ajuuiomml
11mo ago
The victory I wanted was for everyone else to not care, too. Instead, I got LGBTQ2A+ climbing night at the local gym, corporations under the auspices of straight white women plastering rainbows on every surface, and “we believe love is love and kindness is everything” along with casual discussions on the internet of the moral imperative to punch my face.
We replaced homophobia with political enmity, not indifference. To me, the pride flag feels sorta akin to the confederate flag. Its not exactly a symbol of hate or exclusion for most of the people flying it, but it sure feels that way on this side of things.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
You have the wrong culprit. It isn’t because of the studios or data per se. The problem is international revenue as a percentage of the total. Asia pacific alone is like 2x the domestic market. Big studios make movies that are accessible/salient to China, India, the US, and maybe to a lesser extent, Europe. The largest common denominator is MCU, which doesn’t really have gay people, dialog, romance, or Taiwan. Both the problems and solutions are violence. Why doesn’t Thor solve homelessness or Wakanda fix fentanyl? Because neither exist of course, just like actual injuries from all of that play fighting.
Maybe with the reemergence of revanchist Russia, we can make movies were they are the baddies again. Rambo, volume 8, back in the USSR!
ajuuiomml
9mo ago
This makes sense to me - it stands to reason if you spend basically the same on rich students and poor students the former will still do better based on all their other advantages.
I can’t imagine the spending disparity at which that wouldn’t be the case or the upper/middle classes ever allowing us to actually approach it. I maintain the state is an ersatz parent at best and that arguing over the exact allocation of property taxes is barking up the wrong tree.
ajuuiomml
5mo ago
I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people.
To me, this is nearly a complete non sequitur. Why the sudden spike of people identifying as trans? Society is more accepting now for sure, but gay people have always been with us. Trans is something new, and certainly in these numbers. I personally believe there is a strong biological cause. I’ll place my bet on ingesting microwaved plastic daily. Actually looking for the reason would imply that there is something wrong with trans people and that they can be fixed or even prevented so I’m not holding my breath.
I think being trans is about as morally wrong as being deaf. I’d expect the federal government to do something in the case of an unparalleled epidemic of deafness.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
Mass shootings are a culture bound
mental disorder/meme in my book - chiefly spread via popular media. To end mass shootings, we must therefore target the meme. We stop them by not talking about them anymore. Stop showcasing people crying on TV. Stop discussing the shooters and their motivations. Stop the endless parade of sadness. Stop talking about common sense gun control and people taking your guns. Stop reporting on twitterers murdering other twitterers by twittering. Stop the X year memorials. Stop the everyone everywhere needs 3000% more mental healthcare or elsing. Stop the victimization porn. Stop the outrage porn. Just stop it all.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
I didn’t watch the video - it’s hard for me to take the topic and it’s high priests seriously; AI safety is a reformulated Pacal’s wager.
Even if you believe otherwise, there are maybe one or two universes at most in which we could solve the coordination problem of stopping everyone from networking a bunch of commodity hardware and employing 30 engineers to throw publicly available data sets at it using known algos. A not too wealthy person could solo fund the entire thing to say nothing of criminal syndicates, corporations or nation states. This one is not going back in the bag when everyone involved has every incentive to do the opposite.
ajuuiomml
1yr ago
If The Church is any consideration, universalism is not a draw. The liberal branches are dying and the conservative ones are expanding. In my estimate, you can’t organize people around a belief in nothing in particular, nor can any religion exist which asks nothing of its parishioners. How do you evangelize when you don’t have the Truth and everyone else’s truth is just as valid?
The left and the right have conflicting myths about the reason for the country - a city on a hill versus original sin. We can replace those myths with another, but not with Political Unitarianism.
ajuuiomml
11mo ago
while men generally seem uninterested in female protagonists
How do you put a female protagonist in a story for men, who occupies a traditional male role? You need a woman who embodies honor/courage/valor/stoicism/risk taking in the face of immediate personal danger and you also need a damn good reason why it’s a woman doing the job.
We don’t see this in modern fiction (targeting men) because the characters are pretty universally terribly written. I imagine it’s at least partially due to the authors being outright inimical to the role and it’s requirements (except as a vehicle for empowerment) and their would be audience alike.
It’s not impressive or engaging when woman does classic man thing better than all of the doubting men, overcoming the inevitably evil male antagonist, but that seems to be the only plot now. I’ll point out it’s the opposite of empowering, too.
Give me more Ripley! She isn’t a paragon of female empowerment who breaks the glass ceiling through a newly learned sense of self worth and boss bitch power. (Disregarding the allegory of the horror of childbirth…) she deliberately faces down a terrifyingly gruesome death to protect a girl from the same because everyone else is already dead.
I’d gladly watch more (T1/2) Sarah Connors, Buffy, Scully, or even Margot Hanson for a contemporary reference.
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
The problem with our Covid response was the urban/rural divide. Policies for the one don’t work for and aren’t wanted by the other. Unfortunately, that bifurcation closely corresponds to our political parties. It also didn’t help that the public health administration is seemingly tightly aligned with the Democratic Party. Covid functioned more like a mass shooting in the realm of the Culture War.
Accountability literally anywhere in government would be great…
ajuuiomml
7mo ago
I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot.
This is explicitly illegal in the US and would land you in deep shit.
Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?
That is illegal.
Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
I suspect this is also illegal in Michigan.
ajuuiomml
10mo ago
A bona fide medical condition implies a cure, which is really hard to imagine the medical community accepting to say nothing of the trans community itself… or the political mess this would cause with insurance. I believe we will be waiting a while.
ajuuiomml
24d ago
NPR very clearly has a mission of political advocacy. The angle on literally every single story is “how does it affect people of color/women/minorities”. Frequently, resulting in bizarre, inappropriate, or completely uninformative segments.
This is the segment when I turned off marketplace for good - which advocates for “prioritizing black women” via the “black women best” framework. In the whole segment, no policy position or course of action is actually advanced - at all. Very little evidence is offered to suggest that prioritizing black women will actually benefit everyone (trickle up) or that any interventions would be cost effective. The guest even goes as far as to suggest nothing at all will work:
The system of, like, systemic racism and just embedded discrimination in our economy is, it is multifacited, it is, like, self-reinforcing. I imagine that if somehow we could break it down it would, like, re-create itself. It’s so many things at once.
…with the only proscription being:
Jones: It really does have to be a true conversation about power. I think it’s a lot of people who are holding positions of power really just like being willing to share that, being willing to share that.
The segment is so off putting that I come away taking the position opposite than it advanced even though I agree it’s not great that black women have a higher unemployment rate.
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
Thank you for translating.
What would you say the pope would say if we had actual etiology with a highly predictive biological test for trans? I also wonder what progressives would say for those who tested negative and want to claim the identity.
ajuuiomml
4mo ago
and (possibly in the future) even eliminate conservative candidates through bog-standard abuse of process
Coming out to an election near you this winter. If states reign supreme, what’s to stop any state from stripping literally all of their political adversaries from their ballots? Why would they stop at national elections for that matter? All they need is a governor and a stacked court.
ajuuiomml
6mo ago
Carrots are quite sweet: https://amp.abc.net.au/article/9716612
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
I’m reminded of the sidebar content or /r/antiwork which was truly shocking when I first read it:
Liberals say we should end employment discrimination. I say we should end employment. Conservatives support right-to-work laws. Following Karl Marx’s wayward son-in-law Paul Lafargue I support the right to be lazy. Leftists favor full employment. Like the surrealists—except that I’m not kidding—I favor full unemployment. Trotskyists agitate for permanent revolution. I agitate for permanent revelry.
Such a society is incompatible with one that has things like housing, running water, electricity, heating, plumbing, medicine, any form of transportation or sufficient food to keep its population of 300 million from starving. It would also not have any computers or software so turn the dial back to the 40s before your trip to the Middle Ages. It would be incapable of trade to get any of these things. It would be incapable of producing even art, because that too takes a huge amount of work. Committing to the is plan is commitment to genocide in a Great Leap Forward sort of way.
Beyond genocide, and outright impossibility, it strikes me that the author had all the aspirations of a 13 year old. A world of frivolity is not a utopia. A world with no responsibility is a world devoid of purpose.
I remain unclear how anyone engages with this writing seriously.
ajuuiomml
8mo ago
It’s not hard for me to believe that people who think the best government is local do not choose to work for the federal government. Besides, Washington DC votes 95% democrat. Conservatives will self select out of living in a one party town run by their out group. I thought moving the BLM to Grand Junction was excellent policy in this regard. Why in the world should the BLM, which controls 50% of the land out west, be run by Washington bureaucrats as an absentee landlord totally divorced from the land itself?
More generally, what is the meaning of Democracy when some of the people are highly underrepresented in positions of governance? I very much doubt Democrats would be OK with the federal government being located in rural Texas.
Midwestern roots here- I don’t want to see any kissing in public or know anything of anyone’s sexual identity. It’s not my business and its quite impolite of you to make it so. So yeah, keep it to yourselves, everyone.
More seriously, I can’t quantify how many homophobes exist in the wild and the extent to which they make it known. I’d agree that homophobia remains, but I disagree it’s the cause for the political enmity. Hating across party lines is something new.
It feels like the implicit argument, to put words in your mouth, goes like this: the homophones, however many and however vocal, hate you and yours after all this time, so you are justified in hating them back, and twice as hard. There is no off ramp here.
ajuuiomml
11mo ago
Regardless of social status, plumbing is not a low IQ gig (for the well paying positions at least).
ajuuiomml
11mo ago
I'm convinced AI research and development is already far ahead of where it needs to be for AGI in the next couple of years
I’m not! Is your contention that AGI is a bigger, better LLM?
ajuuiomml
1mo ago
Disregarding pimp my ride, it’s hard to say the platonic ideal is male or female, right? Why would going from the one to the other violate that ideal, so long as you arrive at the right spot (theoretically)? We could claim the ideal is that of a man for a man, etc, but then we are back to disagreeing about the initial state.
To my non-catholic understanding, I’d be down with someone transitioning if it is to serve God. That’s a pretty damn high bar, but who knows.
ajuuiomml
2mo ago
I agree it’s not an existential threat - quite possibly every actually does. The people on the other side of you on the issue are not making a claim on the grounds of Utilitarianism.
ajuuiomml
9mo ago
Additionally, our company turns a substantial profit. I receive a very small proportion of that profit, and he receives 10 times that, despite the fact that his individual productivity is drastically lower than mine. I don't believe that he has a right to more of the profits than I do, when I am more productive than he is.
Income is independent of moral fiber, effort, worth, and productivity. Income, as from a job, is a function of supply and demand for labor. The other factors don’t have much play other than making you marginally more attractive as an employee. You don’t make more because your company can just pay someone else to do your job at your current wage (disregarding the real cost of hiring/training).
The rest of the story is that an efficient market ought to have the same yield on all investments on average. In other words, starting a business is really damn risky, so the payout has to be huge or no business are created. The exact extent to which you make business ownership non remunerative is the extent to which businesses will not be created. That looks like eg Britain over the last decade or so (stagnation). People will just park their money in real estate or other unproductive assets instead of creating the Internet.
Startup founders are another good example. They can be billionaires on paper and have literally no income for a decade. Stripping ownership (ie, taxing assets instead of income) is some mix of really really bad and impossible in practice.
You can go after generational wealth - maybe it’s the best answer actually.
ajuuiomml
10mo ago
Different cancers have treatments of varying efficacy. The difference of course is that we don’t have cancer advocacy, cancer pride, cancer parades, cancer lifestyle TV shows, de facto mandatory inclusion quotas for people of cancer in every form of media, constitutional protection at large, and the White House hoisting a Cancer flag in lieu of the American flag as cause celebre.
I don’t understand the distinction between curing congenital defects and sex changes? Surely the person undergoing the procedure would consider them one and the same? If the one doesn’t affect the unique dignity of the person, why should the other? Why does the natural order of the human person exclude some chromosomal ”abnormalities” but not others?
I’m not Catholic, but I’d readily accept some argument to this end. This one feels really light on God.
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