Voyager
2mo ago
I'm a man, I would consider myself having high libido, and still I have noticed more than once that a female acquaintance becomes more sexually attractive as I get to know her better as a person. And from what I've heard, men in general are attracted to women they love.
Perhaps "romantic/personal attraction enhances sexual attraction" is somewhat universal for humans, and a lower baseline libido just makes the effect more pronounced.
Voyager
2mo ago
DoDA works on everyone; as I think Sluggy Freelance points out, levitate someone out a high window (perhaps after disarming them) and they're as dead as if you used the killing curse.
This is even made explicit in the books themselves at one point: Harry defends his use of Expelliarmus in a broom chase by pointing out that Stunning them will make them fall from their brooms and kill them just as well.
"Harry, the time for Disarming is past! These people are trying to capture and kill you! At least Stun if you aren’t prepared to kill!"
"We were hundreds of feet up! Stan’s not himself, and if I Stunned him and he’d fallen, he’d have died the same as if I’d used Avada Kedavra!"
Voyager
2mo ago
I wasn't really intending it as a steelman. I was trying to describe what I think are the actual motivations and mindsets of the donators.
Yes, it's emotive. They want to defend someone who's being attacked and stand up to "bullies". If my post gave you the idea it was a coordinated strategy motivated by cold calculations about cost-effective activism, that wasn't my intention.
Imagine them less like western leaders approving budgets and shipments and more like the people who donated to ukrainian forces to get custom messages written on grenades. (Notice the similarity to people leaving spicy messages with their donations?) It's about wanting to support the fight.
How do you prevent the people to get into similar situations just for the payout?
The desired outcome for the donators is that leftists see that trying to cancel people as racists no longer destroys them when the victim instead get lots of money, stop doing so, and therefore no one gets into those situations anymore (i.e. no viral shitstorm happens when people say "nigger"). Similar to how, althouth it strains the comparison, the West is hoping that Putin realizes that invading another country is not worth it because of the support they'll be getting.
Whether that outcome is achievable is of course a different question.
Voyager
2mo ago
No, you "deserve" wages for doing your job. Which is roughly ("deserve" still hides a lot of complexity here) the modal case for giving money to someone: You pay them for something you want.
My point is that this is a different situation: Hendrix isn't being paid to say this, she is being supported against an attack.
Voyager
3mo ago
Wouldn't surprise me if lives were already lost from black parents losing trust in white doctors or similar effects, just not in a legible way.
Voyager
4mo ago
It’s practically axiomatic that civilization requires (and arguably is) the control of young men.
Fundamentally, civilization is the control of violence.
Which naturally requires control of young men, both in that they're likely to use uncontrolled violence otherwise and that they're main tools for controlled violence.
Voyager
2mo ago
This isn't a steelman. A steelman defends a position on its object level merits and makes no claim on the actual motivations of the supporters. But this is "they oppose this because they suspect bad motives from Trump", explicitly framed in terms of motivations.
A steelman would be "here are some arguments for a principled immigration policy that would reject Afrikaners and allow [groups the episcopalians had no objection to]". But after all, this discussion isn't primarily about the object level policy, it's about double standards/racism. "They are actually objecting to perceived double standards/racism" on the other side is a defense of the people involved.
If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it
That might be a true factor, but if it were the entire reason, it would predict that people make no distinction between buildings that were built before they were born - after all, can't be exposed longer than your life.
That would surprise me and doesn't appear to be in evidence.
An architectural example is the Eiffel Tower that was extremely controversial and hated by many when it was built. Now, it is perceived as an iconic and inseparable part of Paris.
The Eiffel Tower might an icon of Paris - but do Parisians actually consider it beautiful? Compared to, say, the towers of Notre Dame? Or may its impressive and skyline-dominating size, the imposing construction, and the utility as a vantage point more relevant to its popularity?
Voyager
9mo ago
Jerking off in the shower is not sex for the purposes of this topic, because showers can't get pregnant nor impregnate you.
We were talking about abstinence for birth control purposes. Any act that can't produce a baby is still available.
Voyager
2yr ago
Unlike stabbing, choking is a continuous action. If you choke someone out, the expectation is that they will start to recover once they're released. "Choking someone to death" is generally expected to mean holding the choke until they're dead.
So if Penny choked Neely out, but released him before he died, that makes the excessive force and negligence claims much weaker. It certainly sinks any accusations of intent.
If he had punched him out, then he hit his head on the ground when falling and died, "beat him to death" could be said to be technically true, but wouldn't exactly give an audience an accurate picture of what happened.
One can't help but notice that no one was interested in banning people from competing in sports due to biological advantage until the discussion was about trans women.
No, it only appears like it to you because previously there was a consensus matching the status quo, so no one talked about it.
Banning men from women's sports was accepted wisdom, and no one felt any need to disagree, until trans women came around.
You don't see anyone interested in banning teachers from murdering students - because it's already illegal. If Catholic Teachers For Murderism suddenly started arguing they should be allowed to kill students, there would certainly be a lot of disagreement, and not because they're catholic.
Voyager
1yr ago
Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting). HBD is a worse substitute than existing policy frameworks.
HBD isn't a policy tool. It's merely an observation about the world. Standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting are all compatible with HBD, it merely predicts that the results will be racially "disparate".
And since the disparate impact is one of the main arguments against merit-based policies, HBD is relevant as a defense thereof.
Voyager
1yr ago
If the chief of police responds to questions about a rise in sexual assault rates in the city and says 'women should be covering their drinks at bars' and then does nothing else to address the problem through their office, they are blaming victims instead of doing their job.
What does it mean to "do nothing else to address the problem"? What if the police is already doing (or is in the process of starting to do) everything they believe they can reasonably do given the available resources? Should they just sit it out to avoid "victim blaming" when they could give useful advice that helps them do their job and solve the problem? I mean, isn't educating people about safety part of the police's job?
Unless he's facing specific criticism and trying to deflect blame, "here's what you can do to help/protect yourself" doesn't strike me as unreasonable.
Voyager
1yr ago
Since no one has ever demonstrated a statistical advantage in win/loss records and we have weak priors about innate ability, we should assume then null hypothesis for now and let trans women compete.
I disagree. The situation is that normally ineligible people are demanding special allowance, on the basis of arguing that they have a way to nullify the impact of the property that makes them ineligible. The onus is on them to prove that it's really nullified. If we don't know either way, we play it safe.
If they win every contest they ever go to and no one can compete with them, that's probably unfair.
Doesn't need to. If the transwoman only makes 3rd place, then the woman in 4th lost the bronze medal. If that's due to an unfair advantage, that's bad and she was treated unfairly.
There are a trillion local and regional sports records for a trillion things, records get broken literally every day by cis athletes.
But not by mediocre cis athletes.
Hubbard and Thomas perform better than before, by a lot. This shows that transition gave them an advantage.
If we took away entire demographics rights because of 2 anecdotes, we'd be in a lot of trouble as a society.
This isn't a rights issue, there is no right to compete in the women's division with a male body. Cis men don't get to, and no one has a problem with it. The question is whether transwomen should get a special allowance.
Voyager
11mo ago
Should an entire ethnic group be held responsible for the actions of some of its members, many of whom are not even members of the present generation?
This isn't about "holding responsible". It merely means they* should get no claim on what was never rightfully theirs in the first place.
Aside from, as others have pointed out, this being a response to just the same argument in the other direction.
*"they" meaning "the ethnic group". This is assuming an ethnic group may have land claims, but if not, there naturally isn't a claim either.
OP might be speaking from a german perspective. Germany has recently gained a large population of arab/muslim immigrants, whose views on Israel (open celebration of the Hamas attacks) have now opened a new conversation on "do we really want people like that in our country?" The issue has given a clear example of what can be bad about unrestricted immigration, disqualfying unrestricted immigration optimism and validating the points of the right.
It being about antisemitism also means that the normal oppression hierarchy doesn't apply, and that it's harder to dismiss the critics as Nazis, which helps the topic along.
Voyager
1yr ago
I'm not sure if averages will necessarily be enlightening, because we can easily imagine a multimodal distribution. On one hand, transition doesn't necessarily lead to removal of all biological sex differences, on the other it's a medical procedure that can have negative health effects impacting athletic performance. Both seem very plausible.
If, as an exaggerated toy model, transition half of the time does nothing, half of the time completely cripples the patient, we'd observe it averaging out, but half of transwomen would easily dominate.
We don't need to look at averages when we can look at individuals. If we take a specific individual and compare their relative performance before and after, that tells us what transition did in their case. If Lia Thomas or Laurel Hubbard go from average in the male division to record-breaking in the female division, then clearly transition doesn't guarantee to nullify the sex advantage, and therefore shouldn't allow competing in the female division. It doesn't matter if even 90% of transwomen are average and some have health issues - the women competing against Thomas or Hubbard still got robbed.
Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.
Sports divisions are based on biology, and the people in question aren't biologically female. I don't want to play semantics games about what "woman" means, that's missing the point.
Typically the onus is on the person wanting to penalize or exclude someone to provide proof, that's the concept behind 'innocent until proven guilty' and the like.
The proof is easily given though: We have male biology. The burden of proof now shifts to the affirmative defense of "in this case the effects of male biology don't apply".
We have good evidence that male need to be excluded from female competition. We would now need evidence that these particular kind of males do not.
I'm talking about 'unfair' in terms of 'not possible to compete against'.
You're talking about some kind of metaphysical 'fairness' where you have decided that being good at something because you were born male and then transitioned is 'unfair', but being born female and really talented at it is 'fair'.
No, fairness is a function of the game, and if the premise of the game is that male advantages aren't allowed, then any kind of male advantage is unfair. It wouldn't automatically be unfair for a male to compete against a female as long as it's in the open division, however.
They're not mediocre cis athletes. They're exceptional trans athletes.
If they were mediocre trans athletes, then the exceptional trans athletes would have broken their records by even more!
They were mediocre athletes, then they transitioned and became exceptional. This proves that they have an advantage from transition, because they're mediocre on their own talent. This is not just "personal intuition". It improved their ranking, so it gave them an advantage.
Exceptional trans athletes would be exceptional athletes who are trans, like Caitlyn Jenner.
It doesn't affect whether the women's division is a fair and competitive environment, and there's no obvious reason why we should care about it
Allowing certain mediocre athletes to perform exceptionally based on advantages that the division is supposed to exclude is not fair. Competitive is a separate matter.
And the reason we care about excluding it is the same we have women's divisions to begin with.
or, more importantly, why we should restrict people's rights based on it.
Like I told you, there are no rights being restricted, and if you disagree, you should explain which rights are restricted how, not just assert it.
Voyager
1yr ago
"That sounds like a you problem" is also the obvious rebuttal to trans people wanting different pronouns used for them. If (general) you don't respect my psychological comfort, why should I respect yours?
Voyager
2yr ago
That's not how modular arithmetic works: 2+2=4 is still true, it's just that 4=0 mod 4, so 2+2=0 is also true.
Even if your example were true, that would just be notation confusion: The statement commonly meant by 2+2=4 is always true. So if I say 2+2=4 is always true, I'm correct, and if you say 2+2=? and the answer isn't 4 you're just communicating badly by omitting relevant information about the problem statement. In honest conversation this doesn't change anything.
Voyager
1yr ago
How do you think the Hausa or Fulani are likely to respond if an Igbo comes up to them and says that, actually, on account of his people’s average IQ being at least one standard deviation above the Nigerian average, they ought to be in charge of the country and occupy the majority of the top jobs in Lagos and Abuja and so on? How do antisemitic white nationalists respond if you tell them that actually it’s a good thing that Jews are disproportionately in positions of power because we are, in fact, significantly smarter than them on average and that effect is exacerbated in the long tail at IQ 160+ (so we deserve it really)?
But if HBD is true, the Igbo or Jews will disproportionately occupy higher positions, and you need to explain it.
Realistically, the alternative to "we deserve it because we're smarter" is "we don't actually deserve it, we're just oppressing you", which is clearly worse for racial relations.
HBD as a fact of nature is already leading to racial tensions via disparate outcomes. The Hausa or white supremacist are already angry because they don't have positions of power. Discussing that there's a good reason isn't the problem. Denying discussion of the good reason, leaving oppression on the table as the only potential explanation, makes it worse.
Sure, a politically color-blind world, where race is considered about as relevant as hair color and no one cares about racial distributions of anything, would be preferable in practical terms, but that's not the world we live in. And in such a world, HBD could simply be a nerdy niche topic that no one except a few scientists cares about. HBD isn't the problem here.
Voyager
2yr ago
Strangling is continuous, choking isn't (from a wrestling perspective).
A choke has a defined end; which is a tap, unconsciousness, or death.
No, a choke ends when it's released, which can be at any time. What happens afterwards isn't part of the choke.
A choke leads to unconsciousness somewhere between 5 and 15 seconds
That clearly didn't happen here though. Neely was fighting back for much longer.
Holding a choke for 10 minutes isn't excessive if the target is still fighting back at 9:50, just like shooting someone 14 times isn't excessive if the first 13 miss.
Voyager
2yr ago
Even on this forum, I don't often see people mentioning that IQ differences shouldn't imply differences in moral worth -- which suggests to me that many people here do actually have an unarticulated, possibly subconscious, belief that this is the case.
Or perhaps people don't mention it often simply because they consider it uncontroversial, and therefore see no need to repeat it.
It's certainly the case for me - why would I waste time with repeatedly stating it, instead of getting to the meat of the discussion and the actual disagreements? These statements only added if you're worried about being misunderstood otherwise.
In general, it seems fraught to assume that if people don't talk about a certain topic, they must hold a specific position on it - especially a position that is the opposite of a societywide consensus. I rarely see people in here mention that the earth orbits the sun - this hardly suggests they secretly believe in geocentrism.
Voyager
1yr ago
Sure, there’s a difference, but is it really in anyone’s interest to have a society where official organs are first and foremost about sympathy with people who make bad decisions?
No, but even less should they be about further victimizing people who were harmed as a result of foolishly putting themselves into dangerous situations.
Grizzly man will still get first aid after being mauled, possibly while getting chewed out for his stupidity, and if there's triage, he might be last. He will not get a police dog sicced on him "because he deserves it for being dumb about dangerous animals".
A rape victim with a short skirt will not get raped again by the police (or if she does, it would be a scandal of the highest order.)
A man who was falsely accused of rape, however, will have the weight of the law come down on him. This is the proper consequence for a crime, but certainly not for foolishly putting yourself into a dangerous situation.
It's a proxy war, and the donations are foreign military aid.
No one thinks Ukraine "deserves" billions worth of military equipment on their own merits. Western supporters believe that they deserve their independence or Russia's invasion deserves to be opposed (either idealistically, to take a stand against offensive wars, or pragmatically, to weaken the geopolitical rival Russia) and weapons shipments are the way to achieve this.
Shiloh Hendrix isn't being given $750,000 as a reward for saying a bad word, she is being given money to defend against the attack on her, which is perceived as unjust and/or as the frontline of a war between tribes. This is both practical ("if we give her money, they can't ruin her life") and symbolic (actual money is a credible signal of support against the moral accusation on her.)
The previous fundraiser for Karmelo Anthony is also revelant here as an initial escalation. If the Evil Empire sends weapons to the Evilist regime in Proxystan, the Coalition of Good needs to match that in support for the Goodist rebels.
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