naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
It's also worth worth noting that (1) the University of South Carolina canceled a two game women's basketball series in response to these accusations and (2) South Carolina lawmakers are asking why. So this has already gone further than just "did it happen or not"--there have been direct consequences of people drawing their own conclusions concerning unproven allegations.
While researching this story I was intrigued to see how much bigotry is directed at BYU athletes. If BYU canceled games over bigotry and slurs directed at Mormons, they might not have any games left. If they're now to have games canceled by others over hate hoaxes, maybe they should just get on with it and end their athletics program entirely.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
The Harkonnens absolutely were shown as perverse and brutal
They really weren't, though. Pointlessly killing underlings is Darth Vader level "brutality." Gladiatorial combat is merely Roman. There was a hint at cannibalism, a hint at sadism, but "these are outrageously wealthy people who get high while they rape and torture slave children with impunity" was presumably soft-pedaled due to there being too many recent real-life analogies for Hollywood's (or the general public's) comfort. Most importantly, though, they are depicted as being out of control, rather than frighteningly in control. The Harkonnens of Villeneuve's Dune barely rate as comic book villains, to the point that viewers have to be told, rather than shown, that Feyd-Rautha is a "psychopath"--a word that never appears in the original book at all.
I liked what Villeneuve did with Feyd-Rautha very much. "Feyd-Rautha as a psychosexual Darth Maul" turned out lot better than the usual "Feyd-Rautha as a somewhat more competent Joffrey Baratheon"
My memory from the books is that Feyd-Rautha was, while certainly Harkonnen, actually both competent and powerful, in contrast to Rabban. It was his reliance on underhanded fighting tactics that made him an otherwise-comparable foil to Paul (who decides to not use the Voice during their battle, though he could easily have done so). I don't mind his portrayal overmuch, but portraying him as a skilled and even potentially noble fighter ("you fought well") is a definite and unnecessary departure from the text.
casting him as intergalactic Joe Biden showcases that we're seeing a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down
Yes, but it fails to cast him as a formidable enemy. He was practically sleepwalking. I mean--this scene would have been much better, where Fenring declines to serve as the Emperor's champion:
Paul, aware of some of this from the way the time nexus boiled, understood at last why he had never seen Fenring along the webs of prescience. Fenring was one of the might-have-beens, an almost Kwisatz Haderach, crippled by a flaw in the genetic pattern -- a eunuch, his talent concentrated into furtiveness and inner seclusion. A deep compassion for the Count flowed through Paul, the first sense of brotherhood he'd ever experienced.
Fenring, reading Paul's emotion, said, "Majesty, I must refuse."
Rage overcame Shaddam IV. He took two short steps through the entourage, cuffed Fenring viciously across the jaw.
A dark flush spread up and over the Count's face. He looked directly at the Emperor, spoke with deliberate lack of emphasis: "We have been friends, Majesty. What I do now is out of friendship. I shall forget that you struck me."
Paul cleared his throat, said: "We were speaking of the throne, Majesty."
The Emperor whirled, glared at Paul. "I sit on the throne!" he barked.
An emperor of a late-stage empire waiting to be pushed down does not sleepwalk through the confrontation with Paul. He desperately claws at every possible escape, even as the walls close in around him.
I don't understand the point about Irulan.
Irulan is described thusly:
Paul's attention came at last to a tall blonde woman, green-eyed, a face of patrician beauty, classic in its hauteur, untouched by tears, completely undefeated.
I would describe Florence Pugh as a bit sturdy for the role, her features too dark, and her hair was atrocious--it looked like she just never washed it. Her tracheomalacia makes her voice earthy rather than haughty. Ten years ago I'd have said Emily Blunt or Natalie Dormer. Today, maybe Anna Taylor-Joy? Pugh, I honestly don't know how she keeps getting jobs, she's by far the least-interesting player on the screen in everything I've ever seen her in.
Personally I thought that the part with Paul taking the worm juice could have been handled (a lot) better and Dave Bautista was kind of wasted in this movie.
I feel like most of the "Other Memory"-related plot points are included grudgingly, like Villeneuve knows he can't just abandon those entirely but kind of wishes he could. There are throwaway lines about knowing the past and predicting the future but unless you've read the books, I can't imagine getting much out of those. And if you haven't read the books, I can imagine being really confused about everything touching on the Water of Life. And they never address the "sandtrout" at all.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Then why do we have the vote buttons?
I'm pretty sure the truest, most honest answer to that question is "because they came with the codebase."
My recollection is that there was a fair bit of discussion about this (codebase generally, and voting specifically) a year ago, when we took the exodus from reddit. There is a lot of stuff @ZorbaTHut wanted to do that we couldn't do right away. There were several possible codebases considered. We didn't really have the resources and time to build something up from scratch.
Once a day you should get a "The Motte Needs You" prompt; that is the bare foundation of the user feedback system Zorba has envisioned, and ideally the future of moderation and even perhaps AAQCs. But it is a work in progress; Rome wasn't built in a day and Zorba's current budget is about $200 per month plus whatever time he can steal from his employer and his family and himself. There are others who have very helpfully contributed to the code on a volunteer basis, and in fact anyone can do that provided they have some knowledge of coding (so: not me!); there's a Discord and everything.
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
10mo ago
303 Creative is a freedom of speech chase, not a religious freedom case.
What kind of speech (or silence) are we talking about, here? Are you one of those people who pedantically interjects that the civil war was a state's rights issue, not a slavery issue?
For whatever it's worth, my choice of words there was deliberately poking at the number of people calling this an "LGBT rights case." Because of course the case is sufficiently about that, that it's not entirely inaccurate to characterize the case that way, and yet flip that rhetoric on its head and certain people are bound to get worked up...
You seem to think that 303 Creative was an enforcement action brought by the state of Colorado against the company.
Sorry to have given you that impression, but no--I've never thought that at all.
the whole issue of whether or not anyone asked for a wedding website is essentially a red herring
Yes, very good--this is why I found the CNN article, and its downstream effects on conversation in my vicinity, noteworthy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
And of the recent decisions, this is likely to be the only one with any effect. Harvard has already all but announced it'll use Roberts's talisman to get around the affirmative action decision. Biden has already announced he's going to work around the student loan decision AND smack "defect" as hard as he can on the deal which ended the payment moratorium.
This is my feeling as well (hence my opening comment about doubting the impact of most of this week's cases). What will limit the impact of this case, of course, is just the facts of commerce; most people are pretty happy to take money for whatever, and there are so many alternative cake bakers, web designers, etc. that the freedom to refuse service will generally amount the freedom to get out-competed.
There really does seem to be a bit of a gulf between enforcement on progressive versus conservative court victories. The Supreme Court enforces a novel approach to marriage and we start throwing political dissidents in jail. The Supreme Court says "stop discriminating by race, you can consider its impact in individual lives but you can't make it a determinative factor" and Harvard effectively flips them the bird and says "who's gonna make me?" Not that it would probably be great optics for the right, but can you imagine the president of Harvard going to jail for contempt of court here?
I honestly don't know what Roberts is playing at, in these cases. He seems to have managed to achieve results that are easy to report in maximally inflammatory ways, potentially imposing political costs on right-wing candidates, while failing to generate any rulings that seem likely to noticeably and impactfully protect the interests they purport to protect.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
This is a great example, which very much supports my position over yours. Why the hell was Haidak kicked out in the first place? Because Title IX has been interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships! Title IX created the problem (via campus administration), and Title IX "fixed" the problem (via the judiciary)--an exceptionally clear case of digging a hole, then filling it in.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial.
No. The key question is whether the benefits of Title IX outweigh the costs.
Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
In a hypothetical world where there was no such thing as Title IX, how do you think college sports would look today? Universities have undergone all sorts of changes in response to cultural revolutions and the realities of supply and demand. Did Title IX just make obligatory something that would have happened organically? Did it hasten an ongoing process? If so, then the regulatory cost was onerous and the fact that we're still paying it is stupid. Did Title IX instead fundamentally re-engineer a piece of American society, forcing a change to which Americans would have otherwise never consented? If so, then the price was even more onerous, paid in liberty instead of dollars. As far as I can tell, Title IX itself can only either have been unnecessary (in which case: it spawned mostly bullshit jobs), or necessary, in which case it is seriously objectionable on other grounds.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I was always under the impression that most people understand the terms "man" and "woman" to refer to one's gender, and "male" and "female" to refer to one's sex.
To the best of my understanding, this distinction was introduced, or at least popularized, in the mid-20th century by Simone de Beauvoir. In a nod to horseshoe theory, the people who seem to most resist this in my experience are conservative people who make no distinction because they think social and biological roles are intertwined, and trans advocates who make no distinction because they object to the use of any language that helps to distinguish transsexuals from the biological categories they are emulating.
It seems to me that the trans movement is deeply committed to doing the opposite of tabooing their words. They're not the only ones--I think a lot of the political left, along with many conservative religious groups, flee from clarity a lot. My own prejudice is that this is because they know, at some level, that linguistic clarity undermines their ingroup activism. But Scott Alexander has written occasionally about preserving disclarity in ways that may help to arrive at a slightly more charitable take. Maybe.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Not impossible, but unlikely. Does it have more predictive power than stealing the most expensive looking bag? Because that’s what I’d expect motivates most bag thefts. (As a bonus, I’d guess women’s luggage is more likely to be visibly expensive and thus targeted.)
This was my first thought as well, but others downthread have suggested that the bag itself was only valued at about $300, which is not an especially expensive piece of luggage. Maybe it looked expensive?
It is difficult for me to put into words why "the kind of person who does public kink shows" automatically registers to my mind as "the kind of person who is likely unfit for public office at any level." I don't think that being into BDSM or dressing like a dog or even crossdressing is especially likely to correlate with being bad at making dispassionate policy decisions, or whatever else it takes to be a good public servant. But being quite loud and public about that sort of thing does give me a strong impression of rampant, unchecked narcissism, narcissism-adjacency, or some other idiopathic impairment of personal judgment.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
A question: Is dressing in drag (that is, a man dressing like a woman potentially with makeup and so on) an inherently sexual act?
Is blackface inherently racial? Is blackface inherently racist?
"Wearing women's clothing" isn't drag if you're wearing a woman's... sweater, say, or overalls. A guy in a pink parka isn't "in drag." I'm not a big fan of "no true Scotsman" arguments, I don't think I know enough about drag to say there's a bright line here or there. But I can't think of anything I'd call drag, that wasn't at least sexual to the extent of "involving what would likely be regarded as 'sexy clothing' on a woman." I don't think it's plausibly a drag show if you're wearing baggy blue jeans and a loose t-shirt from the ladies' section at Walmart.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
As others have said--Honda Civic, assuming they're as readily available there as they are in the U.S. Remote start has been available since 2008 models, rear view cameras have been standard in the U.S. since the 2013, and the infotainment system is competent. Heated seats available on some models since 2020, which is probably newer than you can get in the price range you're talking--but they do exist. If you want to shave the price a little further, Toyota Corollas are similarly reliable and equipped. Given my own life experience, I doubt I'll ever buy a non-Japanese model again.
It has been decades since I heard anyone seriously praise a BMW, and in the price range you're talking, I can't imagine you'll see many comfortable BMWs unless the UK has a very different used car market than the US right now.
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I would guess that most of the people complaining are more concerned about who he was running against. And for some of those people, more specifically the race of that person.
Do not weakman in order to show how bad a group is. Especially when that group is "this forum," please.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
There is in truth much to be said for a simple, honest effort at a clear-eyed explanation of a potentially complicated situation. It's not always clear to me why people nominate what they nominate--some users use it as a "super upvote," certainly--but one common way to get a lot of nominations is to be honest, clear, and thorough. We have a fairly sizeable silent readership--people who make accounts, submit reports, and click the quokka without ever writing a single post of their own. And while they apparently don't mind the heavier culture war stuff, they absolutely love it when posters present information as you did here: facts about something that is interesting but that is being spun so hard by legacy media outlets that good information is actually hard to find.
(For an example on my own part, I am totally mystified by the way that legacy media will report on major Supreme Court decisions without linking back to the actual court documents, freely and publicly available online, and often without even giving a case name or other identifying information. Like, what the fuck kind of reporter are you, if you can't even report the most basic facts about something? [Answer: a New York Times reporter, of course!])
Or to try to say this in fewer words: often the thing people find most compelling about the Culture War thread is posts that downplay, obviate, or otherwise evade the culture war angles.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to, though it sounds like maybe asking you to explain would potentially violate your concern.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Except that you don't have any evidence of academic malfeasance nor shitty scholarship; as I noted, a search of google scholar turns up nothing.
Look, this is not really a fight I'm interested in having, but in my opinion Google Scholar is shit and I never use it for anything because it is shit and I don't know anyone who does use it for anything because it is shit. To my mind, by far the most useful academic tool to appear in the last, I'm going to say 20 years, is just Archive.org's online library. Probably some people love Google Scholar so this is just me having thoughts about a thing, but I haven't got any other response for you here. I've never seen anyone try to prove anything of worth by citing to "Google Scholar says" so I'm just kind of dumbfounded about it. Maybe I am just old, that is often a problem when matters of technology come into play, but there you have it. Google's front page search is orders of magnitude more valuable to my scholarship than Google Scholar has ever been.
But I don't do STEM, so, you know. YMMV.
And, surely, it is not sloppy quotation practices which make you deem them full of shit, is it?
See, this is where you misread me so completely I have to wonder about my communication skills. It's very much the sloppy quotation practices, for me. It's very much the bad scholarship that I hate. The weird culture war stuff is bad, too, but it might be helpful for me to suggest that when I refer to these scholars as my "outgoup," I am about 60% thinking about the fact that they work in colleges of education, rather than thinking about their political alignment qua outgroup. That is, these are education scholars, often with Ed.Ds, while I'm a philosopher who sometimes writes analytically on education.
It's hard to not launch into a rant about this, honestly. And it feels like a failure of professional courtesy to be like, "oh, those teaching academics are the worst" when I'm sure the engineers or the business professors or someone feels the same about me. But the scholarship that comes out of these colleges of education, like, it's just so bad, basically all the time. And it happens to have kind of played havoc on my day, today, and I thought others might find it interesting to see a specific case, about specific people, making a specific mistake, that is kind of emblematic of the larger criticisms leveled against them.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
You seem to have sidestepped my question, which was ... how do individuals and groups determine morals?
I answered this quite directly, actually:
human reasoning
I am a contractualist, so there is greater detail on what I think the process actually looks like (and some standard objections to my view) behind that link.
If the basis of your belief in “moral realism” is simply long tradition...
It's not. The basis of my belief in moral realism is reason and experience. Specifically, I find moral relativism to be self-undermining; I also don't know anyone who practices applied relativism in a persuasively principled way.
I can’t think of any moral that is universal and also divorced from economics.
I explicitly said
it would be a mistake to assume they are definitely universal in nature, even if they are broadly applicable to humankind
so I don't understand what your question (or economics) has to do with anything.
what is the standard against which you measure moral truth, and where does it come from?
As with every other category of truth you value, the answer to both questions is "human reason."
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Guess I'm just not sufficiently plugged in to European politics to understand why this would be "inflammatory." In this context, "vassal" just means--
a person or country in a subordinate position to another
As a part of the EU, the UK was legally subordinate to decisions made in Brussels (the administrative center of the EU), so I was just describing the literal state of the law pre-Brexit. When you say "The UK government was far from a vassal" are you asserting something like, "the UK did get to participate in the decision-making process, and therefore was not a vassal" maybe? If so, I don't really buy that; the UK was not EU occupied territory (modulo, perhaps, some worries over immigration) and the UK was not an EU colony (see previous qualifier), but I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the people of the UK ultimately chafed at being in a legally subordinate position to Brussels.
But perhaps I have simply failed to understand something about your objection.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
This implies either
No, I didn't put those two sentences together, and neither should you.
Yes, speaking is an important part of a Senator's job; I additionally regard comprehension as an important part of a Senator's job, and the debate shows Fetterman sorely lacking in that department even with transcripting aids. But I would more vehemently disagree with this:
perhaps more important is that the number one job of a Senator is to represent his constituents
I regard political leadership as subtantially more important than political representation. The Framers of the Constitution clearly agreed with me, at least in connection with the Senate; the House is where "representation" was supposed to take place (hence, "House of Representatives") while the Senate was supposed to be a more aristocratic institution. Essentially, I regard the 17th Amendment as a horrible mistake.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
It's not only a gaming platform, that's why.
Thanks--today I learned!
When a moderator says to you:
All of this is to say: whatever you are up to, you have attracted the attention of the mods, and while this post in itself is borderline (you basically repost the article with minimal commentary), you are starting to look like a bad actor. Whatever game you are playing, start being upfront and stop looking like someone who's not posting in good faith (and is likely a previously banned poster).
And not even a day later you again repost identitarian bait, with minimal commentary, as a top-level post, I have to assume you have opted to ignore the warning.
I want to emphasize: in absolute terms, this post is "not bad." It's not great, it does challenge both "speak plainly" and "avoid low-effort participation," as well as "make your point reasonably clear and plain" (though this post is in that regard maybe a slight improvement on the last one). That it does those things as a top level post is an aggravating factor. The CW thread is not a dumping ground for posts other people have written on topics that are maximally inflammatory. It's a place to test your thinking, which to a great extent demands that you do some thinking in an open and public way. Gradually accruing the annoyance of the sub by being a one-note piano while evading effortful engagement with others is, if nothing else, egregiously obnoxious.
So let's start the banning at 48 hours.
What you and /u/FCfromSSC both dance around here ...
The only person dancing around anything here is you.
Should the law require have required my teacher to tell this parent that his son was gay, thus subjecting the kid to homelessness?
Too fucking right it should. It's not the teacher's place to manipulate families based on her own personal values. Schoolteachers are public employees and ultimately answerable to parents. Concealing material information from parents is pedagogical malpractice.
Laws saying teachers don't have to disclose aren't there so that teachers can keep secrets to groom children. They're there so that teachers can use discretion and judgement to figure out what the right course of action is.
That's not a level of discretion government employees get to have over families, not in any sane system. If a child is being physically abused, malnourished, etc. then the law might get involved, and it's tragic and messy but sometimes understandable. If a child is confused about sex or sexuality, that is not the government's business to decide how to address that. By making it the government's business, Democrats are actively grooming children.
If you think it's "abuse" to tell a child that they don't get to date or have sex or wear inappropriate clothing, like, we just have a clear values disagreement. I do think many "transgendered" children are actually victims of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is enough like sexual abuse that I might be persuaded that child protective services should also be allowed to intervene in such cases... but even then, absent any other concerns I'm reluctant to get the government involved. I don't know--do you think I should be more willing to get the government involved in such cases?
Show me what's objectionable in these books, and tell me what age you think you should be in order to access this material, and why.
I mean, for starters. Children's libraries are no place for these materials. Making such materials available to children is textbook grooming. Do you honestly advocate for distributing such things to children? If so, you're a groomer, too, by every definition offered in the thread thus far.
I think the move off Reddit will come to be seen as a big mistake.
Why--because the forum will die? That's a possibility, however (1) the number of CW thread weekly posts hasn't noticeably dropped since the move and (2) Zorba was pretty explicit that "keep our commitment to open discourse and die" was a preferred outcome to "capitulate to limiting discourse on especially difficult topics and live." Plenty of people predicted we'd die after splitting of from the SSC sub, too. We frequently had users point out ways in which they regarded the sub as "dying." But several years later, well... maybe we're still dying? Very slowly?
the main thing that drew admin attention was a few trans activists reporting gender-critical posting
While there was certainly some of that, the co-founder of TheSchism explicitly owned up to drawing the Eye of Sauron to the sub in the first place, because he uncharitably interpreted some conflict theory posting as "calls to violence." And there were other things that AEO didn't like, for example (((parenthesis))). You may be right that radical trans advocates seeking to shut down open discourse were the main problem, but the list of problems was not short, either.
The main pipeline for new and interesting users is now cut off.
Eh. Striking the balance between Eternal September and Eternal Silence is tricky, ongoing, and probably not indefinitely maintainable regardless. I will continue to post our AAQCs in the subreddit until someone stops us, probably. The barrier to participation is a little higher, now, maybe, but in some ways that can be as much a feature as a bug.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
There are a lot of writeups on the "1 in 4" claim. Here is a particularly critical one which concludes:
Now, much more could be said about caveats, but using just the information we have so far, we can see that a more accurate headline would look something like this:
Approximately 1 in 4 of 19% of a Non-Representative Sample of Women Who Responded to a Non-Representative Survey of 27 Colleges (Out of Roughly 5,000) Reported Experiencing Sexual Assault, Where “Sexual Assault” is Taken to Mean Anything from Being on the Receiving End of an Unsolicited Kiss to Forcible Penetration at Gunpoint, Regardless of the Particular Context
Most of the time when I have pointed this out to someone touting "1 in 4," they've been pretty quick to retreat to the rhetoric of "even one is one too many." Women have a lot more to fear from men, than vice versa, and very nearly all women have a story they can tell you about sexual mistreatment (that may or may not rise to the level of "assault"). So it is perhaps understandable why people might be susceptible to exaggerated claims on the matter--but also, the pattern is common across a variety of objectionable activity; police brutality is also far less common than people tend to believe, for example.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
But it would be absurd to say "driving a pickup truck is more unhealthy than driving a Prius (for the driver)" without extra caveats.
This response makes me feel like you read the snippet without bothering to read my post, which consists in substantial part of exactly the kinds of caveats you're talking about.
Furthermore the original use of "unhealthy " in the thread in cake's post used a different definition altogether (likely ideologically based)
This response suggests to me that you just don't understand how the "natural law" mentality pervasively underpins conservative thinking. When someone refers to a lifestyle as "unhealthy" when they also mean something like "immoral," they are (often unconsciously) drawing on millennia of moral judgments evolved in advance of germ theory and other forms of contemporary medical understanding. I suspect that religious prohibitions on pork and prostitution and homosexuality are grounded in the same kinds of intergenerational social evolution as traditions for preparing manioc. Modern science allows us to grasp (at least some of) the causal factors better and so mitigates the consequences of our historically unhealthy choices.
(Imagine how much less pleasant, and how much more potentially illness-inducing, anal and oral sex were in times and places lacking reliable access to clean water--much less soap, antibiotics, anti-virals, etc. Even heterosexual sex was dramatically more risky--but many of those risks could be more easily mitigated through lifelong monogamous pairings.)
Of course the standard caveat now is that we do have access to clean water etc. So why talk about past problems when doing so could stigmatize homosexuality needlessly? Well, mostly there's no need, any more than people need to get on my case concerning my bacon consumption, or for driving a less-than-maximally-safe vehicle. But sometimes it is valuable to understand why people have the intuitions they have about things, to see that the people who disagree with you are not malicious bigots with baseless concerns, but human beings wrangling with facts about the world you have chosen (perhaps quite justifiably!) to elide from your own calculations.
Surely you don't actually mean that?
I was a bit hesitant on the mod button, for all the reasons I already mentioned. I recognize that there is some hyperbole there, and some humor, and some self-deprecation, and I always feel a bit schoolmarmish wagging a finger at that sort of thing. But like--
What's the "on point" criticism, here--that we quote Scott too much? What's the "bad habit"--that we don't actually read the books we quote from and talk about? (This seems clearly false!)
The fact that we have our own status games is interesting, and worth talking about. And there are surely times and places to enjoy an amusing roast. But a lot of the stuff in this list is not actually bad, and most of the rest is unobjectionable if stripped of the pejoration and mockery. To treat e.g. complex vocabulary as a signal of low status is textbook anti-intellectualism. Yes, some people use big words strictly to appear smart, but treating people that way without further evidence requires an uncharitable take on their motives. Writing lengthy posts is frequently mocked in many places on the internet, but some problems are complex and demand extended reflection--assuming you want to do more than make a joke at someone else's expense. While many of the attitudes called out in this post are indeed counterproductive or otherwise objectionable, most of the behaviors are not in themselves problematic, particularly given a charitable interpretation of the writer's intent. If we're going to criticize such behaviors, we should do it in a thoughtful way--not by resorting to mockery that seems crafted to shame others away from effortful participation and thoughtful discussion.
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