naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The basic contours of being motivated to save face are obvious enough, sure, but the part that continues to be absolutely bewildering to me is that dogged stubbornness only makes you look worse!
To people who care about the truth, maybe. But surely you've also heard the advice, sometimes given to celebrities caught up in PR nightmares, to "never apologize?" Sure, if you discover your own mistake or your own agenda requires that you change course, "I was wrong" looks like a cheat code for credibility. But if someone demands an apology, or catches your mistake, owning up looks like an act of submission rather than contrition.
These people are, in other words, treating arguments as soldiers. They're waging a culture war. The original goal of the bad research was never truth to begin with; definitively establishing the falsehood of the initial claim has no bearing whatsoever on the project.
In short: there will be no apology because no one is sorry--or so it seems to me!
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The Internet wasn't built to facilitate profit-taking. It was built by a combination of academic and military interests--both cultural cost-centers dedicated (at least ostensibly) to advancing the public good. Early on, the Internet functioned to connect a diaspora of high-trust intellectual communities, most of whose contributions to the furtherance of the project went unremunerated.
This is why people keep wanting to re-invent the Internet, in whole or in part: to maximize their own profits. To make it possible for them to make a better living. But if you think that clickbait is bad now, imagine the incentives for producing effective clickbait on any blockchain ledger that executes access contracts instantaneously using ubiquitous crypto tokens as a medium of data exchange! This is not to suggest that something like a basic attention token isn't an interesting idea, but I have a hard time imagining any such system that doesn't immediately get gamed to death. Even Bitcoin itself only continues to exist by accident--it has failed, almost completely, in its original mission to become a decentralized, anonymous digital currency. More than 90% of Bitcoin transactions are pure, unadulterated market speculation.
The primary value proposition of the Internet, because this is how it was built, is in its ubiquitous semi-automated bisexual luxury virtual anarcho-libertarianism. People doing stuff for free and other people benefiting from it for free, while the government and some well-heeled NGOs pick up the tab. The profitable bits are tacked on. Writing for a living is tough, not because we haven't figured out how to properly monetize the Internet, but because there are lots and lots of good-to-great writers who are still willing to do that for cheap-to-free. The choice is not between ubiquitous ads and paywalls; you can also just choose to not traffic in professional material--like playing a free-to-play game and never once dipping into microtransactions or gacha mechanics, fully prepared to quit the moment you hit a hard paywall, because there are other games to play.
Stated a little differently: ad-blockers aren't Freddie's problem--I'm Freddie's problem.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Uh, anyone in the UK willing-and-able to comment on this?
From my warped, media-driven perspective across the pond, like... it looks something like this.
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Boris Johnson is a frighteningly intelligent person who managed to become PM and pull off Brexit, freeing the UK from the placid bureaucratic tyranny of Brussels but also from a variety of economically beneficial arrangements with the continent
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, Boris Johnson ultimately failed to heed Dominic Cummings, turning about-face on a number of lockdown policies which Boris did not, apparently, regard himself as bound by (channeling a lot of U.S. Democrats here)
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The economy, predictably, suffers; whether this is due to COVID, Brexit, both, or neither, is a question that will help many economics professors secure tenure
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Maybe there is some philandering by someone important in here somewhere? Recollection vague...
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A bunch of people resign from positions in Boris' administration
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Liz Truss becomes PM
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Six weeks later, someone gets manhandled in the Commons over a vote?
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Liz Truss resigns as PM
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Maybe Boris is coming back?
It's just not clear to me, at all, how Boris managed to get himself removed in the first place; it feels like he was removed for little tiny stupid stuff after massively succeeding on all the issues that genuinely mattered to him and his supporters. He apparently should have heeded Cummings on COVID (and perhaps many other things, too) and it looks like Boris reaped the consequences without actually learning his lesson. But Truss is apparently just wildly incompetent, or maybe she's just catching the blame for what is really Boris' economy?
What's really happening, there. Help me out.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
the r-slurs and spergs cheer
First off you need to write like you want to include everyone in the conversation, which... shibboleths like this aren't an egregious violation, but they are still a violation of that rule.
The more serious violation, though, is that you're deliberately picking on a very general group, here. The real point of your post is not, it seems, to explain Rick & Morty--which would be fine!--but to dunk on "spergs" because they don't enjoy it on as many levels as you do.
So, don't do that.
That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?
People occasionally ask whether the ratsphere is just reinventing the wheel of philosophy (my response then). I suspect that EA is similarly reinventing the wheel of non-profit profiteering.
This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but so far all I have to show for it is a scattered mess of loosely-connected (as though by yarn and pushpins) thoughts. Some of them are even a bit Marxist--we live in a material world, we all have to eat, and if you aren't already independently wealthy then your only options for going on living are to grind, or to grift (or some combination of the two). And the Internet has a way of dragging more and more of us into the same bucket of crabs. AI is interesting stuff, but 99% of the people writing and talking about it are just airing views. MIT's recent AI policy briefs do not contribute any technical work to the advancement of AI, and do not express any substantive philosophical insight; all I see there is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking. But it is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking from top researchers at a top institution discussing a hot issue, which is how time and money and attention are allocated these days.
So for every one person doing the hard work of advancing AI technology, there seem to be at least a hundred grasping hands reaching out in hopes of being the one who gets to actually call the shots, or barring that at least catches some windfall "crumbs" along the way. For every Scott Alexander donating a damn kidney to strangers in hopes of making the world an ever-so-slightly better place to live, there are a hundred "effective altruists" who see a chance to collect a salary by bouncing between expenses-paid feel-good conferences at fancy hotels instead of leveraging their liberal arts degree as a barista. And I say that as someone with several liberal arts degrees, who works in academia where we are constantly under pressure to grift for grants.
The cliche that always comes to my mind when I weigh these things is, "what would you do, if money were not an issue?" Not in the "what if you had unlimited resources" sense, but like--what would the modal EA-AI acolyte do, if they got their hands on $100 million free and clear? Because I think the true answer for the overwhelming majority of them is something like "buy real estate," not "do more good in the world." And I would not condemn that choice on the merits (I'd do the same!) but people notice that kind of apparent hypocrisy, even if, in the end, we as a society seem basically fine with non-profits like "Black Lives Matter" making some individual persons wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. I can't find the link right now (but I thought it was an AAQC?) but someone here did a Likewise, there was a now-deleted deep dive into the Sound of Freedom guy's nonprofit finances posted here a while back, and he was making a lot of money.
So if you want to dig in, the 2020 return is here and the 2021 is here.
As far as most concerning stuff, there is a pretty large amount of money flowing out to Ballard and his wife. $335,000 of salary to Ballard in 2021 and $113,858 of salary to his wife. These aren't super eye popping numbers, but it is a pretty high amount.
The second thing is that they seem to be hoarding a lot of cash. They have like $80 million cash on hand, and are spending much less than they raise. This isn't inherently an issue if they're trying to build an organization that's self-sustaining, but it does mean as a donor your money is not likely going to actual stuff in the short or medium term.
Speaking of that actual stuff, they don't seem to spend most of what goes out the door on their headline-generating programs. A pretty big chunk of their outflow is just grants to other 501(c)(3)s, which is not something you need to be spending millions in executive compensation for. As best I can figure, in 2021 they did just shy of $11 million of grants to other nonprofits. It's a little tricky to suss out their spending on program expenses versus admin, but they claim for outside the US a total of just shy of $8 million in program expenses.
Legal expenses are also very high (at over 1.5 million). Not sure if they're involved in some expensive litigation or what is going on there. Travel is also really high at 1.9 million, but given the nature of their organization, a good chunk of that is likely programmatic.
Now it looks like, even if maybe he did (?) save some kid(s) from trafficking along the way, it was mostly a grift? Anyway, the point is, stories like this abound.
So it would be more surprising, in the end, if the rationalist community had actually transcended human nature in this case. And by "human nature" I don't even mean greedy and grubbing; I just mean that anyone who isn't already independently wealthy must, to continue existing, find a grind or a grift! As usual, I have no solutions. This particular case is arguably especially meta, given the influence AI seems likely to have on the grind-or-grift options available to future (maybe, near-future) humans. And maybe this particular case is especially demonstrative of hypocrisy, given the explicit opposition of both effective altruism and the ratsphere to precisely the kind of grind-or-grift mentality that dominates every other non-profit world. But playing the game one level higher apparently did not, at least in this case, translate into playing a different game. Perhaps, so long as we are baseline homo sapiens, there is no other game available to us.
Because if I can prove it can't be done, then I can use that to explain why people don't do it. Because if I can prove it can be done, then I can do it and gently show people how to politics better.
So, to be sure I'm understanding: when you say "prove it can/'t be done," it seems like "it" here refers, not to including a trans character in a game--since you already know that trans characters have been included in games--but to creating either "trans characters that are never called attention to" or "characters that are an allegory for trans people."
In the case of the former, you are stuck on the "invisibility" problem: "The point of Uhura is that she is obviously black and nobody cares. But you can't have someone who's 'obviously successfully trans' - it's contradictory!" To this I can only respond that contradiction is the beating heart of transsexuality. If gender essentialism is true, then a male who is wired to pursue the Platonic Feminine will always fall short in some way (until we unlock transhumanist body-swapping in the tech tree); because males cannot bear children, there is no such thing as being "successfully" trans, only varying degrees of failure.
(Note that this is also true for infertile women, many of whom struggle emotionally with infertility and regard themselves at some level as failures as women. I observe in passing: how many pregnant women have you seen in video games? Conversely, does infertility strike you as like transsexuality in terms of how difficult it would be to depict in a video game "without calling attention to it?")
But if gender essentialism is false, then it's not even clear what being "successfully trans" can possibly mean, because there is no Platonic Feminine--there are only varying degrees of conformity or nonconformity to socially constructed gender expectations. Either a male who perfectly presents as feminine just is a woman by definition (if gender is inessential and divorced from sex, then there is no such thing as a "transwoman," just people behaving in ways that society arbitrarily dubs masculine or feminine) or there is no gender binary at all, no "men" or "women" in truth but only a whole bunch of people behaving in a diverse array of ways.
The contemporary practice of transsexuality can only even exist in a society that maintains a fairly strict gender binary but also makes sociolinguistic accommodations for people who transgress that binary. For a trans character to be a trans character, you either have to commit to gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to eschew gender essentialism and accept that "it can't be done," or you have to situate your character within a game setting where transsexuality is as explicitly noticeable as race but also never remarked upon. (This might be done, for example, through widespread use of neopronouns, or trans flags, or ubiquitous nudity.) But here I'm basically repeating myself: the disposition of a trans character will depend substantially on the trans-ness you put into your worldbuilding.
Allegories I think should be much easier, in part because queer theory is absolutely drowning in them. An intimately-told story of a woman's struggle with infertility could very easily be an allegory for transsexuality. There are also many, many stories of gender-norm violation throughout history, including women sneaking into Plato's Academy, women dressing as men in Shakespeare's plays, and so forth. "Are these characters actually trans?" is a common topic in writing in the humanities.
Whether any of this rises to the level of showing people "how to politics better" I leave an open question.
Because to me, "the existence of trans people" isn't propaganda any more than putting angels or nazis or bikers or forest rangers in a game is propaganda. Having things in a game does not imply support for those things, nor does it imply disapproval of those things. Having a larger palette makes for more options, which lets me make better games. And the more ways I can use parts of that palette, the better off I am.
This seems like a bit of a motte to me, along the lines of "putting black people in a game (or movie) is not propaganda." Well, no, not all by itself. But there are settings where it makes more and less sense to do, and ways it can seem more or less like propaganda. Including a "successfully trans" character in your 21st century horror RPG is a very different thing than including a similarly-situated trans character in your 16th century open world samurai simulator (Uhura would also not go well in such a game!). Incongruously imposing 21st century American notions of sex and gender on historical settings is propaganda no matter how you might care to protest the contrary. Imposing those same ideas on a fantasy world of your own devising, much less so.
Because it's a challenge.
Again--if I've understood you--the "challenge" you have in mind does not seem to be the mere inclusion of trans characters in games, but the presentation of trans characters at the level of Uhura: visible, but unremarkable. What I think I am trying to suggest to you is that Roddenberry's artistic success in this regard (as distinct from his strategic success in the world we inhabit) was not his inclusion of the black Uhura character, but in his construction of a world where it makes sense for her blackness to pass unremarked. You have asked a character-crafting question when you are actually facing a worldbuilding problem.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
This is one of my favorite things about the Motte--that so many of us have this shared experience with being mystified by the overwhelming prevalence of unreflective dogmatism and group identity. I most strongly identified with right-wing politics when the right was preaching small government and libertarianism, but Republicans can't seem to keep sight of their own principles once they land a spot in the federal government. I most strongly identified with leftist politics when the left was using things like free speech and atheism to undermine opposition, but once the "religious right" receded sufficiently for the left to capture the White House, suddenly it was all about embracing Islam and banning "hate speech."
I've long since given up hope that intelligent people will ever be allowed to intelligently govern the United States of America. I assume this is at least in part because even the intelligent people who manage to get elected or appointed or hired into important positions seem inevitably to get captured in short order by Moloch or some other destructive egregore.
But it's nice to have others with whom to commiserate.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
What exactly is the distinction between a paraphilia and a sexual orientation? The most thoughtful answer I can find with a quick search suggests that the latter is biological and the former psychological?
The very notion of "paraphilia" is grounded in natural law thinking (a la Aristotle and Aquinas). The "para-" prefix means "alongside of, beside, near, resembling, beyond, apart from." The "purpose" of sexual activity is procreation; healthy, functioning sex organs operate in ways that are clearly oriented toward reproduction, just as a healthy functioning heart operates in ways that circulate blood through your body. So sexual activity that could not possibly be procreative is "beside" (para) the point of sex (philia, at least in this context).
On this basic framework, homosexuality qualifies as paraphilia because it can't be procreative. Obviously this also implicates things like children and animals, but arguably implicates things like foot fetishes or pornography and masturbation, too. It even implicates things like oral sex; it may implicate sex while using birth control, or sex with an infertile person. In religious communities that often think in natural law terms without always realizing it, this gives rise to patches like "sex is also pleasurable to strengthen the bond between husband and wife, and part of our natural purpose is to raise children together, so maybe lots of kinds of non-procreative heterosexual sex are okay." But the natural law view also tends to suggest that "adulthood" means "capable of reproduction" rather than some other, more age- or maturity-oriented definition, opening a further can of worms.
In other words--contemporary American sexual mores have become just totally untethered from anything approaching a "natural law" view. Without that mooring, the idea of a "paraphilia" falls quickly to pieces, but the word lumbers on as a terminological zombie. The emphasis on "consent" in contemporary discourse is, I suspect, partly driven by the death of every other standard we've ever had for permissible sexual activity. Natural law style thinking thus lives on, not only in religious communities but also among people who want a pejorative word for any behavior they find creepy. Many "creepy" sexual behaviors do qualify as paraphilias under the natural law "proper function" standard! But so do many sexual behaviors now regarded as "normal" or otherwise acceptable.
So, in short, we're using a natural law term that literally means "sex acts that aren't plausibly procreative" to refer to things that we now regard as either nonconsensual, or creepy. Some of these things are also not plausibly procreative, but some surely are, leading to the fuzziness you observe.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The Blue Check circa 2012 was essentially a spoils system. Basically if you had a sufficiently well-connected PR person, they could get you fast-tracked through the process. It was supposed to fight impersonation rather than being a mark of high quality information, but the blogosphere (remember the blogosphere?) was a bucket of journalist crabs looking for ways to stand out. And since the process was neither automated nor quick, the people who got priority weren't necessarily the most likely to actually be impersonated, they were the people who both (A) wanted it badly enough and (B) had the connections to make that happen. And sure, huge A-list celebrities got to jump the queue, but after that it was mostly B-list (or C-list, or...) media personalities begging for Silicon Valley scraps.
Treating the blue check as a signal of information veracity is like, downstream of the anti-impersonation aim, so I can't say it has mutated beyond recognition. But certainly it has mutated. Moving to a pay-to-verify system cashes in on that mutation, kind of, in an I Am Rich sort of way, only instead of signaling wealth, you're signaling a willingness to pay a whopping $8 per month to prevent impersonation and presumably get some other perks as well.
Network effects are huge, so I'm reluctant to predict that Twitter will die any time soon, but I suspect its popularity has peaked.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Hard disagree.
The first movie was tolerable, and visually well-crafted. The second movie kept up with the visuals, but tipped over the edge for me in several ways.
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St. Alia of the Knife got, essentially, cut. This is the most utterly unforgivable bullshit, especially given the promise of a third movie. There are fewer more iconic moments than the abominable child ending her treacherous grandfather with the Gom Jabbar. In fact, it's the only unequivocally great thing she ever gets to do, making her ultimate end all the more tragic.
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The casting for Irulan seemed like a deliberate slight against the the idea of multigenerational eugenics. Her portrayal of Tatlock in Oppenheimer was grating, but Tatlock was presumably herself quite grating. Irulan is a regal character, if not indeed a somewhat ethereal one. They couldn't even pluck her eyebrows for this?
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The casting for Shaddam IV was similarly perplexing. Christopher Walken played the emperor as a doddering has-been in the early stages of dementia.
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In general the perversion and brutality of the Harkonnens was understated--to the point of being a fumble. This seems to have been simple cowardice on the director's part. Understandable cowardice, perhaps, but cowardice all the same.
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Failure to address the Butlerian Jihad seems like a particularly egregious miss given the present level of public interest in artificial intelligence.
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Chani was an interesting character in the books, albeit a minor one. She becomes a more important figure in the movie, at the cost of changing her into a boring (and fickle) Mary Sue.
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Stilgar is rendered as an oaf and a dupe, the better to mock the "fundamentalists."
In its 6 book entirety, despite failing to reach the final showdown with the machines (Kevin Anderson sucks), is still a magnificent meditation on the difference between humans and human animals, on the fact that evolution continues to operate on us, and on the ways in which that poses a threat to our continued survival as a species. Paul is ultimately a failure as a messiah because he refuses to embrace his bloody destiny, instead leaving the task to his children (SUBTLE METAPHOR WARNING), who then step up and do the bloody business of putting an end to the hedonistic but stultifying preening of the human race. Here instead we get Chani asserting her agency--she won't abide a political marriage for her man--in a story that was fundamentally supposed to be about the lack of agency that is the problem Paul is supposed to solve for humanity.
Other than the wokism of casting the Fremen--but not the Harkonnens--as multiracial, I didn't see anything to complain about along that axis. The unrelenting girl-bossing of certain characters was weird, but only weirder for how badly the writing and acting neutered Lady Jessica. Dune is absolutely stacked with "strong female characters" so I guess the director had to dial that back, to better highlight his distorted vision of Chani as something less interesting than the Mother of God.
Ugh. Anyway. Just once I'd like to see a filmmaker actually deliver on the promise of Dune. It would be challenging, and consequently it would probably be unpopular. A clear portrayal of the truth of the Axlotl Tanks might well be sufficient to send the zeitgeist into total meltdown.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
And why would these two groups coordinate on this? Same question goes for: shutting of water/electricity. Why would Egypt help Israel with this? Why doesn't Egypt simply give the Gazans the water they need?
Downtrodden Palestinians are an important weapon in Islam's war on Israel--arguably, the most important weapon. They are the "victims" the Muslim world can hold up to show the perfidy and savagery of the Jewish state. If they stop being victims, then they stop being useful. The ~20% of Israel's citizens who are assimilated Palestinians are of no interest to the terrorists of Hamas (or their masters abroad).
None of the countries nominally "allied" with Palestine appear to give half a shit about the well-being of Palestinians. What they want is for there to be Muslims in Israel fighting the never-ending Jihad against Judaism. And better yet, for there to be disposable Muslims; certainly other Islamist countries are not in general keen on inviting Palestinian refugees into their nations, and there is no need for them to risk their lives fighting Israelis if the Palestinians will do it for them. The goal for Hamas is not, ever, peace--and certainly not anything like assimilation and coexistence.
This is also why there are so many advocates for Palestinian "right of return" under much broader conditions than have never been extended to any other ethnic group.
The Israel-Palestine conflict is complicated and ugly (on both sides!) in so many ways, but it simply cannot be understood without first acknowledging the central truth that it is a holy war, being funded and soft-supported around the world by hard-line Muslims (and their political stooges in American government, naturally). This is not, at bottom, about colonialism, or apartheid, or anything like that. It is about the deep, abiding intolerance of Muslims for non-Muslims, especially in the holy cities of Islam, including Jerusalem. Treating the conflict as resulting from anything other than simple, religiously-prescribed Muslim bigotry has littered history with failed peace agreements, because the problems those agreements attempted to solve have never been the real problem.
If the Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If the Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel.
What's unhealthy about being gay or lesbian? I guess transgenderism is different because it's kind of defined as dysmorphia even by its activists, but I don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality.
Well, what's "unhealthy" about anything? Is it "unhealthy" to eat bacon? Apparently yes. Why? Because it shortens your lifespan and creates other complications. Does being homosexual shorten your lifespan?
In short, yes. I have deliberately linked the response of the authors of the relevant study to what they call "homophobic groups [who] appear more interested in restricting the human rights of gay and bisexuals rather than promoting their health and well being." Their only goal was to demonstrate the needs of the gay community, not to strengthen any homophobic agenda. Furthermore, advances in HIV treatment have surely raised that number in the last few decades, but the fact remains that practicing homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences similar to those we associate with smoking, sedentary lifestyles, bad foods, etc. Which we typically do not ban, but do often seek to regulate, or at least socially disapprove.
"But sexuality is a part of people's core immutable identity!" I'm skeptical of that, for reasons that aren't important to this argument, but I definitely hear the same thing from obese people, who I've known to talk about food the way that some homosexuals talk about the impossibility of just not doing that. I'm not sure I can accept that it is dehumanizing to be told that your preferred behaviors are unhealthy or even socially forbidden, but I am comfortable that it is unpleasant, and the consequences of letting people eat bacon or have consensual unprotected anal sex in public places with total strangers are in many cases low enough that the costs of forbidding that behavior is more than society should bear. But let's set aside the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections in homosexual men, the high comorbidity of psychiatric disorders that does not seem to be abating as societal acceptance improves, and the effects of promiscuity which apply to everyone but more to homosexual men than any other demographic...
Is infertility "unhealthy?"
This is the final motte of the natural law theorist. Organisms are generally healthy when every part is performing its "proper function." Many parts of you have the function of keeping you alive; if your heart stops pumping blood, it's curtains. Some parts are more utilitarian; if your eyes stop translating photons into useful neurological information, you're not going to die (at least not as a direct result), but you might talk to your doctor about approaches to restoring them.
So what's the proper function of your sex organs and attendant "sexual attraction" neurocircuitry?
Obviously, homosexuality is not infertility of the gonads. But homosexuals (at least if they are strict about their homosexuality) must rely on artificial reproductive technologies for sexual reproduction in the way that people with poor vision must wear glasses to see. Given the prevalence of fertility clinics, it would be weird to say that infertility is not a question of being "unhealthy" (indeed, one highly successful approach to fertility treatment for the obese is: lose weight). One does not visit the fertility doctor when everything is working as nature intended arranged via processes of natural selection over millions of years. There is no effective, humane "treatment" for homosexuality, but--imagine if, in 1899 A.D., someone discovered an easily-farmed plant in the rainforest with sap that reset the neurocircuitry of human sexual attraction to "reproductive sex" mode. How would history look different?
Now, before I get dog-piled with "but causation" and "but elective sterilization" and "but anti-natalism" and "but bisexuals" and all the other entirely-too-obvious "buts" (I will not make a cheeky comment about "but" sex here dammit sorry sorry):
I don't think any of this matters very much. We did not discover a magical sexuality-changing tree sap in 1899, we do have a variety of interventions to circumvent the costs of our preferences and desires, including "unhealthy" ones, and perhaps most importantly, I eat bacon. Literally, and also metaphorically, where "bacon" is a stand-in for all the many ways I fail to do what is optimally healthy, because for whatever reason it's not who I am, no matter what my rational mind tells me I should prefer in my own best interests. I echo the letter from the lifespan study: the point here is not to excuse any mistreatment of any individual based on the character of their sexual appetites.
But you said you "don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality," which statement would seem to me to require a very constrained definition of "unhealthy," much more constrained than we apply in basically any other context.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I really think that the motte-and-bailey of many (often bad faith) questions like this is that "Jewish" is both a faith and several ethnicities.
Imagine if worship of Greek gods had survived to the present day--a religion of, say, 20 million, with half living in Greece but the other half in various diasporas around the world. In that hypothetical world, who is plausibly "Greek?"
Only the people who live in Greece? But, despite the ethnic cleansing of Turkey, presumably many Turkish people are ethnically Greek even today, at least arguably--it was only in the early 20th century that the purest of the Greeks were expelled. Besides, surely the Greek god worshippers would say "we're Greek too!" And what about people whose great-great-great-grandparents were Greek, and who still like to make pitas for lunch? Are they Greek, too? What if they insist that they are Greek? Also Greece has a long and storied intellectual tradition. The whole edifice of Western academia is literally named after an Athenian hero, because Plato's Academy was the Academy. Is academia "disproportionately Greek?"
In a way, the present day status of Greek versus Jewish (both ancient traditions and peoples!) is an interesting illustration of the costs and benefits of being cosmopolitan and culturally promiscuous, versus being insular and protectionist. Greece and Israel have similar populations today, both ethnicities have been subject to (differently executed, but nevertheless) centuries of subjugation, exile, and ethnic cleansing. Greek philosophy has arguably conquered the world; they literally invented formal logic, which no other culture ever independently accomplished, and laid the foundations of all modern sciences, including social sciences like politics and psychology.
(Indeed, Ashkenazi Jews--the Jewish ethnicity most often associated in popular perception with disproportionate intellectual prowess--are the Jews whose ancestry comes predominantly from southern Europe!)
And yet there are no grand conspiracy theories concerning Greek influence (though I admit I have never been to Turkey, maybe they have such things there?). Greek people in America are just treated as "white" people--even if they, as southern Europeans with noticeable genetic overlap across the Mediterranean, are suspicious about that classification! Meanwhile Jews of plainly and overwhelmingly European descent are often given a pass for claiming to not be white. That insularity and ethnic conservatism comes with a price (in particular, the kooks who allow Jews to live rent-free in their heads) but also with clear benefits.
(This same pattern can be observed about American culture in the era of mass media. Cultural differences, including linguistic accents, do continue to exist in the U.S., but American culture has become surprisingly homogeneous, historically speaking, given the size and population of our country--and much of the world has been caught in that phenomenon through mass media, as evidenced by e.g. people in the U.K. and (especially) Ireland participating in bizarre "Black Lives Matter" protests. Cultural "assimilation" or "integration" are interesting topics to me, I guess is what I'm saying here.)
Anyway, my main point is just that "disproportionately Jewish" is an easy target to hit in part because "Jewish" sounds to most people like a group with clear boundaries, but in fact it definitely isn't. It's a historical accident that they get any attention at all; Christianity started as a sect of Judaism, too, so arguably Jewish ideas have also conquered much of the world. But it's not at all clear to me how a question like "what would feminism look like without Christian (or Greek) influence" helpfully informs us about, well, anything.
That being said, this decision by Florida seems to be more a part of the DeSantis for President campaign than a principled objection.
...
And, btw, the claims on the other side that Florida does not want to teach African American history is also nonsense, because teaching of African American history is mandated in FL schools
Or, in other words, the complaints against DeSantis seem to be more a part of the long-running "Defeat DeSantis" campaign than a principled objection? I don't think there's any question that DeSantis is angling for the White House, such that everything he does can be plausibly cast in that way. But asking politicians for principled objections seems to always and everywhere end up as an isolated demand for rigor.
The complaints from Florida seem perfectly reasonable to me; I regard so-called "intersectionality" as much more like a religion than a legitimate form of academic inquiry, and I don't see any value in teaching it in schools (beyond, perhaps, including it in a religious studies course as an example of a secular dogmatism that has emerged in response to the broad exclusion of deity-oriented faith from public debate). Of course, reasonable minds may differ on this point, and I'm comfortable with each state education system in the U.S. reaching its own conclusion through standard legislative processes, which Florida has done here.
But I am also broadly disinterested in having "standardized" education across the country, and would rather see states actively competing in that arena rather than outsourcing everything to monocultures like the College Board. Very few people seem to actually care about AP Black-Queer-Feminist-Communism, and most of the complaining I see is false claims (as you noted) about black history being removed from Florida schools. Given that no actual history is being excluded from Florida schools, only certain forms of political indoctrination, what complaint remains? The complaint that DeSantis is doing this for the votes?
I have a lot of problems with democracy, but ultimately "politician doing the things his voters want him to do" just isn't very high on my list of things to worry about.
ETA:
So, none of the readings complained about are required, and teachers are free, as required by Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" to assign readings on all sides of the issues in question.
This seems like a great way to get poor scores on the exam, though. "You are free to teach what you like" does not translate into "and your students will still do well on the exam." Students who are not closely able to at list imitate the dogmatic thinking from the objectionable readings seem unlikely to do well on the exam that is the ultimate point of any AP class. My own experience with AP exams is that failure to hew closely to the "suggested" readings will often leave your students swinging in the wind.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This is the equivalent of wokes using “white supremacy” to include timeliness, dress codes and objectivity.
False equivalency. Wokes using "white supremacy" to include anything they don't like about Red Tribe values is qualitatively distinct from using "groomer" to include behaviors that are, in fact, preparing children to be exploited or abused, and then exploiting or abusing them.
Here's how: "white supremacy" is fundamentally the idea that white groups or individuals are inherently superior to (at least some) non-white groups. To call, say, expectations of timeliness "white supremacy" is gobbledygook. If the claim is that non-whites can't be timely, then that claim is itself an assertion of white supremacy. If the claim is that timeliness is a "white value" but not a superior value, and that non-whites can be timely but rewarding timeliness or punish tardiness unfairly discounts non-white values, then it is also a claim that not rewarding timeliness, or even rewarding tardiness, unfairly discounts white values. You can't reasonably hold that timeliness is "white supremacy" without holding inconsistent ideas. (This is a frequent pattern in identitarian thinking: it is very often just self-refuting nonsense.)
By contrast, "grooming" describes the act of preparing a child to be abused or exploited, and some common known approaches to grooming are: asking children explicit questions about their sex and sexuality, exposing children to sexually explicit materials, and encouraging children to keep secrets or distance themselves from their parents. These are all things that wokes have demonstrably advocated for, from arguing for the inclusion of sexually explicit material in children's libraries, to keeping secrets from parents, to refusing to return runaway children to their parents. You might ask whether it counts as "grooming" if Party A is doing the grooming but Party B does the abuse, and whether it's still grooming if Party B never shows up to accomplish the abuse. I myself am comfortable with the idea that abusers can and do sometimes employ accomplices as groomers, as well as with the idea that a groomer who fails to follow through on abuse is still a groomer. This is not self-refuting, and so cannot be aptly compared with treating timeliness or objectivity as white supremacy.
And yes--you could certainly argue that the real abuse was families all along! Many on the left do believe this, and it is a genuine values dispute. Even DeBoer doesn't actually come out and say "families are good, actually"--his position appears to be something like "stop saying they're bad so we can win, maybe then we can actually abolish the horrid institution." But when the wokes are out there actually engaged in textbook grooming behaviors and passing laws to enable those behaviors, it's hardly a "dishonest" or "transparent attempt to leverage conditioned emotional reactions." It's more like calling a spade a spade. As I said in the linked discussion last time--if tabooing "groomer" seemed likely to reduce cases of actual abuse, I'd be all for it. But in the current debate, it seems like the desire to taboo "groomer" is just deliberate obfuscation of a real and serious political problem.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
So would you agree that blackface is not "anti-black" per se? Do you believe that caricatures of Jews are not "anti-Semitic" per se?
There are a thousand reasons to dress in drag as a nun other than being anti-Catholic. To criticize certain Catholic doctrines re homosexuality.
Er... maybe we have different ideas about what it means to be "anti-Catholic," but criticizing Catholic doctrines of homosexuality sounds paradigmatically "anti-Catholic" to me. Pushing back on political efforts by the Catholic church seems "anti-Catholic," especially given the Church's long political history.
And, btw, one can criticize the Catholic Church (an enormously powerful institution) without criticizing either Catholics or Catholicism.
Catholics, maybe, but Catholicism? This seems like splitting hairs incredibly fine, to the point of suggesting a motte and bailey doctrine at play. Mockery has long been a highly effective approach to criticism, and criticism is not pro-, it is anti-.
"You can keep your Catholicism, we're just going to level your Church, caricature your symbols, mock your practices--no, we're not anti-Catholic per se, don't be ridiculous!"
That seems implausible to me.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
So, your claim is that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission somehow caused the current problems in SA?
Where did I say that?
I said that "Truth and Reconciliation" failed to do what its proponents claimed it was doing--providing a peaceful path to replacing racial apartheid with multicultural liberalism. One worry of white South Africans circa 1990 was that they couldn't relinquish their dominance, because the inevitable result would be vae victis justice: widespread confiscation of property at minimum and, very possibly, outright genocide. "Truth and Reconciliation" was packaged as the way forward: once everyone had admitted their misdeeds and made their apologies, the country could heal and move on. Certain Western scholars (like my deceased colleague) were especially excited about the possibilities presented by a genuinely wealthy, progressive, modern, secular nation-state potentially arising in sub-Saharan Africa.
And to be fair, for about a decade it appeared that this might actually occur! But all along there was ample evidence that most regular people (as distinct from politicians and foreign diplomats) did not regard "Truth and Reconciliation" to have actually reconciled the black and white communities. My guess is that, while I am always annoyed to have words put in my mouth, I can perhaps steel-man your concern, which may be that I look a bit like a Copenhagen ethicist here. Yeah, "Truth and Reconciliation" failed, but its advocates shouldn't be blamed for noticing the problem, much less for trying and, for a limited time, succeeding in making things better.
But notice that I did not blame the "Truth and Reconciliation" advocates for trying, and I don't even particularly blame them for failing. What does bother me is that people praised them even when it became clear that the facts did not support such optimism, and my expectation that people will continue to praise and emulate them, even though we have seen that their approach does not, in fact work. In particular, the failure of "Truth and Reconciliation" generalizes to much of what is done under the banner of "critical theory" in the United States today.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This is pointlessly heated and antagonistic. Don't do this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
No, your mistake was contributing nothing but heat to what was a relatively anodyne post. "Oh, that went well, but you know my outgroup could have made it much worse, and probably would have just last year" is unnecessary heat. When your outgroup fails to be as horrible as you expect them to be, let them.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
It's very difficult for me to see this post as anything but bad faith apophasis.
We don't typically ban people based on their usernames (after all, what is in a name?) and yet yours is suspicious. Bare links are off-limits; you didn't post a bare link, but copy-pasting most of an article is a near cousin. So you wrote some commentary, but it hardly seems to be effortful commentary--just a dismissal: also suspicious. If someone said "tomorrow, a user is going to make a post that is 90% copy-pasted ZHPL, followed by 10% commentary that is at best a limp-wristed disavowal of the piece," what would I predict was the reason for the post? I would predict it was posted by a troll who either agrees with ZHPL but is pretending they don't, or disagrees with ZHPL but is fishing for damning and sneer-worthy responses from the Motte.
At minimum, this sort of thing is egregiously obnoxious. Please don't.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
I think you are significantly downplaying the motivations for Civil Rights.
I think maybe you misunderstand my criticism. Most sources suggest the civil rights movement spans the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s. You are correct that, during that time, a lot of people were motivated by genuine infringement on their genuinely civil rights. The story of desegregation is the one that is most often retold because it is, I suspect, the clearest case: state actors harming citizens by violating their rights directly, and state laws explicitly requiring private individuals and companies to impose racial apartheid whether they wanted to or not. But "affirmative action"--preferential treatment on the basis of race--was also demanded early and often.
I do not think preferential treatment is a civil right--to the contrary. And so almost from its very inception the movement was deeply self-contradictory. And maybe that would have been okay, but--slowly at first, and accelerating through the end of the 20th century--the demand for preferential treatment for black Americans became, by far, the most important, visible, influential, and imitated aspect of the civil rights movement as it extended beyond the goal of ending the oppression of blacks. Consider: segregation, voter suppression, and the like was limited to a handful of places, but affirmative action was not! Today, racial minorities demand segregation with some regularity. Fewer than 3/5ths of black voters bother to show up at the polls. So what is the true and lasting legacy of the civil rights movement, then, if not preferential treatment--which is not a civil right?
I think the civil rights movement changed American culture for the better in some ways--more in some parts of America than others. Abolishing state-mandated segregation was, on my view, purely good. State-mandated segregation was a huge and serious violation of many rights I regard civil. But the people to my political left do not appear to agree with me about that, not anymore, and they definitely advocate for preferential treatment for groups they regard as political allies. These are the people who most often claim to be the inheritors of the civil rights movement, and they appear to me the people most opposed to genuine civil rights.
If by "civil rights movement" you just mean Martin Luther King, Jr., then sure, I can drop the "so-called." But I'm not sure how to extend the motte and bailey metaphor when the people in the bailey clearly regard themselves as holding the motte.
Yeah, Ralph's family jumped immediately on the idea that this was racially motivated, attracting media attention to the point where the prosecutor very probably was under tremendous pressure to see things that way. Not only has Andrew Lester's identity been revealed, but the pictures on that article suggest that Lester's home has already been vandalized in response--either that, or Lester was already being victimized by kids in the neighborhood! The stories I'm reading don't make sense (some say Lester shot through glass, but all the glass in those pictures appears to be intact) and Lester himself does not look well. Everyone is sharing the boy's side of the story, but essentially none of the media outlets I've seen in the past several days shared the story from Lester's view. I did eventually find it though--thanks, UK!
According to court documents, a witness told police that they saw a vehicle pull into Mr Lester’s driveway at around 9.30pm.
Mr Lester told investigators that he had just lain down when the doorbell rang, he picked up a .32 pistol and opened the interior door of his house.
He told police that he saw a Black male pulling on the exterior door and thought he was trying to break into the property.
He claimed he was “scared to death” at the boy’s size and feared he was unable to defend himself given his elderly age, the documents state.
Mr Lester said that he fired twice and that no words were exchanged with the victim.
During an informal police interview at Children’s Mercy Hospital, the teenager said that he did not pull the door and was waiting outside.
He told investigators that a man opened the door and immediately shot him, causing him to fall to the ground where he was shot for a second time.
Ralph told police the man said, “Don’t come around here.”
So, two pretty meaningfully different accounts. But the court of public opinion has already weighed in.
My mind is drawn to a potentially parallel case involving a white teenager. Last semester, one of my students was making a presentation on "stand your ground" gun violence and she mentioned the case of Carson Senfield, which was current at the time. It is not a particularly remarkable case: reportedly, a teenager attempted to get into a stranger's car, and was shot dead. The working theory appears to be that he thought the car was his Uber pickup? The shooter has cooperated with police, said "I was afraid for my life," and that's that.
As far as I can determine, the shooter's identity still has not been revealed to the boy's family (as a result of Florida's "Marsy's Law"). Was there a racial component in that case? Or perhaps a sexual component? I can imagine a woman being very frightened of a strange man hopping into her car, much as I can imagine an elderly man being very frightened of a strange man trying to enter his home. But how would we even begin to know? The Florida prosecutor has apparently decided against pursuing it, and so the family of the victim can't even begin to discover the ultimate truth of what happened to their son (and the shooter does not get to have his or her house graffitied by activists).
But I never saw CNN jumping to any conclusions regarding that case. Apparently some teenager's lives are just more equal than others.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
tl;dr: Israel isn't a big economic superpower. Why?
Because it has a population of 9 million people in a geographic territory the size of Wales?
Israel has a GDP per capita better than Germany's, or Japan's, and both of those nations are widely regarded as economic superpowers. Israel's geographic neighbors aren't even in its league. Anti-Israel sentiment in the Middle East and elsewhere also presumably plays some role in suppressing Israeli international trade opportunities. As near as I can tell, Israel is economically punching well above its apparent weight, exactly as your IQ analysis would seem to predict.
I'm not sure what else to say. You have picked two pretty inflammatory topics, presented only cursory evidentiary support for your claims, and then drawn a strong conclusion that does not appear to be at all supported by the facts you presented.
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts). Why don't we say it "levels the playing field" to prevent women from using their sex appeal to crush their competitors on a gaming platform? I was going to do a great Simpsons callback and everything, "Twitch became a hardcore pornography platform so gradually I didn't even notice," I had this whole post I was going to write about the sexual appeal of females versus males, maybe do a little amateur evo-psych ("as a treat!")--
--and then the whiplash hit.
Twitch Reverses Policy Allowing ‘Artistic Nudity,’ Citing AI’s Ability to Create Realistic Images
Here is Twitch's reversal of its... reversal? The meat is straightforward:
Moving forward, depictions of real or fictional nudity won’t be allowed on Twitch, regardless of the medium. This restriction does not apply to Mature-rated games.
I guess someone realized that if you allow streamers to turn your site into OnlyFans with Vidya, then the women are going to drop their tops and the men are going to just... use filters? (I don't actually know, I don't use Twitch because I play video games and have no interest in watching others do so, but I am decrepit and out of touch so whatever. I have an Amazon Prime account so sometimes I pop over to Twitch if there's an incentive or something but otherwise it's a mystery to me.)
Now I'm left pondering the apparent Fisherian runaway of human beings trying to become--virtually, at least--teenage-presenting (cat?)girls as quickly as possible. I hadn't previously considered the impact of AI on parasocial human relationships, and now I'm having a hard time considering anything else. But I also have to wonder--is the new policy re-sexist? Will it make any difference at all?
EDIT: From the helpful comments below, today I learned that Twitch is not just a video game streaming site, but also streams other activities like art creation; that the AI nudity concerns are not limited to filters/avatars but to art being produced on Twitch; and that Twitch's reverse-course was likely driven at least as much by AI "nudification" concerns as anything. I remain interested in the thought processes that led to the first change-in-policy, and in knowing what (if anything) actually happened on the server side to cause the rapid about-face! But I appreciate having the bits I did not understand explained to me.
The example I see getting kicked around a lot is how insanely bad Jackson's dissent in the Asian discrimination cases was. Her commentary about black babies and black doctors was just a complete hash, as if neither she nor her clerks have even a rudimentary grasp of statistics. Innumeracy is not a good look, especially when you pile it on top of her infamous failure to define "woman."
In fact Sotomayor's legal reasoning is noticeably weak, and Jackson makes her look bright by comparison. That this encompasses two-thirds of the Court's left wing can make this sound like a partisan dig, but in fact Kagan has no trouble holding her own (though I have seen speculation from both the right and the left that she has taken to "phoning it in" when she sides with someone they don't like). Judson Berger's "Weekend Jolt" from National Review last week had this to say:
So then it can seem like a race/HBD thing except of course that Thomas is black and seems to do fine. That may be substantially a matter of accumulated experience, at least in comparison with Jackson. But also, when it comes right down to it, he's no Scalia.
I do have an alternative explanation, but I'm not sure whether it's more charitable, or less. There is a tradition on the political left that leans in to the who/whom divide. As long as you're fighting the right bad guys (or in other words, attacking the right targets), truth is not only irrelevant, it might actually be something you should actively reject. Representative Cortez famously placed being "morally right" above being "factually correct", and was defended by the media on that. As a life-appointed justice, Jackson could very well be calling a deer a horse for all to see; what are we going to do, impeach her for it? By enshrining false claims about American racism into the canon of SCOTUS jurisprudence, she launders those claims into respectably citable assertions for generations of scholarly grifters.
So like, pick your poison? Jackson might just be so immersed in critical legal theory that she just looks like an idiot to people who think that intelligence is measured by one's grasp of empirical facts--when actually she's more Machiavellian, an "idiot" only to her enemies and a great manipulator of the levers of power for her friends. On this interpretation she is also a horrible justice who should never have been allowed anywhere near SCOTUS, but so long as she minds her Ps and Qs, she will never be removed and so the criticism is now moot. All anyone can do in response is vote Republican and pray.
On the other hand... she might just in fact be an idiot. Occam's Razor suggests that we should probably peer past the pomp and circumstance of pretending that the political appointment process is in any way meritocratic, and just call a spade a spade. And if this is that case, why, she should never have been allowed anywhere near SCOTUS, but so long as she minds her Ps and Qs, she will never be removed and so the criticism is now moot... ah. Looks like elections have consequences, and appointing justices explicitly for the color of their skin and the shape of their genitals does, too. And once that's done, there's surprisingly little anyone can do to fix it.
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