coffee_enjoyer
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User ID: 541
A pure hypothetical thought experiment: imagine it occurs that the Pfizer mRNA vaccination + all booster follow-ups (4+ shots) regimen is disastrous to health, and has a high 10-year mortality rate. In other words, those who strictly adhered to the recommended CDC/Pfizer vaccination schedule have a 25% of dying by the decade’s end, or some such risk. What would be the public’s response and what would be the just punishment for those involved?
I think in such a hypothetical, the whole political climate of 21st century neo-neoliberalism will be fundamentally altered. There would be a huge rightward shift on distrust to authorities, especially but not limited to scientists and public health authorities. I don’t think the public would be satisfied with Fauci and other heads being tried, and will demand sentences for the thousands of individuals involved in the decision similar to what we would see in the Nuremberg trials. This would also fundamentally change the political climate, as the “vax-maxxed” lean left.
Douglas Emhoff, husband of Kamala Harris, posted a photo on Twitter celebrating the Jewish American Heritage Month.
Met with Jewish White House staff in celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month. Our Administration is proud to recognize the Jewish staffers who help carry our nation forward each day and are helping create a more inclusive tomorrow.
I counted, give or take, 155 Jewish Staff Members. There are 474 White House Staff Members in total, meaning that Jews comprise 32% of all staff members. This is a radical over-representation of 1400%, or 14x what should be expected given the population of 2.2%. As everyone pictured is White, presumably this really is a photo with all the Jewish staff members who wanted to participate in the event (otherwise: why no black staffers present?). There may be some not pictured for various work-related or personal reasons, and perhaps some with Jewish spouses pictured. I had difficulty finding the figures on other demographics. According to an authoritative source, 14% of the staff are Black (this just happens to be the same number and is not a typo). I could find nothing on Asian members, but perusing the total list of White House Staff names I calculated give or take 50 with exclusively Asian names; this should be construed as a minimum because of high exogamy rates and names not always being obviously Asian. That puts Asians at 10.5%. Given that Black people sit at 14%, I would go out on a limb and say that the Latino constituents also comprise roughly their makeup in America; let’s peg it at a slightly lower 15% (if someone wants to check from the list of staffers’ names be my guest).
All of this puts the non-Jewish White percent at 28.5%, counting the Turkish and Arab names as White (and ignoring the probably ~2% Native American that Joe slipped in there). And so, among White House staffers, Whites are quite under-represented and Jews are enormously over-represented. This is problematic IMO, because the domestic founding population of a nation shouldn’t be so under-represented, and a single ethnic cluster with a strong activism network and their own influential nation state probably shouldn’t be 14x over-represented among White House staffers without anyone in established media criticizing or noticing. Alas, such topics have been posted frequently, but in previous cases the over-representation was among Cabinet Members and Supreme Court Justices and so on. This shows that even in a large sample size such as 474, the over-representation remains. If I could put my position into as few words as possible, I would steal from a random tweet on the subject: “Half of the White House staff is Jewish, but we get told that ‘White Supremacists’ run America lol.” What pains me is that while the default white Americans are so under-represented, they are the ones who face the most ruthless black propaganda against their demographic. It’s important to educate others on the problem of representation, I suppose.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
How bad can America’s health actually get? And what shall we do?
All kinds of ill health are steadily increasing, from age-adjusted obesity to autism and depression. Anxiety in young adults nearly doubled in the decade pre-pandemic. Type 1 and type 2 diabetes has risen dramatically. Deaths of despair have also risen. There seems to be no actionable plan, ready for implementation, to halt the rising tide of ill health. The numbers are steadily increasing adjusted for age, with some numbers rising faster in the young than in the old.
I find the willpower discussions to be missing the point. Unless there is a plan that we can implement in schools to significantly increase or teach willpower, then it hardly matters whether the will is relevant. The diseased from poor choices and the diseased from poor environment equally hurt the security of the nation, costing trillions from decreased productivity, decreased fertility, and healthcare expenditure. It is curious how much discourse in America is spent quibbling on issues that are so much less important than the health question. Health is something that directly impacts every aspect of the country, not the least of which is the plain happiness and fertility of citizens.
What I would like to see is a harm tax put in place that adds onto every unhealthy item the cost per item of its societal harm: the projected healthcare costs, the loss from intelligent citizens working for corporations that poison us, the projected loss of productivity. Now, this will always be an estimate, but so are many taxes. I think this would largely make sodas prohibitively expensive.
Mr Beast’s Trans Debacle
Mr Beast is the Gen Z entertainment celebrity of note. Calling Mr Beast the PewDiePie of Gen Z would be underselling him. His 25-minute Squid Game YouTube video received 400 million views, which to put in perspective is 5x the total viewership of the Seinfeld Finale. His Tik Tok has 80 million followers, his most popular “YouTube short” has 650 million views, etc. He is more popular than what the average millennial or older would think (I fall into this cohort). When he visited a mall in my state to sell his burgers (one of his successful business offshoots), the line extended miles and made the news. Mr Beast has a childhood friend group with whom he makes videos. The rapport between the friends of the group, what might be called the “vibe”, is a crucial ingredient to Mr Beast’s success. They were, like many friend groups containing boys in America[*], all male; the pure boyishness was a major draw for his success.
This year, one of the “cast” members of the Mr Beast enterprise transitioned into a woman. (For brevity, I will just call the member she and a woman.) Chris, who had a child and went through a divorce, has transitioned in full. She is wearing dresses on video and taking HRT. If you were to plug Chris and Mr Beast into Google News, you would have no idea how the viewers have responded to this change. But plugging it into Tik Tok (the premiere Zoomer app) gives a different story.
The response among Gen Z has been overwhelmingly negative. When I checked last night, 8 of the 10 most watched videos for the search “Mr Beast” were a negative reaction to Chris’s transition, the total view count of which was more than 80 million. The comments overwhelmingly negative. A typical comment section looked like this, sometimes with more than 25k comments. The commenters chant “Mr Beast 6000 coming out”, referencing Mr Beast’s oldest YouTube channel known for political incorrect humor. The consensus among the fans is that the transition has ruined the group’s rapport and that Chris has got to go, but that hands are tied because she is transgender. On the latest (secondary channel) video for Mr Beast, the comment section is censored and moderated so that the issue can’t explicitly come up. The commenters instead spam “we want to see more Chandler and Nolan”, cleverly emphasizing their disinterest with Chris by omission. The fans on Tik Tok are trying to find any clip they can to get Chris cancelled, with one finding a video of him saying the N word and another digging up an anti-Islam tweet from 2017.
There are a few things to explore here.
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Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.
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The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.
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Mr Beast is in a pickle. He became popular, partially, because of the authenticity and joy of his friend group. The discomfort involving the transition is palpable in the latest video. Body language, rapport, banter, and general “vibes” have ruined what led children to watch his content. He is the most data driven creator and knows this. He has previously mentioned that he edits out sneezes and coughs because it loses retention, and I believe once mentioned that adding a girl to reaction videos negatively reduces engagement. Alas, he can’t come out and fire the transitioned member without losing corporate sponsorship and reputation. He is stuck between losing popularity among his fans, or losing support among the progressive power structure. He is also losing support from parents who don’t want their 8-year-old watching a transgender. There’s also the moral issue of supporting a friend post-divorce.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
In Hasidic Enclaves, Failing Private Schools Flush With Public Money: New York’s Hasidic Jewish religious schools have benefited from $1 billion in government funding in the last four years but are unaccountable to outside oversight.
The New York Times has an expose on how ultra-orthodox Jews in NYC are funneling billions in public money for use in their yeshivas. Students are barely taught how to read and write in English (as an example, one couldn't spell "America") and the state requirements are effectively optional or used as a study hall.
The schools appear to be operating in violation of state laws that guarantee children an adequate education. Even so, The Times found, the Hasidic boys’ schools have found ways of tapping into enormous sums of government money, collecting more than $1 billion in the past four years alone.
Only nine schools in the state had less than 1 percent of students testing at grade level in 2019, the last year for which full data was available. All of them were Hasidic boys’ schools.
The boys’ schools cram in secular studies only after a full day of religious lessons. Most offer reading and math just four days a week, often for 90 minutes a day, and only for children between the ages of 8 and 12. Some discourage further secular study at home. “No English books whatsoever,” one school’s rule book warns.
Their leaders, the grand rabbis, wield significant power, and breaking the rules they set can carry serious consequences. That point was underscored by the more than 50 current Hasidic community members who spoke to The Times only on condition of anonymity, for fear of being exiled and barred from seeing family and friends.
Another former teacher provided hundreds of pages of work sheets from the past five years that showed that 12-year-olds — in their last year of English instruction — could not spell words like “cold” and “America.”
Tax dollars are not supposed to go toward religious education. But public agencies pay private schools to comply with government mandates and manage social services. Hasidic boys’ yeshivas, like other private schools, access dozens of such programs, collecting money that subsidizes their theological curriculum. The Times identified dozens of federal, state and local programs and analyzed how much they have given to yeshivas, looking most closely at the last year before the pandemic. The analysis showed that New York’s Hasidic boys’ schools received more than $375 million from the government in that period [...] they appear to get more government funding on average than other private schools in the state, including other religious schools, the analysis found. The city voucher program that helps low-income families pay for child care now sends nearly a third of its total assistance to Hasidic neighborhoods
This might come as a shock to those who have no experience with Williamsburg, Monroe, Kiryas Joel, or Monsey in the NY tristate area. There is what can be described as a Hasidic Jewish mafia, that violates norms and laws to obtain hegemony, while siphoning resources from the surrounding communities. Towns are genuinely afraid of encroachment by the Hasids, because they move in en masse and quickly obtain town leadership positions and school board positions. They usually vote to reduce all extra funding, like extra-curricular funding for public schools, because their children only attend yeshivas. They label their homes as temples and don't legally marry their wives to reduce their taxes. Towns in subjected areas will purposely reduce sidewalks or veto funding for sidewalks in order to deter Hasids from moving in. Usually they will have a non-Hasidic lawyers go door to door asking to buy property with cash. They are involved in coordinated welfare schemes yet somehow get sweetheart plea deals of no jail time. Kiryas Joel was once the poorest place in all of America, and yet they have their own private security force that follows non-Hasids in SUVs if you drive through their estates, they have an enormous temple and their own state-funded maternity clinic on site and are able to obtain a unique 30 million dollar water aqueduct project.
I'm happy that the NYT is doing solid journalism on this. I kind of gripe with portraying the young as victims and bringing up the Holocaust, but it is what it is. In my mind, the Hasidic power structure is a legitimate problem that needs to be made sense of, because if there is all this corruption at just 200k members, well, in 60 years it will be 1,600,000. They will comprise a majority of America's Jewish community in a few decades.
coffee_enjoyer
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19d ago
What is the future of Islam in the West and the future of the West with Islam?
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Popular youth figures Andrew Tate and Sneako became Muslims and made it a part of their media personality, which frequently gets millions of unique views with the audience mostly impressionable young boys.
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Muslim memes are becoming popular online. Muslim terminology is becoming popular online — I have seen cases of Muslim expressions like inshallah and mashallah entering terminally online lexicon (which is the first step to normie lexicon).
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Unlike Christianity, there is a confluence of significant factors that lead to Islam retaining strict behavioral and cultural rules. Mosques and scholars are funded by wealthy Arabs who have a monetary, political, and genetic influence in the spread of the religion; imams have children, the more strict the imam the more children, and dynastic imam families are not uncommon; the center of the religion is the Middle East where there is a constant threat of violence if leaders stray far enough from orthodoxy; the practice of excluding women from decision-making means that feminine-coded tolerance is sidelined; the religion itself highly emphasizes the following of strict tradition and punishments for “innovation”.
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We are seeing the influence of Muslims in the criticisms against Israel, in a London street draped with Ramadan signs on Easter, and so on.
It’s interesting that “Islam is a threat” discourse has died down relative to a decade ago, despite the influence of the religion increasing. Is it because so many people have lost faith in both liberalism and liberal Christianity that they no longer care? I think that could play a part. Is it just laziness? Has there been a fundamental shift in assessment of Muslims?
coffee_enjoyer
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6mo ago
How would Zionists behave if they were in the Palestinian position?
This is a key question for determining the moral severity of the terrorist attacks we saw this weekend. A common criticism of Hamas is that they engage in terrorism against civilians whereas their morally enlightened (ostensibly) Israeli cousins only attack military targets. But I think this ignores the fact that Israel has the luxury of successfully hitting military targets. Israel can kill just as many civilians as Hamas by targeting military sites, while also killing relevant military leaders and defending against unwanted criticism. Yet at the end of the day, the same if not more civilians are killed, and the same terror is instilled in the enemy’s civilian population. Regarding an Israeli missile attack in May which killed ten civilians, Amnesty writes:
They were launched into densely populated urban areas at 2am when families were sleeping at home, which suggests that those who planned and authorized the attacks anticipated – and likely disregarded – the disproportionate harm to civilians. Intentionally launching disproportionate attacks, a pattern Amnesty International has documented in previous Israeli operations, is a war crime.
The idea that it is morally acceptable to kill civilians when you also kill military targets at the same time is often brought up when American bombings in Japan during WWII are discussed. However, I’m not convinced that there is a clear moral difference between Hamas actions and, say, the firebombing of Tokyo, where as many as 100k were killed, the vast majority being civilians.
Back to the question at hand, we know that Zionists had no issue bombing embassies and killing non-combatants in order to colonize the land of what is now called Israel. In the 40s, they notably bombed a British embassy, and in the 50s the Israeli government pressured Britain and Italy not to investigate the bombing. Recently, an Israeli historian has claimed that Zionists were responsible for the bombings targeting the Jews of Baghdad in order to pressure Jews to migrate and settle Israel. So, back when Israel’s position was more similar to Palestine, they did in fact engage in terrorist activity. If Israeli militants would behave as Hamas militants were they in that position, then the immorality of Hamas conduct is greatly diminished in severity.
Alec Baldwin, the Lab Leak, and punishing maximal negligence
Alec Baldwin has been charged with manslaughter. We don’t know the nitty gritty details yet, but let’s consider the following possibility. Baldwin, as someone who funded and produced the movie, was ultimately responsible for choices in hiring. He hired someone insufficiently skilled at risk management on set. In addition to hiring and retaining someone whom a reasonable producer would consider insufficiently skilled, he acted negligently on set through pressure, which led to the death of an employee.
Whatever the actual details, there’s a plausible avenue by which Baldwin has serious moral blame in regards to manslaughter. The details that come out later will obviously dictate whether this occurred, but we can imagine a case in which a producer possesses moral blame for the system of failsafes failing. Importantly, in cases where the risks are high (a gun misfiring), greater care is morally warranted. Our expected duty to exercise care is proportional to the potential of harm.
Following from this example, I assert that we should develop a legal principle to maximally punish anyone involved in catastrophic lab leaks (those resulting in millions to tens of millions of death). [paragraph edited for clarity] We should do this regardless of the material facts of individual responsibility of a lab leak. This is because the risk of leak is of such significance that it belongs to a new category of risk:care ratio concerns. It is the principle of reasonable care and deterrence but amplified to the amount of harm involved. The amount of harm that a Covid leak created (implying that the lab leak theory is true) is more than what inspired the Nuremberg Trials. Playing with genetically modified coronaviruses, specifically enhanced for virulence, constitutes such a threat against the human race that every single person involved should have been made to underwrite their life as a guarantee in case of leak. Not for a lifetime in jail, or capital punishment — the guarantee should have been that the State would use medieval punishment on you for the rest of your life. The scientists who worked and funded and stamped the research should have been so certain that a leak would never happen that they literally stake endless, limitless torture for the rest of their life if it leaked. Only this level of deterrent punishment would befit the level of care required to deal with the potential harm of COVID. I am suggesting a moral principle that would prevent future leaks, applied to future cases, to stave off the risk of leak catastrophe.
If Baldwin, in acting unreasonably in hiring or setting workplace culture, can be responsible for one death, how much more care should scientists who work with virulent viruses exercise? Viruses that will kill 200 million by the end of the century are inconceivably more risky than anything that can happen in normal everyday business life. The risk to care ratio must be maximal because only this level of deterrence is sufficient to encourage a reasonable level of care. The whole point of Law is that foreseeing punishment deters behavior. It’s not just that Baldwin ought to have practiced sufficient care; it’s that everyone in Baldwin’s place should foresee a punishment from failing to exercise sufficient care. Baldwin deserves a punishment in accordance to his level of negligence, and everyone in Baldwin’s position must foresee a similar punishment for similar negligence.
Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?
Giuliani was naively trusting an honest and traditional democratic system. He didn’t expect that the institutions and public forums would conspire together to thwart the democratic process from unfolding. This was the largest escalation of the culture war in history: information indicating that the Vice President’s own son took bribes from foreign adversaries to influence his father’s politics was hidden from the voter’s access through a cabal of anti-democratic figures behind the scenes at major tech companies and news websites.
This is why I don’t care at all if “Republicans lied about the election!” My response is, “brother, the Republicans should be out there telling the Public the most persuasive possible lies they can conceive”. That’s the natural response to the anti-Democratic manipulation we saw in 2020. It is morally permissible, in fact obligatory, to match your enemy’s escalation when that very escalation thwarted the democratic process and destroyed the fabric of American democracy. When you destroy the rules of conduct, we go back to millennia-old idea of just proportional response — this is the nature of “just [culture] war” theory. The Republicans ought to be treating Democrats like we treat Russia: you have violated the borders and agreements, we will do whatever we can to push you back and reestablish a rules-based national order.
Why Boston’s “Embrace Statue” has led me to embrace Western chauvinism
Boston Common is a beautiful park in America’s true historic city. It’s a must see when visiting, and features a number of old monuments. There’s the Soldiers and Sailors monument, the Robert Gould Shaw memorial, and a memorial to the Boston Massacre. All of these are in a beautiful timeless design that the common man appreciates, which is appropriate for the common park of Boston. I wouldn’t say these monuments compare to achievements in European cities, but they are nevertheless noble attempts to celebrate the glories of the nation. As in all great art, the form befits the content, and the statues artfully imitate the gravity of their depicted scene.
Boston liberals decided to plop down a new monument, called “Embrace”, in dedication of MLK Jr — a figure mired in controversy over his support and instructions on raping women and the evidence that he plagiarized both his PhD thesis and his famous dream speech. (If that sentence was strange to read, it’s because I’m trying a new writing style where I introduce progressive heroes like they introduce mine). But the reason I disagree with the statue isn’t because MLK is a cheat or a misogynistic rape-enabler. Were the statue beautiful and heroic, and adequately conveyed the perseverance and dedication and cultural significance of MLK, this post wouldn’t be written. But that didn’t happen. Instead the statue looks like shit.
I mean this literally: it looks like a gigantic turd. The real world angles (not the architectural projections) make it look like a man firmly gripping monumental dung [1]. Some go further, and say it looks like a man gripping a monumental dong — that Boston has erected nothing short of an erection [2] [3] [4]. Surely the view of the common people should take primacy for the statues of the Boston Common, and Twitter is filled with normal people laughing hysterically at this statue.
So why erect something so ugly? The root cause here is the conscious betrayal of the Western legacy. What we see in the Boston Common is what we saw in Obama’s official portrait, with many questioning the artist’s choice of a casual background and hiding semen in his work [5]. The Western legacy and its hundreds of years of artistic development, which made a science out of beautiful monuments, is seen as intrinsically white — which is intrinsically bad. And so the novelty of experimental artists is privileged over the traditional and beautiful forms of art. Many of these artists make bad and gaudy work. The public knows this, but they are chosen anyway by the powers that be, who notoriously have an undeveloped sense of beauty.
And so I embrace western chauvinism. The West is the best, not in all the ways, but in important ones. Their statuary history is surely the best. Because the West is the best, we should privilege the traditional modes of art. Accepting this fact would make the public beautiful again.
coffee_enjoyer
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10mo ago
This is a bizarre problem I’ve noticed with ChatGPT. It will literally just make up links and quotations sometimes. I will ask it for authoritative quotations from so and so regarding such topic, and a lot of the quotations would be made up. Maybe because I’m using the free version? But it shouldn’t be hard to force the AI to specifically only trawl through academic works, peer reviewed papers, etc.
coffee_enjoyer
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4mo ago
In an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and associated culture war, we now have one of the first(?) terroristic threat charges brought against someone in the States. A teacher felt that a student’s comment about his flag was disrespectful and responded by threatening to behead her. It is reported that the teacher shouted:
You motherfucking piece of shit! I'll kick your ass. I should cut your motherfing head off
And students report hearing that
"he would kick her fucking ass, slit her goddamn throat and drag her ass outside and cut her head off."
The teacher who made this terroristic threat is Benjamin Reese, a Jewish man from Georgia, and the flag he had in his room was an Israeli flag [1] [2]. I find this noteworthy for two reasons. A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now. But I’m also surprised that, despite the story first being published 24hrs ago, it’s untouched by mainstream news except RawStory. There’s local affiliates, RawStory, and YahooFinance Canada. But there’s no CNN, Fox, NYTimes, etc. They can’t be waiting for more information, because we already have the police reports. I predict that this story will not gain the traction that it would had the threat been made by a Palestinian man, or Muslim generally. Certainly that would be brought up on prime time Fox.
This instantly reminded me of the Day of Hate news blitz, when the Chabad-affiliated Barry (Baruch) Nockowitz picked up a toddler and threw him against a wall because of “anti-semitism”, telling police he would find another kid to attack [3]. Besides Miami Herald, this had zero news coverage, all the while coinciding with the “day of hate” which received George Floyd levels of news coverage and zero crimes committed. (As proof of how little coverage it got, themotte is on the first page of google results for his name, linking to the last time I mentioned this crime).
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Did the Right lose the terminally online by emphasizing consuming rather than communing?
Leftists (especially LGBT-focused) congregate in highly socialized communities where every small action toward The Cause is socially reinforced. You find this on Twitter and Discord. While there’s a fair amount of complaining typical of online spaces, leftist spaces are unique in saturating their mutuals in compliments and praise. There’s an oversaturation of positive feedback, and negative feedback is seen with suspicion. Anything from an uncreative tweet, a poorly conceived thought, an unlikely empowering experience, whatever is usually met with pats on the back snaps (sensory issues!) and good boys persons. While this oversaturation leads to an over-sensitivity, not to mention some bad behaviors and creations, it also means that the online community forms strong bonds and is only associated with positive emotions.
In contrast, Right-oriented spaces are less keen on compliments and engage in more stressful catastrophization. They consume too much news and complain too much about the news. Culturally right online spaces are more socially stressful and have less bonding. They are critical of the liberal-coded heaping of compliments and empathy, and consequently miss out on a lot of the power and energy that’s present in Leftist spaces. There’s also an optimism deferential, with Leftist spaces generally more optimistic despite performative lamentation, and Right spaces more pessimistic, at least since ~2018.
This is a poor example, but imagine watching Contrapoints versus Jordan Peterson. This is a poor example by necessity — the Right does not have any counterpart to Contrapoints. You can watch Contrapoints and come away without any argument or evidence — but then you would be missing the point; the point is that you’re having an endearing and charming parasocial relationship with the person, and the outfit changes and odd social contextual changes simply work to increase the emotional affect, like a dozen playdates in video format.
There’s a phenomenon online where hobby spaces get “taken over” by more progressive mod teams in a variety of domains but especially terminally online spaces (video game modding, illustrations, speedrunning, etc). We see this on Reddit too. One possible reason for this is the uniquely reinforcing culture of online Leftist spaces. Someone becoming a mod on an otherwise unknown speedrunning discord community is something that would be praised in these communities and an earnest mark of reputation. And maybe they are right to do so — in any case the effect is that these small positional advancements can be a source of continual reward for the Leftist enjoying their quasi-lovebombing, while at the same time advancing the cause day after day.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
Representation in the Last of Us
Because this show is highly popular and ongoing, I’m just going to coat everything in spoiler tags.
coffee_enjoyer
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1yr ago
There’s always going to be racial disparities because there are racial disparities in academic skill as evidenced by testing. Getting rid of honor’s classes because black and latino students do poorly is like getting rid of swimming competitions because short guys do poorly or getting rid of beauty models because fat women feel offended. It is the exact wrong way of looking at the world. The black and latino students, instead of narcissistically believing they are morally harmed, should feel gratitude that they live in a nation where smarter people live and should feel blessed that they have more capable competitors to inspire them. If there is any moral harm occurring, it is that smart students will grow up to have to subsidize the problems of dumb students. In no way do the dumb students possess moral victimhood status, IMHO.
coffee_enjoyer
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29d ago
Texas Governor Abbott signs law attempting to ban free speech at universities whenever the speech criticizes Israel in certain ways (described below).
The Executive Order requires all universities to —
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Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.
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Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.
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Include the definition of antisemitism, adopted by the State of Texas in Section 448.001 of the Texas Government Code, in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.
Section 448.001 reads
Examples of antisemitism are included with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance's "Working Definition of Antisemitism" adopted on May 26, 2016
And this definition includes (among other things) —
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Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
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Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.
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Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
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Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.
These examples are intentionally ambiguous and can be weaponized by politicians or the judiciary against critics. The first example simply bans anyone from criticizing Israel in the same way that Israel routinely criticize others, by comparing them to Nazis. This cuts off a whole spectrum of political comparisons from ever applying to Israel. The second example could imply that you are antisemitic if you criticize Israel for things without also criticizing other nations in the same breath, however culturally and politically distant the nation. The third implies that an ethnostate cannot be considered racist if it is Jewish. The fourth implies that no one — not a single politician who is Jewish — can be accused of being more loyal to his self-defined homeland than America.
IMO this is a clear affront to freedom of speech. I find it embarrassing that any conservative in America would sign a law like this. The ambiguity is dangerous because it could be used by biased politicians or judges in its broadest application. While I don’t think it’s good public rhetoric to compare Israel to Nazis, that should be legal because (1) Nazis are everyone’s go-to villains, (2) Israel was recently the subject of an ICJ inquiry regarding genocide, (3) ethnonations should be extra scrutinized for genocide, (4) ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts. The holocaust, like it or not, has no actual relevance to the current conduct of the Israeli regime. In real life, multigenerational ethnic groups do not swear off the same violence that their grandparents were victims of. So comparisons are fair game, if usually in bad taste.
coffee_enjoyer
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8mo ago
I want to resurrect a variant of an old question that has got me wondering again. Is it possible for an atheist to think deeply about life without losing motivation to live well?
It’s trite to phrase it like this, but the atheistic model still seems utterly devoid of motivation or purpose when you dwell on it. Obviously, if you don’t dwell on the facts of life, you can distract yourself with various concerns and pursuits. But what if you don’t distract yourself? Someone with a religious model involving a loving God can ponder his existence forever and be motivated and purpose-filled, provided that they forever presuppose a loving God as an article of faith. But I’m trying to envision an atheist pondering life while still maintaining motivation to live vibrantly and maximally. How do they do it, do they do it, or are they just distracting themselves?
Eg, “an atheist believes they need to make life count” —> count for what? Your life does not count, by your own definition. You will cease to exist, like the dinosaurs, who surely did not count. So why are you programming your own Operating System as a hobby? It doesn’t count! “But it makes me happy” —> drugs will surely make you more happy. Why not do them?
coffee_enjoyer
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5mo ago
I think the article from Forward is pretty good about a facts-only assessment:
[Ventura County Sheriff] said that the nature of the altercation — including “who the aggressor was” — remained unclear because of conflicting statements about what had occurred and a lack of definitive video evidence.
Some of the witnesses were pro-Palestine, while others were pro-Israel,” Fryhoff said. “During the investigation at the scene, deputies determined that Mr. Kessler fell backward and struck his head on the ground. What exactly transpired prior to Mr. Kessler falling backward isn’t crystal clear right now.”
What is the liberal argument for why the free market doesn’t solve the problem of “looked over” minority applicants?
If there were a number of minority business applicants who felt looked over in hiring and not adequately promoted, why wouldn’t they want to form their own business? For instance, they can simply form their own trading company. Ostensibly, if the problem is so severe as to warrant large scale national discussion and policy change, there must be hundreds of thousands of minorities capable of making way more money than they currently make if only they are hired properly and placed in the appropriate position. Importantly, they would be making money for anyone who invested in the business. As there are already exorbitantly wealthy minority investors, shouldn’t this be occurring? And if the liberal theory were correct, wouldn’t this just be free money for everyone involved? All you would have to do is establish a trading firm made up of whichever minority applicants are being discriminated against.
As a gratuitous example, if Goldman Sachs weren’t hiring Korean PhDs to work on algorithmic trading, someone could swoop in and make free money just by hiring them. Or better yet, a Korean investor could help someone start their very own Korean version of Goldman. We saw something like this with physics PhDs; someone realized they would be exceptionally good at applying their intelligence to understanding the market mathematically, and those who hired them made bank. Now everyone hires them.
So if I were a female trader, or even better, an Afro-Caribbean female trader, and I were not placed in a position which maximized company gains, I would just need to collect together a few dozen others in a similar position and start my own boutique shop with investment from African and/or female investors, of which there are thousands. This should be an obvious decision for everyone involved. It would be a day 1 decision. It’s how non-minorities often decide to start their own business, feeling like they could be better off starting a new organization. A relative of mine started his own company with some colleagues when he felt he wasn’t being optimally placed for his own economic gain (and the company’s, given that he simply left and took clients). It’s also how, for instance, Jewish Americans involved in banking were able to start their own companies — in some cases being hired by the majority who saw their value, in other cases starting their own companies having realized their own value.
Put another way, why on earth are women and Native American and Black traders who feel discriminated against not forming their own boutique firm with the investment of progressive millionaires and even billionaires? It’s free money! And half of all retail investors could invest in the enterprise (the Progressive half). The Portland school district could put their teacher’s retirement funds into their hands, knowing it’s the greatest bang for their buck. It would be like finding an undiscovered Ivy League school, churning out Yale-level talent without anyone realizing it. Why are we not hearing the success stories of all female or all-Latino or etc trading firms?
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
7mo ago
Reclaiming religious social technology by rejecting literalism
We have had discussions on secular culture and the consequences of the old “religious impulse”. But usually there’s a focus on the worst examples and experiences of religion. I want to bring up a different angle: what is the best that religion has to offer? What does religion accomplish best, beyond what we all know (fostering a community with moral rules)? And how can we reclaim and reorganize only the good and useful aspects of religious social technology?
The worship of God as therapeutic mental and emotional practice
Let us assume that there is no God. With this assumption, God is still the greatest possible Being that can be conceived in our mind. This is one of the more popular definitions of God. (Theologians have entertained many ways of construing God, including that He is “being itself”, the ultimate Good, or the ultimate Reality, yet what unites all of these is a desire to imagine the greatest possible thing in a given framework). If a person is using his mind to imagine the greatest Being, he is engaging in an activity that brings psychological and emotional benefits. When we dwell on an aspect of God, we dwell on a greater experience, straining our mind to understand something that brings awe and reverence. If the aspect we focus on is God’s eternal nature, we are attempting to know and feel the fact that something can be eternally existent throughout all of time, reminding us of the grandeur of existence and the insignificance of passing vanity. If it’s God’s truthfulness, we call to mind the idea of perfect certainty and logic, while praising truth itself. If it’s God’s power, we imagine the greatest experiences of power, and applying these experiences to one Thing (one Being, Idea, Cue, or Point in the mind: God). Thunder, waves, the magnitude of the sun, various imagined metaphors (“the earth in his hand”) or personal experiences may apply. If it’s God’s peace and love, we reach into our memory to pull out the greatest experiences of peace and love we know, and then associate God with the underlying experience of love. When someone is worshipping God as “King of Kings”, they imagine a perfect ruler over their life. The perfect goodness and purity of God is a way for us to strain our mind to imagine and feel perfect goodness and purity. The act of worship is a mental reorganization around greater experience, growing in our mind the experience that we attend to.
The triumph of monotheism is that all of these are associated with one “thing”. We might call it one god, one experience, one Word, one “inner gaze”, or one ineffability. Since a person can only focus on one thing at a time, the monotheistic God is just the greatest possible single thing to focus on — not as a consequence of his being real or his being God (we are assuming He is not), but purely on definitional grounds as a phenomenological activity. It’s a mental and emotional activity, a meditation or exercise, which results in benefits even for a 100% atheistic person.
Experiences of greatness, awe, reverence, and the “sublime” are associated with life satisfaction in numerous studies [1]. It is not surprising then that “awe directed at God” collects all of these benefits and more [2]. What I would assert is that God, understood in the way above, is the greatest mental practice of ordering these feelings or states of being. If there is any great thing you have in your mind, then unless it is perfectly great, there is going to be something greater to conceive. That “something greater” is nothing other than the ancient practice of worshipping God, minus the insistence on His existence and providential qualities.
God as Optimal Social Relationship
Leaping from this ground of defining the divine, we can consider what’s going on with a personal Christianized God. Can’t all this be done without “believing in a personal God”, let alone a Christian God, let alone a god? I will supply two answers. (1) Yes, but it never is. In fact, it is not often done by nominally religious people despite thousands of years of poetic tradition. It’s the realm of ancient philosophers, mystics, and the obscurely devout. So while it is not necessarily religious, it is still distinctly religious, and nevertheless a great part of religion that should be recreated. But to be double-minded: (2) no, because there is an essential variable left out of the equation: the primacy of social relationships.
We are not rational creatures first, we are social creatures first. From the standpoint of evolution, social cooperation comes before rationality. Our motivations are traced to social acculturation and values and not pure rationality. Actually, there is no rationality without social cooperation and values. Social life is the father of rational thought and has dominion over it. This is evident when looking at scientific cheating scandals, marketing, and in-group biases. I’d say you can also find this when looking at rationalist communities: it requires a community to draw people toward rationalism and to have them think and consider within the rationalist framework.
Due to evolution, our animal mind comes with large disk space exclusively dedicated to social life. This means that, if we want the greatest thing in our mind, it must be understood socially. We do not love and serve an idea in the way we do a Being, simply because we are not designed to do that. Evolution has deigned to make us social animals with deity-forming instincts when left unattended.
If we cannot grasp in our mind the fullness of an idea as we can the fullness of a Being, and our desire is to grasp the greatest thing in our mind, then it must be conceived of as a being. While we might stand in awe at a mountain, the sea, and the celestial heavens (hence why these are used abundantly in religious poetry), we have more reverence for an individual than a theory. This is the purpose of a personal God and the purpose of prayer. To maximize the use of our mind toward the greatest single object of attention, we must see God as person-like, or in other words, a Being.
Creating a community around the greatest conceived Being is creating the optimal conditions for community
Here’s where the idea of secular culture reclaiming religious practice gets interesting. If a group of people attend the same place to focus on and grow the experience of “perfect love”, then that is the best community for cultivating love. If they do the same thing for “perfect virtue”, then that is the best community for perfect virtue. Organizing people around each person’s conception of the Greatest Being is the best way to organize people together. It is the best way to share positive emotions, because despite each person having a slightly different understanding of perfect love, they are all feeling and sharing the emotion together.
Imagine for a moment that you have wrapped all of Life’s great and optimal experiences together in your mind under the dominion of one Being. You, and your neighbors, go to a dedicated place to worship that Thing, using all the same cues. (By worship, we mean simply increasing our love and interest in the Thing.) This is an extraordinary way to come together as a community. I would argue it’s considerably better than how most people form communities today, structuring them around hobbies, drugs, or suboptimal political aspirations.
The psychological magic of the Christian celebration as optimal religious experience: can an atheist culture recreate something Christian?
Christians come together to celebrate the story of how they (personally) escaped certain death due to the goodness and virtue of a Perfect Man. They celebrate also the wisdom that the Perfect Man bestowed humanity, which they leads to perfect felicity. They consider this Perfect Man to be their teacher who hears them when they speak and who provides support and favor. The Perfect Man is Perfect Teacher, Perfect Friend, and will one day be Perfect Judge. As icing on the cake, the book that unites Christians together (the Gospel) is about mankind’s evil inclinations causing this Perfect Guy’s torture and death!
The benefits of this celebration are remarkable as something felt and experienced (phenomenological) rather than analyzed or asserted. How would you feel if an amazing person saved you and your friends from death? What if your evil inclinations led to his death, but he forgave you? What if he came with good news about living life well and serving wisdom, and you just imitate him? What if he is your perfect friend? The point of focus here is imagining these experiences as if they unfold in your own reality, almost like a great movie that you’re watching rapt with attention. Just like a person can be changed from a movie or a song, while knowing the events are not physically real, a person can be changed from a dramatic religious experience. And this experience is accessible to anyone who simply forgets the question of reality or unreality and attempts in context to imagine this as having happened. It can literally just be appreciated as non-literal, poetry and “living drama” rather than limited-in-scope factual assertions about biographical detail or the archaeological record.
The underlying social technology of uniting a community around an imagined ideal human and an ideal relationship with him is simply profound. It’s so compelling that the element is recreated across all religions, with Buddhists imagining the Buddha, Muslims imagining Muhammad, and even Ultra-Orthodox Jews spontaneously seeing their Rabbi as the Messiah. The utility is that, as a social species, we can’t actually approach Greatness outside of our social understanding — there’s a chronic need for an intermediary between Man and the Divine. I think Christianity does this particularly well because Jesus can be related to through all the powerful emotional dimensions.
Why?
Why should we take a step back to religious social technology? Well, I think we’re in a social dark ages. Our attention is consistently brought down to matters of consumerism and social strife. The idea of genuinely talking about and encouraging virtue among peers is Don Quixote levels of comical. We have lost the religious language that allows us to succinctly reference optimal experience. Our youth are worshipping pop singers, rappers, dim-witted athletes, and absurd political Utopianism. Meanwhile, adults are training their mind for outrage and doom through scrolling and news. Negative emotional states and corrupt social infrastructure have far-ranging consequences on health and civic engagement, and religious social technology offers an improvement.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
If you talk to women in their 20s you’ll learn that a chunk of them go on dates and expect a relationship with a man who has no intention of having one. This is because of social media induced higher standards, hyper-competitive labor market induced higher standards, the decline in slut shaming, and last but not least dating apps.
The solution (shaming, destroying feed-based social media, destroying dating apps, destroying female empowerment) would require a decade or more to see changes. The best thing an unattractive low income American man can do is simply find a foreign wife. Foreign wives have thousands of years of history and have birthed such great nations as Iceland. I’m not a fan of gender war terms, but American women are looking at pure stats when choosing a partner. There’s no reason why American men shouldn’t look at the pure stats when choosing a partner and pick a bilingual foreign woman with a low number of sexual partners.
The hard truth is that you have no chance of healing America’s problems in your lifetime. Simply do what is in your best interest. If you really have a low chance of finding an American wife, then look for a European, Argentinian, Brazilian, Chinese, Filipina, whatever chick who is interested in Americans. They will certainly be more conservative, thinner, less stressed than American women and your kids will be bilingual. Personally I would look for European, Argentinian, Uruguayan first.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
6mo ago
It doesn’t look anything like the blast of a Palestinian missile. Israel gains the infliction of terror on a population seeking shelter that they want to displace as much and as fast as possible. Hamas has never shown an interest in bombing their own hospitals (in this scenario they want the population to stay in Gaza), but Israel has attacked hospitals before and recently attacked a border crossing.
The discourse coming out of Israel has been extremist lately, with Netanyahu calling this a battle between “the children of light and the children of darkness”.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
2mo ago
“He Gets Us” doesn’t get it
[repost because server wipe, if that’s cool with everyone. Same post as yesterday, but probably some uncorrected mistakes from my note app]
The Christian advertising campaign “He Gets Us” aired two ads during the Super Bowl. The first ad asks “who is my neighbor?” interspersed with shots of mostly unsavory characters. The one you don’t value or welcome, the ad answers, to the drums of glitch-y hip hop. The second ad is titled “Foot Washing” and proved quite controversial. Among the scenes of foot washing depicted in the ad, the following have generated the most discussion: a Mexican police officer washing the feet of a black man wearing gold chains in an alley; a “preppy” normie-coded girl washing the feet of an alt girl; a cowboy washing the feet of aNative American; a woman washing the feet of a girl seeking an abortion (with pro-life activists sidelined, their signs upside down); an oil worker washing the feet of an environmental activist; a woman washing the feet of an illegal migrant; a Christian woman washing the feet of a Muslim; and a priest washing the feet of a sassy gay man. This last ad has tenfold the views on YouTube, in large part due to the negative response by Christians and conservatives, for example Matt Walsh and Babylon Bee editor Joel Berry. Joel writes,
There’s a reason the “He Gets Us” commercial didn’t show a liberal washing the feet of someone in a MAGA hat, or a BLM protestor washing an officer’s feet. That would’ve been actually subversive. Because they were strictly following oppressed v oppressor intersectionality guidelines.
I mostly agree with Joel. I think that this ad campaign is a failure.
The campaign fails to understand what brings people to a religion, or any social movement for that matter, or even any product, and as such it will not lead viewers to join their evangelical church or behave in the intended Christian manner. The audience of the Super Bowl is jointly comprised of people who care about what’s popular and cool, and people who care about remarkable feats of strength and dominance. These people are not going to be compelled to “love” their crack addict neighbor because you tell them to, because why would they listen to you? — there is no deeper motivation substantiated as for why they should do this. In the Gospel, Jesus doesn’t say “love your neighbor because it’s nice to do that and I am guilting you”, he says “love your neighbor so as to be a son of God whom created you, and obtain His reward, or else risk judgment from the eternal judge.” This is reward-driven and status-seeking behavior, the reward being administered by God and the status being administered by the church body. In its context, it requires a belief that the person saying it is the ultimate judge of both life and afterlife. (To behave Christlike, the required motivation is the totalizing significance of Christ... hence the name of the religion.) The starting point of the faith is the most dominant and powerful person telling you to care for the poor, not some cheeky “you should care about the poor because you should.”
Again, the Super Bowl viewer cares about what is popular and what is dominant. That’s normal, I’m not criticizing it. So could you not pull anything out of the religious tradition to depict the popularity and dominance of God? What, you feel bad playing off of FOMO to get people to your church? Jesus did just that on many occasions. 1, 2, 3, 4. Do you somehow feel guilty describing Jesus as glorious and powerful? What about the 72,000 angels he commands? You don’t want to tell the viewer that their prayers will be answered, when every 10 minutes there’s an ad for betting and gambling? Viva Las Vegas, non Vita Christi. So it has to be asked, what exactly is the purpose of the campaign? How is this getting people to your church, or even just getting people to behave better? “Jesus gets me” because… biker smoker and crack addict?
If the object of the ad is the instill a sense of pity to compel the viewer to behave morally, then there’s clearly more relevant subjects. Why not the focal point of the religion, the “innocent beautiful sacrificial lamb slain for our freedom” motif? The religion already comes with a built-in way to empower pity. You could say, “he gets us because he dealt with all our pain and temptation”, and that would make much more sense, while incentivizing the intended result of the ad. As is, I get the idea that the ad campaigners are afraid of any depiction of the life of Christ. I don’t get the sense that these people believe he is an essential ingredient of the moral life. And it’s fine if they don’t, that’s their business, but then dont make multimillion dollars ads that about it. If Christ is indeed essential, then your multimillion dollar ad campaign ought to be directed toward producing an image of Christ that is alluring, whether this be through scenes of pity or scenes of power. In an attempt to make Christianity subversive you should not be subverting Christianity.
Back to Joel’s critique of the ad: yes, the foot washing ad is problematic. Beside the fact that it is misinterpreted (explained below), it only works to further demean the image of Christianity to an irreligious America. “If I become a Christian, I’ll have to wash an old man’s feet?” The only viewers that will be compelled here are the foot fetish enthusiasts piqued by the alt girl. You are not going to convince anyone to join your social movement by promising them the opportunity to wash a man’s feet in an alley.
As was mentioned, the ad elevates the status of people who are not exactly Christ-coded, and those whose status is already elevated. During a Super Bowl, it’s not subversive to elevate the status of a vaguely athletic black man wearing gold chains. The half time show was Usher! Neither is it subversive to show an oil rig worker subservient to an environmental activist. In whose world is an environmental activist not more privileged than a dust-coated oil worker? And a wholesome girl washing an alt girl’s feet is not subversive in an event inaugurated by Post Malone’s national anthem. No, no; show me a wealthy and attractive CEO washing the feet of his fat ugly employee, if you must. But don’t just reinstitute the high/low status dynamic already in place by the world.
My last criticism I’ll try to keep short: the theological ground of these ads is spurious. There is indeed a scene where Jesus washes the feet of his disciples, but the writer goes out of his way to clarify the meaning behind it. It begins by mentioning that Jesus “loved his own who were in the world”, namely his followers present and future. The students are shocked when their superior attempts to perform this subservient act, until it is explained to be necessary. “If your Lord washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have given you an example, that you should do just as I have done to you. I am not speaking of all of you [not Judas]; I know whom I have chosen.” So, rather than being an act that a Christian is compelled to do to anyone, we have an act that Christians do to one another, to cultivate humility spirit and esteem for their brethren. They are told not to do it to merely self-labeled Christians, like Judas, let alone those of other faiths, as the ad suggests they do.
Foot washing was a culture-specific action that reflected the status hierarchy in a way that has no direct American parallel. An approximate American parallel would be for a boss to allow his employer to use his office, or for a boss to cook his employee’s family a dinner, or to clean his employee’s keyboard. The difficulty in understanding the event without careful study is the reason why it’s a mistake depict it as a means of propagating your worldview. Nothing is accomplished.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
1yr ago
Does the Sam Bankman-Fried transformation into Bankrupt Fraud tell us something about the failures of effective altruism?
I saw Bankman mentioned on themotte a number of times over the past two years. I’m pretty sure he was mentioned over on SSC, too. After Scott, he was the person who immediately came to mind when I thought of figures associated with EA. Many normies and finance types will only think of Bankman when EA is brought up. (I refuse to use the “SBF” acronym because it was consciously chosen as imitation of HSBC and other institutions, and despite his name the man is not a bank.)
I think the EA’s failure to have any effective impact on Bankman’s moral calculus is its complete absence of emotional salience. Traditional moral systems usually try to maximize moral salience. (Stoicism was short-lived and immersed in a Hellenistic culture that emphasized honor through salient stories, and while “mindfulness” is emotional neutral, traditional Buddhism emphasizes benevolence through stories.)
Consider Christianity. Its stories are designed for emotional salience, using novelty/paradox/shock in key moments to illustrate the moral point. Mankind’s Hero was born in a manger to a lowly family, faced persecution from the very people who claimed moral superiority, took on followers who were poor and irrelevant, and died the death of a painful criminal for the purpose of saving all of humanity. The paradoxes and surprises are meant to enhance the emotional experience, and thus the effect, of the moral point. Within the Gospel narrative, we have parables, also emphasizing salience. You have the wealthy and high status patrician who looks down on his lower class sinful neighbor, and the latter is announced as just and not the former. We have metaphors involving specks in the eye, wheat cultivation, farm animals, and storing grain, all of which would be immediately understood by the target audience. The parable form itself can be construed as the most expedient way of expressing a moral point to the largest possible audience.
While Effective Altruism may be logically sound, in the sense that the optimal actions are clearly delineated and argued, it may also not be very effective in obtaining an end result. There is an ocean of difference between a logical assessment of morality and the effectively-felt transformation of an individual into a moral actor who follows the moral commandments. To walk over this ocean of difference or to part its waters requires a moral system (if not a religion, close to it) that is focused on making morality felt. Otherwise, as in the case of Bankman-Fried, our passions and our greeds prevent us from following through on what we ought. This conflict over Ought and Will is, of course, explored throughout the New Testament, with the inability to perfectly follow moral commandments (the law) being solved in the Person of Christ, who makes morality possible to follow through his being born (a human) and through his friendship (fellowship), which effects the salience necessary to turn the follower moral.
Russell Brand Accusations
Russell Brand has been accused of sexual misconduct and/or rape by four women in a large exposé by the Sunday Times [2]. The mainstream consensus online is that the testimony of these women is absolutely correct. I wonder, though, how many false accusers we should expect given the context of Russell Brand.
Russell Brand is not just some guy, he was at one point a party icon in the UK. As such, he has slept with 1000 women. And these are not just some women, just like Brand is not just some guy. This is not a sample size of the median woman in the UK. The women he slept with would differ psychologically from the average woman: more likely to make poor choices, more likely to be partying, more likely to be doing things for clout (like Russell Brand), more likely to be involved with drugs and mental illness. A study on the lives of “groupies” in the heavy metal scene found that groupies were more likely to use sex for leverage, to come from broken homes, and to have issues with drugs and alcohol. (This is not a one-to-one comparison; heavy metal is different than the rock n roll persona of Brand).
Scott has written that up to 20% of all rape allegations are false. But with Brand, we have a more complicated metric to consider: how many false accusers will you have sex with if you’ve had sex with one thousand women who make poor choices? Scott goes on in the above article to note that 3% of men will likely be falsely accused (including outside of court) in their life. If this is true, we might try multiplying that by 125 to arrive at how many accusers Brand should have. That would bring us to four, rounding up — but again, this would totally ignore the unique psychological profile of the women he screwed.
There’s yet more to consider. Brand is wealthy, famous, and controversial. His wealth and stature would lead a mentally unwell woman to feel spite, and his controversy would lead a clout-chasing woman to seek attention through accusation. What’s more, (most of) these allegations only came about because of an expensive and time-consuming journalistic investigation, which would have lead to pointed questioning.
All in all, it seems unfair to target a famous person and set out your journalists to hound down every woman he had sex with. It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women, which would be a large chunk of the women Brand bedded. Of course, this cohort appears more apt to make false accusations. Quoting Scott,
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