Westerly
Talk to me on Discord! Westerly#7626
User ID: 316
Westerly
6mo ago
This actually ties in well to that recent overkill conspiracy theory post. Surely the Israelis had to have known the US would figure out they did it, did Egypt even have any airforce left by that point in the war?
If Israel expected the US to figure out they were responsible, they would have to be absolutely confident in American subservience to them, that they would take such an attack lying down. But if they were absolutely confident in American subservience, why do they care if Americans hear about them killing some POWs? Wouldn’t it just be easier to count on American loyalty to look the other way on POW executions, as opposed to relying on Americans to look the other way on sinking their own ship?
Any way you slice it sinking a US warship is more likely to piss off the USA than executing Egyptian POWs. So doing the former to cover up the latter is nonsensical. Classic overkill conspiracy theory
Westerly
1yr ago
I really do not see what is wrong with their wording. Are you saying Politico made some specific diminishing statement that the NYT is trying to weasel their way around with their wording?
Westerly
1yr ago
What would it take to convince you
How about her successfully killing herself on her own, for starters?
Westerly
1yr ago
I may have misread the original comment, but I don’t believe he suggested affirmative action caused BLM, but rather that blank slatism did. And that blank slatism also causes affirmative action
I believe the argument would be like this. Blank slatist observes more black men are shot/killed/imprisoned by police and the justice system. Because of blank slatism the only conclusion can be that this is a result of systemic racism, as opposed to any difference in criminality or violence in the affected populations. This same reasoning is leveraged for affirmative action and BLM: that any different average outcomes can only be the product of racism because of blank slatism.
In my view this is an accurate diagnosis of the faulty reasoning underlying both movements
Westerly
1yr ago
Just out of curiosity, how does this even come up with your psychiatrist?
Westerly
1yr ago
I just had this experience in a discussion with someone, and I saw a pattern or script of responses I’m sure some of you have seen before. Intelligence came up, and I was met with “everyone is unique, with their own unique set of abilities, there is no such thing as intelligence.” [Mention IQ] “Oh, wasn’t that debunked by some studies recently?” [Disagrees] “Well IQ tests are just biased towards rich people that know about regattas.” [Deny the regatta myth] “Well all they are measuring is ability to take IQ tests” etc etc etc
I’m not really expecting to persuade somebody to change their mind, but the feeling of going up against this was so daunting. I just felt like I was going up against a castle built by decades of anti-intelligence messaging, and in a Bayesian sense their priors against the very concept of intelligence were so strong that just nothing I could say would even budge them. How do you respond to this? Probably the answer is just walk away. I’m not even sure what I am looking for since I know persuasion really isn’t on the table, but just how do you respond when this comes up in conversation? The person I was speaking with was extraordinarily civil, and not at all upset by my statements fwiw
Westerly
3mo ago
Does anyone have a link to a sincere presentation of the case for him being a federal agent? Googling it literally only shows references to a “debunked far-right conspiracy theory” but not one genuine presentation of it from a right-leaning source
Westerly
1yr ago
Wouldn’t you get the same feeling volunteering in or contributing to a local kitchen? Or mentoring through Big Brothers/Sisters? Coaching Little League
an affective bias against giving and working where one is
You seem to fundamentally not understand EA. In principle, it is not about hating your local community, it is just that mentoring through Big Brother is hard to justify if you count the life of an African child anywhere near to the value of some kid geographically near you. Even if your mentoring was able to save that kid’s life, that kind of one-on-one volunteering is a highly inefficient use of your time compared with just earning a few extra bucks to buy malaria nets with.
You can spend several hours per week for years as a Big Brother to save one kid, or you could take that time to earn money, donate it towards malaria nets and save many times more (depending on your earning ability).
Now you can say you just don’t care at all about the lives of African kids, which is fair, that’s why I’m not a part of EA. But if you claim to value their lives at all it renders these time-intensive charity efforts like coaching sports highly inefficient
Westerly
1yr ago
If I understand you correctly, this is what you are calling the Phenotypic Null Hypothesis: that a trait being heritable does not mean it necessarily has a direct genetic cause. Particularly relevant to HBD, my understanding is that you might say that blacks scoring lower on tests might be shown to be heritable, but perhaps that could be because of racism. Since blackness is also genetically heritable, if blackness were to cause them to experience racism which causes their test scores to be lower, then this would be a plausible explanation for why low test scores appear to be genetically heritable in blacks, but it would actually be due to blackness being genetically inherited and that causing low test scores through a more indirect means than low intelligence.
That seems plainly reasonable and true so far as I can tell. I think people are perhaps responding to you defensively because this feels like an isolated demand for rigor or weakmanning directed specifically at HBD, without considering the epistemic failings of hardline blank-slatists which are surely even greater. Also I think that showing a trait to be heritable has to count as weak Bayesian evidence at least in favor of a genetic explanation.
Trad macho posturing bullshit like this is always so laughable being posted on a community that is an even less productive use of time than some Minecraft open source project. Say, MeinNameistBernd, shouldn’t you be teaching Sunday School, bodybuilding or reciting Greek poetry right now?
Westerly
1yr ago
Did some notable 9/11 truthers get murdered? Is this alluding to something specific?
Westerly
1yr ago
What is the “community nurse” doing other than “finger wagging about dont drink soda”? Why won’t her words go in one ear and out the other? The fact that people continue smoking despite all the well-known harms and warnings suggests that a mild-mannered suggestion from some obese nurse will have no greater effect. What revelatory information about cigarettes or soda is the nurse going to provide? If you are so stupid as to give your baby soda rather than breast milk nothing can help your baby short of losing custody
Westerly
1yr ago
Seems a fitting illustration of my earlier comment that mentioned the recurring theme of suicidality of leftism and endless, unquestioning affirmation. If you would affirm and aid a teenage girl in cutting her breasts off, why not aid her in committing suicide? Who is to say her desire is invalid? She is just speaking her truth.
In discussing transgenderism in teenage girls, such as in Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage, analogies to other forms of self mutilation like cutting and anorexia are frequently brought up. To those (such as myself) that question gender affirming care, there is the fear that we are effectively engaging in cutting-affirming care. I can easily imagine a future with suicide-affirming “care” for teenagers being the logical endpoint. I can even imagine the arguments like “They are going to commit suicide anyway, you might as well make it legal and as painless as possible” (see: abortion and drug arguments)
Westerly
1yr ago
nomenklatura
Can someone explain why I have seen this word maybe 10 times in the past week but never before in my life? Did some prominent person or blogger use it recently?
Eh I doubt epistemic injury is a factor, I don’t think people think that deeply. Probably a combination of 1) deterrence when other men are around and 2) lies/imagination. As for 2, I’m sure some women are doing the whole “OMG that creeper was totally stalking me” thing. But several women I know not to be fabulists have related to me more instances of creepy behavior when they are alone and it is not unreasonable to assume male presence deters it.
Edit: Isn’t there any woman you trust completely to be honest and accurate on this? My wife hates minorities as much as any motte user but reports harrassment when on her own that I never see
Westerly
1yr ago
We can now see that the incessant fears of “AEO” and “Sneerclub trolls” were always just ways to shut down discussion of certain topics. There is literally nothing to worry about now that we’re no longer on reddit but the accusations haven’t stopped
Westerly
1yr ago
Why does he strike such fear into the heart of rationalists? Just ignore him and downvote
Westerly
6mo ago
Given the wide variation in homosexual practices by culture, it seems pretty evident that cultural pressure/conditioning/therapy/whatever can actually effectively change the sexuality of a significant portion of people
Westerly
1yr ago
That study supports my point. Even among WEIRD urbanites willing to sign up for a study to discuss masturbation habits (which is surely biasing the numbers way upward) only 38% of women masturbated. Now I haven’t read their study, maybe they were ambushing Amish girls and forcing them to discuss their masturbation habits at gunpoint to balance things out, but I assume not.
I’m not saying I have never brushed past a woman at the grocery store who has masturbated. I’m saying that among women that I’ve known well enough to be confident about their masturbation habits, which is around 10 women, the rate is zero.
Given that I probably have some spooky law of attraction thing going on that biases the pool of women that I know, my experience seems eminently plausible given this study.
Westerly
1yr ago
Why does your experience trump mine? OP said every woman he knows owns and talks about sex toys proudly. I said my experience completely contradicts this so it must be a bubble thing. Is this really so hard to imagine given he is the kind of guy who attends sex toy parties? Isn’t it a little bit likely that is evidence his bubble is somewhat skewed on this issue? I have never even heard of such a thing and neither has my wife. If you are attending sex toy parties that probably puts you in the top 5% (just pulling a number out of my ass (definitely in a totally straight way though)) in terms of progressive sexuality.
But now people in the “attends sex toy party” bubble are boldly asserting “No way, every woman you know definitely owns vibrators and masturbates secretly.” It would be equally supported for me to claim “No way, all those women claiming to own vibrators are just lying to you for feminist cred”
For some reason blue tribers have some obsession with claiming that definitely everyone is sexually degenerate/adventurous as they are and any claims otherwise are false/lies/social pressure/shame. Like I said, this is like Kinsey citing outrageously inflated numbers for homosexual activity in men.
Sorry, but what do you find utterly repulsively evil about it?
Edit: To clarify a bit, you never explained what your problem with EA actually is. You just stated that focus on “global moral enterprises” is utterly evil, but why? I can understand valuing your own country higher than one halfway around the world, and perhaps you can’t emotionally identify with the EA view, but calling it utterly evil seems bizarre and ridiculous
I believe you are right, and it is interesting how completely taboo it would be to suggest to a gay person, “Maybe a heterosexual relationship and a family would make you happier?” What percentage of people in heterosexual relationships experience little or no sexual desire for their partner? Between the elderly and the ugly I would guess >50%, but plenty of hetero people are fine making that compromise in exchange for a friend, a companion and a family.
Westerly
1yr ago
There were honestly so many retcons over the course of COVID that I lost track. I can only hope someone more spiteful than me collected them all lest they be memoryholed. I at least remember when the WHO edited the definition of 'herd immunity' to exclude natural immunity after the vaccine came out, or when magazines retroactively attached prefaces to articles about how leaky vaccines might make diseases more virulent explaining this did not apply to COVID for unspecified reasons
If a guy enjoys his anus being penetrated by a pseudo phallus, yea, it’s safe to say he is somewhat homosexual. Oh, but he isn’t actually attracted to being anally penetrated by a man, he just likes the physical sensation.
What if he regularly engages in anal sex with men, but not because he is attracted to men per-se but just because he finds that they are more capable of stimulating him physically in certain ways? Is that not gay either?
Basically, it’s a physical simulation of sex with a man. What more need be said?
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