Zephyr
7d ago
It's a noun. It has to be capitalized.
If you're going to be pedantic, it's a proper noun, which is why it has to be capitalized.
He who lives by the grammar Nazi, dies by the grammar Nazi.
Zephyr
13d ago
the far-right hated him more than the far-left
Not to put too fine a point on it, but I think this may be observably not true, given the information that has come out about the assassination.
Zephyr
1mo ago
I mean, also as a Canadian - I’d definitely take “Invasion by US military under Donald Trump” over “Liberals import 3% of our population per year.”
YMMV.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I mean, you absolutely can assign greater culpability to the more effective side.
I have a new kitten who is just three months old, and a one year old cat. The kitten loves attacking the bigger cat, but I have to be very careful to keep him from hurting her.
That being said, as Hamas’s intent is seemingly “genocide all Israelis,” I do have very little sympathy for them.
Zephyr
2mo ago
A concern about “loser pays” is that the payment only occurs when they, well, lose. If I can’t afford the up front costs, or if the settlement is much less likely to hurt me, I may have to go for it, as I can’t be certain that a case that I should win will go my way if it goes to court.
It also has a number of weird edge cases - for example, say that I sue someone for $10000, and my lawyer is going to charge me $1000 - if my opponent has deep pockets, they could hire a lawyer that costs them $90000, which means that if I lose, I lose $91000, which puts enough of a risk factor that I couldn’t afford to sue them, period, even if my case is good.
Zephyr
2mo ago
So one thing I think is very common in modern western countries is something like the following:
- No administration may bind a future administration to a promise.
- An administration has a deep, deep desire to do something that they think will take more years than they will be in power.
- So what they do is let themselves be "negotiated" into a position where breaking the promise that they made, although possible, is extremely costly.
If voters want to express a sentiment against something a government has done, sometimes the more rational option is to bite the bullet and do the costlier option, even if it'd be "easier" to not do so. I think for a lot of voters, they've hit that point with immigration.
Zephyr
2mo ago
The way you write Hanania reminds me of Sailer’s law of female journalists (https://www.unz.com/isteve/sailers-law-of-female-journalism/) - very low value human capital of him to succumb to the same pressures.
Zephyr
2mo ago
Have you heard of the use-mention distinction?
One of the reasons we left Reddit was that a user was explaining the (((brackets))) around certain names, and what it meant, and Reddit decided that using them, even in an explanation like this one here, indicates an endorsement of the position.
Now sure, if your ideological opponents pick a name that is obviously biased, you don’t have to use that - no one is saying you should call it “The Public Execution of the Innocent George Floyd by white supremecist cops, as endorsed by Republikkkans”. But calling it “George Floyd’s death” is, if anything, conservative coded.
Censoring his name, or censoring the name of the activist organization BLM, simply makes the arguments appear unserious - to me, they seem like someone who is so angry about the concept that they can’t think clearly about it, and as a result, are probably incorrect about it.
Zephyr
2mo ago
So to be entirely fair, while horrific, this isn’t the kid’s fault. I think what TitaniumButterfly is looking for are times when an adoption went wrong as a result of parents being unable to deal with the kid.
Although you alluded to this in the post, I think the specific examples would be more useful for what was requested.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I would argue that it’s selection effect.
If the enemy is strong, and I don’t think I can defeat them, I’m not going to bother trying.
If the enemy is weak, and trivially beaten, I don’t need to spend any time defeating them - especially if I have allies who are against them too.
It’s only the situations in which the enemy is plausibly the same strength as me in which this comes up. And due to the asymmetric nature of people, it’s easy for both to be true at once. Academia is fairly heavily captured by the left wing, so they are extremely strong when represented as “expert opinion.” (At the moment) the US government is captured by the Trump wing of the republicans, so they are extremely strong when it comes to court rulings and similar.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I mean, not everyone is at the top; you could easily have mid level bureaucrats in the party blackmailing other mid level bureaucrats, or someone higher level (but not at the “throw your enemies out the window” high).
A lot of the time, the blackmail is the excuse you use to remove someone - you keep them around and use the blackmail to make them publicly support you, then (when they know too much, or are making noises about possibly not being 100% on your side, or are simply embarrassing now that you’ve used their support to climb higher) you reveal it to have a public excuse to remove them.
Hell, you could argue they’re more effective in totalitarian countries - if you are exposed in the US, you are definitely not getting the death penalty (you probably won’t even serve jail time if you were powerful). If China discovers you are acting against the party, you may just disappear.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I know at least two people in real life who (were they to use that handle) it would be kind of an “obviously it was them.”
It only seems obvious in retrospect. If true, that is (I’m inclined to believe it’s at least plausible).
Zephyr
2mo ago
Perhaps I misunderstood - what I read from your initial comment was that “nobody not made of straw” would deny that it was a baby. But that they supported abortion anyways. If I am misunderstanding, my apologies.
A lot of pro choicers also call it a “clump of cells,” not a baby.
If you want to bite the bullet and say that abortion is ending the life of a baby, go ahead, otherwise this is false on the face of it.
Zephyr
2mo ago
Perhaps "You can't sell yourself into slavery" would be a better example here.
There are no pure assertions of "negative" restrictions on rights -- there are only positive assertions of rights. "You should not have the right to do X" can be rewritten as "I should have the right to punish you for doing X". Or, more explicitly: "I want the right to punish you for doing X".
I think this is a bit confusingly written. There are three possible states here:
- You have the right to do X.
- Everyone else has the right to be free from you doing X.
- You may do X, but you do not necessarily have the right to do so.
The way you phrased the above implies that 3 and 2 are equivalent, while I don't think they are.
Free speech (in America) falls under 1, murder falls under 2, while something like "paint your house vibrant pink" falls under 3. In theory, you are not allowed to enter into an arrangement where your right to free speech is abridged(1), you are forbidden from entering into an arrangement where you are allowed to murder someone(2), and you are free to enter into an arrangement where your ability to paint your house is denied (HOA).
(1) The reality on the ground may differ from the ideal.
(2) Soldiers and police officers aside.
Zephyr
2mo ago
You need to know that you’re missing the experience to know you have to look it up on Wikipedia. If you only worked part time as a teenager, you just assume all jobs work like that; if you assume that everyone anti-trans is just a Christian bigot, you don’t have to look up their views, you just write a religious idiot.
I very much disagree that college students know that they are sheltered and don’t have life experiences.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I would disagree entirely - I think it’s an “Al Capone was arrested for tax evasion” type thing.
If someone lies about intending the downfall of America, you have a much better excuse to kick them out than if you have to find an example of them stepping outside the bounds of free speech.
Zephyr
2mo ago
Yes, but do a sufficiently bad enough job at the bridge that they tell you to stop. Sometimes the only way out of an impossible situation is to act so incompetent that people stop forcing you to do it (after all, if you hadn’t saved the guy the first time, you wouldn’t be asked back).
Zephyr
2mo ago
So we don’t actually know that they reduce overdoses either. There is a plausible mechanism for them to do so, but there are also a few mechanisms in which they could not.
- It is possible that fatal overdoses are reduced, which would allow the individual in question to overdose in the future again.
- It is possible that SIS increases the number of people who get addicted to drugs (in BC in particular, there is an ongoing controversy where safe supply drugs are sold to get funds for fentanyl, which leads to more people having drugs than would otherwise; although I realize this is not quite the same thing as SIS, the SIS are responsible for the distribution of the safe supply, so I think the consequences apply here too).
I would also caution in believing that the three items in your list can exist simultaneously - although there is no physical reason that they cannot, there are political reasons they will not, and that is much harder to change.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.
What type of developer are you if you'd rather be talking than coding? /s
More seriously, the situations I find AI is really useful is when I need some information, but have enough knowledge to fine tune it after the fact. I've tried to use it to write code, and it always produces code that is kind of messy and bad. I asked it to produce some builder interfaces from a set of DTO interfaces, and it would do weird things like put in defaults that I didn't intend, or return the wrong field occasionally*. What worried me about it is that the junior developer I was working with at the time was copy-pasting them into the codebase as is, and didn't have any comprehension about why they wouldn't work.
*For reference, the type of implementation I was talking about would be something like:
interface IAddress { function line1() : string; function line2() : ?string; function city() : string; function province() : ?IProvince; function country() : ICountry; function zipCode() : IZipCode; }
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( ?string $line2 ) : static; // you get the picture }
It would give me something like:
interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( string $line2 = '' ) : static; function setLCountry( ICountry $country ) : static; function setProvince( string $province ) : static; }
Which was just not very useful.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I really wish I could see in AI what other people do; I recently tried to use Cursor at the recommendation of a senior developer, and I found that it was actively trying to force me down the wrong path when I was coding (I had to write a one-off web page that was compatible with some very ancient technology, and it kept trying to suggest CSS rules and autofilling text that made no sense for the use case). This has been a very consistent experience for me whenever I try to use AI for literally anything.
It's possible that I'm just not very good at prompting it, but I find that every time I start relying on it for anything, it is subtly wrong in ways that are frustrating to track down and repair.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I think you could honestly do it much more easily then that; for example, you could keep all of your existing assignments, but simply tell people that you will be asking some number of random students a question about their essay/assignment/whatever at the start of the class in which you return their assignments. There's been a recent study which shows a lot of people do not retain a lot of information when they use AI to write essays for them. This would catch a good chunk of AI submitted assignments with very minimal work.
If they "cheat" and use AI anyways, but memorize enough of their assignment to answer a question? Mission accomplished; the nominal goal is to teach students the information, so we shouldn't actually care about how they learn it.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I believe that most people don’t actually think of Trump as a god emperor, but do be wary - every insane position on the left also started with “no one taking it seriously” (usually through being “just on tumblr” or “just some kids on campus”). Some people are definitely taking it too seriously, even accounting for the lizard man principle.
I think the way that it works is that it provides an outlet for sexual frustration. Imagine that the old paradigm worked something like this:
Whereas the current framework is more like:
I think it's fairly easy for someone to be using a pornographic website to get their rocks off, and see something in the sidebar that is like, 90% of what they like, and something they don't know if they like or not; they 'try' it, and if it works, it starts featuring more and more in their sexual interests.
To take a (very) simple example; there are a large number of men who enjoy being dominant in bed; this is fairly normal. In a normal relationship, this looks like taking the lead, and a bit of dirty talk. In the world of internet pornography, this can involve things like semi-rape behaviour, inflicting pain, using bodily fluids to degrade, etc. The underlying desire is still the dominance; but the ways of seeking it are out of whack with what someone would do in real life. There's also a degree to which people aren't really that aware of their desires; they know they find it hot when the woman is in pain, but they don't necessarily get that the part they're fantasizing about is the woman submitting to their sexual desires.
You then run into the 'toaster fuckers' problem; whenever there is a large community online dedicated to a sexual fetish, it becomes easy to identify it as a legitimate orientation, which makes becoming involved in it much easier. If you aren't aware, the 'toaster fuckers' originated from an old meme (I want to say a 4chan greentext, but I'm actually not certain); the gist of it was that back in the day, if you wanted to fuck toasters, you were on your own; society would condemn it, and you'd never find another person who would admit to liking it. Nowadays, you can go online and find people who are telling you that it's okay and they're just another persecuted group. But say you're the person from my example: you go online and discover that there is a huge community dedicated specifically to inflicting pain as part of their sexual expression; and further, they actively want more members for their group. You now don't have to deal with lots of women rejecting you; you have a group that wants you, and your mind is already oriented towards the 'inflicting pain' as being the important part of the sexual experience. In that sense, it may matter less that you have a physical woman in front of you, as your brain is saying to you 'pain is sexual'.
So the reason that obtaining a girlfriend short circuits the whole process for a lot of people is that the original fetish is something that they can explore with a partner without getting all the weird extra stuff that the algorithm is pushing on them. Before I got a girlfriend, the above is actually super similar to what I went through; I didn't 'get' that my underlying desire was for a woman to submit to me, all I knew is that I found some of the more degrading pornography to be super hot. When I managed to get a girlfriend, what I realized was that I found her wanting me, and being willing to do whatever I wanted to be even hotter; it meant that paradoxically, all the things I thought were true about my sexuality were wrong, and what I really liked was just having someone who desired me.
If I'd been a bit less of an antisocial curmudgeon, I could easily have seen myself falling into this sort of community (probably the BDSM community instead of the furries, but I think it applies there). Sexual frustration can make you do weird things, because it's hard to be lonely.
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