, my daughter)". There definitely are some people claiming trans identities that abuse bathroom rules to harass and assault women and children, though the extent to which this happens and is a significant concern versus being an overblown fear are of course debatable. Which makes it kind of strange that this has become a primarily conservative position, while feminists who align with Blue Team are typically the first argue about the risk of sexual assault from having men in female spaces, but this gets us into the whole TERF debate.
So shouldn't not wanting yourself or your daughters to be subject to sexual assault be a personal issue? That's the core motivation here IMO.
As kind of an aside, does the law even really regulate who's allowed to use which restroom prior to trans issues entering mainstream politics? As an ordinary straight cis biological male, if I was to enter a womens' restroom somewhere in public, I expect I would be asked to leave, perhaps rudely, by any women there who saw me or possibly management of the place I happened to be in. The police wouldn't really get involved unless I made a big scene about it and stayed around long enough for them to come, assuming there didn't happen to be any police there already. I might be trespassed or arrested for something to the effect of disturbing the peace or resisting arrest if I continued to hang around and make a scene about it long enough for police to get there. I don't think there even was a way to be charged with using the incorrect bathroom.
You don't have to discuss the other points if you don't care to, but you did write in the very post I responded to "but these people were trying to be as deliberately offensive as possible" and "do something political, like wear a police uniform".
More options
Context Copy link