OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
1d ago
It's hard to find a perfect, 'control' scandal. Profumo just sprang to mind as the most famous example of a sex scandal bringing down a politician.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
This ties in with the ambiguities of morality. I predict Mr. Huang will recover. He will remain in good standing with the public and the media despite this. Yet had he been revealed as using a sock puppet for posting "badthink" online, well, this would be much worse in the eyes of the public. Indeed, Patrick Stewart had 2 affairs and it amounted to a footnote in media coverage of his passing.
The public and the media don't particularly care about sexual morality, the sanctity of marriage, or the like any more. A consensual affair is generally treated as a private matter, with no public regard for the victim, that is, the deceived or betrayed spouse.
I am reminded of Barnaby Joyce's affair a few years back, and the debate over whether this was an appropriate thing for media to report on at all, or whether it was in the public interest. While politicians do have some right to privacy, I would have thought that whether a major political figure (he was deputy prime minister at the time, the Australian equivalent of vice president) can be trusted to keep his promises, even on the most sacred matters, is of public concern.
We are a long way from the Profumo affair, when adultery was still seen as a significant offence.
As I've said before, one of my convictions is that I will never support an unrepentant adulterer for any political office. Jensen Huang does not have an elected office, so I don't need to make an assessment along those lines, but I am willing to conclude, "Yep, he's a bad person".
Now that said, I suspect that most tech leaders are also terrible people, whether because of adultery or something else, so I don't think that Huang is uniquely bad. But adultery is bad, from Jensen Huang to Patrick Stewart.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
It is plausible that the order matters.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
'Hostile to pleasure' seems like an odd description of a party that instituted policies like Strength Through Joy.
OliveTapenade
3d ago
That's largely been my feeling on the Fermi 'paradox'.
Or, well, I have two feelings on it.
The first is that I'm annoyed that people call it a paradox. It's not a paradox. It's at most a question, or a mystery. A paradox has to involve a contradiction of some kind. An observation that seems odd is not a paradox.
But that's just pedantry. My second feeling is that it just seems pointless, to me? We don't have enough data to plausibly speculate as the prevalence of life in the galaxy, or the prevalence of advanced technological life, or any kind of life that might be visible to human civilisation from Earth. The answer to, "Why haven't we seen evidence of extraterrestrial life?" is "We don't know, and we don't have enough information to do anything more than speculate".
Armchair speculation can be fun. Maybe life is very rare, so it's just that we're the only one out there. Maybe life is more common than that but we just happen to the first one off the mark. Maybe there's some sort of 'Great Filter'; technological civilisations destroy themselves, or all lose themselves in virtual worlds, or for some reason don't leave traces of their presence. Maybe extraterrestrial civilisation deliberately conceals itself. Maybe we're some sort of technological outlier and we don't know how to look. There are just too many possible options and with a sample of exactly one, Earth itself, we can't calculate any plausible probabilities.
I just don't think there's a paradox or even a particular puzzle here. Thus far we have not seen any signs of extraterrestrial civilisations. That's not a paradox. That's just an observation that we don't yet know the explanation for.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
I agree that he's not as crazy as Candace Owens, but I think he's still around, say, the Hasan Piker level of crazy. That's not maximally unhinged, but it's still across my threshold for describing someone as a loony conspiracist.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
If Fuentes is over your bar for insane conspiracism, the bar might be in a bad place...
OliveTapenade
5d ago
What would it mean to be 'actually' non-binary? Human beings are binarily gendered. Do you mean people with various intersex conditions? People who use medication and surgery to try to achieve an androgynous appearance? Something else?
For what it's worth, in my experience I have met two types of non-binary person, which I think of as (and I am aware of the irony), male NBs and female NBs.
Male NBs are usually straight guys who don't want to be fully trans, but in some way want to defect from or signal that they're not participating in conventional masculinity. (Pa)trick Weekes might be an example of this, but I have met some in person. Generally they look like ordinary men, maybe with a pony-tail, or maybe with painted nails, or something trivial like that.
Female NBs that I've met are generally just lesbians. They're just lesbians. Usually a bit of a butch affect, short hair, tomboyish, etc., but if you round them off to lesbians you won't lead yourself far wrong.
Pretty much. It's a radicalisation tactic, surely? It's a variant of the Extremist's Gambit - a visible, violent action forces onlookers to pick a side. Joe Biden is an extremely visible, prestigious individual. Openly attacking him displays your strength (especially cultural strength) and forces onlookers to pick a side, either allowing the action or taking a stand against it.
In Greer's words, polarisation is intentional. The attack is on the uncommitted middle ground - either you're with the (genocidal) establishment, or you're with the (righteous) rebels. There must be nowhere to hide.
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