Voyager
3hr ago
Pragmatically you have to do this. At an international level for instance you can’t give out tourist visas to a Somalian and a Norwegian at the same rate or demographic change would occur.
Colorblindness doesn't require that. You can take a standard for visas that captures what you care about without any reference to race. Only when your policy receives complaints about disparate impact you might need to do invoke HBD.
Voyager
14hr ago
Was addressed in a follow-up: https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1949169427062173810
Voyager
8d ago
I fully agree with your point. But I think there's one additional aspect that's present in webfics that isn't found elsewhere, which the social aspect of webfic.
The social aspects of serial releases are the main advantage offsetting the difficulties finding something actually good (Sturgeon's law says "Ninety percent of everything is crap" - for web fiction it's more like 95%, although the cream of the crop is still up there).
If the release is chapter by chapter, you get to discover each step of the story together with everyone. Everything can be discussed, analyzed, theorized together, unlike a normal book you read in one sitting and are only able to share your thought on the final conclusion, not the intermediate steps.
Voyager
11d ago
I was talking about roughly this with some friends recently, and it came up that in some ways post-industrial humans seem to be suffering the same sorts of malaise that zoo animals do. Sure, we have plenty of food and are kept safe, but we've socially isolated ourselves, and many of us are, at a fundamental level, mentally and physically unhealthy. We engage in over-grooming and self-destructive activities. Can't get pandas in captivity to maintain species-wide TFR either.
Related idea: "Humans won't breed in captivity" by Devon Eriksen. https://x.com/Devon_Eriksen_/status/1918506702267175234
Voyager
14d ago
I will say, though, that I think leftwing and liberal attitudes about sex and race have created very fertile grounds for being preyed upon by fabulists.
Yes. The problem isn't liars, liars will always exist. With healthy scepticism and verification procedures, you can mitigate the damage they do. The problem is that when your culture considers questioning certain claims anathema, you're systemically unable to deal with liars who exploit this.
Voyager
16d ago
To be fair, a hot male physique* is generally thought to imply physical prowess, and something you can work on by improving your physical prowess.
So Git Gud is both possible and instrumentally useful beyond hotness, but a woman who is already in a healthy weight range can do much less, and it's unclear what purpose it would serve beyond attracting men.
- Or what straight men consider to be one, in any case, I gather there are claims that women don't actually find the super muscular type that attractive.
Voyager
22d ago
I don't think it fits in that case though. No one rejects the statement "Black Lives Matter" as "unacceptable" or "completely wrong". Sceptics agree (at the very least pretend to) with "black lives should matter", but not with the implication of "but in current society they specifically aren't treated as such", and therefore their opposition always routes around opposition to the surface level statement.
"All lives matter" is specifically an attempt to state disagreement with the implications and the "gang affiliation" while not disagreeing with the surface statement. The equivalent would be "it's okay to be any skin color" or "it's not just okay to be white, it's a privilege" which would paint over the gang sign just fine if you didn't actually disagree with the surface level statement, but is curiously nowhere to be heard.
Voyager
28d ago
Push nuclear, nuke China and Russia
Anakin: "Nuclear is the solution for climate change."
Padme: "Because it provides reliable carbon-neutral energy, right?"
Anakin: "..."
Padme: "... right?"
Voyager
30d ago
Merz famously voted against criminalizing marital rape in 1997.
This is technically true, but lacking context and very misleading in practice.
There was a general consensus to criminalize marital rape, but disagreement on the details (whether to allow the victim to retract an accusation.) Importantly, a CDU backed proposal to criminalize marital rape had been voted out earlier the same year - so the majority of Merz' political opponents also "voted against criminalizing marital rape". The individual votes for the other proposal weren't tracked, so we don't know Merz' vote, but there's reason to believe he voted in favor (later, he cited the retraction issue as the sole reason for his no vote in the second proposal).
Also, marital rape wasn't actually legal, it just didn't fall under "rape", it would still have been prosecuted under "sexual assault". So strictly speaking, it's not even technically true.
Voyager
1mo ago
What's your evidence for this? Because I don't think you need an agenda to want to set the facts straight, especially if the wrong claim unfairly demonises you.
Declaring something sacred and therefore any opposition to related claims automatically invalid and evidence of bad faith is not valid epistemics. You can be wrong while thinking it's for a good cause, and people can correct you without being motivated by a bad cause. I don't believe in taboos. If the reasons for the taboo are good enough, the position will be able to withstand counterarguments and the taboo isn't needed.
It's not like the age of consent is a law of nature either. In Germany, for example, it's 16 (with the exception of power-imbalanced relationships like teacher/student), and it's a priori not clear that's a worse solution. Or the 17 in some US states. If you want to argue 18 is the right number, that needs to be based on facts, not bulverism.
Voyager
1mo ago
If setting the facts straight "reflects poorly on people", that's a major issue with the conversation that's important to push back against. Pointing out something is incorrect is always a valid addition to the debate, and tabooing the truth is never justifiable.
"An 18 and 16 year old having a sexual relationship should not be discouraged" is one thing. "It is ephebophilia not pedophilia"is quite another and makes it sound like what he really wants is for himself to have sex with 15 year olds without risking punishment.
Or maybe he just doesn't want to be shamed for his perfectly normal sexuality? "It's not pedophilia" is just correct, and implies nothing about what kind of relationship should be appropriate. You can perfectly well be aware that a normal heterosexual man will find 15 year old girls attractive, and this is not inherently a problem, but still think he should wait until she's older, and if he doesn't, then it becomes a problem.
Voyager
2mo ago
As for the space operations of SpaceX, it's not really clear to me what kind of innovation you expect here. In 2025, SpaceX already launched more rockets than the rest of the world combined. They've established a reputation as being cost effective and very reliable, which is great but also means it's hard to drive costs down further or become even more reliable.
They've achieved the cost reductions through partial reuse of rockets, the next step is full reuse via the Starship program, which (although estimates differ) is expected to driver cost down another order of magnitude. Starship has seen lots of R&D investment and appears to be close to deployment.
Voyager
2mo ago
Police are on the scene and they take his self defense claim as legally legitimate and do not arrest or charge him.
If the Wiki article is correct, no. They arrested him "Drejka cooperated with deputies on the scene, and was transported to the North District Station in nearby Dunedin, Florida, for further questioning by detectives", then released him the day after, citing the surveillance video. Meanwhile, the black guy wasn't arrested, but rushed to the hospital. So it's not at all what was wanted.
The question is, were those words the opening, or was there previous interaction that didn't get caught on camera?
Because that seems to me like a strange thing to say to a random passerby, but a natural thing to say to someone who's been trying to intimidate you or picking a fight with you.
Voyager
2mo ago
To be fair, being tribalistic about your literal family is quite natural. I think quite a few people who aren't very tribalistic otherwise would help their literal brother hide a body.
The culture war fodder is that they chose to do so by shouting "racism", which suggests that being too uncritically accepting of racism accusations might let people get away with murder.
Voyager
2mo ago
Even permanently requiring the game to be downloadable may be too much for an individual or small company that has gone bankrupt.
That's not what I was talking about. I was proposing making older versions available alongside the newest, which adresses the specific issue of an update removing content.
If you go bankrupt, your customers get to keep (the offline part of) what they bought, but need to manage it themselves, including getting copies of games they lost when their hard drive broke or older versions they didn't save back then from third parties.
Voyager
2mo ago
Consider the regulation "a software seller cannot disable any offline feature in their client without refunding buyers". Sounds reasonable, right? But what if an indie game developer pushes a balance chance that nerfs an OP character by removing their special ability? What if they remove a poorly-implemented game mode almost nobody was playing? Both of these also sound reasonable, but both can be considered disabling offline features.
Surely that can (and imho should) be easily solved by just keeping the old version available for download? If you enjoy playing the OP character or the unpopular game mode, you can still play it in single player that way. Only if you try to connect to the servers, it tells you "please update your game to the latest version [Update] [Continue offline]".
Voyager
2mo ago
Surely it's their job to check whether the arrest has merit, which includes checking the evidence at least somewhat?
What if the case is entirely fabricated and exhibit A is just a picture of a cute cat? Should the judge rubberstamp that?
Voyager
3mo ago
There are many Western countries that have active drafts (or, like Germany, appear to be considering one). For young men in those countries, the draft is less a fear and more a certainty.
And of course, the Ukraine situation where men are marched to their deaths by the hundreds of thousands, is evidently possible. Even some risk of that should count for quite a lot.
Voyager
3mo ago
Far lower risk of death than what? Especially considering that peacetime may turn into war quite suddenly.
Nevertheless, my point against your original argument stands. Conscription doesn't require immediate threat, so why should childbearing service?
Voyager
3mo ago
So, that's in a country that doesn't actually have active conscription now or anytime soon, so the stakes are low. In countries where conscription is active (or likely to become so in the near future), like Germany, Austria or Switzerland, there's a lot of feminist-rhetoric opposition to draft equality.
Voyager
3mo ago
Solution 3: They're obviously just different things and it's not a double standard to begin with so the idea of a "solution" for fairness doesn't make sense.
It's obviously a double standard: Conscription affects men, there no corresponding duty for women, despite equality under the law being considered very important in other circumstances.
Conscription for everyone or no one would be trivial examples of a fair solution, the status quo isn't fair.
Voyager
3mo ago
The main ethical difference I can see between conscription and 'forced' childrearing is the immediacy of the consequences and the duration of the commitment.
If a nation is faced with an invading force or a war over critical resources and can't front enough manpower into the fight, they will very likely cease to exist. So the country, or perhaps the state the governs it, if it considers preservation of its people a priority, has a strong basis for forcibly recruiting men if there's insufficient volunteers. "If we don't make you fight, then we're all going to die."
So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?
There are many countries that have conscription during peacetime, with varying levels of invasion threat. The difference you refer to doesn't actually exist.
Or you could just give visas to Norwegians freely but scrutinize Somalians, while agnostic to typical somalian skin color.
Use anything from wealth to culture to average IQ (again race agnostic) to previously observed behavior of tourists of the origin country.
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