The-WideningGyre
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User ID: 1859
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I'm going to also not read other comments yet.
I would guess that the editor endorsed comments will consider AA to still be a regrettable necessity. And trot out some disparity stats as to why. I would guess the reader picks would be mixed, overall less supportive, but still with some of the 'regrettable necessity' getting votes, but also some "don't fix discrimination with more discrimination also doing well".
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
It does, and it will endlessly remind you of it. At a AirBNB place we stayed at, they had Alexa, and you could sort of trick (play channel X, or play a different song, which it then tells you it can't, and plays something close). Super-obnoxious, further turned me off assistants.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
According to German news, it was two, so likely a married couple, which means their house got hit (edit: or tractor apparently), so not particularly strange from that aspect.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
He has the perfect recent example in the OneCoin mogul, Ruja Ignatova, where it's unclear what's happened. Top theories are hiding in the Arab world somewhere, or killed by the Bulgarian mafia (or is that cover for the hiding?).
She arranged a diplomatic passport to Dubai a while before her disappearance.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I found the fakes of Gandalf reviewing the Rings of Power pretty funny.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I would offer an and/or for (2): get competent at something useful / popular / impressive.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Sadly the ACLU has completely betrayed its principles. It makes me sad; I was so impressed by them as a teen, and now they're up there with the UN Women's Twitter account.
The-WideningGyre
6mo ago
I don't think that's true, as there seems to be a cap on human longevity -- so it seems it's more like you have a larger population dying potentially decades earlier, and then 'the rest' living essentially to near the cap, which seems to have a LEGG effect.
The-WideningGyre
11mo ago
Isn't the "intent to intimidate" the big part? It seems hard to prove (and should be), and could be applied to a candlelight vigil as well, which would usually be a bad thing, IMO.
I didn't pay that much attention, but in the images I saw, the torches seemed an incidental thing. If they were waving them in people's faces, sure, fire is serious business. But if they were just walking holding them, no I don't think the law should be stretched that way. It's like if there were a law about wearing military clothes to intimidate, so anyone with a camou-colored backpack, or rangers baseball hat got charged with an extra serious crime.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Well stated! I'm quite deeply shocked that someone wouldn't consider Putin's Russia quite antithetical to the West. The fundamental one is "invading another country in Europe". All the rest was kind of generic and shitty dictatorship stuff, but that one crosses a rather literal line.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
At what point would you consider it a credible threat? You seem to be setting the bar incredibly (and unfairly) high.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
This just seems wrong to me. Admittedly I'm older, married, and long out of the dating pool. I'd say most guys realize in early high-school they aren't going to be dating the head of the cheerleading squad, aka the hot influencer types. Things actually get better for them as they get older, as other things get valued comparatively more.
Opposite to your claim, I could believe Tinder is enabling more women to sleep with 'surface-level' hot guys (I really like /u/ThenElections post above about the prevalence of lemons on Tinder. I also think mass media has gotten somewhat worse, with crappy romance setting ever-more-unrealistic expectations. And I'm going to guess it's something of an interplay between the two with a large dollop of men being worse because they have the distraction of gaming and porn.
Women think they are entitled to a better match than they 'actually' are, but can get a one night-stand with a hot guy, because Tinder enables that, so they never revisit their expectations. That hot guy is a dick (which is why he's still dating and not in a committed relationship), so they double-down on 'guys suck'.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I watched it, it's fairly short and enjoyable, but it's almost entirely preaching to the choir, I find. There wasn't really any support for helping de-program the other side. (The factoid about prison rape was new and interesting for me though).
Most interesting was the very first slide, where he says the dictionary definition of a feminist ("wanting to men and women to be treated equally") is wrong, in that almost all men agree with this, but only 1/3 of men consider themselves feminists. He instead proposes (paraphrasing) feminists think that "men are treated unfairly better than women" and notes that essentially all feminists would agree with it, but most non-feminists (including ones who agree with the dictionary definition) would disagree.
The rest is kind of the classic stuff -- men die on the job more, are affected by violent crime more, commit suicide more, the pay gap is BS, the "women are wonderful" effect etc. He notes how no one sees anything wrong with the Ukraine not letting any men between 16-60 out, which is a powerful contemporary datapoint.
It's also nice that he notes he wrote this book for his daughter, because he sees the feminist ideology leading to self-pity, antipathy, and injustice, which he sees as bad, and also that he briefly explores why he thinks it so popular, which he sympathetically phrases as "If so many people disagree with me, why do I think I'm right?"
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
100% Most conservatives also agree, but, stereotypically, see it as the church helping widows and orphans.
We are a rich society, and I think that behooves us to help the less fortunate. The trick is how much, and doing it in a way that doesn't encourage too much becoming an 'unfortunate'. I think that's a really complex topic, and one, unfortunately that seems hard to talk about.
E.g. I think having decent unemployment insurance and welfare is a net social good, reduces stress, making people more willing to change jobs, and even reducing crime (as you have more to lose). OTOH, it of course incentivizes people who could work, but just don't, which parasitizes society. I don't think you can have the one side without some of the other, and the key to good policy is finding the balance, and ways decrease the bad effects in ways that don't decrease the good effects more.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
FWIW, I think that says more about your world than the larger cultural one. I'm kind of involved in that sector and burning man is barely on the radar.
We're not in the US, which perhaps plays something of a role, but BM seems more known for drugs, garage creative, and rich folk cosplaying as creative.
I agree there's a lot of creativity there, but I don't think it's made it out much into the larger world.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I think the bigger difference is willing to engage with what makes good or bad science. Scientism, as you call it, just get religious again "believe the Science" (with a capital 'S') but only if it's things I agree with and a study I support, not if it's, e.g. personality differences between men and women, or ... just about anything to do with Covid...
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
FWIW, I didn't think this was a low-effort sneer, and I thought it was very much relevant and on-topic for what the person brought up. It's the core criticism.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
You kind of give the impression that you're playing at ignorance, but to address the "but IQ test must be easily learnable", I'll point you towards various standardized tests (SATs, GREs, MCAT, LSAT). They are incredibly important for getting into various schools, and people fight very hard to get to those schools. While training courses exist, they generally don't do much, and if it were as easy as you seem to think, everyone would have 100% anyway.
Seriously, have you ever taken a standardized test? Did you ace it? If not, do you think it's only because you couldn't be bothered?
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
People are never exactly the same. Standards are lowered. As the pressure rises on recruiters, the scales are pushed on ever harder. And typically, for the good jobs, you're punishing people who didn't benefit from their 'privilege' (more than their peers) and rewarding people who never suffered.
Competence matters, and it's hurting.
And really, come on -- you've seen the 300 pts on the SAT and the 80% of Berkeley professors being pitched on the diversity statement. Hell, we had the supreme court justice primarily selected on her identity. Apparently the question wasn't if a black woman would be taken, it was which one. It's not just tie-breakers, it's nowhere close, even if that were meaningful.
In a sense, it really is a motte and bailey, to harken back to the sub/site's name -- the motte is "when things are exactly equal, it's a small tie-breaker to help out" and the bailey is 300 points on the SAT and men being on 40% of college graduates, but women are the victims because there are still a few majors where there are more men.
The-WideningGyre
8mo ago
Agreed. I wouldn't say I'm hopeful yet, but I just visited with some very historically progressive friends in CA, and all were sort of hinting at things having gone too far, which I don't think they ever would have dared to do a year ago.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Well, for one, the statistics I've seen for divorce is that there is a very large class difference. My first result of a Google search was this that says overall only 30% of middle and upper class couples get divorced, 41% of the working class, and 46% of the poor (which also disagree with 50% overall).
Result #3 says the overall divorce rate is 44%. It also notes many professions (including SW devs) have a divorce rate around 20%.
Aella's readers are a very non-representative sample. Perhaps not quite as non-representative as the lobby of a divorce lawyer, but not too much worse, IMO, and yes, selling very skewed data as representative data is worse than NO data, IMO.
The-WideningGyre
11mo ago
There is occasional hand-wringing, but no actual changes to, e.g. scholarships. And they can always find a few majors that are mostly men, and hold that up as a reason to keep discriminating.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
I think there's the significant point that the job of person making a poll on sexual satisfaction with partners is offering sexual satisfaction as a non-partner. Yes, maybe he could have used another word, but the point was (primarily) to draw attention to that.
The-WideningGyre
1yr ago
Minor note: for me "to go Dutch" means to split the bill, not to avoid paying. I guess in the sense of date your phrasing fits too.
Jack Reacher was fairly good, I thought. Not woke at all, and pretty good action.
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