Misembrance
1yr ago
but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse
Genuine question because of the paywall: are the people dishonestly pushing the debunked homophobia claim suffering any sort of consequences?
Misembrance
1yr ago
Yea, reading this ymeskhout’s reaction seems bizarre. Like he is coming from some alternate universe where baseless woke smear campaigns are actually punished as opposed to rewarded. Like, what does he imagine the consequences will be? Does he foresee Chanda Prescod-Weinstein being fired? Does he think her next campaign will just be roundly ignored and dismissed with derision?
Misembrance
1yr ago
Even if “the pendulum is swinging” (which I have been hearing every year), all the media has to do is gin up another George Floyd. Will these “reasonable” hackernews progressives have the fortitude to keep their cool in the face of the next outrage du jour, having learned from these excesses? Will they actually vote Republican? Doubtful imo
Misembrance
1yr ago
I’m not saying Republicans would be any better if they had similarly ironclad control of every university in the country. But they don’t, and even if Republicans won every election for the next 20 years they still wouldn’t. But if these HN contrarians are not actually willing to defect, then how is the pendulum shifting at all? They can say all day “Gee these woke universities sure are crazy!” but as long as they continue to donate to them, attend them, vote Democrat and dutifully rename master branches to main, what good is it?
Misembrance
1yr ago
when two or more candidates appear to be equally qualified, and one belongs to a historically marginalized group, that candidate should be chosen
Just like how euthanasia is only ever used for 95 year-olds with terminal brain cancer and Alzheimer’s, right? The reality is that black students get the equivalent of over 300 bonus points on the SAT last I checked.
Misembrance
1yr ago
but given that these situations are very rare, I don't think it really matters that much
Well, given that these perfectly equivalent candidates are so vanishingly rare that any effects of such decisions are trivial, how about we just not do any affirmative action? It’s so rare it doesn’t really matter after all, right?
Misembrance
1yr ago
This feels somehow wrong, because despite occasionally producing SBF or Theranos, Palo Alto is still a nice civilized place and the same can’t be said for the black murder rate in places suffering from that. SBF had zero tangible effect on me, black crime has made entire neighborhoods and cities no-go zones.
One for one, a single SBF may produce more total harm than a single murderer, but for every one SBF there are probably thousands of murders, and innumerable assaults and lesser crimes.
Misembrance
1yr ago
Your question is worded as if nobody on The Motte is pro-Ukraine and we have only perhaps talked to such people. Also you seem to fail to consider genuine belief that Russia is in the wrong here. Just a bizarre lack of comprehension of a very normal, widespread opinion
Misembrance
1yr ago
Why do you need to disarm people to have a war on drugs? The US would seem to prove this false
Misembrance
1yr ago
Goes a bit further back than that as just an interesting sidenote. Lajos Kossuth toured the US and was hailed as perhaps the greatest living hero in the world in 1850 (with Russia also playing the villain here as well). We even named towns after the guy! We don’t have a Zelensky Iowa yet.
Misembrance
1yr ago
I agree, I think the majority of people will profess beliefs when asked, but these don’t really exist in a meaningful way outside of the verbal expression. I came to this conclusion particularly observing young womens attitudes towards astrology. An enormous number seem to say they believe it, but is it just a joke? I don’t think it’s a joke, but it’s not really serious either. It seems somewhere in between, mostly an act because it is more fun to act like astrology is real and since nobody is demanding they show costly commitments to it (making large monetary investments based on horoscopes for example) there’s no real pressure to sort out what they really believe. A lot of guys are the same way, even guys on the Motte when talking about satanic elites or whatever.
I think if you put a gun to their head and say you have the oracle truth in an envelope you get very different answers from most people.
Misembrance
1yr ago
You and all your interlocutors seem to be talking past one another. You seem to be starting from the belief that NATO/globohomo is fundamentally intent on the genocide/replacement of white people. And because of this, nothing Russia does could be worse or less desirable for Ukraine than this.
I guess to get back to answering your initial question, I imagine most people supporting Ukraine are simply not starting with your set of beliefs regarding white genocide/globohomo. The vast gulf here in terms of assumptions makes discussion pretty pointless I think
Misembrance
1yr ago
Let’s just say that it could be proven that Ukraine could win against Russia and that popular will of Ukrainians genuinely preferred this. Would this matter to you? Would it change your opinion? Or would the genocide/replacement issue render these concerns irrelevant? What I am driving at is attempting to find the core of the disagreement between you and most posters here, the disagreement that actually drives the difference in opinion. Given your statements regarding invasion by immigrants I doubt any of these other things are really very relevant.
Misembrance
1yr ago
Finally we can enjoy even more remakes and reboots!!!!
Misembrance
1yr ago
People always propose explanations like this without considering if they have any predictive power. So going by this, I should be able to look up the countries with the lowest rates of home ownership and highest youth unrmployment and find the wokest population, right? Do you think that will be true?
Misembrance
1yr ago
The government doesn’t need my consent to ask people about where I was on the night of the murder, I don’t really see why they should need my consent to check the sample DNA against my relatives. Even in that case, wouldn’t it be your relatives’ consent that matters, not yours?
How is this different from a suspect being described as 6’5” and blonde with a peg leg, and the police rounding up all such guys in town to interview? The trace DNA left at the scene is effectively just a witness description (fallible, but substantially less-so than eyewitness reports), and the testing is just a way of finding people that are close matches to that description. It seems like a strict improvement over the previous scenario I described. I just really fail to see what is wrong here
Your second objection regarding potential contamination really has no relevance here. Because a test is occasionally wrong we should ban the test? Do we have anything better? Are eyewitness reports more reliable? No. Even these days confessions are viewed as frequently coerced and unreliable, so what do we have left? Sometimes it feels like anti-authoritarian types just want all forms of investigation to be banned snd have no suggestions of how it should actually be done
Misembrance
1yr ago
What is wrong with either of those things? Why would using familial DNA to solve theft be a bad thing? And what makes it a “fishing expedition” as opposed to just an “investigation”. Would canvassing an area for witnesses be considered a fishing expedition? If witnesses to a murder described the perpetrator as having a specific highly distinctive facial tattoo and then police tried to reference mugshots and ask around tattoo shops to find men with such a tattoo, would that be a fishing expedition? That just sounds like a typical investigative procedure to me, and surely a witness description of a specific tattoo is far more prone to false positives than familial DNA.
For everyone that had a problem with familial DNA, please tell me what kinds of investigative techniques you are okay with
Misembrance
1yr ago
You didn’t explain the actual harm of either of those things. Say it slips past theft to vandalism, why would solving vandalism with familial DNA be bad? You keep hinting without spelling out any actual harm.
The same goes for the “fishing” part. Why does it suddenly become bad if there are a million tattoo shops?What is the actual harm, and what evidence is better or less error-prone than familial DNA? Every critic here is dodging this question
Misembrance
1yr ago
These aren’t problems with familial DNA any more than they are problems for a number of existing technologies decades older. Has the fingerprint database led to this issue? Has the normal CODIS led to this problem?
My parents’ condo was broken into. A DNA database already exists. Despite this, the totalitarian police state had no interest in swabbing the doorknob for touch DNA and running it. I really see no evidence this will lead to any of the problems you enumerate. All these same arguments could be applied equally to use of fingerprints (which are surely even more prone to false positives). Why didn’t fingerprints destroy society?
I honestly feel like “anti-authoritarian” is just a personality type or inclination like “contrarian”. And anti-authoritarians in this thread just seem dispositionally opposed to the gov’t acquiring any new tool or capability, just on principle even if they can’t articulate any harm that would come from it. Consistency should dictate opposition to the use of fingerprints as well, but given their use is over 100 years old, and no dystopia resulted they are given a pass.
Familial DNA is already being used. I see the benefits of decades-old cold cases being solved, but where are the costs? Has their been a marked increase in wrongful convictions attributable to the technology?
Misembrance
1yr ago
Beginning a few years ago it started to be actively suppressed by the mods and sneered at by the “cooler” users on TheMotte. I think it sort of coincided with Julius Branson. I noticed that every post mentioning HBD that wasn’t by a 5 year+ veteran was treated as “Probable sneerclub troll baiting to get the sub banned”, and at least downvoted if not banned by the mods.
Were the discussions repetitive and boring after a point? Sure, but so is everything we talk about. How many times have people discussed tech censorship of online communities? How often do we talk about overproduction of elites and wokeness as intra elite competition? It’s the same topics every week for years, barring a few new events. HBD was definitely excised from the community pretty deliberately, perhaps most here still believe it but have gotten the message that talking about it is deeply uncool and liable to get you banned.
Just look at how BorfRebus talks about “HBD autists” upthread, we don’t talk about “libertarian autists” or “classical liberal autists” or “anti censorship autists” with such casual mockery
Misembrance
1yr ago
This sort of macho attitude is just going to lead to a death by a thousand cuts through unilateral disarmament.
Your response could equally be pointed at white women. After all, they have it pretty good, hardly much to complain about. And Jews too, they’re ultimately doing fine so can’t the ADL just chill out? Neither of these groups have disarmed their constant advocacy despite lack of any substantive complaints.
This kind of flex is frustrating to read, because there’s really no response that doesn’t sound uncool by comparison to your “git gud bro.” Of course it seems cool to never be bothered by anything, but that sort of response could basically shut down any and all discussions we have here. Abortion? Who cares dude, women still have it so good here compared to Iran. Affirmative action? Bro just study harder. SBF? Brah just don’t make stupid investments, not that hard.
Misembrance
1yr ago
My mind is blanking, what conspiracies were proven true last year? Maybe Twitter working with the IC?
FWIW I believe the DePape gay sex conspiracy 100% but I doubt it will ever be proven more than it is
Misembrance
1yr ago
Mr. Kehoe, who was 30 at the time of the 2018 stabbing, had a record of 33 prior offences as a youth and as an adult
I feel like every time some crime gets in the news, the criminal has some absolutely ridiculous number of prior arrests. Yet it is completely accepted common wisdom with anyone you talk to that our judicial system is ridiculously harsh and overly carceral, lenient on white collar crime by comparison and doesn’t offer enough opportunities for rehabilitation. This would seem to be a complete fiction, given that such cases do not seem to be at all unusual.
How is this myth maintained so effectively? Or is there truth to it and my perception is being warped by a small number of examples salient in my mind? I’m not sure what quantifiable data could clear this up for me. Maybe I would be interested in seeing how much average sentences actually are affected by prior convictions. In my mind an ideal justice system should dramatically adjust sentences based on priors. If you have a DUI, an assault and an armed robbery all in separate incidents you should probably be executed IMO. The system needs to be more responsive in classifying people as completely antosocial destructive forces
Misembrance
1yr ago
You never step in the same river twice. Conditions will never be perfectly, exactly equal or ideal for comparisons. And for the ideologically motivated, this will always give enough wiggle room to dismiss the data. Your reasoning sounds good to me. But this discussion seems pointless. Even if you convincingly win on the poverty argument, he can always retreat to the motte of “legacy of slavery/historical oppression” of which only the specific and unique conditions of some groups count, while others don’t due to river stepping sophistry
More options
Context Copy link