Also, this isn't motivated primarily by ethnic tribalism, it's motivated by wanting to save the downtrodden from harm, hence the 13yo example.
Come on. And what was the ethnicity of that 13 year old carjacker? When we are discussing 13 year old carjackers in the US, we all know exactly what ethnicity we are talking about. Also, white people aren’t allowed to be considered downtrodden. Too much charity here
Misembrance
1yr ago
Perhaps a more realistic hypothetical I have seen discussed before: Imagine a pill is invented that “cures” transgenderism, as in eliminates dysphoria and causes your gender identity to painlessly conform to your birth sex. Would leftists support this? It seems undeniably good, even if you support gender affirming care as it is the perfect treatment. But I have a hard time imagining leftists actually supporting this, which I think reveals that transgenderism is actually a preferred state tk cisgenderism
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
You are misunderstanding Bayes. For your coin example, your prior belief the coin is fair is most likely not 50%. I’ve never encountered a coin I knew to be unfair in my life, so my prior belief that some random coin is fair is probably upwards of 90%. If I toss the coin a bunch and it comes up pretty much 50-50 perhaps I update my belief that the coin is fair to be 99.9% certainty.
As for whether or not you divorce your wife, well that’s not Bayes Theorem that’s just how you choose to apply the beliefs you have. I am highly certain my wife isn’t cheating on me, to be fair I can’t really say 100% certain, but I’m as close to 100% as I think anyone can reasonably be without stalking or imprisoning their spouse, so call it maybe 99%, which is good enough for me to not divorce her. If some event occurred that caused me to update my belief (she starts having weekly lunches with a male friend) then I would have to choose what to do with that updated belief.
And the choice is rarely so binary as divorce/not divorce. If my certainty in her fidelity fell to 90%, maybe I would just have a conversation with her about her new male friend. Maybe at 80% I’d ask her to please stop having lunch alone with this guy, and so on.
Misembrance
1yr ago
Those quotes say nothing more than “I’m right but people won’t listen to me.” Just because something is dressed up as “The Parable of the X and the Y” or is quoting someone from 2000 years ago doesn’t really make it fundamentally different from just leaving it at “I’m right you’re wrong”
Misembrance
1yr ago
Even so, Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, did it. And in a sense, so did World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan
Talk is cheap. Hitler is dead so there are no stakes to saying “I forgive him.” You put Eva Kor in a room with living Hitler and the power to kill him and we would see if he was really forgiven. Outside of that this is just virtue signaling
Misembrance
1yr ago
any mandates are tyranny that must be defended against to the death
This seems like overly dramatic macho posturing. Obviously you are still alive and didn’t do anything of the sort.
Can you seriously not imagine a situation where mandates would be warranted? I don’t support the mandates for COVID, but being unwilling to even consider that there might be a point where the tradeoff scales tip is just an unreasonably ideological suicide pact. If there were a hypothetical disease much more deadly than COVID, surely you must be able to imagine such a thing
Misembrance
1yr ago
Quoting that Kipling poem is the Motte equivalent of saying your favorite book is Catcher in the Rye
Misembrance
1yr ago
There was a time in the not-so-distant past that the country was effectively 100% Christian and weekly church attendance was the norm. Where did that lead us? Obviously God is not such a bulwark after all and doesn’t automatically eternally guarantee based tradwives until the end of time.
You have to then answer the question: Why will it turn out differently this time?
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
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
Saying that Alexandros didn’t recognize his own arguments as presented by Scott is a bit like saying “The glove didn’t fit when we asked OJ to try it on”
Misembrance
1yr ago
I know this theory will sound retarded, but I don’t think Bonobos are a real species. Is there any biological basis to their classification? Apparently they can freely interbreed with Chimps, and I believe their status as a separate famously pacifist, feminist, homosexual species is propaganda
Misembrance
1yr ago
These are always boring semantic debates. If I set out to beat you until you love me, and after an hour of beating I give up because you still hate me, leaving you a bloody unconscious mess on the ground while I’ve scraped my knuckles who has lost? Who won? I failed to achieve my goal, it’s true. But I was hardly scratched while you are near death. Even harder to say I lost and you won. Perhaps my goal and plan to achieve it was foolish and impossible, but at the same time I demonstrated my ability to beat the shit out of you without even breaking a sweat. Win and lose in situations like this are just silly labels like we are keeping score.
Misembrance
1yr ago
A thief and felon, who somehow managed to convince the right people to let him on the ballots
I think the process here is key. Was any voting necessary? How was this decision made?
This seems like a legitimate failure of the local Republican party worthy of criticism, with proper perspective of course not as an indictment of the party nationally. This post is like an inverse “Republicans Pounce!”
Misembrance
1yr ago
I may well get banned for asking this, but whatever. Are there any books or sites that present the case for Holocaust denial in a sane and somewhat reasonable way? I read some book skeptical of the Anne Frank diary that someone on here mentioned a while back, but I wasn’t impressed with it.
Now I understand the witches problem, and the fact that it is so taboo/ghettoized it’s going to select for nuts, but if there’s anything to it surely someone has put together a relatively coherent argument that actually engages with the strongest arguments of the non-denial side.
I have seen enough BS like Kamloops to be willing to give denialists a hearing, if any of them have written a summary worth reading
Misembrance
1yr ago
They believe in what they are doing for moral reasons but back down when pressured enough. Happens all the time. My wife’s public university offered course credit to protest Kavanaugh but backtracked when it got media attention. That clearly wasn’t a publicity stunt.
This idea that nobody actually believes in this and it’s all a plan to drum up controversy annoys me. It’s reminiscent of “it’s just a few kids on college campuses.” Or suggestions that cancellations are just cover for severing ties with people for business reasons. Why is it so hard to accept that there are lots of true believers out there?
Al Franken was not a strategic move but true believers going crazy. A&E canceling all their most popular shows in 2020 was not a tactical business decision it was a moral panic. There are lots of believers out there in legit positions of authority.
Misembrance
1yr ago
Maybe this is a result of working in a heavily gender-imbalanced field but I have never once seen a romantic relationship between coworkers. An asexual workplace would be great. In fact I would guess this is the norm actually. I doubt many kindergarden teachers or oil field workers even have many people of the right sex to pick from.
Misembrance
1yr ago
If the police are so popular across the political spectrum in the Netherlands is there actually much that needs reforming?
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
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
motherhood today is very stressful
It has literally never been easier
Misembrance
1yr ago
This “ugh, just soooo boring” thing is clearly an act and an attempt to shut down discussion. People try the same tactic with HBD. Just collapse the comment tree if it bothers you, otherwise you aren’t convincing anyone with this “so tiresome” tactic.
The truth is, the Holocaust is clearly highly relevant to American CW issues. Clearly many people on the Motte get very upset about revisionism, the way many SSC posters get viscerally angry at HBD. SecureSignals is not spamming about it, just responding when it is brought up and he generally brings more evidence to bear than his opponents (yea, I understand the Epistemic Learned Helplessness issue, doesn’t change it)
Misembrance
1yr ago
This won’t be popular here, but I honestly support heavyhanded censorship of toxicity on social media even if it is used as a fig leaf to specifically target my own political beliefs, as long as it actually also removes hateful comments.
I have to go off on this. The trend (and it very much is a trend) to have a personal, unique set of food “sensitivities” is very annoying to me, and makes hosting guests near impossible
I recently invited an acquaintance and his wife over for a homecooked dinner and was informed he had a gluten “sensitivity”. Not celiac or a deathly allergy mind you, just a vaguely termed sensitivity. It occurred to me how selfish this is, in a way. Because if more than one person has such non-overlapping sensitivities you pretty rapidly reach a point where the intersection of acceptable foods is empty. If one person is gluten free, another vegan, another paleo, another won’t eat seed oils, what exactly are you supposed to cook?
Any meal can only really support one such person before a home cook has to just throw up their hands and say that there won’t be a meal and everyone should just eat on their own. So by making such a claim you are claiming that one spot for yourself and more or less destroying the meal should anyone else dare to do the same
It especially annoys me because these claimed sensitivities usually just cause the person to “feel lethargic” or some such vague nonsense. Can you not suck it up for the sake of a social gathering once in a while? There was a maybe 6 year period where I was vegetarian, but I would eat meat if at someone’s house for Thanksgiving or some such, it just would have been rude to stick to my diet
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