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SubstantialFrivolity

I'm not even supposed to be here today

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joined 2022 September 04 22:41:30 UTC
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SubstantialFrivolity


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
I'm not even supposed to be here today

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 22:41:30 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 2, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Why should it be Democrats’ responsibility to pick up after the toddlers?




Because they're the ones complaining about the "obstruction". Every member of the House has the right to vote for whomever they wish. And if the Democrats think it's sooooo bad that the process can't move forward because of the split in votes, then it's on them - not the Republicans - to sacrifice the vote their conscience says they should make in order to get things to move along.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't see how you equate the two. Animals have less moral worth than humans, not zero moral worth. Eating them is legitimate (yes, including pet animals). Torturing them for sick pleasure is not.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It is not on OP. The Constitution is an enumeration of powers for an otherwise-powerless government, not a listing of rights which one would not otherwise have. The burden of proof is on you to show why people would not have this right under the constitutional framework, not the other way around.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
More specifically, it's a weakness of cramming everything into a single megathread rather than using separate threads. The Reddit style isn't perfect, but the way we use it is even worse.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 9, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Look it is the public fault. In democracy what happens in the public square is eventually the voters responsibility.




For better or for worse, that isn't really true of a representative democracy. You can vote out someone that does something stupid. You can, if there is such a candidate, vote for a candidate who promises to undo the stupid thing. But for any given issue, there's no guarantee that candidates for office will even realize that $issue is something the voters care about and want to change. In many elections you simply will not have the option to weigh in on a given issue by using your vote.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Specifically, people support procedurally fair rules when they believe those rules will lead to just outcomes and oppose them when they think they won't.




It sounds to me here like you are saying that people have just shrugged and said "well, since the rules don't produce just outcomes then fuck the rules". It seems plausible that this is what people think, certainly. But it is distressing to me, because that attitude seems like nothing more than "I do what I want" with extra steps. I will certainly concede that following the established rules (which let's say for the sake of argument are fair) will not lead to a just outcome every time. And by all means, I think we should endeavor to change the rules to ensure maximum justice in the outcomes (while keeping them procedurally fair). But even though the rules are imperfect, I believe that on balance following them will lead to more just outcomes than ignoring them.


More pragmatically, I think that the ideas of liberalism (and federalism, what scraps we have left in the US) are very much correct, even to this day. I may not like it that my fellow citizens can do (insert immoral act here). But I like that a whole lot more than if they could force me to follow their ideology. Which, as sure as the sun rises and sets, they will do as soon as they get power, unless we agree to a truce. So I support a truce, even when I'm in a position of power (especially then, in fact), because I want my teeth to not get kicked in as soon as the other guys have institutional power.


Unfortunately, it seems like a lot of people have lost sight of this. I remember arguing with people (otherwise smart people, even) about Mozilla firing Brendan Eich back in the day. They simply considered it unimportant that if we set the precedent that you can fire someone for being against gay marriage, you also are going to be able to fire people for being gay if the Overton window ever shifts that way. They were purely concerned with short-term "get the enemy" even at the cost of long-term harm to their own causes.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I also haven't identified a clear personal use case, but since I've never used it, I may well be missing out.




Here are some good use cases that I've found for mine.


    

  • 

    When I'm busy cooking, it's really clutch to be able to say "Alexa, set timer for x minutes" while I keep working on my cooking.
    

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    Similarly to the above, when I'm planning a shopping trip it is useful to be able to verbally add things to my shopping list as I go through the kitchen identifying what things I need. And when I'm at the store, I can use the app on my phone to pull up the things I need.
    

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  • 

    Simplifying things for my wife on occasion. She is terrible at remembering the details of how our AV receiver is hooked up, and she used to always ask me "hey which input is X on?". But now (with the assistance of a Harmony hub to be fair), she can go "Alexa, turn on the PS4" and all the devices get turned on and to the correct inputs.
    

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  • 

    Triggering home automation routines. For example, when I say "Alexa, good night" I have a routine which turns off every room light, turns the TV and related devices off, locks the front door, and turns the hall lights to a dim nightlight setting. Sure I could do a button to kick off the routine, but it's a lot nicer to be able to issue voice commands and not have to have a physical thing to trigger for each routine I want to setup.
    

    • 



Overall, I would say that it is legitimately useful to have in our household. Granted I'm looking to jump ship, but that's because Amazon has been adding user hostile behavior and not because the core use cases aren't good for me. I would say that voice assistants are kind of like In-N-Out Burger: ridiculously overhyped by the hardcore fans, but still legitimately good as long as you don't let those hardcore fans set your expectations too high.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I am going to disagree. I've been hanging around the Motte a long time now, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen the poem. I don't think it is as common as you're asserting, or else I would've seen it at least once before.


If we want to talk Kipling quotes which get used a lot, it has to be the Danegeld quote.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Who cares? None of those things is bad in and of itself. It all comes down to motive. If you are hiring very few black people because you are discriminating against them, that's certainly bad. But if it's because the applicants really are less qualified, or because there are fewer applicants, that's perfectly fine.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The fact that you don't recognize your good fortune doesn't mean it wasn't there. Yeah, some guys don't know how to evaluate women and are overlooking good women. No argument there. But in at least two of the cases I mentioned (me and my friend who's my age, can't speak for my older friend from church), the issue isn't one of rejecting good women. It's a lack of women who are interested. And like I said, you can tip the scales in various ways (e.g. where you hang out, effort put into your personal appearance), there is no such thing as a guaranteed return on those efforts. You can do everything right, and still have no candidates to even reject or accept.


Which is the very heart of my point. In a world where someone doing everything right to try to attract women can still wind up attracting no women, it's not really fair to blame it on a person individually just because they happen to still be single. Lord knows that lots of men need to get a swift kick in the pants and get told to wake up, but definitely not all. And since it's not all, I don't think one should generalize a rule of thumb like you were talking about. Better to (temporarily) think too well of those who don't deserve it than to judge those who don't deserve it, imo.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
While I applaud the attempt, I don't think you can solve anything this way. At its core, the trans debate is a values debate, not a confusion of terminology. The left-ish side (as I understand it, not trying to strawman) is that you need to do whatever you can to respect people's feelings, and that this stuff is all socially constructed anyway. So if John says he's Jane now, then you owe it to Jane to try to be courteous by respecting her decision. The right-ish side is that while respecting people's feelings is important, recognizing objective reality is more important. And if John says he's Jane now, yeah no he can't become John just by fiat. He's a man who wears dresses and got his genitals removed, not actually a woman (which is something we simply do not have the medical technology to grant at this time).


There's nuance to this, and it's basically impossible to boil everything down to a simple "this vs that" idea. I have no doubt that there are many people on both sides of the trans debate whose positions I didn't capture. In fact, I know there's a religious argument I didn't touch on and really is kind of orthogonal to the "anti" perspective I gave. But the point is, even though many different values exist in this soup, the fundamental issue is one of values. If it were a terminology issue, then it would've been resolved ages ago. So as much as I think your post is well-intentioned, I think it's also fundamentally incapable of actually resolving anything.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think there's a lot to be learned here about how organizations like twitter act as central authorities to prevent purity spirals, allowing incredibly "diverse" groups to avoid infighting as they attack a common enemy.




Maybe, but it seems to me like this is an entirely predictable result. The people moving to Mastodon are (anecdotally, based on my observation) mostly the people who were most zealous in their political opinions. Which is to say, they are the ones who were by far the most likely to start purity spiraling and attacking people they don't like. Essentially, Mastodon got an influx in some of the most censorious Twitter users, so of course they're going to be censorious when they get to their new platform.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 10, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's not a typo (probably). It's common in the Internet to use "commiting sudoku" to refer to suicide.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for February 21, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I made a mistake in this Wellness post. I forgot how highly smart people value their intelligence, and so my claim that I no longer felt stupid here is all anyone can focus on and has caused great injury.




You've missed the point of why people are upset with you and I honestly can't tell if you genuinely don't see it, or if you're trolling. People aren't annoyed because you said that the posts here are getting less intelligent. They are annoyed because you are using people's good-faith responses to your Friday Fun post as some kind of gotcha.


Your actions here, simply put, come across like you were setting out to pick on people from the beginning. Of course nobody likes that. If you simply had posted about how you felt like the posts here have gone downhill (and left the movie thread out of it entirely), nobody would be upset.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You (and @moonrider18) should know that SkookumTree is known to be wildly mistaken in his beliefs about women (check out past Wellness Wednesday and Small Scale Question Sunday threads to see what I mean). Basically, he's convinced himself that he's an ugly autistic freak whose only options for love are to get a bottom tier woman (literal drug addicts, someone who's so fat she will need full time assistive care before long, etc), and persists in that belief no matter how many people here tell him he's dead wrong. I would take anything he says about romantic relationships with not just a grain, but a giant fistful of salt.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't really think that the theory of induced demand in traffic holds any water. As someone here (I forget who, so unfortunately I can't credit them) put it recently: in any other context, if building more capacity led to that supply being consumed as well, we wouldn't go "oh no, induced demand, let's stop here". We would say "holy cow, that's awesome - let's build even more capacity".


It's not impossible that traffic is a unique and special snowflake where normal human behavior doesn't apply, cats and dogs live together, etc. But I doubt that's the case.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Well your meme was dumb for one thing. If it was a good meme maybe you would've gotten somewhere. But also, the culture here isn't really into posting memes and other low effort content. Even a genuinely funny meme would most likely be only tolerated, not celebrated. This is a text posting community, not an image posting community. So honestly, what did you expect? If I went to rdrama and posted some long essay hoping for serious engagement, I would be mocked. That's why I don't do that. You basically did the equivalent of that kind of faux pas, and are wondering why people didn't like it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


My mom grew up on a farm and cows were the equivalent of dogs to her.




As an aside, I find this incredibly surprising. I also grew up on a farm (a dairy farm specifically). For me, and for literally every other farm kid I ever have known, they have a very pragmatic approach to life and death as a result. Cows die, we eat them, it's just part of the circle of life. When you grow up around this reality of life every day, it desensitizes you rather than makes you more attached. I've definitely never heard of a farm kid thinking of cows as pets before, or being upset if someone eats meat.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This is my take as well. If someone is jerking off to lolicon, or gore porn, I think that's disgusting and they are almost certainly a very bad person. I also think that despite that, the person still has a right to exist in society, do legal business freely, etc. I don't support this nonsense of "they're creepy and not very popular, so we're going to gang up on them to punish them".


So to push back on the point @Amadan made, no I'm not supporting them because they upset the SJWs. I'm supporting them because it's the right thing to do. Hell, if it was the SJWs being suppressed I'd support them because it still would be the right thing to do (much as I personally dislike them).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm going to echo @netstack and say that again, this doesn't really address the point. I certainly agree with you that things like David Shor's firing, or the "OK" gesture being labeled white supremacist, are insane overreaches and well worthy of criticism. They are horrible, and the people advancing those ideas should be laughed out of the marketplace of ideas.


However, like @netstack I don't think that they are particularly relevant to the object-level point about Kanye. For his entire life (he was born in 1977), it would have been considered bad to go on a rant about the Jews. This is not some new and capricious facet of cancel culture, this is the crossing of a very well established boundary in polite discourse, one which Kanye should have known full well about.


You are certainly welcome to disagree with that, but in that case an argument of "these other outrageous things happened too" is not going to be persuasive as it isn't really relevant. A more relevant (and thus persuasive) argument would be something like "here is a public figure who recently angrily ranted about Jews and got away without consequences". Better still would be multiple such examples, because they would show more clearly that the examples were due to different norms and not because a single person somehow flew under the radar. But bringing up cancel culture overreaches that are completely unrelated to anti-Semitism isn't going to really cut it, at least not for me personally.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IDK man. I'm a childless 30-something, and even I know perfectly well that women have a maternal instinct. It's patently obvious, I have no idea how these people can say otherwise. So I think there's gotta be at least some other factor at play here besides "has not watched kids interacting very much".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If you think being a mod for a place where charged political discussions happen is a power trip, you are so far off base that you aren't even in the stadium. I've modded a forum like that before, and let me tell you: it fucking sucks. You spend almost all of your time dealing with shitty posters who are spoiling for a fight and deliberately antagonizing others, but who are just on the good side of the rules most of the time. They are the equivalent of a child who runs up to a line in the sand going "haha, you can't touch me" the entire time. They make the experience worse for everyone except themselves, and the moment you give them a warning (let alone a ban) they will raise bloody murder about how you are biased and persecuting them. Meanwhile, the good users aren't giving you shit but they don't really care about the work you do either. The "janitor" analogy is apt here, because people rarely take notice if you're doing a good job but notice right away if you're doing a bad job. In general it's a thankless job which can easily lower your opinion of humanity if you aren't careful to not let it get to you. Any minor power trip you might be able to get from moderating a backwater politics forum simply is not worth it, and nobody is doing that.


Contrary to your assertion, the mods actually use a pretty light touch. FFS you can go look yourself and see all the times Hlynka got temp banned and given a lot of lenience. And in many of those cases you can find people bitching "ah, so Hlynka continues to get away with posts like this and the mods do nothing". So even the "overbearing" mod presence you decry is considered by many posters to be far too light. That by itself should tell you that you are way out of touch if you think that this is overbearing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


"it was more of a lecture - I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting"




I mean, that person isn't wrong. That's kind of the entire DEI modus operandi.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for April 28, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would say your definition of nerd and geek is spot on. I have no idea WTF the author here is on about with saying nerds are people who like things that aren't good. That's not what it means, nor has it ever been what it means.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I had a bot tell me not to use the word 'mankind' at one point since it wasn't gender-neutral.




That's not just annoying, it's factually incorrect. Mankind is gender neutral! It really makes you wonder if some people actually paid attention in school.