Prosecuting Caesar always struck me as a bad idea. Perhaps an ideal, extremely robust democracy could get away with it. At present, I don't think the US is it.
Let’s assume he is guilty, and let’s also assume that 30-40% of the country doesn’t believe he is (apparently 85% of republicans don’t think he should be prosecuted). Shouldn’t a hypothetical, nationally representative jury, nullify the charges?
I too am annoyed by loose threats of terrorism, such as ‘if you don’t give young men sex/poor people money/if you police black people/etc, they will rise up’, but Carlson’s prediction of violence is justified here. If the ballot box and the jury box fail (edit: I forgot, perhaps the most egregious of all, also denied the soapbox when democrats cheered when he was kicked off twitter), what box do they have left? They are, ultimately, a large faction of armed men (like the democrats). Their power to inflict violence should be respected (and democracy, at heart, very much respects it). Their opponents do not have to accede to their every demand, but they should definitely refrain from putting their leader in prison. It constitutes a direct challenge to the war-making potential on which their political power rests, and as such invites the battle democracy is supposed to avoid.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
Still, it’s a waste of goodwill. People used to want to serve for patriotic reasons. That was pure profit for the state. It was like a charity, they were fed and housed, but some of the work they did was effectively donated. As with billionaires, the state should find ways to encourage donations, not turn them away to make the diversity quota. You know, tell people what they can do for the country, not what the country can do for them, all that jazz.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
The way I heard the story, a warlord in the somalian civil war attacked UN troops distributing aid – and so the US obligingly went in because they didn’t have anything else to do that day. But you reckon this was a machiavellian exploitation of the third world that now justifies a somalian revenge ?
To be fair, many US nativists are actually in favor of a less interventionist US foreign policy.
Yeah, and they say: 'I don't care if foreigners kill each other, even if we could prevent it easily'. Are you ready to stand by that statement and policy, or were you just using US interventionism as an excuse for foreigners to not be bound by any standard of decency?
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
How do men ‘get’ women drunk? Do they threaten them, do they syringe them in the back? No, women voluntarily pour the inhibition-reducing liquid into themselves. Are they capable of making their own decisions or not?
You say the problem isn’t ‘men being interested in sex’, yet you assume ‘declining sex’ is the right decision. Your whole angle is: men are tricking women into this sinister deed. Let’s say I ‘got’ a woman drunk and used her drunkenness to… teach her spanish. Is that considered generally objectionable behavior? Obviously not. So like the sex-neg radfems which came up with ‘rape culture’ and ‘objectification’, in reality, you don’t object to the tricking, you object to the sex.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
A lot of the late-80s early-90s Civil Rights Act feminism, for all I complain about its more recent excesses, was in response to employers forcing employees into (het) sex and other sexual behaviors in public.
Additionally, she testified that Taylor had touched her in public, exposed himself to her, and forcibly raped her multiple times. She argued such harassment created a '"hostile working environment'" and a form of unlawful discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
That’s like saying a demented walmart manager chopping my arms off with a chainsaw constitutes discrimination and a hostile shopping environment. The intention behind this bizarre categorization is to paint the benign and mundane with the same brush as the criminal and abhorrent, requiring ever increasing state monitoring and control.
Additionally, this case ruled that the sexual conduct between Taylor and Vinson could not be deemed voluntary due to the hierarchical relationship between supervisor and subordinates in the workplace.
They should never have accepted that argument from a sex-neg rad-fem who refuses to distinguish between rape and intercourse.
Catharine A. MacKinnon, author of Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, was co-counsel for the respondent and wrote the respondent's brief.
”Perhaps the wrong of rape has proven so difficult to articulate because the unquestionable starting point has been that rape is definable as distinct from intercourse, when for women it is difficult to distinguish them under conditions of male dominance.” in Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory (1982)
This is the real ‘cultural marxism’ conspiracy to destroy normal human interaction. A "feminist theory of the state"? They should be more subtle next time.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
I don’t agree with the way you splice up the debate types. You’ve got the old-school adversarial debate, in the interest of finding out the truth (so still cooperative on a deep level), which used to be at home in universities, and I guess we still have here, for example. Then you’ve got the adversarial politician’s debate, which looks and sometimes is similar, but with dirtier rhetorical tricks to appear right.
But the university presidents have little experience of those. They are used to more surface-level cooperative debates, where the goal is not the Truth but the reaching of a status-adjusted consensus. Free speech gets in the way of that consensus. Hostile questioning, from that perspective, is rude and a status challenge. The correct answer is not to answer but to air your disdain and let your higher status win the debate consensus for you.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
Is everyone satisfied with the moderation here? For me, it’s getting to unacceptably high levels. For some reason, they recently felt the need to almost double the mods to take care of the shrinking userbase.
Our old charitable custom was to treat strangers as if they were worthy of good faith. Increasingly the mods treat those whose good faith has already been established (such as the recently modded Kulak, Hlynka, Burdensomecount) as if they were strangers.
Like reddit, you can start off as a bastion of free speech, but inevitably mods identify with their function and see mod action as an end in itself, until they become more prison guards than janitors.
So are there good alternatives to the motte out there?
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
that most disputes over consent in intimate relationships are going to devolve into a he-said-she-said situation, and that there is no practical way to prevent this, even in principle.
That's only a small part of the problem. Modern rape laws, and further ‘anti-rape’ lobbying efforts, are attacking consent as a defense, like they attack every defense. It’s not just ambiguity. The schema is not : he-said, she-said, what shall we do? ; but he-said-yes, she-said-yes, – still rape. If you’re drunk – consent invalid. If you’re a student or an employee – consent invalid. You agree the woman's consent does not matter to you in those cases?
I think the story is really a straightforward conspiracy by radfems and trads to impose their sexless tyrrany by classifying all sex as a felony. They haven't achieved it completely yet, but they're getting there.
And yet we still have to pick a norm, and the choice is between favoring accusers or favoring the accused.
For centuries, for all other crimes, it’s the accused . He gets the presumption of innocence. The acccuser has to prove a crime occurred. But we have allowed our justice system to be inverted and perverted in this holy crusade against rape. The rape our culture encourages, according to feminists.
We do not expect the downsides of favoring the accuser to affect us
I don’t think you can contain the damage to your outgroup. Your leaders are constantly being targeted under the absurd rape laws. I don’t think total abstinence or the pence rule can protect you from the sanctification of Woman’s Word. Remember, evidence is no longer required. Evidence Law is an obstacle to victims getting justice.
As you say, “it's not obvious that being falsely accused of rape is significantly more or less traumatic than being raped.”, therefore I’d have to side with any woman accusing you and send you to prison regardless of what actually happened.
Traditionalists do not generally believe that "affirmative consent" will actually work
yeah, because you don’t believe in consent. Sex is bad and consent is irrelevant, just like your radfem sisters.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Their objections to content are often explicitly political and coded red-tribe.
But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. Being pro-liberty does not require them to support the woke reading list over the maga reading list.
I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
This is exactly the problem with the whole ‘consent’ framework though, which is an inherently modern thing.
The ancients knew what rape was, women refused suitors all the time.
Widespread consent of the governed is relatively modern. Modern man, and woman, is considered capable of deciding.
I’d like you to assume the full consequences of your critique of consent. Could you develop? I think reactionaries who seemingly criticize consent, really value the consent of the father above the adult daughter’s, which kind of makes sense from a ‘women as overgrown children’ perspective, but I don’t think that’s your position.
Everyone understands that there’s such a thing as getting someone drunk. “I got my friend drunk last night”, or “our boss go us so drunk last night” are statements everyone understands.
Not in the exculpatory sense you’re using it for women. If you’re stopped for drunk driving, “my boss/friend got me drunk” does not work. The responsibility is yours. The fine is for you. You can reproach your friend for bad advice, being a bad influence, but ultimately, it’s all your fault.
I mean you’re surely not denying that social pressure, perhaps the most powerful human communal force, exists?
My parents, like I’m sure, most parents, warned me extensively against social pressure as I was growing up, to prepare me for life as adult. Are you saying women are psychologically too feeble to resist that pressure?
that results in the man’s gain of status and the woman’s loss of it
Well that seems morally entirely fine. Surely you can’t expect a human to privilege the status of another above his? Any contest, any discussion between people has a status component, and usually one’s gain is the other’s loss.
often a clear sense of being exploited or dirtied afterward.
Subjective state of mind contradicted by their actions. Worthless as an objection to the original deal.
If their consent at the time did not matter, then their withdrawal of consent later matters even less.
Proving they both actually said yes is impossible.
No, that has actually been done here, there’s video, text messages, no one is disputing that she said yes.
‘He said she said ‘ goes : ‘He said she said yes, she said she said no’ – If he’s telling the truth, she said ‘yes’, so he’s innocent of rape. And if she said “no”, he’s guilty.
That’s not the situation here at all: all agree she said yes, but for some cockamamie reason the consent has been declared invalid so - schocker – he’s guilty, yet again.
You and the radfems don’t accept consent as a defense because you don’t accept innocence as a defense. The way you see it, he may be innocent of rape, but he’s still guilty of being a man and having sex.
This evidence was obviously insufficient to protect the men in question, as they were nonetheless accused of rape and were prosecuted, with disastrous results for their careers and their lives.
Right, and that's absurd. They have overshot the standard for innocence by several orders of magnitude. They should be released with the court’s deepest apologies, maybe teach the prosecutor what a real case should look like.
disagree with the above statement, because it seems to me that the problem is in fact an infinite regress. If you have video of them giving consent, they can claim the video is coerced.
No argument there. @orthoxerox is just another guy on the trad-radfem side, he does not recognize women’s consent because there’s always a man hiding in the bushes, coercing them.
The problem is that sex is not, in fact, a safe source of unadulterated, low-stakes, trivial fun.
I get it, you’re not big on sex, like your prophets before you.
We have no rigorous way of measuring intoxication after the alcohol has left the system, and even timestamped breathalyzers suffer from the same problem as the video evidence above.
I don’t give a shit? Drinking does not put the responsibility for your actions on others in any other context (drunk driving, getting into a fistfight, etc).
You can't prove a negative, and nothing less will be accepted because the accumulated harm demands that something be done.
Maybe the ‘accumulated harm’ demands that all Jan 6 protestors be sent to prison. The accumulated harm is not a real thing here.
People generally sympathize with women for solid, well-founded reasons
You can sympathize with women, admire them, fear them, as much as you like. Their legal ability to turn their agency and reasoning faculties on and off at will still won’t make any sense.
If the employee, the student, the woman, cannot be counted on to make one decision because her body is weak and her mind easily influenced, how can she be counted on to make any?
You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women
No, in the absence of evidence for a crime, I want no consequences at all.
would not willingly live under either of your regimes.
Not only are you living under the radfem one, you’re a pillar of it.
The radfems have no ability to criminalize the sex I have with my wife.
She could easily accuse you, anytime, of getting insufficiently affirmative enthusiastic continual consent, that one time in boca. Marital rape is a common thing, you know. Oh god, she wasn’t drunk, was she?
You, like them, have nothing to offer people like me, other than to leave us alone.
I originally set out to find where the battle lines really are in this triangle. And I think it’s pretty clear that you are in fact allied to radfems, in your shared hatred of ‘fornication’ and in support of modern rape and harassment laws, against classical liberals like me.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
What kind of statement would you like "I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of the nazi party"? I'm not defending the plagiarism, but this is ideological witch-hunting. Does every reference to che guevara have to result in a groveling apology for the crimes of communism?
I don’t know why he bothered with the edgy jokes and dogswhistles. He should have simply called for the genocide of jews, then the presidents of harvard and co would find his behaviour compatible with a strongly inclusive code of conduct.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
The allies of convenience created by this controversy are farcical. DR guys defending the affirmative action hyper-woke presidents of Harvard and their commitment to free speech, now I’ve seen everything.
Calling for genocide is obviously “harassment”, in the same way that citing statistics is “harassment”. On a regular day, harvard students ‘feel unsafe’ when confronted with mild antagonism and unfamiliar ideas, and the administrators use this ‘harm’ to justify censoring offending speech. Now I’m not invested in this line of thought and I’m not that kind of guy, but it should be obvious to anyone that such a vulnerable person would feel even less safe by hearing calls for their genocide, than by hearing a random unorthodox talking point like abortion should be illegal. For harvard, it's a little late to try to catch the first amendment train.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
The gore is a feature, a token of our respect for life. We’re not “putting people to sleep” here. Each juror should get a splash when the blade falls. They shouldn’t eat meat if they can’t kill the animal.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
I agree with Hlynka’s interpretation. Scott might as well have called it ‘In defense of liars’ – letting lies fester is his thing now.
In Bounded Distrust, he wants us to consider information in a vaccuum, possessing a certain deracinated signal-to-noise ratio. He wants us to ignore the liar status of the speaker, softly whispering that it's not that bad if he is. But there is a bright line here, between the speaker (journalist, sociologist, authority figure) who inadvertently tells a falsehood, and the one who knowingly does so.
The only reason why the latter still sometimes tells the truth, is because he doesn’t think he can get away with bigger lies. Morally, as far as I’m concerned, he’s done. As a source of information, we’re always better off asking another man, since the liar’s statements, at best, merely reflect what others can prove.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
Many moons ago, on old reddit, when the ultra-progressive subs like SRS started banning certain words like ‘retarded’, everyone laughed at the futile attempt to stop the euphemistic threadmill. Now, even here, new words are regularly put on the index.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Just world fallacy. I suppose men like dating younger women because they realize they’ll treat them better and are better lovers?
The somewhat feminized characteristics of asians (shorter, socially reserved, small round features) creates an imbalance in the desirability of their men and women (works opposite in blacks), reflected in the singaporean student imbalance.
White men are just more attractive. So when your asian gf tells you how happy she is to be with you and how great you treat her, remember that to her you’re like a girl with big tits.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
The amount of resources required to sustain the Ukrainian military is astounding and completely unsustainable.
The amount of resources required to sustain the Ukrainian military is similar to that required to sustain the russian military, only the west is economically about 30 times greater. So assuming the russians go all-in and marshal about 50% of their economy for the special military operation effort, and Ukraine, the sanctions, and technological superiority do nothing, the west needs to assign 1,7 % to that nuisance. That’s relatively high but completely sustainable for a distant power like the US, and outright cheap for the threatened countries of europe.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Books :
- The Myth of Male Power - Warren Farrell
- Who Stole Feminism? - Christina Hoff Sommers
Old Books :
- The Manipulated Man - Esther Vilar
- The Legal Subjection of Men - Ernest Belfort Bax
Documentary: The Red Pill
Reddit: Haven’t been there in a long time, but /r/mensrights was always decent. They have a huge FAQ with references, more books, etc. Though I must admit, they don't like feminism over there. Neither do I . I think feminism is intellectually very shallow, relying more on people's general goodwill towards women, as well as on accusations of sexism against critics, than on a coherent model on how the world actually works.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
What's the reward, meth?
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
Well, no, because a jury actually hears all the evidence and arguments, a process which most of the voting public will never bother with.
Let's have his trials in republican strongholds, then. I'm serious, this would make a conviction ten times as legitimate and vastly reduce my objections.
'They' Control the Supreme Court and the House and most state Senates where actual things that affect people's daily lives get passed. 'They' have had huge wins in the past decade across all kinds of political domains, including the abortion victory 'they' claimed to care so much about or decades.
If they are so powerful, why would you risk antagonizing them by repeatedly going after their leader? All the more reason to maintain the fragile peace of democracy.
Of these, only black people have actually done anything about it in recent memory, because the actual material conditions of their lives are bad enough that it's worth the risk.
There is no clear relationship between oppression and propension to riot. Slaves rarely revolted. Perhaps the tulsa race riot proves that whites were oppressed. Or Kristallnacht tells us something about the material conditions aryans were forced to live in.
People riot because they can get something out of it, because they can get away with it, and often, for the hell of it.
fuckduck9000
3mo ago
If the vassals are comfortable and self-satisfied, how can their wills be said to have been subverted by the hegemon? This isn’t domination, it’s don’t-mind-ation.
Let’s say you had an all-carrot-no-stick hegemon, who uses his bulk surplus to bribe his ‘vassals’ into recognizing his nominal overlordship. The vassals can still do whatever they want. The vassals can even get him to do their bidding because he wants their approval. I mean, when is it no longer domination? Surely at some point of hegemon softness, the relationship is more accurately described as transactional, friendly, or even reverse-domination.
fuckduck9000
2mo ago
Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
Unironically Yes. The Truth will set us free.
In that case, something is deeply rotten in the kingdom, and the Truth has to start desinfecting somewhere. By comparison , the partisan point-scoring about who the truth harms first is of trivial importance.
Let me tell you a story about a helicopter pilot. He had noticed the fuel gauge was systematically under-estimating the fuel left. He learned to live with it, mentally adding dozens of liters to the reported volume every time. One day, he ran out of fuel and crashed. A mechanic had repaired the gauge. The pilot had accepted the lie, and so the lie killed him. And this was a man who had survived being shot down down over the USSR in a U-2 spy plane. Beware of normalizing lies and dysfunction.
fuckduck9000
4mo ago
The russians haven’t made any progress either. When the soviet inheritance is entirely spent, the attritional industrial war will just be western handouts versus the russian economy, and I don’t think russia looks good in this contest. Whether the ukrainians want to keep fighting is their business, but as a western european I’m happy to foot the bill and keep russia busy indefinitely, especially since there is no long-lasting peace on the table, only a provisional ceasefire.
I could lean on zelensky if you offered pre-feb 24 borders, else let’s just keep playing ,who gets uncomfortable first.
I don’t recognize this guy anymore. He thinks people should refrain from searching for the truth because the search is not fair/random enough for him. Who cares? That which can be destroyed by the Truth should be, immediately. Whether you personally dislike Gay or politically oppose Ackman or just want clicks, I am thankful for any skeleton you happen to find in their closets. Scott is willing to let lies fester until such a time when they can all be revealed impartially, or something.
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