Zephyr
2mo ago
The parallels between being woke and being in a religion have definitely not gone unnoticed.
Zephyr
2mo ago
I'd argue this is actually one of those areas where you can get away with it; Hephaestus is specifically the god of the forge and crafting, and does have a limp. It fits well within his character to have him develop a mechanism for easier mobility. I wouldn't object, for instance, to Artemis and Apollo being portrayed as redneck hunters armed with rifles, as it still fits well within their characters.
I feel like when situations come out like this, it's important to save ire for when the diversity for diversity's sake actually ruins the end product; like, the 2016 Ghostbusters wasn't bad because they chose an all female cast - it was bad because they didn't realize that the reason the original Ghostbusters was good was that it was more about the realities of starting a small business than it was about the paranormal. You could easily have made a 2016 "female leads" version of Ghostbusters that wasn't garbage; were I writing it, I'd have set it up as an allegory for the realities of balancing working at a small business with raising children and maintaining a household. You can even make the lead women in the show the daughters of the original cast; that way you don't shit on its legacy, while continuing to explore the themes that made the original great.
I think as long as you're sticking with the correct themes and characterization, you can get away fairly easily with including extra diversity; however, most of the people including the diversity have long since had their brains dissolved by the woke milieu, and can't write anything interesting that isn't just "diverse = good." It's not bad because of the diversity - it's bad because it's bad, and you're only seeing it because a lot of people have had their brains rewired to think 'diversity!' is the same thing as a good and interesting story, so approved it despite it's terribleness.
Zephyr
2mo ago
That aside, I am a big fan of national ID cards. The US should have one, and so should every other country. I don't understand why the right is so opposed to it. It's the easiest way to control illegal immigration.
As someone who is opposed to it, what I'm most worried about is the possibility of the government being able to 'unperson' someone. I live in Canada, where the government literally banned people who had not taken the COVID vaccine from entering a lot of establishments, enforced by presenting positive proof that you had been vaccinated. This severely curtailed my ability to participate in society until the restrictions ended.
Here are some of the wonderful things that a government could do with a national ID, ranked approximately in order of how long it would take the slippery slope to get to that point.
- Require it for the purchase of (guns/abortion drugs/hormones). Use the fact that the person purchased them as an excuse to '3 felonies a day' them.
- Require it for sign on to the internet, in the name of 'safety'. This would probably start by requiring it for access to online government services, then expand to being required for internet sign on for people caught committing a felony involving the use of a computer network (think like, child pornography, or large scale fraud), then to children to ensure they only access the 'safe' parts of the internet, then to everyone, as a generation has grown up thinking it is normal.
- Require it for transit (for example, to use a bus, or to start your car); track people's movement with this (to be fair, this would require a digital ID; to also be fair, the chances of it being non-digital in this day and age approach 0).
One thing I think is a very big disconnect between the left and the right is that a lot of the right (the libertarian/small government part) sees governments as (at best) a necessary evil, while the left doesn't necessarily think of it the same way. As someone who has libertarian leanings, what I see is that the government is constantly expanding its own power, while making decisions that are not to the benefit of the majority of its constituents. Elections tend to be shams, as we don't get to vote on the policies we actually want - we instead vote only on the policies we are allowed to vote on (for example, a large portion of Brexit was people voting against immigration; but the government decided it wanted more immigration anyways, so did that all on their own; in the last Canadian election, none of the parties that have ever formed government before ran on decreasing immigration - and we have roughly the same absolute amount of immigration as the US does, with 1/10 of the population). Here are the results of the last Canadian election; notice all the blue in Western Canada? It doesn't make a difference at all, as Quebec and Ontario voted to continue allowing Central Canada to loot the piggy bank in the west (and from my awareness, this occurs in the US too; cities have a lot of seats, and overwhelm the nearby countryside, even though the policies that are desired by the city are not in the best interests of the countryside). They also constantly violate their own rules; in Canada, it was determined that the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, was 'not justified' in breaking up the convoy protest against him and his COVID policies. He suffered no consequences for this action. The order in the Canadian military to take the COVID vaccine was determined to be unlawful; however, by the time the ruling came through, it was too late to seek recompense for it (as a member of my family personally experienced).
To take a slightly more 'hinged' take on it; right now, in the US, I think it's fairly safe to say that a large percentage of leftists consider the current government to not only be illegitimate, but evil on top of that. I can assure you that when Biden was in charge, a large percentage of rightists considered it to be the same situation. Both parties spend approximately 50% of the time feeling like they're under siege from a government completely unaligned with their values; why would they ever accept anything that would make it easier for the government to do evil things to them?
Zephyr
2mo ago
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:
- Be a teenaged boy; think of sex pretty much 100% of the time.
- Be sexually frustrated because you are single.
- Be unable to relieve this sexual frustration (because masturbation is a sin, and the best pornography you can get is like, a swimsuit magazine).
- Become more desperate and try harder to get a girlfriend, until it eventually succeeds.
Whereas the current framework is more like:
- Be a teenaged boy; think of sex pretty much 100% of the time.
- Be sexually frustrated because you are single.
- Look at pornography online; we have very hardcore pornography available now, so it satisfies the sexual frustration you are feeling.
- Repeat.
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.
Zephyr
3mo 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
3mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
4mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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
5mo 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.
As someone who leans more to states rights than not - I don’t think it is, actually.
The usual answer would be that each level of government is responsible for what only it can handle, and nothing more (in an ideal world). Territorial Sovereignty (whether that be through border control, military action, international trade, etc) are exactly the sort of things a federal government should be the authority on.
That being said, I’m Canadian, and I have no idea if that’s how it works out in practice in the US - but it is at least not inconsistent.
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