aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
11mo ago
A lot of the current mess dems are in could be traced to them trying to stop Bernie twice.
this reasoning is just straight forwardly poor. Bernie only looked like he had a chance because the centrist lane was crowded. When it became uncrowded he had no chance. This isn't "trying to stop Bernie". This is a group of 20 friends, 2 of which want to eat at the same slop house and the remaining 18 of them each preferring a different steak house deciding on a particular steak house that was only one guy's first choice rather than take a vote at the restaurant level and end up at a coordinated minority's preference.
A tremendous amount of people came out of that primary thinking that they should have been allowed to win because other candidates were obligated to keep splitting the ticket 8 ways in order to give him an opening. It's ridiculous.
aqouta
11mo ago
Not exactly what you're asking but we have a blood on the motte tower discord server that occasionally has some discussion on the other games chat. DM me if you want an invite. It's been thoroughly colonized by dramanaughts but of the more manageable sort.
aqouta
11mo ago
Scott's criticism, that toughness alone can't solve the problem without an actual actionable plan, is both true and uninteresting because it doesn't engage with the critiques of the current establishment and just says a truism. It's an important truism because many people do actually just have no real alternative to the status quo, especially true when discussing critiques of capitalism that amount to basically "capitalism hasn't brought about utopia yet".
However being more tough becomes a more interesting critique when you believe that the problem we have with handling the homeless that I'd call hyper-empathy. if hypo-empathy is not being able to take another's perspective, usually implied because of lack of care or interest, and empathy is having a good understanding of another's perspective and needs hyper-empathy is the mirror of hypo-empathy where you are charitable and caring beyond reason. Hyper-empathy might be characterized by letting a bad actor brutalize you and your family because it would be mean to interfere and maybe they have a good reason to do so, maybe you've contributed to a general environment and they're the product of blah blah blah.
If you think the problem with our treatment of the homeless population[1] is hyper-empathy by the NGOs that basically run all homeless programs then being tougher makes sense. We need to either axe this hyper-empathetic orgs or staff them with people who are willing to be tough. Scott says the reason we can't solve the homeless problem is a lack of state capacity. Well what actually is state capacity and why don't we have it? What's actually stopping us from doing the things he scoffs at like building asylums and throwing people into them? I think part of the equation is a general lack of will or "toughness" among the people making decisions on this topic. The money is there, a desire for a solution is there. I'm an outside observer, I can't go into a step by step explanation for how to build asylums and set up laws so that we can populate them, that's an incredible burden, but I do know that the people that we entrusted billions of dollars and many years to have utterly failed to deliver improvements and they all seem to be manically hyper-empathetic so toughness might be just what is needed.
1 - by homeless population I mean the people in tents long term that make no effort to reintegrate back into society rather than people who live in their car for a little while or even temporarily rough it while trying to reintegrate for whom we do have good services and tools that I advocate for even being quite generous with.
aqouta
11mo ago
wo particular and factual points. Recent polling indicates that in his "home region" which includes significant battleground states (that's Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), CNN pegged him at -16 net favorability, which is dramatic. Especially considering that usually VP picks are chosen specifically for their help in swing states! That he's hurting them there instead is notable.
I'm not really sure I'd call Illinois and Indiana battleground states. ohio and michigan, sure. But Illinois and Indiana aren't particularly competitive.
aqouta
11mo ago
You're leaving out the pretty important detail that he was twice her age at the time, 30 years her senior.
aqouta
11mo ago
I'm not going to say the crass blowjob imagery is how I'd go about it if I didn't prefer her to win over the alternative, but I object to claims that it appeared to be much more than transactional when someone younger than I am now is sleeping with someone older than my father and getting political appointments out of it. That's wild and I'm not sexist for finding it distasteful.
aqouta
11mo ago
The answer to this question just goes back to the reason women's leagues were made in the first place. I personally don't really care that much what women do with their league, include or exclude trans people, none of my business. But the reason these leagues exist at all is because women want to be able to compete and know that in an open league none of them would rise to the top because men at just much stronger. If it's true that trans women being introduced into these leagues would make it so that women can not make it to the top then it's perfectly reasonable to draw the line such that women are on one side and trans women are on the other.
aqouta
11mo ago
justified in excluding black women, on the grounds they would be too dominant
If there was some racial group of women that somehow had man equivalent strength then I think and argument could be made. I'd imagine such a thing would have a lot of trouble practically because racial lines have a bad history of being drawn with malicious intent but in the hypothetical space I don't have a fundamental issue with it. Natal women is a naturally category and drawing it there rather than a genderless weight class has obvious winners in losers, natal women win, very light natal men lose and this is fine.
aqouta
11mo ago
This is silly, it's important to actually get the facts straight and one shouldn't respond as if attacked when corrected on the facts. The question of how to categorize people with rare genetic defects and whether to rule them in or out of sports competitions are entirely different to the same questions applied to natal males or natal females who identify with the opposite sex and undergo treatment to approximate as much as possible the body and experience of the opposite sex. One can come to the same conclusion on both, and I broadly do, but we must actually keep our thinking straight here.
aqouta
11mo ago
The suspicion is that those facts are being weaponized
Fighting the facts is just never a good look. When you start out saying something that isn't true you pretty immediately lose the persuadable audience. It's not good strategically and more importantly to me, it's not good epistemics. Keeping these things straight matters.
You can't make arguments for years on end that rely on conflating "trans" and "intersex" and then get all huffy and indignant when people confuse the two in a way that you don't find politically convenient.
They weren't doing this though, or at least not the more serious people. Certainly intersex people come up in discussions of exactly where to draw lines on defining what it is to be a man or a woman because they're exactly the kind of edge case bullet people need to bite if they want to rigorously define "woman" and people arguing for expanding the definition will naturally make you bite those bullets. The claim wasn't that trans women and people who were born with a vagina and womb but have an odd genetic disorder are exactly the same thing, just that they're both category errors(or at least the trans advocate will try to claim that trans identification ought to make them a category error, I find this argument dubious).
They're obviously quite different for many reasons, most important to me because intersex is a very objective kind of thing, we can run tests and know what is going on. For this reason we're not at high risk of mistakenly giving someone, especially a kid, inappropriate life altering treatment. We have no risk of a social contagion of intersex diagnoses. Because of this I think we can and should calmly sit down and determine what should be done about these cases where nature is the only party at fault. I do still think in that calmly sitting down, if we avoid invoking the trans culture war mind killing, the natural outcome would be banning intersex cases that provide advantage from serious competition. And invoking trans people in this discussion is not helping.
aqouta
11mo ago
A trans person is a natal male or female that identifies with the opposite sex and seeks to undergo treatment to approximate the experience of the opposite sex as close as possible. An intersex person is someone who is born with a rare but identifiable physical ailment that complicates the standard XX/XY binary options that naturally describe male and female people. I'm very sympathetic to annoyance that the various authorities haven't clarified the situation but as far as I know no one who has looked into it seriously thinks this is a trans person.
aqouta
11mo ago
I fully don't even think it is bad. Agnostic on good. People stress testing your information diet is a kindness and a service a perfectly rational person might pay for in a red teaming sense. Hoaxes, as long as they ar published are unambiguously good.
aqouta
11mo ago
You're just describing conflict theory from the inside view. The essence of conflict theory is saying things you don't believe as means to an end rather than to reach understanding. You can think conflict theory is good and normal, it is, but there is no way to describe knowingly saying wrong things on purpose as mistake theory.
aqouta
11mo ago
I concur that this is a pretty bad look from a moderator, and would really like the mods to look past the +44 upvotes and fawning u-go-girl responses and consider that this sort of thing is enabling/deepening bad tendencies in the community.
Obligatory low heat take drop that moderators not using the mod hat are allowed to make low quality posts. We are moderated by men, not gods.
aqouta
10mo ago
I like the case for modesty as intimacy increasing. There is something to having a large delta between the woman that she presents to the world and the women she presents herself as to you personally. I'm not sure how that weighs against other interests but I am sure there is at least some value there.
As for why women are more lefty I can see this from a bunch of different lenses and have trouble coming up with as strong reasons for the opposite. the evo psych lens is pretty simple that women do best in stable safe environments where all their offspring can make it to adulthood and men do best in somewhat more risky environments where they might sire children with many women. When resources are plentiful women might prefer they be shared equally and men might prefer a chance to roll the dice and end up with a bigger share. From the self interested lens the redistributive state as it is today tends to take from men and give to women on average. The social dynamics lens tells us that caring, self sacrifice and gentleness are a feminine traits that women compete with each other on and leftists successfully pitch leftism as the humane alternative to callous and brutal liberalism. Older masculine framings of leftism like those in the soviet era of manly men menacing their enemies with the tools of their trade and demanding what is theirs would see a different skew but the feminine framing predominates today. From a propaganda lens it seems like the leftist strategy of just showing as many dead or suffering children as possible and drawing some plausible causal chain to the status quo is more effective on women than men.
aqouta
10mo ago
A fair nuance. I'm not quite a red piller and do think that monogamy is a good a social technology. For the evo-psych perspective though it's sufficient that men with the ability to influence such things would generally prefer more risk though as it's selected for where they can influence reproductive success and irrelevant where it doesn't.
aqouta
10mo ago
The game theory for making sure individuals maintain an offensive advantage remains. It makes the land generally inhospitable to tyrants. It is true that there are costs but I tire of people that think simply pointing them out and also the that the decaying retirement home husks of once vital nations don't pay them should make me jealous. To put it as kindly as possible, I am not jealous of these nations. Pointing out that these once giants and now living museums have adopted a policy in the last few hundred years makes that policy sound as appealing as rat poison. I don't have any particular attraction to guns. I own none and despite having been shooting with friends on a few occasion generally recognize no personal appeal. But I hate the idea of being part of a disarmed population. I will not childproof my my home for my own safety. Fuck that.
aqouta
10mo ago
I know a few people pretty high up in HPE, despite their job's being selling AI servers they weren't aware of what TSMC even was let alone that it was a bottle neck in their supply chain. The idea that this group is doing well targeted assassinations is uncredible.
aqouta
10mo ago
I don't buy the Hollywood scenario where a tyrant suddenly has tanks rolling down the streets from a bunker where they never interact with the common man. Trump's recent experience with American small arms should shatter any illusion that assassination is beyond us and fighting a full military occupation is a step I don't think anl properly armed population willing to fight gets to.
aqouta
10mo ago
This conclusion seems very excessive. China has a couple hits but the west has a large stable of bangers and continues to release. If we're going to say that the East is punching above it's weight class the example would be nintendo and it's a little late to be worried about that. The last mega hit was Balder's gate, a western studio making a game using a californian IP. The East is big in gacha games but that's partially because those aren't as popular in the west. You mentioned PUBG but you know who ate their lunch? Fortnite, western.
It doesn't really seem like the East is eclipsing a west that can no longer make games so much as china is actually for the first time making serious contributions. many of which are using western IPs like many of your examples.
aqouta
10mo ago
My bad, for some reason I had thought the eponymous coast in wotc was Californian.
aqouta
10mo ago
People don't like a loser, Trump's whole brand is winning and it's why he can't give up the last election. Two losses in a row and becoming even older is going to be enough to have people jump ship, even if his health doesn't decline biden style.
aqouta
10mo ago
2.92% inflation in the last 12 months. If you measure inflation as "absolute distance from 2% target" this is 54th percentile for all years since 1990 (a hair worse than average)
I'm usually on team "the economy isn't really hat bad actually" but I'm baffled how people can misread the sentiment like this. It's obvious that what people who think inflation was too high want is for prices to go back down. the inflation number is a second order leading indicator. The previous years were 3.4%, 6.5% and 7.0% so around 17% over 3 years. And spread unevenly among the indexes so there were items in the basket that stayed relatively flat and other items that saw much higher price hikes, human cognition is such that those price hikes are the main thing people notice and do feel like the kind of thing that ought to be able to be put back in the bottle.
The leading indicators of how the economy is going to feel in the future have done decently over the last 6 months is just not really a compelling argument.
He is for sure not innocent. You can certainly argue that it was a politically motivated prosecution of the 10 felonies a day type but Trump really did commit a crime.
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