aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1yr ago
And there were offshoots of the offshoot. Some users moved to a more "right" version of The Motte called (I think) /r/culturewar (it's banned now, so that would make sense...). One prominent moderator on The Motte started a more "left" version.
Ah, a retrospective of someone who hasn't even been following closely enough to know /r/culturewarroundup and /r/theschism exists, surely they'll have a balanced reading on the place.
A few days ago I saw a top-level comment wondering why prostitutes don't like being called whores and sluts, since "that's what they are." Some commentators mused about why leftist women are such craven hypocrites.
I read at least the top post on every thread and don't know what this could even be referring to. Why is it whenever people critique this place they always come up with the threads that don't represent the modal motte thread at all? This all comes off as a thinly veiled /r/sneerclub post trying to keep /r/slatestarcodex users from visiting us.
The attitude of conservatives towards women's sports in my lifetime has been blase at best and condemnatory at worst.
This frequently made point is over stated, at least unless by 'conservatives' you mean the online presence rather than the actual constituents . Conservatives with daughters want their daughters to be able to compete and while I've met plenty of liberal parents with kids in sports nearly every conservatives parents I've met has had their kids do sports. Sports in general are conservative leaning(this again is not to say that most normie left leaning people aren't also involved)
I doubt many conservatives would care too much either way; they might not exactly rail against the idea of a school being forced to spend ungodly sums on unprofitable women's sports because they spend millions on the football team
I always find this comparison facile, the men's sports are profitable, they subsidize other parts of the school not the other way around.
But the relevant governing bodies imposed testosterone limits, and while we can argue that those limits are too high or too low, we can't argue that no man is meeting the most lenient ones without taking supplemental estrogen.
And without the conservative railing this might not have happened, and it still doesn't seem fair. Fairness really matters in sports, violating it is a big deal. Did you actually ever play sports growing up? It takes a substantial amount of time to be competitive, undermining that with unfair practices is crushing. You can see how upset unfairness makes whenever a referee makes a call that people think is incorrect.
One thing you never hear about is what the actual women athletes have to say about this.
Of course you don't, they'd be canceled.
And if those most at stake don't care, then why should we? After all, when it comes to the priority of things, sports are pretty far down the list.
Like all appeals to "Why do you even care about this? It's so unimportant". The response is obvious. If it's not important and we care more than you do then let us have our way. If you think it is actually important enough to fight over then drop this shaming act.
aqouta
1yr ago
Dude you're almost certainly making something like five times the national median household income, you are not normal.
All this is well and good, if we lived in conservative world absolutely men should take responsibility for their offspring. But we don't live in conservative world, we live in the hyper individualist progressive world where accountability is a dirty word and men are noticing that everyone else gets to reap the rewards of this tradeoff except themselves. All these universal values that we're supposed to stoicly bear when they're against our interests seem to turn to sand the moment a situations comes up when they might defend our interests and we're starting to see that the game appears to be rigged. That if there is an universal value in play it is that we will do what is best for women and this is only not said aloud as to dupe credulous men. alimony seems very much to be less about the kid and more about the state leaning on it's monopoly of force to skip out on a bill that is the obvious consequence of its other policies.
If consent to sex is consent to a parenthood then lets live in that world, if it's not please stop pretending that we do when it harms me.
aqouta
11mo ago
Why don't left types just admit that a wall on the southern border would reduce illegal immigration and....
It's because they don't want the policy and the objection to it isn't based on the efficacy of it. Why give up ground for no reason?
aqouta
10mo ago
Honestly this all seems super unnecessary. No one is actually confused at all about this stuff. Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category. As cliche as it is, human beings naturally have two legs we don't need to blow up this useful assumption because of amputees or people with disorders that caused them to grow some other number of legs. The only reason these unusual conditions are brought up at all is because trans advocates want to conflate these unusual conditions with the intentional efforts used to mimic the opposite sex that trans people undergo. If we drop the abnormal conditions it just collapses to "sex is what you are identified as if you don't intentional put substantial effort into changing that perception", which is what everyone, even trans people and their advocates actually use as a category. If it wasn't the case then trans people wouldn't need to put in the effort and the concept of 'passing' would be incoherent. The major disagreement is on to what degree this mimicking should be humored.
aqouta
1yr ago
I too find the vibe shift where supposedly the Social Justice Advocates are in retreat a little too good to be true. I think we should wait until a few months past the 2024 election cycle and see how we feel then. The DEI march continues in my giant financial institution, but being behind the times is pretty on brand for giant financial institutions. More than anything I'm certain trying to read the direction things are going on a month to month scale using a handful of discrete events seems foolish to me. A lul before we ramp into Trump 2.0/Desantis rise looks pretty identical to a woke disintegration.
aqouta
1yr ago
It's been asked enough times that the answer has gotten quite compact. HBD is a defense against the tendency of Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps. The future where HBD understanding in the mainstream is not one where Black people are discriminated against openly, it's one where we become as disinterested in the achievement gap between whites and Asians as we are with the achievement gap between blondes and brunettes. I think this is a better future.
aqouta
1yr ago
Are they in any danger of getting booted off reddit? I don't really think sneerclub ever served the purpose of keeping us epistemologically humble.
I believe she made the wrong choice but I strongly object to removing that choice. We should have exit rights to life. If you can't choose to end it all I don't think you can truly be free. My fiance is a psychiatrist that works at a public hospital where she sees some of the most chronically afflicted, she has stories and I'm aware that there are many common ways of being that I would choose death over. I trust no one but myself to decide what those states are. This is not because I trust the medical establishment but because I do not trust it.
aqouta
1yr ago
Has retard really hit this level of the euphemism treadmill that it is included on this list? Besides the dead naming and stalking I could have produced anecdotes for that whole list for myself and many people I knew growing up and none of us even considered ourselves that bullied. Discipline the little shits doing it for sure, they need to learn what is unacceptable but am I really supposed to be that surprised middle schoolers are little bastards to each other? I suppose if these are tasteful understatements that might be different but that doesn't seem their style.
aqouta
1yr ago
The reason he keeps doing it is because he thinks these people are on his side and just mistaken. He has an unshakable prior that there must actually be some genuine truth to the trans question and there are just a few bad apples and bad bits of science that need to be cleaned up. He truly believes the emperor is wearing clothes and he just needs to find the right light spectrum that everyone else must be looking through to see it and can't tell that all the other people telling him his methods are a ridiculous insult to the emperor because he's obviously wearing clothes are lying to him.
There's plenty of room to articulate a vision for the future that is better than what democrats have to offer. I wish someone would try, and we could see two visions of utopia competing for popular support rather than the depressing political morass we've been languishing in for the last decade.
I think maybe left type people misunderstand right type people's vision for the future. The idea isn't that things shouldn't get better, it's that things are already getting better on their own, capitalism and investment are making all of society more wealthy and we need to avoid killing the golden goose responsible. Tomorrow will be better than today just implicitly so long as we don't do some foolish nonsense like destroy the whole system in a frenzied desire to make sure wealth is equally distributed among the different hair colors or dismantling our industrial base because it offends people that those who invested critical dollars early get the biggest return.
To conservatives progress is sound investment and carefully maintained stability for that investment to grow. Like a carefully planted garden. And to conservatives much of the progressive proposals are of the "Brondo has what plants crave" variety. Conservatives see themselves are pleading with angry short sighted people to leave the plants alone, it's better to eat the fruits than the seeds.
aqouta
11mo ago
I think you have this precisely backwards, not that it makes life much better for the worshipped. White men are given maximum agency and the progressive stack can be run backwards from there to determine agency. A homeless black man is nearly minimally agentic, they would be less so only if they were also trans or some other identity minority, and thus can attempt to, with full intention, push others in front of trains and have this written off as simple non-agentic manifestations of latent society and be back out on the streets within a day of the incident. While a white man can, against their actual intention, kill a black homeless person while trying to restrain them and be held to the standard that this was intentional homicide. This interpretation seems to accurately reflect how society reacts to these two types of people and has something for everyone to like and hate.
aqouta
1yr ago
The entirety of Freddie DeBoer's life outlook is that he loved hippies/bohemians in new york in the 90s and then turned out to be quite smart and a world view crystalized around that abstract attraction/memeplex. It was pretty clear in his infamous planet of cops piece and it explains exactly why he lives in a groundhog world of noticing the left has lost it's mind but waking up the next day completely forgetting that realization.
As for the 90s vs today, the tech sucked and was expensive, the domination of the moral majority sucked even though it's piercing light gave contrast to interesting subcultures just as much as modern progressivism sucks despite it's life giving contrast to communities like our own. The grass is greened by the lack of our, or at least my, current enemy but there is a cause for the sword in every era.
This kind of "all the sheep will die" fantasy seems not healthy. I thoroughly oppose things like mandates on liberty grounds but the demand for the rolling out countermeasures to a widespread deadly disease to somehow also have been irrational is unseemly. Consider it in a world where they were not mandated, a new vaccines rolls out that seems quite effective but as all things has some risk of unknown very negative long term side effects. The disease itself may have very negative long term side effects in addition to the immediate risk of death. So you must decide between rolling the dice on the vaccine or the disease and given the information available the vaccine seems like a better bet. You can only blame people so much for rolling a snake eyes at a critical juncture. As far as I can tell there was no mistake made in actual risk management.
edit:post originally mangled by phone autocomplete.
aqouta
1yr ago
I thought of this, but given that these situations are very rare, I don't think it really matters that much.
Are they really? I've seen the thumb on the scale even in my relatively low stakes white collar office when I was told we were either getting a white/asian/male senior engineer or junior URM/woman with the same budget. Unsurprisingly we got a woman, who is absolutely fine and I don't blame at all but it's an unsettling thing to see a process that would have rejected you for no reason in the wild. If it doesn't matter much, how about we just don't do it? Save everyone the controversy, bring on the dice, hell record it's rolling publicly, hash the candidate names for privacy.
Besides, if the "marginalized" groups really do face a disadvantage
This is just shifting the power to whomever gets to decide which disadvantages count as you mention elsewhere. I put forward that by the time you get to applying for this position all the other legs up given to underrepresented minorities means white candidates have a disadvantage, please propose a way to determine who is correct.
If members of both the overrepresented and underrepresented groups adjust their beliefs rationally, the total amount of "feeling quite bad" should remain the same (that is, of course, an enormous if).
There is a reason this originally unironic comic is referred to as "bike cuck". It's even worse to expect other people to unwilling make their peace with their discrimination. It is hard to quantify exactly what effect this kind of resentment will have but Trump is not as bad as things can get when people move past wanting to show the establishment a middle finger to other displays of disapproval. Scott put it best here but replace "liberalism" with "identity blindness"
People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.
I think people on your side of this debate do not understand just how much rage bubbles under the surface when people see things like this going on and it's a pressure cooker that discussing and venting about this is a career endingly dangerous thing to do with your name attached. Some people tried to overthrow an election on behalf of the frankly embarrassing figure that is Trump, the democrats seem hellbent on forging the weapons of tyrants such as speech control and normalizing broad executive overreach. Someone is going to come along and show us all how to wield them. I do not like this path, I do not want to go where it leads. What you think we're getting out of this, it's not worth it.
If the employer has whittled down the list of applicants to a group of people with similar qualifications, and more detailed information that might help the decision is impossible or infeasible to attain, then the choice of whom to hire will be arbitrary. In this case, I don't see how hiring Brinton because of his unusual presentation is any worse than rolling a die or flipping a coin to make the final choice.
It's worse in the very trivial way that it leaves a whole lot of the population fighting dice that are incapable of rolling in their favor. Yes, it actually feels quite bad to know that you automatically lose any tiebreaker no matter what for something you have no control over to fight a disparity you had no hand in.
edit: and of course there is the other factor which is that I have literally zero faith that the people making these choices are actually not rounding everything down as to what counts for qualifications for people with my phenotype and rounding everything up for qualifications that count for people like Brinton before they declare that several candidates are of equal qualifications. I have seen the faces of this kind of person when they see an unrepresented minority in a prestigious position.
aqouta
1yr ago
The FBI's regular meetings with people like Yoel Roth were characterized by the latter as telling him that state actors might try a "hack and leak" operation prior to the election.
One thing I've always found weird about this story is why I'm supposed to care about the provenance of the leak so long as it's credible. If it's a "fabricate and leak" operation, sure, and if the hackers are breaking the law I'd like them punished for it. But if the information is true and pertinent to voter why would that justify suppressing it? We aren't a court of law and the character of the people on display is most of the point. If Rittenhouse was running for public office that video they didn't let into the court of him talking about wishing he had his gun while watching shoplifters should definitely be in play. Same is true for the shit on Hunter's laptop. If someone has burned a zero day to hack something totally disqualifying on Trump no one would be batting an eye at spreading it as widely as possible.
Leftist inclined people want to create racial equality of outcomes, and they therefore boost whichever kinds of rationalizations they can come up with for the achievability and justification of such equality.
And they've had the reins and got to be the null hypothesis for decades. All of their interventions failed. We can play the snipe down studies game all day but in the end one story is backed up by observed reality and the other is backed up by blind dogma.
But I honestly don't even care if this ridiculous debate is settled, all I want is for the blank slatists to actually have to justify their interventions and pay some cost when the inevitably fail. That all the costs of their failures are dumped on their outgroup is unacceptable.
aqouta
1yr ago
As did Tolkien, who intentionally loosely modeled the dwarfs off of Jews and even had their language be Semitic. A people pushed out of their homelands. It was notably not a thing done with animus as he was fond of Jewish people.
aqouta
1yr ago
I don't like that the culture war is taking place over control of the platforms themselves but this does seem like people who live by the sword dying by the sword. I just wish there were more places one could live without swords. I deeply hope that a lesson is learned here and that it isn't "fight even more underhandedly at platform control."
aqouta
1yr ago
I'm not sure if you're referencing this intentionally but some male writers did do something like this and it was quite controversial. I had just searched out the first article I could find on the subject without much care to the content besides that it got the basic details right and man is it a funny read. It tries to thread the needle on why publishing under a male sounding pseudonym to target a male dominated audience is good and empowering but publishing under a female pseudonym to captured a female dominated audience is bad and cannot be legitimized. The idea that people shouldn't judge books by their author's genitals is not addressed.
aqouta
1yr ago
I'm not going to try to do the thing that Trump supporters still do where they justify all of the actions in some 4D chess move. I've been quite disappointed by a lot of Musk's handling on Twitter. That said the doom posting on it seem incredibly excessive. It would not surprise me if Musk has lost and will not recover a lot of twitter value. It also wouldn't surprise me if behind the scenes all that really mattered was cutting the costs by firing tons of people and this will all come up Milhouse. What I really object to are all the people that are pretending they have any clue whatsoever what the future holds on this matter. Sometimes the skeptic is a fool for not seeing the obvious but I think far more people are going to seem far more foolish when we do a retrospective in 5 years.
Where are the scholarships? Where are the outreach programs? Why was none of the gender uplift social architecture ever designed to work in the general case and not just the specific cases where women were disadvantaged?
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