Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
19d ago
The argument was incomplete. It's not the use of unrapeable in isolation that's making the threat. It's the contrast between that section and the other sections. If you made a tier list of food, put dog-kidney pie in "inedible" and all the other dog meats in the other not-inedible sections, it would imply you consider other preparations of dog meat acceptable to eat.
To draw up a situation where the courts would find someone at fault for doing like this, consider a Mafia boss writing a list containing categories like "deal with soon" and "not to be killed" and handing it to a made man. Then, a few weeks later, some of the people under "deal with soon" are dead. This would be evidence connecting the boss to the crime, even though the literal interpretation of the list is that it never listed anyone to be killed, only those to not be killed.
but treating a group of posh high school boys as if they were seriously contemplating violent rape
The reason it should fail is because the threat is non-credible, and being done in private, couldn't have been used to coerce anyone.
So, two years on, how are things going for the galaxy’s least heteronormative entry in the franchise after a BILLION dollar marketing campaign?
We’ll let the Bookscan figures speak for themselves:
If it weren't for the alleged billion dollar marketing campaign those would be decent sales for these books. Like, what figures were they expecting? The average traditionally published book gets in the low thousands of sales (and the median, worse). All the books listed here range from very good sales to mediocre but still acceptable sales. We can't tell the exact deals offered, but at a fairly typical 10% royalty per book, Daniel José Older would have gotten $39k from Midnight Horizon, and at the rate he writes he'll be making a fairly decent income from this. (I don't know the exact details of what sort of contract you'd get for this work, however. I imagine writing books for an established franchise like this will involve more payment up front, less royalties.)
Tophattingson
11mo ago
why people who apply razor skepticism to anything approaching a mainstream view would be so inanely credulous of random shit grifters say on the internet is beyond me.
In my case it's quite simple. The mainstream had the power to falsely imprison me with lockdowns and did so repeatedly through 2020 and 2021. The random shit grifters did not and largely wouldn't want to. To make things slightly less personal, the amount of damage the failings of the mainstream does is orders of magnitude greater than anything their opponents can do.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
If I had told you ahead of time that we can't trust the experts on an upcoming pandemic, would you see me as going too far?
No, because that lesson was already available from the Swine Flu pandemic. What would be less believable is just how far beyond the pale that so-called experts would go. That countries would forcibly imprison their entire populations over a spicy cough and get away with it (with their reputations intact, no less) would have seemed like bad satire in 2019.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
I don't think the mirror image argmument of supporting the Confederacy's aims of independence but objecting to the Davis administration would hold much water anywhere.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
Putting Belarus above Ukraine in 2020 in terms of human rights just due to Ukraine being influenced by Western COVID-policies, and implementing lockdowns, while Belarus' leader doing absolutely nothing and advising his people to drink vodka in order to protect themselves from COVID leads to some interesting paradoxes. You'll get African dictatorships above Denmark.
Interesting? Yes. Paradox? No. Tanzania did rank above Denmark for human rights in 2020. It's pretty hard to be worse for human rights than imprisoning everyone. I guess Pol Pot's omnicide attempts are clearly worse, to give at least one example?
God created all people in his image, and your belief in God and your obligation before other human beings is not dependent on whatever left-wingers or establishment in your country do or say. I'm not religious, but I'm a moral universalist, and death of Russians, Ukrainians, and Americans is equally tragic. American right-wingers, who often emphasize their religiosity, do not consider suffering of people in Haiti, Russia, Ukraine, China, or wherever — explicitly.
I think my comments preferring places as far-flung as Sweden and Tanzania to my own country (and countrymen) should make it clear that I do take a universal approach.
Catturd2 is a piece of shit, but I still will have moral obligation to save him if I'll see him drowning. Radical in-group ethics is evil, but I understand that some people might disagree.
The difference here is that I was metaphorically drowning and, worse than merely not being helped, the majority of people around me hoped I'd drown harder. There is a point at which charity becomes doormattery, and caring for people who overwhelmingly wanted to harm me is the latter.
And yes, I donate much of my salary to charity, so I put my money where my mouth is.
I would donate more to charity if I felt there were charities that were reasonably working towards their goals. I was much more likely to donate to charities pre-2020, before most of them revealed themselves to be nigh-fraudulent by refusing to challe nge lockdowns. To provide an anecdote from when this place (or was it /r/slatestarcodex, don't quite remember) was back on reddit, we once had someone approach the subreddit soliciting donations for a charity that operates on a native american reservation to help with malnutrition. We quickly found out, after some questioning, that the cause of their economic plight was not just generic poverty, but that the government of the reservation had imposed lockdowns on it. The charity refused to challenge the actual cause of the malnutrition. Me and some other people basically said we'd donate to an org willing to help with the actual problem if such an org exists but the proposed charity ain't it.
Tophattingson
10mo ago
The careful consideration of even minor interventions with negligible potential harms like this by medical ethics always struck me as admirable. As for why this was discussed for dementia patients and not parenting, I think medical ethics simply cared way more about the details of what they were doing. There's nothing fundamental stopping a similarly detailed childraising ethics field from existing, but it just doesn't.
All this makes it even sadder that medical ethics completely jumped the shark in 2020 and thoroughly discredited itself as a field in doing so.
Tophattingson
4mo ago
Between covid bankrupting hard-left claims about uplifting the poor and promoting civil liberties, and the racism of the antisemites bankrupting hard-left claims of opposing racism, I think I have a good understanding of why these intellectuals should, and are, switching sides. It's basically the same reason I did, just much later (for the former, I figured that out in 2020, not 2022. For the latter, Corbyn already revealed this among UK progressives in 2015-2019). I would be most interested in hearing a steelman over why these intellectuals should not switch sides. Has anyone attempted that, or are articles responding to them all just tribalism?
Tophattingson
10mo ago
Medical ethicists continue talking because doctors and hospitals listen.
The events of the past few years would suggest otherwise.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Agreed. But it at least lets us skip any debates about determinism. It has already been demonstrated wrong. The absence of determinism isn't actually useful for identifying free will, however.
Tophattingson
7mo ago
MMT does not fit with the other two, because it was explicitly arguing against the economic consensus, and the economic consensus ended up being correct.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
Comparing the badness of various problems to COVID isn't a meaningful basis for a response because the response to COVID wasn't driven by how bad it is.
The short version is that I believe that there are multiple basic human intuitions that are simply missing from the modern secular liberal mindset/worldview.
This is the topic of The Righteous Mind and Moral Foundations Theory, which suggests that people have Care, Fairness, Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values. Liberals are more sensitive to Care and Fairness, whereas conservatives equally mix all five. Thus Haidt suggests a blind spot where liberals can struggle to understand conservatives when they make a judgement on the basis of Loyalty, Authority or Sanctity, but conservatives are still able to understand liberals when they make a judgement on Care or Fairness.
On the other hand I disagree with that. Liberals do still have those values in there, and can express them just as strongly if not stronger than Conservatives. They just need an unusual nudge to do so. Covid was one of those moments where Loyalty, Authority and Sanctity values dominated Liberal moral decisionmaking.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
And they seem to be saying this without any reflection on the past, where conservatives they hate, like Ben Shapiro and others, have been warning everyone of the same trend for basically two decades, at least since the early years of Bush Jr’s presidency.
I've previously commented on this pattern where even relatively moderate left-wing commentators will refuse to acknowledge when conservatives have been right about something even while they agree with them. It's strange. I don't know how to describe being so overwhelmingly certain in your own beliefs that you refuse to consider the possibility you were wrong about conservatives on a topic even as you simultaneously switch to agreeing with them. The only guess I have is that young, politically active progressives have a uniformity of political views that simply doesn't exist in any other large political group within society, which there is some weak evidence for in the UK.
Tophattingson
5mo ago
Operation Menu, which targetted North Vietnamese incursions into Cambodia, was incredibly limited in scope and number of bombs dropped. Operation Freedom Deal, the far larger campaign, focused its bombing on the Khmer Rouge.
And once the Khmer Rouge came to power the US was pretty hands-off toward it,
Perhaps the problem is that the US didn't bomb them hard enough, then? The US stopped when there was no longer any alternative government left to defend because the Khmer Rouge had seized the capital and started slaughtering its occupants. Another oddity - why is the Khmer Rouge strengthened by being bombed but their opponents are not strengthened when the Khmer Rouge massacres them? And why were they not strengthened when Vietnam conquered them either?
It's not necessarily about a public apology, but rather admitting where the 'new' idea you are bringing in comes from. Something akin to "This is an idea that's been popular in right wing circles for a long time, and I think there's something we can learn from those ideas." There's a difference to suddenly saying you believe that college students have been indoctrinated to hate Israel as if it's an idea that came out of the void, and saying while also noting that some right-wing commentators have been banging that drum for years.
The right wing seems much more willing to take ideas from the left while acknowledging the origin of them, whereas left wing will take the ideas sometimes but without acknowledging the origin of them. Not that I have stats on it, of course.
From my own political experience, this topic does cut across partisan lines. Seeing antisemitism firsthand when I went to university was a moment of "mugging by reality" that made me pull out of the reflexively in, hip, progressive left-wing whatever you want to call it that most people of that age group in higher education automatically gravitated towards. It's one of the three major experiences that formulated my political beliefs.
Tophattingson
2d ago
I wonder if this series will eventually cover the Tiflis bank robbery under "thuggery", because the number of people the Bolsheviks managed to kill in a single bank robbery is quite astonishing.
Tophattingson
5d ago
It seems to me that every single one of your arguments again places a convenient cutoff point on history.
I quite deliberately mentioned that you can keep finding earlier original wrongs. "repeat this process for pre-1948 wrongs". The point is that the origin mentioned by OP is definitely incorrect because these earlier wrongs exist.
The 1948 war was preceded by massive Jewish immigration into Palestinian lands
Massive immigration fits most of Europe and Europeans are generally not considered to be entitled to commit random acts of violence.
terrorism by armed groups representing it,
Same.
and them leveraging their ties to the international community to secure support for plans that already amounted to mass expropriations of Palestinians
The housing crisis in many major cities in Europe has this same de facto outcome.
The particular reason why Palestinians are more entitled to engage in unrestrained terror tactics than these groups is that they have been subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously.
And this would also apply to Israelis, who also believe that they were subjected to unrestrained terror tactics first and continuously. So once again we end up with no special reason why Palestinians are uniquely entitled to do this.
Tophattingson
1mo ago
That's true for you, and people like you. IE, male gamers with good reaction speeds and visual logic skills.
Yes, and a game that's an 8 or 9 on the scale is still even harder than dark souls for journalists too. There's no point cramming most of gaming into the top 3 points on 10 point scale just because the average Journalist is performing at a 3/10 level.
Also, for what it's worth, my visual reaction speeds aren't particularly great. I am terrible at fighting games and fast-paced shooters. Sim Racing is something I'm good at because reaction speeds matter a lot less than you'd expect, precision and repetition is more important, and we get the advantage of force feedback.
I was watching a livestreamer recently, and she was trying to beat one of the old mario games. And just was dying, over and over again
I have previously heard a variety streamer describe why they sometimes seem like inattentive amateurs on stream even if they're good at their go-to games. Their mental capacity is focused more on audience interaction than getting to grips with a new game.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
In order to have the type of free will we want, determinism has to be false. That is, for a given fixed state of the universe (i.e. reality as a whole, both the physical and whatever non-physical components you believe in), there have to be multiple other possible states that could follow afterwards.
Materialist science already answered this question. Multiple possible other states can follow from a single fixed state as described here.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
Do I have to beat my usual drum again? Fine.
I find Hanania is being very uncharitable to the right, and buying into an essentially progressive framing of the world.
I agree. He's just buying into it in a deeper way than you even imagine. A terminally online way, where people arguing about niche topics supposedly disrupts normalcy and is therefore maximally uncool. But is this actually relevant? If you want maximal normalcy, should you follow Hanania's advice?
When it comes to attacks on normalcy and normal life, forget Republicans arguing about sports and Democrats arguing about Trans people. Forget that an orange man and a dementia man are competing to be president. The amount of time either matters for anyone's normal, daily routine is <1% of their life. You know what did matter for seriously disrupting normal life?
Covid restrictions.
Every other policy or political event is a rounding error for your life in comparison. And for these restrictions, Democrats consistently sided against normalcy. Whether it be demanding that people wear weird clothing, sit in weird arrangements, attend or not attend certain places at certain times with certain people etc etc, and none of it was normal. The majority of political decisions affect very few people. Arguments about drug law only affects drug users, arguments about violent crime affects only the criminals and the victims. But masks? Business closures? School closures? Vaccine mandates? Each of these is broadsiding a huge swath of the population with anti-normalcy. And a few rants about WWE or NFL or Taylor Swift is never going to be equivalent to that.
Tophattingson
6mo ago
How many people actually have the will power to resist their sexual urges
Is your suggestion that the majority, or even a large minority of people have failed to resist their sexual urges and are rapists?
And, I note that you provide no evidence for any of your claims.
Here's a source on the difference in how crimes are rationalised between rapists and child predators.
Child sexual abusers display deficits in information-processing skills and maintain cognitive distortions to deny the impact of their offenses (e.g., having sex with a child is normative; Hayashino, Wurtele & Klebe, 1995; Whitaker et al., 2008). In contrast, rapists display distorted perceptions of women and sex roles, and often blame the victim for their offense (O Ciardha, 2011; Polaschek, Ward & Hudson, 1997). With respect to affect, child sexual abusers assault to alleviate anxiety, loneliness and depression. Rapists typically assault as a result of anger, hostility and vindictiveness (Polaschek, Ward & Hudson, 1997). Many of these characteristics have been incorporated into the typologies of rapists and child sexual abusers (Camilleri & Quinsey, 2008; Groth, 1979; Knight & Prentky, 1990).
Tophattingson
11mo ago
and to anti-lockdowners, I guess, "when they didn't ask our opinion"? "When it wasn't in response to anything I personally did"? Maybe you can clarify.
Arbitrary imprisonment is defined by imprisoning people who have not committed or are not suspected of committing a crime. This is because totalitarian regimes can always present a reason to imprison someone that correlates with an external reason. They are a political dissident, they disagree with the government, they are nebulously dangerous etc. The problem is that these reasonings are illegitimate deployments of the state's power, clearly being used only to perpetuate it's power rather than for the purposes we allow the state to imprison people (some combination of protect/rehabilitation/justice for victims).
The word invokes "literally no correlation with any external reasons other than 'we said so'"
Lockdowns are still this to me. There was no correlation with any external reason. There was no evidence base for lockdowns prior to them being carried out. There is still no evidence base for lockdowns. Therefore I do not believe states did lockdowns for the reason they claimed they did so.
The majority of non-libertarian conceptions of the state, and even many libertarian ones, view legitimate states as a transaction. We give up some things in return for an organisation that will, ultimately, serve us in return. Taxes are expected to pay for services from the government, not simply fatten the president's wallet (that we specifically call the latter corruption or embezzlement should hint at that). Police are expected to protect civilians from criminals, not protect the government from disagreement. Prisons are expected to house criminals, not political opponents.
In 2019, someone who doesn't want the government to put everyone under house arrest on a dubious whim was called a person. In 2020, they're called a libertarian.
Tophattingson
11mo ago
As is usual I disagree with all the major factions involved. The most likely place to find any risks associated with COVID vaccines is in the delivery mechanism and how this necessarily functions differently from the virus, not in the spike protein.
For Pfizer that delivery mechanism is a payload that codes for the spike protein encased in a lipid nanoparticle. This causes two differences from how getting covid works. The first and most obvious is the lipid nanoparticle itself. The second, much less frequently noted but probably more important, is that the lipid nanoparticle can deliver the payload to a different distribution of cells than OG covid. This is enough to put forward a plausible hypothesis for a very wide range of side effects, though the key word here is hypothesis.
To make a comparison to something that's probably more clear-cut, the AstraZeneca heart issue risks (which US anti-vaccine commentary missed because that vaccine was never deployed in significant numbers in the US) are likely caused by how it's delivery mechanism, an adenovirus viral vector, interacts with the Coxsackievirus and adenovirus receptor, which is expressed in cardiac muscle and involved in all sorts of heart problems including myocarditis.
Due to me largely being a single-issue anti-lockdown guy at this point, I guess in the US I'd fall in with the "dissident right" even if I disagree with them on the majority of social issues. To give an example, I back LGBT rights in about the way you'd expect from a progressive but I can't back progressives in their current form because the end result of lockdownism is everyone, including LGBT people, equally having no rights. You can't claim to support LGBT rights and simultaneously criminalize sex).
So Russia... Fuck Russia. They too are a lockdownist regime, and I equally want Putin's head displayed on the end of a pike as I do the average prog. The place I differ is that I also want most western leaders heads lined up alongside his. Hence my stance on the war is that I hope both sides lose. Both sides losing probably requires that Russia lose first, because I don't see a route where a Russian victory leads to uprisings against Putin but a Ukrainian victory probably has Zelensky get turfed out in a few years if recent Ukrainian history is anything to go by.
There is a hypothetical world in which Russia are indeed liberating Ukraine from it's vile regime. The problem, of course, is that this isn't the actual circumstance. Belarus would have a slightly better case to make, as one of the few countries that avoided lockdowns, I'd at least give Lukashenko the time of day if he invaded Ukraine in 2020 to liberate Ukrainians from their regime - it would at least be a coherent cause. Even if Russia invaded the UK, I might defect to them just for the opportunity to get justice for the crimes that the British regime has committed against me, but it would be no more than pure opportunism on my part. But what exactly can Putin claim to liberate Ukraine from? From one corrupt lockdownist oligarchy to another? How utterly pointless.
The most notable form of repressions over the last few years were lockdowns, affecting billions. When it comes to how brutal these are, there isn't some vast difference between Russia and the West. Even China has typically behaved more courteously towards those protesting lockdowns than Western regimes have done. And if democracy is meant to be the difference, I wonder what exactly is supposed to be the difference between Putin's machinations and media control to win his elections, and western "mainstream" parties winning via similar censorship and violent attacks on dissidents? We no longer need to speculate. The paper trail of censorship of opponents of lockdowns has been traced back to governments.
But why do some on the dissident right actively support Putin rather than take my burn it all down including Russia approach? I don't think it's quite enemy of my enemy is my friend. It's more appeal to an outside power. Like cosmic intervention. Desperately hoping they'd swoop in to save the day. Just like far-left dissidents wanted the USSR to do during the cold war, or e.g. anti-Putin protesters in Russia sometimes want NATO to do. It's a cry for help because they do not see any way to depose their regime without external assistance. Which I reject, because I don't think Putin would replace their regime with what they want. Sweden, though? They can nuke me whenever they feel like it. Drone me harder Tegnell.
The social contract to not act in maximally selfish ways is broken, and the dissident right have a good claim that they aren't responsible for breaking it.
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