guajalote
1yr 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.
guajalote
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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).
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:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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
1yr 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.
guajalote
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr ago
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.
guajalote
1yr ago
Spoken language is unique. It doesn’t need to be taught because our brains have been fine-tuned by evolution to learn language and grammar for at least hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years.
Writing is a few thousand years old, and since the invention of writing the majority of people have been illiterate. Evolution has not had time to optimize our brains to learn to read. Same with math, same with driving. These things have to be taught.
guajalote
1yr ago
Music and spoken language are two unique categories of learning because evolution has been optimizing our brains for language and music acquisition for at least hundreds of thousands of years. These are basic human social technologies that our brains are tuned to acquire quickly.
guajalote
1yr ago
I have a physics degree, went to law school afterwards, and now have a lucrative job as a patent attorney. Several of my classmates went to medical school with physics degrees. Physics is probably the most flexible degree you can get.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think it's an example of the simplistic political thinking most people have, where they assume a regulation to prevent X will actually prevent X, and repealing such a regulation will cause more of X to happen. Most people think rent controls reduce rent and repealing rent controls will cause rent to rise, despite mountains of empirical data suggesting the opposite is true. It's just much easier to assume that laws do what they say they do, rather than thinking about all the complex ways that stated intentions can fail to manifest in the real world.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. If I didn’t have a physics degree, I would need some other science or engineering degree to do patent law successfully. And as far as such degrees go, physics is one of the best because it is very broad and heavy on math so it provides a great foundation for understanding many areas of science and technology.
And more generally, what I mean by "flexible" is that many different types of jobs in many different fields will accept people with physics degrees, whereas most other degrees have a narrower range of job options. You can go into almost any field, other than certain highly specialized ones, with a physics degree.
guajalote
1yr ago
There are three main reasons, as I understand it, why many economists think rent controls drive up rent:
-
When renting to a new tenant, the landlord has to set the rent based on the expected market price over the next, say, 10+ years the tenant may occupy the property, instead of setting the price for the coming year knowing it can be raised later. This raises rents.
-
A rent controlled apartment is effectively an asset that gets more valuable the longer the tenant holds onto it. This reduces apartment turnover, which reduces supply, which increases price.
-
Rent control makes building new housing a less attractive business model, so fewer apartments get built, thereby reducing supply and increasing price.
guajalote
1yr ago
Complicating this is that both facial claims are probably always at least a little true.
Yeah it's a pretty trivially silly distinction. Even if something is "100% genetic," environment is still hugely important. For example, let's imagine math ability is 100% genetically determined. Nevertheless, a math genius born in a modern developed country is going to have a much different set of life outcomes than the same person born in a hunter gatherer society.
guajalote
1yr ago
Five of my favorite podcasts have zero ads and are consistently high quality: Econtalk, the Fifth Column, Blocked and Reported, the Glenn Show, and Chapo Trap House.
guajalote
1yr ago
-
A billionaire building a private army to conquer territory isn't going to be looked upon kindly by existing world governments, for obvious reasons.
-
Haiti has a horrific colonial history, and it's going to be easy to credibly accuse an invader of colonialism and geocide.
-
"Invade country with military to bring peace and prosperity" has a terrible track record. Pretty likely the billionaire just fails miserably.
guajalote
1yr ago
In my experience "capitalism" in these kinds of discussions just means "all the ways in which society has failed to live up to my expectations."
guajalote
1yr ago
Forgive me if I'm interpreting you uncharitably, but you seem to be arguing that public opinion would consider an invasion of Haiti justified because white people were killed in the Haitian slave revolt of 1804? And your support for this claim is the fact that Czech expulsion of Sudeten Germans after WWII was considered justified? As far as I can tell, these two situations are not remotely analogous, either in reality or in terms of public perception.
Yes, I've always been curious if there was a name or explanation for this phenomenon.
More options
Context Copy link