For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream. Don’t whine about black music! Respond to this criticism by saying that it’s much easier to appeal to PMC fears of chud expression, that liberals said they favored free speech, and that this is a serious art form that deals with all aspects of human life, including the negatives. Have they ever listened closely to country singers and thought about what it might mean for an artist to give voice to the people that they grew up alongside in the trailer park? It’s doubtful.
This misses the point, Walsh was not as much whining about rap music, he was pointing out the double standard of Aldean's critics. And even that one is not self-serving, it is just a reminder that the PMC class does not not care about the rules - they run anarchotyranny of culture. The clerics on Twitter are the ones interpreting the reality, and they are the only ones with arbitrary authority to call for excommunication for any transgression - even the one that is on the face value thousand times milder than what they regularly not only tolerate, but also praise.
For me, this is another example of the woke are more correct than the mainstream.
Yes, this is nothing new. As an example, back in the dinosaur days of 2019 Bill Maher had Denis Prager on his show who talked to him about how there is a push to say "men can menstruate". I think Maher was absoletely clueless about it, he thought that Prager was some nut inventing conspiracy theories or some such. I think Maher now admitted that he underestimated the whole thing back in the day on Rogan's podcast, and he now does interviews with Peterson, which is interesting to see. I would not describe it as woke being more correct as mainstream as opposed to mainstream being absolutely clueless. It is almost a defining feature of mainstream, as soon as you stop being clueless you will pick a side - Maher will be right-wing coded by "platforming" people like Peterson.
The fact that it hurts people's feelings to tell them that they squandered their opportunities to make something of themselves doesn't mean that they didn't squander said opportunities.
Sure, but this begs the original question. You didn't make it, so you had to squander your opportunities because we removed all the obstacles such as religion, race and so forth. This is basically restating my original position - if the outcome are not equalized it is hard to argue that opportunities were equalized.
But even if we abolish all of those barriers, you're still left with the uncomfortable fact (qua deBoer) that some people are naturally smarter, taller, faster, stronger, more charismatic etc. than others and will inevitably have better outcomes as a result, and there's precious little that social engineering alone can do about that.
Sure, however the messaging is different. You are genetically one of the useless lumpenproletariat and equality of opportunity will do nothing for you or your kids. The best you can get is to equalize the outcomes, meaning you have to basically extract rent from those more successful somehow. Be it political action for more welfare - maybe using low level violence to extort them to cough up the money, up to actual crimes. Those are avenues available to you.
Which BTW kind of questions the whole idea of merit as well, if somebody is successful it has to be somehow related to some merit, he may be the best programmer or best hustler or best drug dealer or whatever. To me it really is not that clear that a programmer developing one of the addictive gacha games shows more merit than literal criminal or that some unemployed person who uses his money to do graffiti has less merit than somebody who has ability to worm herself into liberal arts academia financed by government dole.
One thing I would add is that it is very hard to measure opportunity. How do you know two people have equal amount of it? You may coast on the idea for a few years or decades - we are equalizing opportunity, just wait for it. But after some time people will be tired of it, in the end increased opportunity should lead to increased outcomes in some way. Equality of outcomes is really the only way to measure equality of opportunity, I think people are falling into a trap even mentioning equality of opportunity. Because if the outcome will not improve, you will end up being the guy telling people that they had plenty of opportunity that they squandered, so they should stop complaining.
I would have an issue with stealing a book, pirating said book I see almost no issue at all. To me piracy is behavior on level of using adblocker or not paying voluntary fee for using toilet. I see it as a much lesser crime than theft.
As others said, it is basic premise of stoicism and its teachings on locus of control.
I find it especially useful to avoid certain manipulations - including those asking money from you, like EA. As a pragmatic observation, my internal spidey sense now lights up as spoon as I hear “we” as in “we humanity”. We should stop climate change, racism and if we are at it why not also hunger, all murder and pineaple pizza?
I think saying “not my problem” and even “fuck you, I wont do what you tell me” is perfectly fine stance for random ask by some stranger, especially online.
You describe how people are convinced about anything like ever. It always works frustratingly slowly and then suddenly and quickly. You do not convince people in one discussion, my working model is that you maybe shift their position 1 percentage point at a time. And as their previously 100% opinion reaches that 50% threshold after many discussions and personal experiences, then they suddenly flip their publicly stated and communicated position. It may seem very surprising, but in fact nothing dramatic happened - it was the same slow process as before inside their heads. The upside is that the new beliefs have deeper roots and they will not shift on a whim.
The second rule is that even if talking with true believers, the aim is not to convince them - although it is a plus if that ever happens even in the sense of mildly shifting their posterior. It is lurkers and bystanders watching from the outside, those who are interested in the discussion which are the true "targets". So you are not shifting one person slightly, you are shifting many more people slightly and depending on quality of your arguments you may flip public position of a few people on the margin. I know it happened to me and at least my friends I talk to, when over time we are more likely to get closer in our previously different opinions if the quality of arguments is good.
As for "creative songbirds" who transcend the polarization, they are out there. Prime example that comes to my mind is Breaking Points with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, a youtube talkshow where the former represents the progressive and the later conservative viewpoint on a given controversy of the day. The issue is that the polarization is in the eye of the beholder. Depending on who you ask, the Breaking Points is a cesspit of fascist propaganda or a commie plot sneaking into your bedroom. Again, not a new phenomenon - I remember similar research that asked to rate newspapers and their stance on Israel/Palestianian conflict. The evaluation of any given paper from people asked ranged wildly, depending on what piece from that paper different persons remembered. People often get stuck on things they dislike, it is hard for them to forget. You may know that saying where a man builds 1,000 bridges but sucks just one dick, and he is now forever known not as a bridgebuilder, he is now a cocsksucker.
I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.
This is immense amount of cope given the original claims of herd immunity and all the rest. The vaccines were supposed to make all the severe lockdowns and immense damage they brought upon our society "worth it". If people knew that the result of a year-long anxiety, isolation, interruption of education and so forth would be cutting deaths of very old and very ill people somewhat - and all that after the epidemic already took its toll year before, this would not be accepted. Hell, we have CDC advocating for adding COVID vaccine as mandatory schedule for kids. I think this decision is more about saving face for these experts than based on actual merit and prevention of severe illnesses among adolescents.
We do not know why people are gay. In the past there was a strong push for saying that being gay is immutable genetic characteristic, I think this was a soldier argument against the old practice of conversion therapy. Of course there is a lot of nuance here, there is research such as that by infamous Alfred Kinsey who sees homosexuality as a scale, nevertheless there was research like this one on 61 pairs of identical twins and they found concordance of homosexuality of 65%. Which may suggest that there is some role to be played by the environment when it comes to this.
I am fairly certain that the culture has significant impact on rate of homosexuality, possibly increasing the numbers by tens of percentage points even when it comes to genuine identification as gay/lesbian based on sexual attraction and possibly more when it comes to superficial identification of just being cool etc.
Archive link for the paywalled article: https://archive.is/6WOew
I’m pretty much convinced it’s not aliens. The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships.
This is much weaker "evidence" than you think. One possible explanation is that "aliens" are results of an AI driven Von Neuman probe that was activated by some human technological advancement a few decades ago. It jumpstarted factories somewhere in Ooort cloud producing more and more advanced technology that visits us, on its mission as programmed by some long dead civilization.
Similarly, no evidence of structures or signals is not evidence of nonexistence. We did not even map our own system, it is still possible that there is undetected planet X in our own solar system, we know nothing about interstellar space or other star systems.
To me, increased immigration seems like a no-brainer, similar to Bryan Caplan style open borders.
The issue here is that immigrants and as we see from the article even nations where the immigrants come from are affected by the same demographic issues that afflict the western countries. A young 30 years old immigrant will require pension in a few decades for himself. So at best, you only kick the can down the road - you are not really solving the underlying issue of too few children being born. To the contrary, you are introducing foreign religious and cultural elements into your country, so when the resource scarcity will hit in those 3 or 5 decades later down the road, you will have much more linguistically, religiously and culturally divided country than it is now - all possibly creating tribal blocs to fight for resources.
Now maybe you envision perpetual system where your country is attracting immigrants at the expense of all the other countries that in turn have their natural demographic collapse made worse by economic emigration. But again even at best if you assure 100% perpetual assimilation of this mass foreign immigration into local culture that produces country where people want to move in the first place - this is not a global solution, but rather very localized workaround. If this is what people mean by solving demographic crisis, then my "solution" to Climate Change is to move north to Canada or Scandinavia and live comfortably while the rest of the world boils and descends into Mad Max dystopia. There, climate change solved, it is nobrainer.
There used to be a meme that if UK was US state it would be third poorest state. I looked at 2021 numbers and with UK's GDP of $46,500 Per Capita (Purchasing Power Parity) it would actually rank as literally the poorest before Mississippi with $47,190 and West Virginia with $53,852. The US GDP is $70,250
Many people talk about welfare state in Europe, but even this ranks hollow mostly because people do not understand that US is 51% richer than UK. So even if USA had half the spending on welfare as percentage of GDP compared to UK, it would still be on par in absolute amount.
If someone keeps preferring racial discrimination to other methods of filtering, the most parsimonious explanation is that they are racist.
As other point, you are just using the word "racist" as a conversation stopper. Many other types of "filtering" are also verboten and can make you a sexist, classist, islamophobe (or other phobe), ageist, ableist and so forth, and all it takes is to "prove" disparate effect. So in the end who cares if Skibboleth think it is racist, everything is racist of course.
Second, people are not playing by the same rules. Filtering by race (or sex or age or whatever) is okay if you point out to disparate outcomes. So under your definition, somebody who claims that black men are disproportionately target of police brutality is racist and sexist just by virtue of using such a filter, right? Moreover if one looks and sees that black or Hispanic people prefer to vote for black/Hispanic politicians, this means that they are themselves racist as well.
I don't give a shit about "good calibration" in this context. This is endless debate also with Scott's prediction. What I am interested in is usefulness of the info 538 provides. Look at the daily graph of predictions for 2016 elections and please tell me what it is good for. You are somebody who finds 538 useful, what is it that you are getting from them?
Look at their politics calibration, it does not look nearly as well as sports one. It is also because of this:
When calculating the calibration and skill scores for forecasts that we updated over time, such as election forecasts that we updated every day, we weighted each update by the inverse of the number of updates issued. That way, we counted each forecasted event equally, regardless of how many updates we issued to the forecast.
Nevertheless at minimum stop spreading stupidity like "538 predicted 30% chance of Trump winning". They made 150+ predictions with wildly different number assigned. Having articles that "Today 538 predicts politician X winning with 90% probability" means nothing, in a week there may be a new prediction reassigning it to 50%. At best you may gauge who is favorite and who is not, but one does not have to be an expert for that.
The question OP posited was that bioethicists claim that medicines used for executions are faulty, they can cause pain and suffering etc. I do not hear these types of complaints when it comes to medicines used for euthanasia. What a coincidence that political motivation clouds judgment of bioethicists in virtually the same scenario of administering lethal drugs.
They are either lying, or they are perpetuating the unnecessary pain of inmates for political gain.
Of course they are lying. This article in Voices of Bioethics journal describes wonderful evolution in Canada from right to suicide in 2016 to current murdering of ill people (not even terminally ill, just ill) under euphemism of "death with dignity" or MAID (medical assistance in dying). There were over 10,000 people killed in 2021, over 13,500 in 2022 and the number is rising and quickly becoming leading cause of death in Canada. Presumably unlike executions, killing ill people is painless and wonderful.
Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people.
Oh, not this again. The 30% chance was from polls right before the election, the thing people had with 538 was how polls changed completely from day-to-day. On October 17th 2016 the 538 predicted Hillary with 88.1% after it was basically 50:50 on July 30th, then two weeks later on November 4th only it dropped 24 percentage points down to 64.5% for Hillary. The point is that Silver does not have the prediction, he has series of dozens of predictions that swing wildly so it is hard to pinpoint if he was "right" as there is many possible definitions of that.
I stand by my claim that polls in general are more then useless, it is akin to using aggregator to predict weather on a particular day 2 years from now somewhere. You either use absolutely obvious and thus useless take (it will be warm because it will be in the middle of summer - California will remain blue), but you will not know the specifics of events close to the day, such as specific front forming in Arctic or whatnot and thus your predictions are useless until the very day. Silver's polls are useless to watch prior to election because they are for sure to be subject to wild swings so they are not really predictions in that sense, and they are useless to watch on election day because you will have results anyway very soon without needing to then put forth lame defense of how often 1:2 or 1:10 or 1:100 event happens.
Of course it is perfect for Silver's business, we have elections only every few years so it can take decades of data to prove that he is actually full of shit. By that time he will be multimillionaire, in that sense I say well played.
Yep
I can throw the same against you. Trans and Queer activists say they only want to normalize their way of life so that kids can consider being trans/queer too (Bailey). And they do that by getting books like Gender Queer into school libraries with scenes like this in there (Motte). And if parents object that this is not appropriate for school aged children, then suddenly the are "book banning bigots" who attack vulnerable queer community. Oh, and also chanting "we are coming for your children" is obviously a joke.
So my position is that to promote books depicting oral sex on strapon to elementary school children by adults behind parents back is literally grooming. Then lying about it, mocking any outrage against it and fighting to keep that book in the schools is if not grooming at least facilitating grooming.
So the argument is that since "sissy hypno porn etc." is available online, then there is no need to be worried that it is pushed in school as it does not do that much harm?
Good, so given that terminally online people have access to gore and snuff videos or ISIL radical propaganda or holocaust denial bullshit, let's move it into schools maybe in slightly sanitized form. It cannot harm anybody to have teachers handing out books written by Nick Fuentes, right? Kids who don't like it will not read it anyway and even if they do, it will not do that much harm.
A year ago there was a kerfuffle around A Message From the Gay Community AKA "We are coming for your children" song, which was pretty blatant call that they are the ones who will educate kids into whatever their idea of "tolerance" is - and there is nothing you as a parent can do about that. Of course I think that this is all about clash of ideologies or one can say religions. Of course everybody thinks that they are projecting what is good into the world. There are people who think that books like Gender Queer or surgical transition of 15 years old kids is what tolerance means. So I'd say that "we're coming for your children" can be absolutely terrifying even if taken at face value by the criteria of said group - LGBTQIA+ pride protesters in this case. Radical Muslim imam proclaiming that he is going to teach your children how to interpret the Quran and spread goodness into the world, would probably be taken as a threat, despite his best intention of bringing them to heaven in his own mind.
The same for me. In my mind the LGBTQIA+ movement is now indistinguishable from radical religious cult. For me it is not unlike Scientologists infiltrating government institutions. So for these radicals to chant that they are going for my children is akin to Scientologists saying that they are going for my children (meaning they will "help" them by using scientology auditing method on them etc.).
Anyways, what is interesting is that there seems to be some self-awareness among these people that maybe they have shown their cards too soon and that they maybe overestimated their grip on our culture to some extent, given the current backlash. A year back there was a song by gay chorus about how they are going for our children, now it is a single voice in pride parade that is viewed as cringe by fellow marchers.
I think his main problem is that he's a materialist, like most Marxist intellectuals are.
It depends on what you mean by materialist. Even Karl Marx himself spent most of the 1840ies laying groundwork for his later thinking, but in 1840ies he was much more theoretical. In his books such as Economic and Philosophical Manuscript he inverts Hegelian idealism on its head. But only in so much as to claim that it is not some ultimate idea , or Geist trying to use history and dialectics, but for Marx the role of the Geist is replaced by Man, specifically Man as species being. For Marx the man recreates himself via his Work, unalienated labor that takes paramount position.
But it is this cycle where man uses Praxis of work to refine Theory, which then shapes society which in turn reshapes man in dialectical cycle. The nature of The Work itself is malleable, for Marx it was literally the manual labor of proletariat wielding literal hammers and sickles. But for modern Marxists it may also be broader work, reality is socially constructed is it not? It is our duty to socially shape reality by doing The Work to bring about better tomorrow, reshaping institutions and seizing the means of cultural production. It is at least as important as seizing the means of industrial and agricultural production, because in the end what we are sculpting is the New Soviet Man and he is product of culture broadly defined.
Paradoxically the "everybody is slave to the meme" claim is itself a meme, deconstruct the deconstruction you memetic slave.
I don't think this is useful way of thinking about this, it is another example of nihilistic attitude. You may as well say that we are all just a womb to galactic AI or that we (including galactic AI) are all just slaves that speed up entropy so the heat death of the universe comes sooner or any other teleological nonsense like that.
There is no life (or righteousness) in the void, only death.
(The text in OP's parenthesis does not follow from the premise so I will ignore that).
We have completely different view of the situation, shame is routinely used now to the extent that it was probably not used for decades before - to enforce progressive values. The progressives developed shame into an art, they deployed the heavy philosophical weapons and they even have special name for it - problematization which is very much also part of the Critical tradition (as in Critical Theory). Look at something or somebody and try to find out what is wrong with them. Shame them until you take control of it.
James Lindsey described this tactics as a three-pronged ad hominem attack:
Attack on your intellectual legitimacy: Are you an expert on the topic? Did you read all the relevant books? What is your H index, do you have PHD or do you use authoritative sources such as New York Times?
Attack on your emotional legitimacy: Who hurt you that you are saying this? Are you feeling well today, you do not seem like yourself, It is okay to accept that you are depressed, no shame in that.
Attack on your moral legitimacy: You know that only fascists say what are you saying? Why did you like a tweet from known transphobe?
In short, people are constantly pressured that they are either stupid, crazy or evil if they do not conform - sometimes all three things at once. We are living in one of the most stifling times in history of humanity. Just today there is a news that one Noah Gragson was suspended from NASCAR for liking a twitter meme making joke of George Floyd. Liking a tweet in your home on your private time possibly while drunk is fireable offense now. Talk about losing the utility of shaming. Utility of shaming is all there on the display stronger than ever, it shows its power and utility of creating illusion of conformity all around us.
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