SSCReader
25d ago
I definitely am not, and thats after going to take a look. The whole place looks deeply unappealing to me
I am sure lots of people enjoy it, but the overlap with here seems to much less than 100%
SSCReader
10d ago
/* Don't @me, you know it's a safe assumption on this issue!
I'm confused because the answer to your question seems to be no, it did not take urban liberal Jewish lawyers to deploy it, because the lawyer in question seems to be a Catholic black latina? Whom you quoted. You don't need to make an assumption at all!
SSCReader
12d ago
If CO2 emissions really as as catastrophically dangerous as they are made out to be, then nuclear is the obvious, guaranteed-to-work, 100% solution that would completely have already solved this problem by now
Unless the same people also fear nuclear power to roughly the same extent. And unfortunately many people who drive environmental concerns grew up in an era where fear of nuclear power was rampant. The Cuban Missile crisis, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. In other words if you think A will be a catastrophe and can be solved by B, which will also be a catastrophe then it becomes easy to see why people look for options C through F.
The real test is once those people die/retire/age out of leadership roles will the movement reorient itself.
Same as generals still fighting the last type of war instead of the next one.
Notably, they can of course be wrong about how catastrophic A or B might be, but from direct exposure to very many high level "climate alarmists" it is my opinion they are absolutely sincere in being worried about the climate. They are just also worried about nuclear catastrophes. And a whole bunch of other things. In fact I would say the thing that connects them (or most of them), is they worry way too much about a lot of things.
After all if this fear of climate change is driven by hysteria, what makes you think their other fears are going to be rationally evaluated against climate change in order to solve climate change?
SSCReader
26d ago
This is counter-signalling. He knows defending them makes him look like he is on the other side (and so his arguments will be reflexively ignored), so he must counter that signal by also making sure to point how how much he doesn't like them.
SSCReader
8d ago
He is suggesting you are blaming the victim. Though really the analogy would need to be: Someone walking in a bad neighborhood was raped, so their lawyer suggested showering afterwards, not calling the police and simply hoping the perpetrator was caught.
I think it would be reasonable to criticize the lawyer, while still being aware that the rape was bad in and of itself as well.
SSCReader
26d ago
Jailed doesn't happen often for speech, fined and community service is more normal. In 94 LGBT protestors (including Peter Tatchell, protesting an Islamist group) were arrested for having placards, and took 2 years to be acquiited. In 98 Tatchell was found guilty under a law from 1860 outlawing protest in a church for mounting the pulpit to give a speech opposite the Archbishop of Canterbury. In 2012 Azir Ahmed was fined and sentenced to community service for speech about soldiers who should go to hell. In 2012 Barry Thew was jailed for 8 months for wearing a T-Shirt that approved of cops being murdered.
Whether you would call them leftists I don't know but, being pro LGBT, anti colonial (or neo-colonial) use of soldiers and being ACAB, seem pretty left coded.
SSCReader
5d ago
The Sexual Revolution pitch was that we could remove shame from sex completely, that everyone could have all the sex and everything would be fine.
I don't think that was the pitch, because like every change, there was no single one movement responsible for it. What you had was a coalition who wanted slightly different things, one part wanted gay sex to be accepted, another wanted women to have more freedom outside of marriage, another wanted men to have more freedom without getting married, another felt sexual urges in general should not be shamed as much, etc. etc. There were few would if you asked would have said for example, should we stop shaming sex with animals or corpses? Almost no-one wanted to remove shame from sex entirely.
To be clear almost everyone is shamed under the old model. They just use that shame to behave differently. Every kid who felt guilty about masturbation. Every husband who felt shame at cheating, or even having thoughts of cheating. Every woman who felt shame at sex outside of wedlock, or who had a sex drive society felt was too much. Every gay person who felt shame at being attracted to their own sex. All of those groups constitute probably a majority of people. That's what I mean by a tipping point.
Now as for why Puritan America did not change, well Puritan America was a result of people fleeing from cultures that shamed differently. There is a reason we call them Puritans after all! So they in fact are a product of a "Revolution" of their own (among other things of course). But even more the 20th Centuries Sexual Revolution I would say the sexual norms of the Puritans did not last, they were relaxed within decades. It's just in the New World there was a lot of space for people who felt differently to just..go somewhere else. And practice things differently. But that isn't the case in the US anymore.
Just to point out, I do think shame is important, as is empathy. They are evolved mechanisms given humanity is a social species. And they are important in ensuring societal stability. I'm not saying that shaming sex is bad, or that not shaming sex is good. I am saying that our history shows that shame has limits and ANY society or culture that wants its beliefs and conditions to continue is on a tight rope. Can't shame to much for too many, can't shame too little. Both will result in the destruction of your system. The good (depending on your point of view!) news is that also is true for whatever comes next. I think there are signs that the shame mechanisms invoked by "wokism" are also going too far and will fail.
Social dynamics mean we are not good at simply arriving at a pretty good spot and just staying there. We almost always push too far, or not far enough.
SSCReader
27d ago
I think you are looking at it the wrong way. Natural selection is the answer to the question of why we see creatures with fins and gills and legs and lungs and compound eyes and sonar. If it is true and explains what we see and is descriptive of the world as it works, then it is useful whether or not it is tautological. In fact if it is tautological that is very useful information, because we too try and breed new types of creature and knowing a potential natural strategy can allow us to iterate upon it.
If you know miniature shetland ponies die out in the wild because their size is non-beneficial then you know if you want to keep a population then you have to keep their environment controlled. If you know nature works a certain way, you can learn things from it even if that knowledge is merely describing a logical tautology. You know that you need to replace natural selection effects with your own (allowing only the smallest ponies to mate for example)
If we know that nature selects for beneficial traits then when we find say large numbers of people with sickle cell traits it can help us find out why that trait was selected for.
In car format, if most cars in a racing car world are red because red cars go faster, but you find a place with a population of blue cars, then that in and of itself tells you to take a close look at those blue cars because it is likely something is happening there. In a world you didn't know about car natural selection, you would not know why that was odd.
A description of the world may be very simplistic and tautological but that doesn't mean it isn't useful.
SSCReader
5d ago
Also as per the article the figure they are giving is per migrant household not per migrant.
SSCReader
14d ago
Clearly we need meta-safetyists to invent safetyist brakes. Of course then we will need meta-meta safetyists..and so ad inifinitum.
SSCReader
21d ago
Hmm interracial marriage rates are twice as high for black men as black women and have been pretty steadily for decades. Whereas for asians it is the other way round. I don't think that can be attributed to lies from black men particularly.
"Among blacks, intermarriage is twice as prevalent for male newlyweds as it is for their female counterparts. While about one-fourth of recently married black men (24%) have a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, this share is 12% among recently married black women."
SSCReader
19d ago
I don't see how placing a hairdryer in your car violates Primum non nocere.
Doctor's will cut you open and remove a perfectly healthy kidney from you. You can live with one kidney, but it can give you health complications and issues for life.
Now the justification is to save someone elses life through organ transplantation. But the donor is harmed. So as long as there is a relevant greater justification we do remove healthy parts of the body even aside from Trans or BIID issues.
Which isn't to say we should do that, just that First, do no harm does already have exceptions, even outside of culture war flashpoints.
SSCReader
22d ago
Isn't that cutting your own nose off to spite your face? Your opponents finally come around to your position, to the extent they are now willing to violently oppose the Islamic people/world you also dislike and wanted to keep out, which was one of the key disputes you had with them...
And you switch sides to side with the people you were against in the first place?
Why would you expect to be taken seriously? I hate that you won't go along with my position so much, that I would side with the people that we had opposing views on? That seems like simple spite. At which point despite being correct you can't be taken seriously in any kind of political coalition. If you don't get your own way, you side with the people you were against?
Setting aside any moral issues, pragmatically there is no reason for your opponents to ever consider your ideas. If you hate them when they disagree, and hate them when they agree, then you aren't leaving much space for change, even when you are actually right.
SSCReader
27d ago
You are over egging this entirely. Approximately no-one cares about Cesar Chavez day, and 31st March has been both for quite some time without any problems. And it was established after the day of visibility itself (2009 vs 2014)
I predict this has basically zero impact on political outcomes and calling it political malpractice is exaggeration to the point of nonsense.
I don't know if Biden was involved or not (experience says he likely said yes when asked by a staffer should we do x) but its essentially about as small a deal as you can imagine.
SSCReader
3d ago
Or maybe it's the only sane thing in the room.
Or simply that Christianity is not one thing. Some versions of Christianity can be too blood-thirsty and some versions too meek, some too triumphalist, some too obsessed with slave morality. And to the extent that every Christian is different, we can change Lewis's example a little. It is not just many men speaking of one man, it is many men speaking of many other men.
Catholicism and Orthodoxy are different, and each have their own different sects and churches and local differences. If you ask me to describe Christianity I am likely to talk about it in the context of the Christian conflict in my home nation. That is going to be very different than a Greek orthodox in Crete, or a Baptist in Alabama. Not just because the viewer is different, but so too is the thing being viewed.
SSCReader
21d ago
But the split happened in Europe. If that made Christianity stronger why would the effect be more pronounced in the US?
Hell my own country had so much zeal we are still murdering each other even now (though much less frequently thankfully). And the percentage of non-religious is almost identical between the US and Northern Ireland (27 or 28%) which is also similar to the EU (25-26%).
So it doesn't seem to be much better at keeping adherents anywhere. Just in the US selection effects means it is more geographically concentrated.
A Christianity that did not have ruinous wars and splits I would argue would be stronger. Because it showed to adherents that whatever lofty claims were made Christians were willing to kill Christians over doctrinal differences. A united Christianity that stretches from Moscow to Constantinople to Jerusalem to Rome to London to Rio de Janeiro to Washington would be a much stronger world force than it is now.
A schism that is resolved quickly might increase strength and fervor, one that rumbles on for centuries and then schisms again and again over smaller and smaller differences is hard to portray as a stronger, I would say.
To be clear though I am not saying either Christianity or Islam will fall entirely tomorrow, we are talking decades to centuries. To paraphrase the old saying. There is a great deal of ruin in an organized religion.
SSCReader
21d ago
And is Christianity as strong now as it was 400 years ago? Would it have been stronger or weaker without schisming?
Schisming that is not quickly and decisively dealt with is an ongoing fracture point.
SSCReader
25d ago
Ahh. An optimist! I think the problem is I am not confident the Catholic Church was initially wrong (or has actually made real change, but that is a different post).
As you point out the predictions were true, admitting the issue was indeed used as ammunition against the Church.
We evolved these social defense mechanisms for a reason. That many people are not good with base rates, that it really did damage the Church significantly. A better solution (from the point of view of protecting the Churchs mission) might have been to close ranks while internally trying to reduce the problem.
As long as you have a Catholic church some priests (and people pretending!) are going to do bad things. The only thing you can control is what level of bad things are worth its continuing mission. And the same applies to trans people. Some number of either real or fake trans people will do bad things. What people say, or have said is mostly irrelevant to the current situation.
If the pope said that no priests would ever abuse a child, the fact 0.000001% do, may not be a good argument for dissolving the clergy even given the pope was strictly wrong.
SSCReader
25d ago
A report is a report. It was speech (or text technically i guess) punished by a fairly long jail sentence.
SSCReader
3d ago
That is, there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science", where the latter is specifically things like what the politicians, media, and every party member in good standing must say in order to not end up in the metaphorical gulag.
Then you may want to angle to speak a little more plainly in my opinion. Tongue in cheek can be difficult to make out via text and using terms like "New Lefty Science" in that manner is just more heat than light when you are (as per the point of the site) going to want lefty people to read and engage with your points, rather than just arguing about whether the science is changing which wasn't really the point of your comment. Though I am not a mod, so you may of course ignore me entirely freely!
My experience with relatives who are addicts is that contra to our resident Indian doctor, it isn't possible to not be an addict any more. It is possible to not be an active addict, but seeing uncles falling off the wagon after decades of sobriety has resolved that for me. That doesn't mean I think alcohol should be illegal however.
And the difference between alien chest bursters and addiction is the fact that the chest burster kills the host and births a monster, an addict can be a "monster", then return to being normal for years or decades or the rest of their life, even if the monster risk is always hanging over them. It is more like lycanthropy perhaps, if we must find a monstrous analogy.
SSCReader
3d ago
Like surgical removal? Freezing them in hypersleep? Harvesting them for Royal jelly?
I like an Aliens reference as much as the next guy but having an alien parasite that bursts from you and always having to worry about relapsing even if clean for say 5 years don't see all that similar personally.
SSCReader
3d ago
Is this new science though? The old saw is once an addict always an addict and I've heard that for decades. That alcoholism and drug addiction have no cure just treatment to stay clean.
Saying addicts need treatment is not the same thing as claiming that treatment is a total and peemanent cure. Don't confuse what the science says with what politicians or the media say the science says.
SSCReader
10d ago
Hence "just build nuclear plants; if you thought it was such a problem you would already have accepted the added risk".
Unless you also feel nuclear catastophe has a similar cost. Remember we've already established the risks are not being evaluated rationally. So you can't then use the fact they are not evaluating the comparative nuclear risk rationally as evidence of anything other than irrationality, thats what I mean by double dipping.
Remember these are not utilitarians. Just like the answer as to why groups who feel like abortion is a Holocaust happening every year aren't concentrating solely on that. That is just how people are. Virtually nobody who claims to believe that X is the worst thing in the world are willing to trade off other bad things against it in a rational manner. It is just not how we operate by and large. We are not rational. They are not rational. Rationalists are not actually rational (although they try).
So people who try to use that against a group (whether that is claiming Christians don't really believe abortion is murder or that climate worriers don't really believe in climate change), are just missing the point. They do believe it. And yet they will not act as if they do. Because they also believe in many other things and are not evaluating the trade offs in a utilitarian way. So that isn't evidence of anything except that they are humanly flawed (or gifted, if you think utilitarianism is evil).
Maybe it is true that every anti-abortion advocate should quit their job and advocate full time for a federal ban given as they believe that hundreds of thousands of innocent children are being murdered annually. Maybe everyone who believes climate change is an existential threat should be crowd funding atomic reactors. But that just is not how most people work.
But what you feel shame about is culturally formed. Kids don't feel about being naked or touching themselves until they are trained to do so. Catholics don't feel shame about the things they feel shame about until they are trained into it.
And that means your alarm can be false. Like people who internalize that they should feel shame about approaching members of the opposite sex even respectfully or who feel shame about feeling sexual attraction at all.
So you can't use the alarm to tell you there is a serious problem. All it can do is warn you that you have internalized that X is a problem. It doesn't do much to tell you if X is a problem really.
My grandfather was raised in an ultra strict Quaker offshoot, where any contact with the outside world was seen to be wrong and that music was sinful. He felt ashamed of listening to a choir in the less strict Church of Ireland he later moved to. Is hearing a Christian choir a serious problem he should have been alerted to? Or was his sense of shame miscalibrated because his society was simply wrong?
In other words, I agree shame and shaming is an intrinsic part of the human condition and that it exists to bring together societies through incentivizing behaviors your society see as positive. What it can't do is actually tell you if those behaviors are or are not positive in and of themselves. Because shame is sub-conscious.
And just like with feeling shame about a choir, the seeds of the sexual revolution lie in the fact that if you shame too much it becomes just as much of a problem as shaming too little. We historically shamed too hard and too deep and as with all oppression, a revolution will form. The previous norms of sexual shaming were crushed, because they were not moderated, because so many people ended up being shamed that they were in fact able to overthrow the shame mongers. That is the lesson I personally think all ideologies need to learn. Shame too many people (whether for sexual immorality or for racism or sexism or whatever), then there is a tipping point.
You might argue the results have been wretched, but obviously enough people felt the previous situation was ALSO wretched enough in order to overthrow it.
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