guesswho
2yr ago
I'm not sure what to say besides 'you have spectacularly failed the Ideological Turing Test at every turn, maybe spend 5 minutes pretending your opponents were human beings and then consider what they would say about each of these topics'.
guesswho
2yr ago
That's been my position for a while now, but I thought I'd test the waters and see if anything had changed. I'm actually slightly heartened by the replies so far, people seem less touchy about specific labels and more interested in discussing object-level stuff than they were during the 'cancel culture' craze a few years ago.
guesswho
2yr ago
Ok, so modern immigrants from Italy or Ireland will not have those mixed genes, and should be subjected to the same expectations of criminality and incompetence?
guesswho
2yr ago
guesswho
2yr ago
Cool, thanks, I feel better knowing that.
I do feel like it would violate some standard I hold myself to to go completely anonymous and deny my identity if asked in the future. The name here was supposed to be a mild ironic game (same as when I made my flair a Hamilton reference back on the subreddit after coming back from my long ban), I frankly expected people to notice my writing style and positions and ask me the question withing the first week or two. /shrug.
guesswho
2yr ago
To be clear, these groups ran organized crime networks that caused a ton of trouble. I don't really understand the perspective that people thought the Irish and Italians were corrupt, and boy-howdy were they wrong. Irish and Italian immigrants really did cause a lot of problems.
Right, but the point is that anyone at the time who made an HBD argument using that as evidence was laughably wrong. And maybe we should notice a pattern.
guesswho
2yr ago
Can I just take a moment to say:
Racists do not describe themselves as racists. They always have beliefs that re perfectly reasonable and normal from their own perspective, and generally have either sources of evidence they consider authoritative or arguments they consider persuasive to validate those beliefs.
That being said: are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
And if not, who in the world could we call a racist, then?
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
But in many cases, it's pretty easy to tell when that stuff is all happening above someone's bottom line. This also relates to epistemic learned helplessness, with people being rightly skeptical of arguments and citations that seem persuasive but are highly optimized to seem that way by lots of distributed effort in some cases, but being more amenable to those types of arguments when they come from certain people/groups or support certain things they're disposed towards.
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
guesswho
2yr ago
If he has an arrangement with his wife that allows this then they're not affairs.
Do the emails actually say 'I will let you have a chapter in my book if you fuck me', or does he just meet people through work?
Unless there's actual evidence of coercion or quid-pro-quo, idgaf.
Actually idgaf either way, I don't have a parasocial relationship with Singer and his sex life doesn't change the quality of the arguments themselves. But it's double-ultra transparent if people are going to try to attack him for his sex life when there's no evidence of wrongdoing.
guesswho
2yr ago
It's funny you should say that, Darwin (did I guess right?).
Yeah, confirmed that a few weeks back.
I'm more aware than anyone how frequently downvoted my comments are, and perhaps uniquely have the perspective to see that the number of downvotes is not very correlated with quality, effort, antagonism, or etc. I'm not surprised if there are correspondingly many reports.
I'm also aware of the 'reputation' (I find it intensely weird that strangers have strong opinions about me and try to stalk me across a decade of posts, I have no interest in being a 'personality' and just want to talk about ideas exclusively, but c'est la vie)
Whatever people believe, I don't try to toe any lines as any kind of game, that sounds incredibly boring. And I don't try to be any more antagonistic than the average poster here talking about wokies or BLM or trans or whatever; it always seems to me like this forum accepts pretty antagonistic stances as long as the targets are correct, and applies a lot more scrutiny if the table gets flipped. Which, again, I'm not even trying to make a game out of 'turnabout is fair play' or w/e, I'm a bad-at-reading-socialcues person trying to tone-match the attitude of the room and constantly surprised when people get mad about it.
Anyway, if you do see reported posts form me that you find ' antagonistic and uncharitable to your opponents, but within the limit of what I'm willing to tolerate', I would love to get a similar 'request and mild warning' and detailed explanation like you did for Astra here. That would help me a lot to understand what people are reacting to and expecting, before it blows up into something more serious.
guesswho
2yr ago
Are you suggesting that polyamorous refers to the relationship model and the relationship model alone?
I'm proposing that this would be the most useful way to use the term.
I think this broadly aligns with your point 3, and I'm having trouble parsing your objection to 3. But, yes, I think the point is that someone who describes themselves as poly is looking for a relationship in which both partners do the thing that Aella is quoted as saying is poly, allowing the partner lattitude.
I guess that saying 'I'm poly, I want to be in a poly relationship' sounds weird at first, but 'I'm a miner, I mine things' is not actually confusing. It's pretty standard to overload the same term as both a description of a person and a description of an activity... a surfer surfs, a bowler bowls, etc.
You might further object then, that the polyamourous person is seeking a reciprocal relationship of Aella's model defintion. But 4 Aella didn't describe reciprocally in her definition. She used you pronouns, which linguistically imply a personal defintion not a relational definition.
I mean, not in the 2 sentences that OP quoted, no.
Obviously those 2 sentences aren't going to convey her entire nuanced position here.
If you've actually read and listened to everything she's said on this topic, and know that it doesn't jibe with how I'm summarizing it here, then I concede to greater expertise and change my argument from 'I think this is a fair summary of what Aella means, and I think it's a good proposal for how to use the term' to 'This is my proposal for how to use the term.' I'm not actually invested in defending Aella or anything, I'm trying to stake a position about the object-level question.
If like me your only knowledge of Aella's position is reading OP's comment, then I don't think my interpretation is incompatible with what was quoted there, keeping in mind that short qu0tes pulled out of context never give the full picture of someone's argument and there's a lot of lattitude in what the actual position could be, reading backwards form the quote.
Is 'mormon style' polygamy now not polyamorous?
Other replies to my comment seem to think that yes, it's not. So it's at least a live question.
For me, I dunno, I don't see why everything has to be this precise?
If a single person says 'I'm poly', and you're thinking about dating them or setting them up with a friend, you can just ask them 'does that mean you want a mutually poly relationship where both partners can have outside partners, or that you're a cuck and only want your partner to have other partners, or that you're selfish and only want yourself to have other partners?'
And then instead of relying on identitarian labels to categorize people into warring factions that admit of no variance or humanity, you can actually, like, have a conversation with a real person and get to know them as an individual, and learn a little more about how these things are nuanced and subtle and complicated on an individual level, instead.
So basically, yeah, I don't think the fact that someone saying 'I'm poly' leaves you with, like, ONE more question you need to ask before 100% nailing down a fully detailed image of the relationship model they want, is a big drawback. I think it's kinda good even.
At the end of the day, wouldn't it be much cleaner, to, instead of hi-jacking polyamorous to mean something ideosyncratic, describe the relationship model with the already existing word, "open relationship"?
See here, I think it's important (very useful) to maintain a distinction between 'Exclusive romantic relationship between 2 partners plus guest-stars for sex sometimes' vs 'Open romantic relationship where people have multiple committed romantic partners.
Confusing those two things would be especially dangerous/disruptive.
guesswho
2yr ago
Ok, it looks like I'm once again in the situation where I'm 10 comments deep into a single string of replies and my interlocutor has changed 3 times and I'm still arguing my original point without noticing that the new people who replied later are trying to talk about different related points. So, sorry for the miscommunication.
guesswho
2yr ago
Wow, I hope that when I finally snap and refer to some right-wing posters as nazis or w/e, I get such a measured and restrained response from the mods.
guesswho
2yr ago
Oh hey look, it's capitalism.
If 'seeking engagement' is a disqualifying criteria for bloggers, then you may as well just give up on blogs altogether.
guesswho
2yr ago
How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?
I still remember the old days of Usenet where you got porn from small communities that uploaded it one image at a time and had a community with discussions and small talk and etc. built around it. Being a young adult forced to get porn there vastly increased the chances of running across a groomer - or getting a virus for that matter.
Getting porn from Pornhub is vastly safer for kids than any of the less-moderated alternatives.
This is the classic 'will refusing to do any sex education make kids not have sex, or make them have unsafe sex with pregnancies and stds and coercion and etc.' debate.
If you had a policy that makes it so no kid ever sees any porn ever, cool, do it.
This policy can't possibly do that, it can just punish the largest and therefore generally safest and most well-moderated venues, forcing kids into more dangerous venues instead.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yeah, that's a very specific definition of "polyamory" and what makes that different from an open marriage,
I generally understand open marriages to allow sex but not love and dating. A single partner plus guest stars, not a primary and a secondary partner, or several coequal metamores.
guesswho
2yr ago
Defining an orientation or proclivity based on non-nullifcation of your partner's activity is such an unintuitive and messy way to approach it.
Right, but it's you assuming that the word refers to an orientation or proclivity.
Aella is using it to refer to a relationship model.
And this is a completely intuitive and straightforward way to describe a relationship model.
I think using it to refer to relationship models makes the most sense. Otherwise someone with expansive desires who has chosen to commit to a monogamous commitment has to say 'I am polyamorous and monogamous', which is awkward and bad.
If they just say 'I am currently monogamous' or 'I am currently in monogamous relationship', that tells people what they want to know.
Ultimately, polyamorous is broadly understood as the opposite of monogamous, and monogamous refers to a relationship model, not an orientation or proclivity.
guesswho
2yr ago
It sounds like you just want 'poly' to be an identitarian sexual/romantic orientation, and Aella wants it to describe a relationship model?
I think there should be a term for both things, and yes it's confusing that we're currently using the same word for both.
But I do think that if we have to choose one, applying it to relationship models is more useful.
First of all, because we already have too many sexual/romantic identity labels. Their main utility was in serving as a rallying point for political organizing and civil rights fights 20-60 years ago, and most of them have served that purpose already. Today they're mostly pushing people into boxes and limiting our imaginations, while creating the normal identitarian culture-war problems. I generally oppose making new essentialist identity labels for this stuff, rather than just describing what you do/like as an individual (unless there's a political fight happening that needs a rallying point, but I don't think poly is there right now).
But second, because the relationship model version is what other people need to know about you most of the time.
Saying that you're gay, straight, or bi is mostly useful to other people because it tells them whether they have a chance with you, or who else you might be interested in that they could introduce you to, or who they might expect you to show up with at Thanksgiving. In terms of poly, those things are not determined by your personal identity, they are determined by the relationship model you are in. If you desire other people but are committed to a monogamous relationship, then the answer to all of those questions is more accurately conveyed by saying that you're not poly.
As far as teh objection of 'it's confusing to change the meaning of the term midstream, stop that' goes, my impression is that poly is neither mainstream enough nor used consistently enough at this time for this to be a big issue. Basically, most people have no fixed or nuanced idea about what it means to begin with, and the people who do use it are already using it inconsistently anyway. So there's still time to settle on the most useful definition in the future, which I think is the relationship model definition.
guesswho
2yr ago
???
Pornhub didn't say they can't make the ID requirement work, they said it's stupid and awful and they want nothing to do with it.
Objections 1 and 2 are pretty much my primary take here.
A large infinity minus a small infinity is still infinity.
You can block any number of mainstream sites with corporate offices who actually have to fear government regulation, and there will still be infinite sources of porn available for kids who want it.
It will just be less centralized and less moderated and less regulated, therefore much more likely for kids to see much worse stuff or meet actual groomers or etc.
(like, Pornhub censors searches for the word 'rape', for goodness sake. Do you really want kids going to Motherless or Exhentai instead?)
This seems so blindingly obvious to me that, yes, it is hard for me to resist the intuition that the people pushing for these laws can't actually believe that it will actually decrease the amount of porn kids see, which makes my mind immediately flail to makeup another motivation for them. Punishing porn sites financially out of religious spite, compiling databases of all porn every citizen has ever seen so they can secretly appropriate it and use it against political enemies and malcontents, simple vote-grabbing by appealing to their base with pointless boondoggles that carry the correct cultural signifiers, etc.
I in fact have enough perspective to apply Hanlon's Razor, and imagine that these extremely old and out-of-touch legislators actually do believe that this will make kids see less porn somehow. But it's really really hard for me to do that, it makes so little sense to me and has such obvious dystopic tendencies, I have to entirely take the outside view to hold the possibility in my head.
So I'm not surprised that lots of people with the same intuitions as me can't/don't default to that assumption, and see sinister motives instead. Failing to apply Hanlon's Razor is pretty much a fundamental defining feature of the culture war in general.
If progressives passed a law saying that any site which allows unmoderated comments or comments that feature racism or misogyny will require Real ID to use, with al user's actions on such cites recorded in a database alongside their real names and identifying details, because children should be protected from such things... would the right not assume that this move has nothing to do with protecting children and is 100% sinister and dystopian? That's about what this law feels like.
guesswho
2yr ago
I never said I thought it was unjust - it transparently is, but that wasn't part of any argument I was making.
It was the central question of the original conversation you jumped in on, here.
Anybody who does actually believe that is mis/underinformed to such a degree that they don't have anything of consequence to say about the political situation involved.
'Anyone who disagrees with me is so stupid that it's not worth listening to them' is not typically a stance that ends up with you yourself becoming educated and well-informed on a topic.
i.e. they would have prosecuted him immediately rather than timing the prosecution and important court dates specifically to interfere with his election campaign
He's not being prosecuted for insurrection!
What we are talking about here is the Colorado election board saying he's not eligible for the primary ballot.
Colorado does not have the standing tocriminally prosecute a former President for insurrection. Only federal courts can do that, and they still haven't decided to do so.
The only reason the Colorado election board can make a finding about insurrection is because it is relevant to the construction of their state ballot, which is why they had no standing or reason to do that before he would appear on a ballot.
Things like this are why 'anyone who disagrees with me is too stupid to listen to' is such a dangerous position to take. The real world is complex, and if you're supremely confident you already understand it well enough then you're probably just going to miss all the nuance that actually matters.
but who ended up being right, people freaking out about the changes in Internet discourse seen in Tumblr Social Justice Warriors, or people claiming it was just a couple crazy kids on the Internet?
People claiming it was just a couple of cray kids on the internet.
The thing is, you can certainly point to things that the social justice movement has changed about the world, and be mad about them if that's your perspective.
But those things were not the central claims of the anti-SJWs at the time. The central claims were things about Otherkin and 53 genders and Muslims taking over city and raping all the women and Christians being persecuted into the shadows and of course of course of course children being groomed and abused and etc. etc. etc.
You do the same thing here:
but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors.
Again, the blood libel that absolutely did come up and that we were saying 'that never happens to' is 'Crazy mothers cutting of their 4-year-old's dick', and evidence is still that this never happens. The best you have is the one Reuters search of giant databases, which even assuming there are zero errors in that medical database with hundreds of millions of entries (which, just, NO, that's not true), lists '56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021'. Which, 1. 16 is the age of consent in most states, 16 and 17 year olds doing things is not the same claim as 'young kids are doing this thing', 2. that's just genital surgery of any kind, no data to indicate it's genital reconstruction surgery for purposes of medical transition, some people need genital surgery sometimes, 3. some people are born intersex or with other developmental abnormalities in the genitals, choosing how to resolve those at 17 isn't the central case for the trans debate at all, and 4. etc.
So, sure, maybe a few years ago, there were a few people saying 'I'm really worried that as many as eighteen 16-17 year olds per year might be getting genital reassignment surgeries, I wish they'd wait another year or two', and the correct reply to that would have been some measured response like 'Well the data is kind of ambiguous and I'm not sure it actually tells us that's happening at all, and since you're allowed to get married and have kids at that age I'm not sure it's hugely important to deny them this one life-altering decision while allowing so many others, and if the numbers are that small I'm not sure it makes sense to have the larger debate about the trans issue generally hinge so crucially on this tiny and ambiguous group of people, but sure, maybe a few people are making questionable decisions and should wait a year or two to be sure, maybe we send around a memo to doctors about that or something.'
But that measured take of 'I'm really worried that as many as eighteen 16-17 year olds per year might be getting genital reassignment surgeries, I wish they'd wait another year or two' is not something that I remember ever encountering from the loudest culture warriors on the other side, who I had to engage with if I wanted to have any public debate on this issue at all. The bailey was very much 'children are getting their genitals mutilated left and right,' to which I correctly said 'No, that's not happening.'
For both the trans issue and the SJW issue, there was probably a motte of people with limited nuanced predictions who were mostly correct, but the bailey where most of the rhetoric took place was very much wrong. This is not surprising or even unusually shameful, my side does it too, it's what pretty much always happens on every issue everywhere all the time. That's why it's such an important idea that their site is named after it.
What I do consider shameful is the perfect-hindsight/moving-the-goalposts tactic of bringing up vague memories of how people rejected your bailey in the past, and then going 'see, here is my perfectly reasonable motte, and remember how the other side rejected it back then? They sure have been proven wrong!'
This is part of why I don't try to keep score and issue recriminations (unless challenged, as here). I'm sure a lot of this is not intentional, that in hindsight you remember the argument being more about your motte, or that you personally did hold the motte in the past and interpreted people rejecting the bailey as rejecting you too. I'm sure I'd accidentally make mistakes like this one if I tried to keep score and issue recriminations. I just don't think it's worth it.
guesswho
2yr ago
If they believed in a god that said humans were cattle to be exploited, I think I would just... disagree?
What I meant was, what if whichever religious figure you respect said they had a revelation from the same God you believe in saying that the aliens had dominion over you?
For the sake of argument, whatever series of factors make you believe that you have dominion over animals on religious grounds, the same factors happened within your own religion, saying the aliens have dominion over you.
It's impossible to just totally reject doing something about plastic straws, because their impact isn't zero, but it's hard to articulate exactly how much less important reducing plastic straw usage is than feeding starving children (in the opinion of most people outside the Motte, at least). Maybe for most folks the ratio would be something like 1:100, or 1:10,000.
Sure, but my point is more about the fungability of efforts to address problems.
There already exists a regulatory body in charge of passing regulations on restaurants, and they have free time. That legislative body can easily pass a plastic straw ban; it is not clear how they would direct that effort instead towards feeding children in foreign nations. They have neither the authority nor the mechanisms nor the expertise to do that.
Perhaps you can imagine firing half the people who work in that regulatory body, re-training them on international diplomacy and supply chains, and assigning them to figure out how to feed those starving foreign children. But there's going to be huge costs to that transition that probably the benefits to those children, those people probably don't want to do that kind of work and wouldn't be good at it anyway (there are reasons people have the jobs/interests they do), and theoretically the regulatory body shouldn't have a lot more staff than it needs anyway to begin with.
So I'm not arguing about the ratio of importance between the two things, I'm challenging the idea that all issues are in competition with each other for resources, and that ignoring one means you are definitely making more progress on another one. Society as a whole isn't perfectly efficient and friction-less like that.
If a straw ban is good and you have a mechanism by which to issue it, but no mechanism by which to transfer the resources for a straw ban into food in the mouths of starving foreign children, you might as well do the straw ban. Saying 'what about the starving children' as a way to oppose the straw ban is disingenuous, if the resources saved by not doing the ban won't actually be used to materially aid teh children instead.
guesswho
2yr ago
When you say 'dominion' is this a strictly religious interpretation, or is it meant to be based on some set of empirical factors?
In either case, if we contacted aliens who had either the same revealed religious/empirical factor-based relationship to us that we have to animals, would you be happy to admit that they also have infinite moral worth compared to us, and walk happily into the thresher for their most minor benefit?
Also, generally speaking: Questions of the form 'why should I care about X when Y exists' are ussually not very meaningful. The people and resources being devoted to X are generally not easily translatable to Y, or at any rate you caring about X does not conflict with you caring about Y unless you are already devoting so much time and effort to personally solving Y that you have no time in the day for X.
I don't have to imagine I'm an atheist, I am, and I'd happily confirm that I'm a heretic relative to any particular religion's dogma that defines me as such. I know that I meet that definition and don't have any problem with the word because it is has no moral worth to me.
The way that example is different from the one we're talking about here is that the people who meet a standard definition of racism don't want to be called racists. You imagine an atheist wouldn't want to be called a heretic, but why should we care? We've actively rejected that frame, so we're not embarrassed about being accurately labeled.
Whereas most racists have not actually rejected the social frame that gives rise to definitions and accusations of racism. They still want to be an upstanding member of that society, and they still want to think of themselves as morally correct within that society. So they want that society to drop it's own labels and definitions in order to accommodate them.
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