Titus_1_16
10mo ago
The same way that gay liberation did a number on close male friendships (ie made them more difficult to cultivate and maintain), trans emancipation has been strictly negative for masculine women (who of course greatly outnumber MtF transsexuals)
Titus_1_16
10mo ago
People who get eye contact wrong come off as autistic, because it's a classic symptom of autism. But they can get it wrong by having too much or too little.
The correct amount of eye contact varies by culture. New Yorkers make remarkably little, and Irish tend to make quite a lot. I was showing a crew of New York Jews around Dublin last year for a wedding, and the eye contact differential was striking
Titus_1_16
9mo ago
Far-right insulting term for blacks. Comes from some case in the US South a while ago where a black jogger was shot. I think it's popular because the last four letters are G-G-E-R
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
What did Jefferson mean by inferior in "body"?
Probably aesthetically. Enslaved people tend to look pretty wretched. Also, this might not be obvious to a person from a multiracial country, but if you're not exposed to them very much, people of other races can seem kind of generally gross. Witness eg Chinese people encountering bodily hairiness in the flesh for the first time - they're often repulsed. Or, non-African men (for whom women's hair is a site of eroticism) encountering precolonial African women, for whom the hair on one's head was no more a locus of beauty than the skin on one's elbow.
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
Fair play
Titus_1_16
8mo ago
The average person with that title on LinkedIn (and by extension Hinge) is literally one step (or no step) above a ‘hustle’ crypto influencer and hangs around their city’s startup coworking scene selling ‘networking services’ and asking for 5% in exchange for ‘marketing and connections’
Roman criminals weren't nailed this hard my god
Titus_1_16
7mo ago
Poland in full war mode would likely crush Russia.
What on Earth makes you think that? Is this a typo?
Titus_1_16
7mo ago
Twitter is a lot more crass than this place, it's like putting your mouth right on the tap.
I know the answer is always to curate one's feed, but it's hard to stop the low content creeping in on twitter
Titus_1_16
7mo ago
It's amusing in a post talking about translation and language prowess that you've actually made a (very common with Americans) grammatical error.
if I would evaluate people by the content I find on the social media, I'd be forced to conclude that the vast majority of humanity are complete utter morons.
This should be either "if I evaluated" or "if I were to evaluate", since it forms a subordinate clause to the second conditional, if you're interested. Mistakes of this form are nearly guaranteed with Dutchmen, which I always find interesting because their English is otherwise near-perfect, and typically more orthodox than the average, say, Brit.
Titus_1_16
7mo ago
That's super interesting, have you ever been to Europe? There's a lot that's distinct about White Americans (the capitalisation makes sense here to draw attention to the group, they're not just Americans who happen to be white) compared to other Euro nations. If I'm to trade in unkind European characterisations, White Americans can be a bit insincere, plastic and not-quite-there. Maybe "hollow" would be a better term than "plastic", actually.
I wonder if these traits are what you noticed; "automaton-like" is not a bad match for this set of traits
Titus_1_16
7mo ago
And I strongly suspect the 'people see more child porn so they want to offend more' effect is either nonexistent or tiny
I eh, disagree emphatically with your suspicion. If cp doesn't make people into more vigourous paedophiles, then we have to assume also assume the whole wild explosion of paraphilias and perversion that's come out in the past 20 years has just, by remarkable fluke, happened to co-incide with the ubiquity of online porn. I don't think the evidence supports that position, and I think wider availability of cruelty-free fairtrade child porn would likewise increase paedos' appetite for real-world abusing.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
the above are just a few years ahead of the rest of us. If we survive the singularity then we, too, will spend our lives on our little reservations, everything provided from above
It's worth considering that the rickety, shitey-arse state of many reservations etc. is as much the result of incompetence, indifference and bad faith from conquerors, as it is the inherent fecklessness of indigenes. Perhaps a hyper-competent, hyper-intelligent robot overlord would simply provide a better standard of reservation.
Competently-administed mandatory eudaimonia would actually be a wise policy on the part of any hypothetical roboking that was disinclined towards genocidal eradication. To keep humans in a sub-par state of flourishing would mean less predictability - there's always the chance of some freak behaving who-knows-how. Having all the decorative/ethically-sourced humans in a state that is the absolute pinnacle of human excellence means you can plan accordingly, and the odd freak won't "hop the fence" so to speak.
Even that practical concern aside, I think an AI inclined to keep us would probably keep us well. And for the humans, this is a life at least as fulfilling as that experienced by all the chaps in the old testament, in Greek myth, etc - a life of challenge, overseen by known gods. Not too bad really.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
I think until such time as Israelis stop kvetching to Germans about the Holocaust, Palestinians can be permitted to protest their subsequent territorial expropriation.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Personally I think a 50 year limitation seems fair.
Do you agree that Israel should stop accepting their annual "sorry" payments from the German government, pursuing old men who were Nazis, etc?
It strikes me that it's basically impossible to make proper restitution for millions murdered, but relatively easy to make whole someone that's had their land connived and stolen away from them. If anything, all the Israeli schmaltz and guilt about WW2 should stop well before the Palestinians give up on regaining their rightful homes.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Both are in restitution for evils that are older than the state of Israel, ie well past your 50 year rule. If the Paelstinian cause has exceeded some statute of limitation, it follows that WW2 and all its attendant evils has passed also.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Not negligent per se; let's just say they didn't sincerely prioritise the flourishing of those they hadn't the heart to murder.
Suppose for example I'm the governor of some territory with a load of indigenes and colonists. Even if I set aside a physical space for the indigenes and make some financial allowance for basic medical treatment and what-have-you, there just aren't enough men or dollars or hours in the day to really ensure the indigenes' flourishing.
An AI will only be able to conquer and master humanity if it is significantly more capable than us. Consider how we might expect, say, a mediaeval army versus a modern polity to care for spare people in their charge. Now consider than any humanity-beating AI would be far more competent than a modern state, and by a much greater degree than the modern state outclasses some mediaeval horde.
I think an AI good enough to beat us could also husband us well without breaking a sweat.
I don't think it's true that a purposeless life need be as squalid as those of many modern indigenes - many perfectly nice and even quite good lives don't have any purpose that's apparent to their possessors. And honestly, life in divine obedience to a real machine God seems at least as purposeful as any of the religions of the book. I reckon it would beat "modern hedonistic self-actualisation" too.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Right, so the AI creates busywork for humanity.
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Sorry, that was a failure to convey tone correctly on my part - I agree with the busywork proposal, I wasn't being facetious. Perhaps some holy commandments like an obligation to pray x number of times per day etc
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Okay I'll bite on the pictures: the first, more attractive, woman is the nice one who wrote the Slate piece, and the second woman is the one that wrote "Cat Person".
Titus_1_16
6mo ago
Standard physiognomy win, nice
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
You might not believe this, but he's not.
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
It was a bunch of people writing books at the same time.
What's the difference between that and an intellectual movement?
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
modern democracy is much more actually democratic than Athenian democracy
The Athenians took the word "democracy" to mean one thing, and modern Western politicians take it to mean [almost anything they want]. It's small-minded to claim one particular state of affairs is more "democratic" than another - very many political system can fairly lay claim to the term.
It's a defensible position to describe as "democratic" any that involves a reasonable number of people voting on what's to be done/whom to rule them.
Beyond those bare bones, it's like arguing which of Louisiana and Utah is the more American, or Pentecostalism and Anglicanism is the more Christian. Ie, a futile endeavour to rile up true believers
Titus_1_16
5mo ago
An interesting specification here:
a pretty (by conventional Western standards) blonde lead
Is the detail in the brackets really necessary? Is there really any hetrosexual man who wouldn't, in his heart of hearts, grant that this woman is at least "pretty"?
I mean perhaps there are some freaks who'd demur - but they'd simply be wrong. This is "pregnant people" hair-splitting.
If the word "pretty" means anything, and if there are any moral/æsthetic truths at all, then it's just simply true that this actress is "pretty".
Yeah she's quite pretty, looks well for her age
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