guajalote
2yr ago
I wonder if tracingwoodgrains could get us a shoutout on the Blocked and Reported podcast. That seems to me like one of the most closely adjacent places that isn’t explicitly part of the ratsphere.
guajalote
2yr ago
Maybe, maybe not. The migrants are young, healthy enough to make a multi-thousand mile trek, and motivated to work. The trailer park denizens may well be older, obese, diabetic, and addicted to meth or opioids.
guajalote
2yr ago
I turned 21 in spring of my senior year of college because I skipped a grade. That wasn’t terribly uncommon in my experience, I met others in a similar situation. Personally it surprised me to read that zero students in the class were a year ahead.
guajalote
2yr ago
If you took 50 white American citizens from a trailer park and sent them to Martha’s Vineyard, the same thing would happen. It has nothing to do with immigrants and everything to do with poverty.
guajalote
2yr ago
The point I am getting at is roughly the "sex is good/important" progressive viewpoint @YE_GUILTY stated above, though perhaps he articulated it better.
Rape is obviously about sex. Date rape wouldn't be the most common form of rape if it wasn't about sex.
As for why people claim otherwise, a few theories:
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Sex is a basic human biological drive. If a starving person steals a loaf of bread, we tend to consider their actions at least partially justified, because they were driven by biological need. If rape is about sex, this opens the door to potentially justifying or exculpating rapists in certain circumstances.
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If rape is about sex, this implies victims who dressed or acted sexy increased their odds of victimization, and this is too much like victim blaming.
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An inability to model how male sexuality works, or an unwillingness to acknowledge major differences in male and female sexuality. Most women, regardless of circumstances, could never commit rape. History shows that many men, under the right circumstances, could. Look at the aftermath of almost every successful military conquest in history, for instance.
As a further corollary to #3, imagine you could somehow do a study where you asked the following question and got a totally honest answer from the study participants: "Imagine you have just committed rape. What do you think was your reason or motivation for doing so?" I think the average female answer would be something like "I hated that person and wanted to ruin their life and make them feel violated." I think the average male answer would be something like "They were just so incredibly sexy and I was just so turned on I lost control of myself." I think men and women will therefore tend to model the motivations of rapists differently because they get different answers when they try to introspect about what could possibly drive someone to commit rape.
guajalote
2yr ago
Honestly, nothing, at least not that I can think of. I regularly break many of the taboos others have listed, such as saying "things can't get any worse" or setting thermostats and volume dials on random numbers, and am often taken by surprise when I get scolded by other people who are bothered by this stuff. I think I am missing the part of my brain that makes me care about symbolic or "sacred" things. I'm an atheist, I don't care about flags and similar symbols, I don't get offended by the utterance of taboo words, I don't care about particular dates on the calendar (e.g. I often take my wife out "for Valentines Day" on a day that is not actually Feb 14, since the restaurants are less crowded).
guajalote
2yr ago
"50 Stalins" is sometimes used in discussion of free speech but it's applicable in other contexts as well. For example "John pretends to be an opponent of effective altruism, but all his arguments are just 50 Stalins critiques. He actually seems to agree with effective altruism, he just doesn't think they go far enough."
guajalote
2yr ago
I have nothing against high-context cultures, but this should not be one of them. The point of this place is to (1) welcome all viewpoints, so long as (2) the viewpoint is articulated and defended clearly. High contexts cuts against both of these goals.
guajalote
2yr ago
The definition of Quokka should probably note that "Quokka is often used to refer to people who naively believe all disagreements are attributable to mistake theory" or something along those lines.
guajalote
2yr ago
I'm going to stop discussing political and culture war topics on Reddit. It's been a bad platform for those kinds of discussions for a few years now and is only getting worse. But it's still a great platform for non-political interests and hobbies, especially if you stick to smaller subs.
guajalote
2yr ago
I suspect this is not the same thing I'm describing. For me, this is not something that happens during meditation, it's something I can cause at will with no difficulty by consciously "letting go" of control of my muscles. I've been able to do this as long as I can remember. It's not a particularly pleasant feeling, a little like being electrocuted, and I can't maintain it for more than a few seconds without feeling like my muscles are going to involuntarily spasm.
What blows my mind is how anyone can think the whole word method is a good idea. If someone suggested driver’s ed classes stop teaching traffic laws and instead just put kids behind the wheel until they absorb how to drive by osmosis, everyone would realize that’s dumb. If someone suggested teaching calculus without explaining the concepts but instead just showing the equations and hoping the funny symbols eventually make sense, everyone would realize that’s dumb.
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