Tarnstellung
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User ID: 553
The "Communist Party of Britain" is a tiny Stalinist sect. The CPB should not be confused with the Communist Party of Great Britain. The CPB was formed as an offshoot of the slightly more mainstream CPGB in the 1980s when the leadership of the latter decided "hm, maybe totalitarianism and mass murder is bad". From the first paragraph of the CPB's Wikipedia article:
It is affiliated nationally to the Cuba Solidarity Campaign[10] and the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. (...) After the fall of the Soviet Union, the party was one of two original British signatories to the Pyongyang Declaration.
The Pyongyang Declaration:
The Pyongyang Declaration, officially titled Let Us Defend and Advance the Cause of Socialism, was a statement signed by a number of political parties on 20 April 1992 that calls for the unity of the socialist camp and a vow to safeguard socialism. Representatives of 70 communist and socialist parties from 51 countries arrived in Pyongyang to celebrate Kim Il-sung's 80th birthday.
So you would side with (even vote for!) these Stalinists, North Korea apologists, wannabe mass murderers, these certified lunatics, because they said "trans bad"?
You will surely understand why your post doesn't make me more sympathetic to the anti-trans side.
I think that's a trend that's common with environmental regulations. Whether it's CFL bulbs, paper straws, gas stoves or low flow toilets, consumers get stuck with an inferior substitute and the alleged crisis never seems to actually get solved.
Lest someone conclude that environmental regulation never works and only serves to make people's lives worse without addressing the actual problem:
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CFC refrigerants are banned, the ozone layer is recovering, and modern fridges are perfectly fine.
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Leaded petrol is banned, lead is no longer being constantly spewed in people's faces, and modern petrol cars are perfectly fine.
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SO2 and NOx emissions are restricted, acid rain has been greatly reduced, and modern vehicles are perfectly fine.
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DDT is banned, bird populations have recovered, and food production is perfectly fine.
These aren't just random examples – these four were some of the biggest environmental problems of the 20th century, and they have all been solved with minimal harm to consumers. (The others were nuclear energy (which wasn't a problem at all, the only problem with nuclear powerplants is that we don't build enough of them) and anthropogenic climate change (which hasn't been solved because no laws that would actually solve it have been enacted).)
Regulators were overeager to promote CFLs which ended up not being very good, but in time LED technology was developed and incandescent lightbulbs have now been completely phased out in favour of much more efficient lighting, so the original goal has in fact been achieved. LED lighting is still not a perfect substitute due to colour problems, but this is a technical problem that will be solved eventually.
The original comment, in case someone hasn't seen it.
By the way, the original comment is a bit confusing to read with the update. It's not clear where the update ends and the original begins. Maybe move the update to the end, or add a note to the effect of "Original comment follows:" after the update?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Taxonomic names are regularly changed, often because species weren't related in the manner previously thought
They are regularly changed because the previous names were wrong: placing a species in the wrong genus, grouping two species into one, and so forth. They are never changed because someone doesn't like the name.
There is a firm principle that scientific names can't be changed unless it's justified by new discoveries. Changing even one name will open the floodgates. You know it won't stop at Hitler. There are many other species named after bad people, and still more named after people wokeists would consider bad. It will lead to all sorts of squabbles, with no benefit whatsoever.
The Hitler beetle's name wasn't even changed after World War II. I think everyone agreed at that point that Hitler was bad; many had experienced his badness first-hand. But they stood by their principles, because they knew changing it would just make everything much more complicated.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Well, I guess we have a different idea of what "numerous" means
The ground-floor walls are completely filled with graffiti. There literally couldn't be any more! There's even some underneath the greenery on the wall behind the kissing couple, implying it's been there, with no one cleaning it up, for enough time to let the plant cover the wall – a few years, at least. (After writing this paragraph, I realised it was just pointless nitpicking. Feel free to ignore it.)
if you infer "general dysfunction" from a scene in which there a bunch of children playing, people going to work or walking their dogs,etc, well, I think that is on you.
You can easily find photos of children playing football in Brazilian favelas. People go about their lives, even if they live in horrible slums. That doesn't mean it's incorrect to describe slums, and the social and political system that produced them, as dysfunctional.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
I happen to agree with your overall point, but I think your post breaks basically every rule that this website has. This is not Rdrama. Your post is almost entirely sneering without any actual arguments.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Jews in medieval Europe were heavily represented in a parasitic rentier class
This requires you to believe that banking and trading contribute no value to society. This was certainly a widespread view in the Middle Ages (and still is among Muslims), but it shouldn't affect objective retrospective assessments.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
None of these one-liners, if posted individually, would come even close to meeting the thread's quality standards. I don't think combining them into one huge (and very unwieldy) post makes up for it. It's the same as posting them one by one sequentially, except the format makes it even harder to discuss. (After writing this, I saw that @iprayiam3 said basically the same thing.) If you didn't want any discussion here and this was just an invitation to chat with you, that belongs in the Sunday or Friday thread, not here.
Another problem with your list:
\28. “It is not possible to be a good criminal defense lawyer AND a good person.” Pro
This is just asking how you personally should feel about the lawyers. It doesn't result in any policy prescriptions. Weird to include it together with the much more concrete questions like 7 and 19.
In general, you mix strictly normative questions (28, 39, 40, 48), strictly positive, empirical questions (6, 7, 11, 19, 22) and questions that are a complicated mix of both:
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9 requires you to define "feminist" (there are many very different definitions and settling on one, even just for the purpose of a single discussion, may not be easy) and "bad" (which requires an entire moral theory), followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions
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30, again, requires a moral theory to define what it means to "deserve" something and what is "fair", followed by a complicated discussion of empirical questions; for example, two people may agree that the poor deserve to be poor if equality of opportunity exists and the poor are just lazy, but they may disagree on the empirical question of whether equality of opportunity does in fact exist; or they may simply believe, as you apparently do (per 51), that equality of opportunity is morally undesirable
Safety: The Chernobyl reactor was an ancient Soviet design. Modern designs are much safer and more resistant to human error. With a failsafe design, there is no possibility of a black swan event. A black swan event is by definition unpredictable, but for a reactor it is in fact possible to predict and account for all possible failure modes.
As for military attacks on nuclear plants, the very worst that could happen is a Chernobyl-type scenario where a city-sized area is contaminated. There is no global risk. Most likely, even in a direct strike on a reactor, the contamination wouldn't be nearly as bad. Nuclear plants have insane security, so a terrorist attack or sabotage couldn't do very much. And it should be noted that hydro plants are also vulnerable to attacks (and even random failures) that could result in large-scale destruction, including thousands of direct and immediate deaths.
Waste: The warnings for people 10,000 years in the future are in case civilization collapses and humans basically revert to the bronze age. I don't know why anyone would take this seriously.
Nuclear waste is only considered extremely dangerous because of double standards. Burning coal produces radioactive ash. If the same standards were applied to coal as are applied to nuclear energy, the ash would be classified as low-level radioactive waste and would need special procedures to dispose of it. In reality, it is mixed into cement to build roads. High-level waste, which actually is dangerous, exists, but there is so little of it that it can just be stored somewhere securely.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
I really don't understand the near-unanimous outrage here. Does no one believe the suffering from a psychiatric condition can be so terrible as to make the person want to die?
Another comment interpreted her two suicide attempts as calls for help or attention. If this were true, would she not have stopped short of actually killing herself in the end?
If euthanasia had been illegal, she would have just committed suicide with a different method – I mean, she clearly wanted to die – and it would have been a brief sentence or two in an article about the terrorist attack. "Shanti De Corte, who was 17 at the time of the attack, was set to testify, but committed suicide after suffering from PTSD following the bombing. She is regarded as the 33rd victim of the attack." or something to that effect.
But I know that at least some people who have survived suicide attempts have gone on to lead happy lives.
And there are others who attempted again and were successful.
Why does everyone here think they know better than the woman herself, a panel of doctors and a public prosecutor, all of whom must have known far more about the case than was shared in this one news article?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Aren't "autogynephile" and "gay dude" supposed to be mutually exclusive, autogynephiles being heterosexual men who like to imagine themselves as women because they like women?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Expressing "a feeling of strong distaste for the bigotry of [a] comment" is taboo here because it doesn't actually add anything to the discussion. This is an anonymous forum; none of your friends will be outraged that you tried to engage a neo-Nazi/incel/paedo-fascist constructively instead of dismissing them without a second thought.
Realistically, a large proportion of the users and comments here are bigoted by the standards of Reddit. If you're going to post something that amounts to "yikes, sweaty" under one in every 3 or 4 comments, then you should leave, for your sake and ours. But I believe a constructive and mutually beneficial discussion can be had as long as everyone sincerely tries to "be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary". If you can do that, I urge you to stay. We could use more ideological diversity.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Recently, there was a series of studies demonstrating that ADHD medications are both much less helpful than previously thought (boost lasts for only two years or so) and with much worse side effects, including heightened risks of dementia later in life.
The first study linked, which concludes that ADHD treatment isn't very effective (after skimming the article, "boost lasts for only two years or so" seems to be an oversimplification), is from 2009. The second and third, which find a correlation between amphetamine use and Parkinson's disease, are from 2011 and 2006, respectively.
I understand that some fields move more slowly than others, and that a clinical trial by its nature must take several years (plus the time to prepare the trial before it starts, to collect enough participants, etc., and the time needed to analyse the data after the trial is done and to write up the results, and the delays related to publishing). Nevertheless, I think describing a study published 17 years ago as "recent" is a bit of a stretch.
(It could be that you just didn't see when they were published, and assumed they were recent, for some reasonable definition of "recent". This is known to happen. I've read on Snopes that stories sometimes reappear randomly: someone stumbles upon an article from years ago, assumes it's recent and shares it, other people see it and share it, and suddenly thousands of people believe something new and important has happened, when in fact it happened years ago and was unimportant and quickly forgotten. It's why The Guardian added a big bright yellow warning above older articles saying "this article is x years old".)
When I first read the quoted sentence, before any links to the actual studies were present, my interpretation was that a series of related studies (I think it's not unusual for one clinical trial to result in multiple publications) examining in detail all the long-term effects of ADHD medication had been published within, say, the past few months. In fact, the first study reports the findings from a clinical trial on the effectiveness of a certain kind of treatment for a certain subtype of ADHD, and makes no mention of dementia; the other two investigate a hypothesized correlation between amphetamine use for any reason, apparently including recreational use (the third even counts methamphetamine as a relevant type of amphetamine), and make no mention of ADHD treatment.
Meth is a known neurotoxin, not much to say there. Recreational use of amphetamine, at doses significantly higher than those used to treat ADHD, is likewise already known to cause neuropsychiatric problems, including psychosis. Your post, however, implies that treatment of ADHD with amphetamine was recently found to be dangerous, a claim not supported by the studies linked. If it had been discovered in 2006, or even in 2011, that treating ADHD with amphetamine increased the risk of dementia, this would have become widespread knowledge by now. As I noted in another comment, however, looking up "ADHD medication dementia" only returns results of ADHD medication being used to treat dementia.
In conclusion, the central premise upon which your entire post is based is false. This does not mean that "privilege theory" is correct, just that this particular argument against it is invalid.
P.S. Anyone who was treated for ADHD and became concerned after reading the original post should now relax. (Maybe with some benzos?)
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
It's not like they saw the Germans invading Poland and then quickly decided to invade to salvage what they could. The invasion was planned and coordinated between Germany and the Soviet Union from the start.
Was the Katyn massacre also part of the Soviet 4D chess strategy to beat the Nazis?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
On Thursday, the Tallahassee Democrat reported that the principal of a local charter school, the Tallahassee Classical School, was forced to resign after three parents complained about an art teacher showing a picture of Michelangelo’s 16th-century sculpture of David.
Reading the entire interview, the school board comes out looking only slightly more reasonable than was portrayed in the "mainstream media".
The chair of the school board, Barney Bishop III, insists that the David incident was only a small contributing factor, but when asked to elaborate why the board decided to pressure the principal to resign, he says:
based on counsel from our employment lawyer, I’m not going to get into the reasons.
To me, the overall tone of Bishop's statements suggests that the David incident was in fact a major reason, if not the sole reason, for the firing (sorry, "resignation under pressure"). Bishop says:
The teacher mentioned that this was a nonpornographic picture, No. 1. The teacher said, “Don’t tell your parents,” No. 2. (...) Three parents objected. Two objected simply because they weren’t told in advance. One objected because the teacher said nonpornography. Nonpornography—that’s a red flag. And of course telling the students, “Don’t tell your parents”—that’s a huge red flag!
The interview doesn't say in what context the teacher told the students not to tell their parents or that the images were not pornographic. (Maybe the original article does? I haven't read it because it's paywalled.) Out of context, it does sound suspicious. I suppose the first could have been a joke. As for the second, I'm not sure why the teacher would need to tell the students in the classroom that the images were not pornographic. In any case, my priors are that it is extremely unlikely that the teacher was a "groomer" trying to sexualize the kids.
The year before, the school had notified the parents that their children, who are 11 and 12 years old, were going to be exposed to the horror of a statue depicting a human. This year, the teacher teaching the class told the principal (the one who was later fired) to send out a similar notice, but the principal apparently forgot. This is an "egregious mistake":
98 percent of the parents didn’t have a problem with it. But that doesn’t matter, because we didn’t follow a practice. We have a practice. Last year, the school sent out an advance notice about it. Parents should know: In class, students are going to see or hear or talk about this. This year, we didn’t send out that notice. (...) This year, we made an egregious mistake. We didn’t send that notice.
Michelangelo's sculpture of David is "controversial":
Well, we’re Florida, OK? Parents will decide. Parents are the ones who are going to drive the education system here in Florida. The governor said that, and we’re with the governor. Parents don’t decide what is taught. But parents know what that curriculum is. And parents are entitled to know anytime their child is being taught a controversial topic and picture.
Parents choose this school because they want a certain kind of education. We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap. I know they do all that up in Virginia. The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids. Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me? I know lots of teachers that are very good, but to suggest they are the authorities, you’re on better drugs than me.
The interview ends with the reporter saying "I just don’t think this statue is controversial", to which Bishop responds:
We’re not going to show the full statue of David to kindergartners. We’re not going to show him to second graders. Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is.
And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.
An article in the BBC relates this to the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act, AKA the "Don't Say Gay" Bill. Personally, I think it's just typical American prudishness. In other Western countries, it is perfectly normal and unremarkable for statues with exposed penises and breasts (non-pornographic, of course) to be displayed in public, where they are easily seen by children of all ages.
At one point, in describing the school, Bishop says:
We don’t use pronouns.
Obviously the sentence is false if taken literally, as critics have pointed out. But does anyone know what he might have actually meant? They don't have pronoun badges? They don't put pronouns in their email signatures? They don't use trans people's preferred pronouns? I'm asking because I'm genuinely curious as to what leads people to say nonsensical things like this, what they understand the word "pronoun" to mean.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
While the EU is nominally in favor of cultural diversity, it means they will subsidize folk dresses and bland exhibits with 27 flags. It does not mean they will allow an Eastern European country to be against gay marriage.
A bizarre assertion, given that, according to my count, 13 of the EU's 27 members don't allow gay marriage.
It does not mean they will allow a country to practice eugenics
Eugenics is not part of the traditional culture of any country. The reason it's not implemented anywhere is a lack of popular support; it has nothing to do with the EU.
or protect key industries.
This has moved well beyond preserving culture and into plain economics. The EU does in fact protect traditional products. What the EU doesn't allow is protectionist restrictions that are meant to benefit one country's companies over those of another.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
+if/when NATO finally takes out Russia, I imagine Poland would be in the runner-up for the next 'disturbingly native-looking' country in what remains of Europe then.
Do you believe that a primary goal of the EU/NATO is to fill all European countries with non-White immigrants? Do you actually think the EU/NATO strongly object to the fact that the population of Russia is mostly ethnic Russians, and that the population of Poland is almost entirely ethnic Poles?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
The numerous graffiti imply decay, a lack of maintenance, and general dysfunction. If the picture were less cartoony and more realistic, that street would probably be filled with rubbish and the buildings and roads would be in a state of disrepair. I don't like tattoos or piercings – I think they are invariably ugly – but that's just my subjective personal preference, whereas a city that is falling apart is objectively bad from any sane perspective.
Another rarely discussed downside of hydropower is that it is extremely environmentally and socially destructive. Damming a river basically destroys its ecosystem. Dams also often flood very large areas, requiring people to evacuate and destroying anything that was there, natural or manmade.
For example, the Itaipu Dam:
When construction of the dam began, approximately 10,000 families living beside the Paraná River were displaced because of construction. (...) The world's largest waterfall by volume, the Guaíra Falls, was inundated by the newly formed Itaipu reservoir. The Brazilian government later liquidated the Guaíra Falls National Park. (...) The Guaíra Falls was an effective barrier that separated freshwater species in the upper Paraná basin (with its many endemics) from species found below it, and the two are recognized as different ecoregions.[18] After the falls disappeared, many species formerly restricted to one of these areas have been able to invade the other, causing problems typically associated with introduced species. For example, more than 30 fish species that formerly were restricted to the region below the falls have been able to invade the region above.
The construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt flooded 5,250 km^2 and resulted in the relocation of 100,000 to 120,000 people and 22 Ancient Egyptian monuments.
For comparison, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone has an area of 2,600 km^2. That is to say, the Aswan Dam rendered uninhabitable twice as much land as the Chernobyl disaster.
That's just one of many reservoirs all over the world. Looking at this list, if we exclude the reservoirs that resulted from the enlargement of pre-existing lakes and consider only the ones that are completely artificial, there are 15 reservoirs which individually rendered uninhabitable more land than the Chernobyl disaster. The total amount of land flooded by dams is many times greater than the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. I don't have the exact figures, but the number of people displaced by dams is certainly also much larger than the number of people who were evacuated from the Chernobyl area.
Don't forget that this is a normal and accepted part of building hydropower, whereas the Chernobyl disaster was a one-time event that resulted from a combination of poor Soviet design and human error. If we considered the failures of dams, we'd get a death toll much larger than any estimate for Chernobyl.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
"Opposing Israel is antisemitic": episode 47239875.
Zionism is an integral aspect of the identity of many Jews.
Segregationism and secessionism is an integral aspect of the identity of many in the Southern US. That doesn't make it acceptable.
I oppose banning specific viewpoints on principle, but it is entirely possible to ban a viewpoint without this being secretly a way to ban some group whose members disproportionately hold that viewpoint. The Zionists here are trying to apply the "disparate impact" principle, which I think practically everyone on TheMotte rejects. They're not standing up for free speech, they're just standing up for their own specific belief. I'm sure they wouldn't mind banning Holocaust deniers.
(Edit: When I say that "I think practically everyone on TheMotte rejects" the principle, I'm not trying to build consensus, I'm just stating my impression that a consensus already exists.)
Maybe there does exist a carefully-developed and safe PED stack which could significantly enhance performance without significant side effects, but as soon as you allow any PEDs, there would be a strong incentive to disregard health and take the highest possible dose. In the end, the ranking still ends up being a combination of genetics and hard work, except all the athletes have now destroyed their hearts and livers. It's a prisoner's dilemma.
Edit: If you allow cybernetic enhancements, implants, etc., you would still need some restrictions, otherwise a shot putter could just mount a trebuchet on their back. The line has to be drawn somewhere, and "no cybernetics at all" is a very natural place to do it.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
you're right. I changed it to 'gay rights'.
"Gay rights" is vague. What specifically does the EU prohibit, and how does it enforce the prohibition?
It's an example of an edgy policy that would never be allowed by the EU. It illustrates that the allowed diversity is only surface level.
May I ask for a more realistic example? Something that a significant number of people in an EU country might actually support?
Which is exactly what I meant (and said). Your point about protecting local cheeses kind of proves my thesis.
Yes, a trade bloc works to facilitate trade between its members. I am glad we agree. But what does this have to do with protecting cultural diversity?
Finally - why are you doing this?
I am from one of the newer EU member countries, and I don't think the EU is harming my country's traditions and culture. I feel like the EU is being misrepresented here, and I wanted to provide another perspective, lest this forum's mostly American readers get the wrong impression.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
It isn't just the tens of billions spent on weapons so far, it is going to be tens of billions per year for decades.
This is nothing for the US.
The inflation, caused by this war combined with the raised interest rates to combat it, far surpasses the direct cost of the weapons.
The inflation was caused by money printing during COVID. The war has contributed very little to inflation, at least in the US.
Did anything come of /u/MaxwellHill?
For those unfamiliar, /u/MaxwellHill is a Reddit account that moderated a bunch of big subreddits and posted a lot, many of their posts being highly upvoted and widely seen. In short, it was very influential on Reddit. When Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested, the account suddenly stopped posting (and it hasn't posted since). Some people noticed this, and, speculating that Maxwell herself was behind the account, started looking through its posts. They found some more circumstantial evidence, like a mix of British and American English (Maxwell moved between the two countries), and breaks in posting lasting a few days at a time that lined up with major events in Maxwell's life, during which she would have been distracted or busy. There's much more to it than this; you can read a summary here.
The little media coverage it received at the time was of course entirely dismissive; see for example the article in Vice.
I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories – I think Epstein may well have killed himself, for example – but this one aroused my suspicion at the time, and it's strange how it suddenly fizzled out. The Vice article above mentions private messages exchanged between /u/MaxwellHill and some other moderators (there are screenshots out there, but those are trivial to fake), but if the person behind the account was still there, why did they stop posting, and why haven't they started again after over two years?
If it was Maxwell, why didn't she give the password to someone to make a post and remove any suspicion? "Hi, I'm still here and I'm not Ghislaine Maxwell, but I'm going to abandon this account because of all the harassment I've been receiving." (Whether there was any harassment is irrelevant.) Would she have been prevented from doing this? I assume she was able to communicate with her lawyer, at least.
At the time, it was speculated that Reddit wanted to cover this up, as it would be embarrassing if it was revealed that one of their most influential users was an international child trafficker. Why didn't they just take control of the account and post something? Surely the admins can do this. Or just edit the database manually, as /u/spez infamously did. To me it seems like they wanted to sweep it under the carpet, and they thought any activity would just bring more attention. If this was their strategy, it appears to have worked.
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