naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
Lots of big Supreme Court decisions this week, all important in various ways--none, if you ask me, likely to be nearly as impactful as imagined by either their proponents or opponents. But I was struck by a particular take on the religious freedom in commerce case that I saw popping up in a few places today.
Very roughly, here's the deal: American courts can only decide "cases and controversies." This is a procedural thing, basically you need a plaintiff who has actually been harmed in some cognizable way before you can file a lawsuit. Sometimes this means you need someone willing to engage in a little civil disobedience, breaking the law for the express purpose of getting prosecuted. "Plaintiff shopping" is something activist lawyers have been doing for centuries. But to layfolk this can look a little suspicious, in much the way that forum shopping can seem suspicious. In fact American law is mostly indifferent to this kind of gamesmanship, and in some cases we even regard it as a clever thing to do (at least, when our ingroup pulls it off).
The CNN story presents itself as a "just the facts" observation that--hey, here's a party to the facts of this case who claims he didn't do what the record says he did! Isn't that interesting? Gosh, how "concerning," he says! Nobody even thought to contact him in six years!
"I don’t necessarily think that would be a tipping point in this case at all, but at the very least … a case of this magnitude should be corroborated, should be fact checked along the way."
No one is saying this changes anything, oh, no! Just, isn't it suspicious? (Is that... winking I hear?) Well, regardless, Stewart is only identified by his first name; CNN was able to contact him "through information in court filings." Although, in another funny coincidence,
Stewart, who previously worked for CNN, said that he is a web designer himself...
Now, CNN is only a mid-sized comedy troupe, but it does rival some legitimate news organizations in size and scope. Still, what are the odds, huh?
I've got several friends in my social feeds sharing the story, now, making snide remarks about how Lorie Smith clearly ginned up this whole case out of nothing. Of course, the CNN story doesn't actually say that; it just reminds the reader how suspicious it is for a plaintiff to have, shall we say, gussied up their case.
But the point of this post is not to take the piss out of CNN. Rather, what struck me was one other remarkable coincidence. There is another incredibly famous LGB rights case from the Supreme Court in which the actual facts of the case are completely irrelevant to the holding: Lawrence v. Texas.
That link is to a New Yorker article called "Extreme Makeover." If you're not familiar with Lawrence v. Texas, this was the 2003 SCOTUS case in which Justice Kennedy declared that the government has no business telling you who you can have sex with, as long as it's consensual and you're in the privacy of your home. Much like the later Obergefell case, Kennedy's opinion in Lawrence is packed with paeans to the sanctity of love and the primacy of intimacy--so packed, indeed, that there is essentially no room for coherent legal analysis! But here's the crazy bit:
There was no gay sex in Lawrence. Indeed, there was no gay couple in Lawrence.
The plaintiffs were gay men, charged under Texas' anti-sodomy statute. If you haven't heard the story, you really must read the New Yorker article. But in short, Lawrence and Garner were not together, sexually or otherwise, before or after the case. But since they were the two charged under the anti-sodomy statute, and activist lawyers wanted a case to take to the Supreme Court...
Each of the legal experts who were subsequently brought into the case knew instantly that it could end up at the high court. The challenge would be in finding a story about love and personal dignity to tell about Lawrence and Garner.
And so:
High-powered lawyers would represent Lawrence and Garner, as long as they agreed to stop saying they weren’t guilty and instead entered a “no contest” plea. By doing so, the two were promised relative personal privacy, and given a chance to become a part of gay-civil-rights history. The cause was greater than the facts themselves. Lawrence and Garner understood that they were being asked to keep the dirty secret that there was no dirty secret.
That’s the punch line: the case that affirmed the right of gay couples to have consensual sex in private spaces seems to have involved two men who were neither a couple nor having sex. In order to appeal to the conservative Justices on the high court, the story of a booze-soaked quarrel was repackaged as a love story. Nobody had to know that the gay-rights case of the century was actually about three or four men getting drunk in front of a television in a Harris County apartment decorated with bad James Dean erotica.
Perhaps better court-watchers than myself had some idea of what was going on, but I did not know anything about any of this until the New Yorker article ran nine years later. Does it make any difference? Well, maybe it makes you suspicious. Maybe not. Maybe you're thinking, "hmm, isn't tu quoque an informal fallacy?" Well, I'm not really staking a claim either way. I don't like forum shopping, I don't like plaintiff shopping, but I don't think I have anything like a thoroughly-developed account of why--it's more like a general distaste for gamesmanship. But without gamesmanship, American jurisprudence might scarcely exist at all! So I don't know.
But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style. Okay, that's a bit of hyperbole, but still, two points form a line. So long as Congress remains sufficiently split that impeachment and amendments are off the table, the Supreme Court is the last word on American law. Why bother with the democratic process, if you can convince five unelected and unaccountable moral busybodies to make the law instead? All it takes is a bit of theater, apparently.
It doesn't necessarily end well for the puppets, of course--from the New Yorker again:
At a press conference after the decision was announced, Lawrence read a brief prepared statement and Garner said nothing. Some advocates hoped that Garner might have a career as a gay-rights spokesman. After he gave a drunken speech at a black-tie dinner in the plaintiffs’ honor, that idea was scratched. The case is called Lawrence v. Texas. John Lawrence died last November [2011]. Almost no one took note. Garner died five years earlier, at the age of thirty-nine. When Lambda Legal proved unable to raise funds for a proper memorial or burial, Harris County cremated him and sent his ashes home to his family in a plastic bag. There was no funeral.
I don't know what the moral of the story is. Being disillusioned with the legal process is nothing new or insightful. But this was what occurred to me when I read the CNN piece, and saw people sharing it around as proof positive of the Court's perfidy. No, silly people, the Court is not fundamentally deceptive. The Court is always and altogether--albeit willfully, like a moviegoer whose suspension of disbelief is essential to the process, like a wrestling fan whose kayfabe is the lifeblood of the art form--deceived.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
...is that sarcasm?
Nope.
I have to assume you are at least aware that Twitch isn't only for gaming, right?
I was previously unaware.
I know you said you don't watch it, but the idea that Twitch ... is just about gaming is trivially demonstrated as false.
Yep. No one had ever demonstrated that to me.
or even live-streaming in general
I understand that many things are live-streamed, though I basically never watch live-streams outside of oral arguments before appellate courts. But I always thought Twitch was a gaming service. I even have a login through Amazon that I sometimes use to get gaming bonuses, and I never saw anything there that wasn't someone else playing a video game.
I understand that the question is relatively simple to answer, but I'm pointing out that the question itself never even occurred to me. I've never had any reason at all to suppose Twitch was anything but a video game streaming service.
This NYTimes article proves once again that we should not trust Israel’s assessments or American intelligence assessments on Israel.
This language falls on the wrong side of the "consensus building" line. Speculative analysis by an American news organization (or Twitter randos, or known terrorist sympathizers, or...) may or may not be more reliable than official reports from American or Israeli governments; you and others are free to make the argument either way. But this NYT article does not appear to prove anything, must less prove anything that has already been proven (i.e. "once again"). While you do not actually write the words "everyone knows," you do not present the matter as open to discussion, instead treating certain matters as clearly settled. Your engagement on the topic (which is rapidly approaching "single issue poster" status) does not communicate any willingness to entertain the possibility that you might be wrong. Rather, your rhetoric here looks like an attempt to build a consensus about what "we" should think on a question that is open (and may, given the circumstances, forever remain open). That is a way of waging the culture wars instead of discussing them, and is against the rules here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
@FarNearEverywhere's original comment:
A blankface meets every appeal to facts, logic, and plain compassion with the same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare
Speaking as a former minor local government minion, I recognise this person. No, not the blankface (though at every level in every job and situation in life, there are indeed little tin gods who love exerting whatever scrap of power they possess) but the person making the "appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
I don't have a fancy label for them unlike Mr. Aaronson (Dr. Aaronson? Professor Aaronson?) since I don't have the creative big intellect he undoubtedly possesses, but every bureaucrat in a public-facing role (indeed, every worker in a public-facing role) has encountered them at some time.
The people who rock up late after the deadline for submission, without the necessary paperwork or supporting documents, who didn't bother applying and want you to fill it all out for them, breathless because they dashed here at the last minute. The ones who want an exception to the "rules and regulations" because, well, they're just that special and exceptional and their case is unique and not at all like the other fifteen people waiting in line, that they are holding up for the past hour because they've been arguing - sorry, I mean "making appeal to facts, logic and plain compassion".
(I would also venture a lot of people here have been stuck in line behind such a person).
The fact that what they want is against the regulations, because they don't qualify? Irrelevant, and besides, have you no compassion for their special, unique case which should get an exception?
The fact that they had three weeks to get this done, and showed up half an hour after the cut-off? Not their fault! They have busy, important lives unlike you, minor official of no consequence, hence being such important people, they deserve an exception!
The fact that if I accept their application, I'll have to do the same for everybody else who also does not qualify? So what, that's nothing to do with them.
The fact that (1) this is against the regulations and (2) I will get into trouble with my boss, my boss's boss, and the department head? So what? That's not their problem. Why are you being so unreasonable?
The fact that I have explained three different times, in three different ways, why your application is defective? Ah, here we go again with the "same repetition of rules and regulations and the same blank stare".
Clearly, the fault cannot lie with me, Important Busy Smart Person With A Life And Impactful Job. It lies with this blankface who is hiding a contemptuous smile as they tyrannically wield the power entrusted in them to make others miserable. Yes, that must be it!
As I said, I don't deny there are people who won't budge an inch because they like making others squirm. But the 'blankfaces', be it in public service or private businesses, often are not doing this to spite you. We'll like to help, we want to help, but we can't because (a) oftentimes the ability to exercise initiative has been deliberately stripped from fears of setting precedent (if you do this, then all the other applicants/clients will want the same, and will go to court to force us to treat them the same - and yes, this does happen) and in order to keep costs down (b) you are the one genuinely at fault because you don't have the necessary supporting documents. This may or may not be your fault, but if the regulations say "must have proof of identity", I can't take your application just because you show me a crumpled envelope with an address on it.
Often times, other people are at fault - I've mentioned on here before when I assisted in processing student grants, and one award was held up because the parents were in a pissing match after the separation and the father just would not provide three lines of notified statement that he was not paying child support. There's nothing I or anyone else can do there, much as we really do want to help.
Aaronson strikes me as the kind of guy who takes things personally - if there's a holdup, it's not because "well, there are screw-ups in systems all the time", it's because that official there wants to tyrannise him just like the Nazis against the Jews and he's going to be dragged off in chains if only that guy could do so, it's because he's Jewish, he knows it:
I almost wanted to say to the police: where have you been? I’ve been expecting you my whole life. And I wanted to say to Dana: you see?? see what I’ve been telling you all these years, about the nature of the universe we were born into?
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
FYI, I have removed this post, it doesn't really meet the effort threshold for a top level post.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
My experience is that it is extremely politically biased--on any page where political bias seems likely. This is probably to be expected; "wokism" (or at least a certain strain of it) is arguably just "the unstable populist ideology that emerged from post-smartphone internet memes in the anglophone world" and so is the default ideology of all websites minus those that are explicitly anti-woke (compare Conquest's Laws). Wikipedia is online and not explicitly anti-woke, ergo it has the standard anglophone internet bias (where applicable).
Fortunately--I think!--most Wikipedia pages are not (yet?) politically relevant, and thus often quite useful and more or less devoid of political bias (though not, it bears mentioning, other kinds of bias, for example against any heterodox views on the relevant subject matter). Many people like to remind others that Wikipedia, while useful, should probably not be taken as a definitive or authoritative source of anything. It is my view that this warning is probably wisely heeded, however, in connection with all sources of knowledge.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
What should be done about racial gaps in IQ?
Progressives have this insane tendency to assume that if it really is true that blacks aren’t as smart as whites on average, then the only logical thing to do would be to murder all of our fellow black citizens in Treblinka-style death camps. Why? Because, they apparently reason, only Nazis, as they’ve so often said, think blacks have lower mean IQs, so if it turns out that the IQ Nazis are right, well, that means Hitler should be our role model.
This article is not the worst thing I've ever read on the subject, but it's frustrating how readily people go to the strawmen/weakmen/worst-case-scenario in these discussions.
If you don't personally think of native intelligence as high-status, then you aren't going to much care if (say) Asians are more likely to have it than Native Americans. In fact many people throughout history have treated native intelligence as either neutral or low-status; in some circumstances it might be bad to be smart (recall the manioc example from The Secret of Our Success). Because the "Information Age" has imbued nerds with social cachet they haven't always enjoyed, this is less often the case today than it has been in the past.
Progressives are (like most Westerners) far too quick to run to the Nazi analogy, but their underlying concerns are more, I think, a combination of their own eugenic instincts and their concern that social programs not be dismantled. Because progressives tend to think of intelligence as high-status, they also think of it as the sort of thing that should be distributed "fairly" (i.e., as equally as possible, whatever that means). But because progressives also tend to think we should "follow the science," specifically through government intervention in the human condition, they tend to jump immediately from facts to action plans. Tell a progressive that you've developed a low-cost, low-energy, non-polluting technology that turns dirty water into clean water, and they're immediately wondering how that technology can be deployed to benefit of humanity. Tell a progressive that you've found the genetic cause of a particular disease, and they're immediately wondering how we can turn that discovery into a treatment. The progressive mindset is fundamentally one of engineering the human condition.
To a deeply conservative mind, the proposition that "some people are stupid, it runs in families just like eye, hair, and skin color" is not only so blindingly obvious that researching it seems like a huge waste of time money, but also just a fact of life from which no particular conclusions need be drawn. Oh, sure, maybe you have second thoughts about marrying the handsome boy when you realize he's kind of dull; you think "do I really want to have this guy's dull children?" But this is not substantially more eugenic than secretly hoping that your children get your wife's red hair.
But the deeply conservative mind is living in the human world, not attempting to renovate it. So when a progressive is presented with mountains of meticulously-assembled peer-reviewed evidence that (1) IQ is substantially predictable along the lines of racial heritage and (2) IQ substantially influences the quality of a community's culture and economy, they don't just shrug their shoulders like a conservative. They start to wonder--how can we use this information to engineer the human condition? And the human mind, in its wonderfully inventive way, starts making suggestions: sterilize the idiots! Increase high-intelligence immigration from other nations! Uh... date white men and Asian women, perhaps?
In this way, progressive opposition to the very expression of the data on these matters is a kind of "telling on themselves," so to speak. It's not that they think the only logical thing to do would be to murder anyone with a low-IQ; it's that even a cursory grasp of HBD painfully illustrates the incredible shortcomings of progressivism as an ideology. If it turns out that your life is good, not because of anything the government has done for you, but because you live among the right sort of people, then huge swathes of social policy are just pointless and wasteful expenditures, fruitless attempts to engineer the human condition that can never, ever succeed until we literally engineer the humans themselves. This is incompatible with Western liberalism, and further exposes the daylight between "liberal" and "progressive." It threatens to unravel such entrenched political interests that the only possible response from the ingroup is to taboo the subject entirely.
tl;dr: Do any of you read Portugese?
I am having one of those moments where I feel like I must be losing my mind, because the alternative is that the world is even stupider than I already thought, which is just too depressing to countenance. I was doing some research on education for what are, ultimately, culture war purposes (I think parents are more important than teachers, and I think people to my political Left get this horribly wrong all the time) and I came across a citation that seemed potentially useful. I found it in this document (PDF warning) as both the title and on page one:
Politics are an important influence in schools; as Paulo Freire stated in his 1968 book Pedagogy of the Oppressed: “all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act” (p.19).
Now, any time I see a reference to critical theory from the 1960s, it piques my interest, because it has been my experience that a lot of people work very hard to obfuscate the origins of what is currently being called "Wokism," and used to be called "cultural Marxism" (not to be confused with the conspiracy theory that "Cultural Marxism" is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory--I assume Paulo Freire was not a Jew, but I admit I do not know for sure). Anyway I immediately went looking for a copy of Paulo Freire's seminal work so I check the quote out in context. Fortunately, the author of the paper appears to be a music professor at McGill, so the citation is right there for my use!
Freire, P. (1972). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.
I fire up the Internet Archive and find a 1972 edition of the book (the UK printing, apparently) and turn to page 19, which... does not contain the quote. I pull up other editions--there's a 30th anniversary edition, a 50th anniversary edition, someone clearly regards this as an important text--and not only does the quote in question appear nowhere in these pages, but chunks like "education is political" or "neutral act" also return no results. Maybe the text search is wrong? Maybe the scan is bad? Hmm, no, a quick sampling finds the OCR did a bang-up job, actually.
Googling the full quote generates a number of results. The University of Sheffield's "Education Matters" blog gives the citation "Freire (1970: 19)." But no--the 1970 printing also lacks the quote. Dr. Fatima Nicdao (she/her) suggests it's actually (1968), but that's the Portugese date of publication, as near as I can tell. Anti-Racism in Higher Education: An Action Guide for Change is also pretty sure the quote appears on page 19, as does Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices and Developing and Evaluating Quality Bilingual Practices in Higher Education, to name only three of the books that agree on this citation. You may notice that all of these books were published in the last two years.
At this point I'm thinking, "I've got to be missing something. Maybe I'm making this too difficult for myself. I haven't even checked Wikipedia!" There I find the following:
There is no such thing as a neutral education process. Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate the integration of generations into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes the "practice of freedom", the means by which men and women deal critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.
— Jane Thompson, drawing on Paulo Freire
(emphasis added)
At this point I am feeling increasingly confident that the quotation is spurious. Now, it seems pretty clear to me that Freire would agree with the quotation! I don't think any of these people are misrepresenting his view (though they might be oversimplifying it). I'm able to date the quote "teaching is never a neutral act" back as far as 1998, in a book entitled (of course) White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America Similarly, "all education is political" goes back at least as far as a textbook from 1996:
What are some examples of Freire's idea that all education is political?
As an aside, page 181 of that textbook is also of historic interest, and reads as part of a chapter on "Teaching to Empower Minority Students":
The emphasis on empowerment is part of a broader educational development referred to as critical theory. Critical theory developed from Paolo Freire's work, a reconsideration of the work of Dewey, Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren, Lois Weis, Alma Flor Ada, Jim Cummins, Stanley Aronowitz, and others. The following concepts are central to critical theory, and are useful in trying to comprehend and analyze your own teaching experience.
(Here is the list, for the curious, with definitions elided.)
Consciousness ...
Culture ...
Domination ...
Empowerment ...
Ethics ...
Hegemony ...
Hidden Curriculum ...
Ideological Domination ...
Ideologies ...
Social Class ...
Social Construction of Knowledge ...
Anywhow, I am terminally crippled with self-doubt, and proving a negative is hard. Part of me is certain that the very first reply to this rant is going to be "oh here's a direct link to the page where he wrote that, you just missed it." But I cannot find any evidence at all that Paolo Freire ever actually wrote the sentence, "all education is political; teaching is never a neutral act." Certainly those words do not seem to appear in any English-language translation of anything he has written. Which, who cares, right? Spurious quotations are totally an Internet thing, Abraham Lincoln said so.
But I care, because now instead of finding an academically useful citation I've spent three hours going down the rabbit hole of a spurious quotation. How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source? I mean, I guess this is in the end just a particularly academic example of the old "too good to check." But I'm frustrated in part because none of the foregoing accomplishes what I actually intended to accomplish today, which was to make progress on a scholarly paper. There's no place for me to publish a peer-reviewed essay entitled "Spurious Quotations in Education Theory: Jesus Christ You Critical Theorists Are the Worst Academics Alive, Check Your God Damn Sources For Once, You're a Fucking Embarrassment to the Profession."
So please. Embarrass me, instead. Find evidence that Freire actually wrote the quoted phrase. Somewhere, anywhere, in any language! Because right now I'm feeling extremely uncharitable toward my outgroup on this, and it's such a petty thing, I know, but it just feels emblematic of the entire critical enterprise of focusing on "whatever works" over and above any commitment to truth, facts, history, academic rigor, professionalism, or even taking two seconds to check the damn source.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
The fact that the first person to say "hey maybe the parents don't need to know" wasn't instantly exiled and nuked from orbit is, unto itself, a dog-fucking level offense in my eyes.
This is too much heat, not enough light. Please don't do this.
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.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
How does this match up with decreasing fertility even in countries where women are generally not part of the workforce, as brought up by other commenters?
I'm not sure, but now that I've found the article I was thinking of, Nowrasteh definitely has a lot more to say about the aforementioned "carrots." Economic opportunities are a part of that picture, but so are things like Netflix and video games and international travel. His argument, ultimately, was that deregulation is the answer, which seems a bit optimistic to me. But also moot, because there's basically no political will for deregulation at this point, at least not in America. Which is in turn partly because it's easier to fight a culture war if you're authoritarian about it, so American politics has become increasingly authoritarian as it has become increasingly factional.
This is probably related to what you're talking about here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Given
only pairing specific toppings with specific ice cream flavors
And this
We try to avoid making two-flavor combos where the dessert could be done as a single flavor in one of the two flavors.
It looks like you're trying to say that if Flavor1 goes with Topping1, a two-flavor combo should not include a Flavor2 that also goes with Topping1, and also Flavor2 should not have Topping2 that could be paired with Flavor1. You have presented the following combinations as permissible:
- Vanilla: ChocChip & WhipCream*
- Mint: ChocChip
- Caramel: ChocChip**
- Strawberry: ChocChip**
- Coffee: WhipCream
It's not clear whether "ChocChip & WhipCream" is considered a single topping, or two separate toppings, or a distinct topping from ChocChip or WhipCream alone. The precise details of Caramel and Strawberry are also vague: is it only Strawberry that only gets ChocChip topping in "more specific combinations," or also Caramel? The "only in some more specific combinations" also seems to strengthen the idea that one legitimate topping is "ChocChip & WhipCream" as distinct from either ChocChip or WhipCream alone, such that there does not appear to be any way to know for certain what constitutes a permissible topping combination for Strawberry (and, maybe Caramel).
My inclination is to agree with @PutAHelmetOn that Vanilla can be eliminated, since the two toppings you've mentioned both go on Vanilla, so adding a different flavor to vanilla doesn't add any topping possibilities--assuming the only two toppings are whipped cream and chocolate chips, which seems unlikely (and is never stated by you) but there's no further information given on the matter. This appears to hold true even if "ChocChip & WhipCream" is a distinct topping from either ChocChip or WhipCream alone, since presumably adding ChocChip to "ChochChip & WhipCream" won't count as adding a topping by adding a flavor.
Since Mint, Caramel, and Strawberry are all identified as ChocChip (with some asterisks), the obvious thing to do is combine one of them with Coffee, identified as WhipCream. Mint-Coffee would most easily and obviously fit the bill, but it's not on the list. Of the two non-vanilla options, Mint-Caramel and Caramel-Coffee, Caramel-Coffee seems to be the easiest fit, assuming Caramel is not part of the "latter" flavors intended to include ChocChip "only in some more specific combinations." If so, Mint-Caramel has the same presumptive problem as Vanilla: both flavors take ChocChip topping, even if some further combination requires it.
And all this depending somewhat on what the "more specific combinations" actually are, of course, but that information isn't provided, but... the way you've written the problem, Caramel-Coffee appears to be the only plausible answer. It's just that the whole rest of the problem seems to hint at the existence of further helpful information which you have for some reason neglected to provide, which anyone actually applying for an apprenticeship would certainly make it a point to know. For example, if Strawberry only gets ChocChip in combination with Banana topping, then Vanilla-Strawberry would work despite the ChocChip overlap--but this is also moot given the possible answers, since none of items A-E include Strawberry at all. But this reasoning also works for item B, Vanilla-Caramel, if Caramel is indeed among the "latter" flavors in that sentence and the combination in question includes some third unmentioned topping.
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.
Over the summer, Arizona lawmakers passed a universal educational voucher program, to my understanding the first in the nation. It attaches state education dollars to students rather than to specific schools, allowing parents to choose where to send the money the state spends on educating their children.
This was immediately challenged by, well, the whole education establishment. Kathy Hoffman, Arizona's State Superintendent of Public Instruction, was officially tasked with overseeing the program; instead, she doxxed parents who signed up for it. Arizona's teacher's union was immediately mobilized to work with the far-left non-profit "Save Our Schools" organization, which sought to gather signatures to put a repeal of the scholarship law on the next election ballot.
Arizona's Secretary of State excitedly tweeted her receipt of the supposedly over 140,000 signatures (almost 120,000 were required). Her statement that
Filing petitions today means the applicable portion of law will not be implemented tomorrow on the General Effective date🛑As long as the petitions continue to meet the min sigs through all the processing, that portion of the law stays on hold.
is a bit confusing to me, I don't know how Arizona referendum law works but the idea that a petition to add an issue to the ballot could function to suspend the operation of a signed law raises several questions in my mind. However, as the Secretary of State maybe this was her call to make? Anyway she was too glib by half. The libertarianish Goldwater Institute, which had posted watchdogs on the filing process, immediately noted that fewer than 90,000 signatures had actually been filed. "Save Our Schools" Facebook page calls this "questionable" and notes that only the Secretary of State can make the final determination, but apparently the Secretary of State's office only received 8,175 petition sheets with a maximum of 15 signatures per sheet. Off their Facebook page, SOS concedes that they have likely fallen short. Their explanation of the miscount? "Well we were just estimating." Apparently Arizona's schoolteachers aren't so great with math!
SOS receives preferred treatment in the news reporting, but poking around some parent sites it looks like they have been predictably underhanded pretty much the whole way. Despite the support of both the Secretary of State and the Superintendent of Schools, both of whose offices are supposed to be effecting the law rather than repealing it, the voucher program is likely to proceed (which may only attract even more anti-choice money to the state's lobbies, I guess). With almost 11,000 applicants pending, it's likely to generate some very happy parents--along with at least some frustrated ones. I doubt we've heard the end of this.
But the victory here may encourage other states to follow suit. I feel like this is one more symptom of the present educational paradigm unraveling. COVID showed parents both how much, and how little, public schools do for them, personally. I know many parents who were relieved to send their children back to school. But I know many others who have simply decided to not. It's a bit of a homeschooling renaissance, it seems, and now in Arizona there are public education dollars attached to that. A family with three children could get something like $21,000 per year to help educate them.
The substance of the opposition is that this deprives neighborhood schools of much-needed funding, "skims the cream," hasn't got enough oversight, and empowers uncredentialed teachers to teach. These are basically all the same criticisms teacher's unions offer against charter schools, which are booming business in Arizona--Arizona's BASIS charter schools are regularly ranked among the best in the country (I count four of their Arizona campuses in the US News top 30). Basically, it looks like public education simply can't compete, and is desperately scrambling to protect its monopoly and union largess.
Parents, apparently, are not buying these arguments, at least in Arizona. And indeed I have never seen any evidence that these arguments have any merit; to the contrary, I am persuaded by The Case Against Education that our existing K-12 system cannot be upended fast enough. So I have been, and will be, watching Arizona's voucher experiment with great interest!
But in case I have not sounded appropriately unhinged thus far--I do have to ask. What would have been the outcome, if the Goldwater Institute had not posted watchdogs on the counting process? The Arizona news media seems to want to cast SOS as the watchdogs, here, but SOS appeared to be quite happy to smear their numbers in their own favor, and they have at least two powerful allies within the government who swallowed their claims whole, declaring the law "on hold" even when the math obviously didn't add up. This kind of narrative-crafting is really disturbing to me, and the fact that the Secretary of State seemed happy to take SOS at their word, to the point of tweeting about it, even as the Goldwater Institute knew instantly from the math that this wasn't going to fly... well, the whole thing seems awfully shady.
(This is where I deleted a paragraph borrowing a jack about "finding" a thousand more pages in a box somewhere...)
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I'm posting this because I'm worried that I am more gullible than I thought.
Are there any simple heuristics that I could have employed here to better avoid falling for creative writing exercises?
Sure, you could practice being cynical:
cyn·i·cal /ˈsinək(ə)l/
adjective
- believing that people are motivated purely by self-interest; distrustful of human sincerity or integrity.
There's a reason rationalists are sometimes accused of being quokkas. There is also a reason why, at a certain threshold, open-armed rationalists can be seen transforming virtually overnight into hardened black-pilled culture warriors. The transition from Jedi to Sith portrayed in the Star Wars prequels is sometimes mocked as too abrupt, in a way that is arguably responsible for all the Jedi lore that has developed since (though it did give us a wonderful bit of flash rationalfic from Eliezer Yudkowsky). But the strongest counter is that George Lucas just had it right to begin with: the most sensitive are the most vulnerable. A mistrustful misanthrope who is constantly on guard against being tricked, lied to, and abused, is rather insulated against betrayal from the beginning.
By contrast, a tendency to simply believe what people say, until you have a reason to believe they are lying, is the kind of attitude that is difficult to maintain in the face of persistent exploitation. But if it is your "nature" (insofar as any of us has one of those) to be a quokka, you probably aren't going to change the first time you get burned. Instead, repeat burns are going to accumulate until it is simply no longer psychologically possible for you to ignore them, and then the whole quokka edifice is going to come crashing down all at once.
I would like to suggest that the question you've posed is complicated in part because there is a good reason for you to continue falling for creative writing exercises: that you fall for them at all suggests you still have faith in humanity, or at least in its potential. There are explanations for every objection raised; the story as told is not literally impossible (I think--I've never used Hinge--but any given lie may also be an exaggeration, or an attempt at infosec, rather than proof that a story is entirely false). And even false stories may communicate truth, else why ever touch fiction? Presenting fiction as fact is problematic, of course, but there are also times when a carefully crafted lie is instrumental to uncovering truth.
The question that has faced careful thinkers since time immemorial, then, is whether your love the truth is so strong that you are willing to be stripped of human experience as a result. Socrates died for the truth, and Plato preached the virtues of the solitary mind. The original Cynics, including Diogenes of Sinope, were ostracized from polite society over their commitment to the truth. But there are others--Aristotle, the Epicureans--who thought that socialization was crucial to human flourishing. They, too, were committed to truth, but the Epicureans at least recommended against participation in certain kinds of conversations (most especially, politics!).
It's probably good mental hygiene to maintain a healthy skepticism against anything you read on the Internet; anonymity and inaccountability present a different incentive profile than face-to-face interactions, after all. But "gullible" is not quite the same thing as "open and trusting." Aristotle might say that "gullible" is having too much trust, while cynicism is having too little. I don't know what the relevant virtue-mean is ("credulous?" maybe just "trusting?") but striking the right balance is probably the pursuit of a lifetime. Falling for a somewhat-plausible work of creative fiction is a far cry from, say, getting bilked out of your life savings.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
"Ethnically American" is a retarded statement when applied to anyone who didn't have ancestors dwelling on the continent before Columbus showed up
I don't think so, though I would not personally limit "ethnically American" to borderers or even to European stock. One reason your claim doesn't hold up is that "Hispanic" is the most widely-recognized ethnicity in the Americas, and all it means is "descended from Spanish (and maybe Portugese) settlers of the New World." Most Hispanic people are additionally descended from aboriginal Americans, but many are distinguishable from Old World Europeans only by the accent of their Spanish.
Remember that "ethnicity" is a word that was added to the English language less than one hundred years ago, and was not even a dictionary entry until 1972. It was intended to replace "dated" (the source says "tainted") terms like race, nation, and minority. From the link:
Today, “ethnicity” tends to describe any group that is characterized by a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent.
People who say they are "ethnically American" today are broadly asserting that they experience a distinct sense of difference owing to culture and descent. You appear to essentially be using "ethnicity" as a synonym for the older concept of "race." Which you're free to do, but it kind of violates the whole point of the word's coining. Which you're additionally free to disagree with, if your focus is more rooted in DNA etc., but you should then be at least conscious of the controversy.
Certainly as used by KMC, it carries a not even veiled implication that they're somehow more American than the rest of them.
I suspect this is partly due to the overlapping meanings of "American." Even Scott Alexander has noticed that "American" tends to tag the "red tribe" in at least some contexts. Of course, it is also the abbreviated name of two continents, and one nation, so using as the name of an ethnicity that is predominantly of European descent is clearly going to be fraught. As usual, when seeking clarity it's probably best to taboo our words--but of course, asking a large group of people to stop using their preferred ethnic tag tends to go over like a lead balloon.
They're fucked, and I think there's something noble in fighting until you're wiped from the Earth by your enemy.
About 20% of Israel's citizens are Palestinian. The people dying in Hamas-controlled "Palestine" are primarily those who chose (or whose families chose) to fight a never-ending war against the presence of Jews in Israel. If Israel were to kill every single Palestinian in Gaza and the West bank, there would still be Palestinians, and there would still be a great many Arab states, with hundreds of millions of people living in them. If Hamas were to kill every Jew in Israel (about 7 million), this would bring an end to the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, the only Jewish nation in the world, and very nearly cut in half the total number of Jews alive in the world today. By contrast, there are about 1.5 million Palestinians in Israel, 6 million in other Arab countries, and 700,000 in other countries.
Not that either group is really a plausibly endangered minority; there are fewer Danes (5 million), and only very slightly more Native Americans (~10 million). But the Jews, in short, are far closer to being "wiped from the Earth by [their] enemy" than Palestinians, much less Arabs (which Palestinians, ultimately, are--along with 450 million others).
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
@Folamh3's original comment:
To be pedantic, these are AI-modified images. Twitch thots/OF girls are posting photos of themselves for public consumption on X, and the DignifAI account is replying with an edited version of the same photo. "Bob/Alice posts a public photo or video on a social media platform, and a bunch of people who don't know Bob/Alice create edited versions of said photo or video without Bob's consent" describes hundreds if not thousands of viral memes throughout the history of the internet (e.g. Now We are Homeress, Miss Teen USA, Chocolate Rain, Leave Britney Alone, Boom Goes the Dynamite, You Da Real MVP, the Trump mugshot, Yao Ming Face, Scumbag Steve). Occasionally Bob/Alice may give their blessing and say that they don't have a problem with said memes, but this is the exception rather than the rule (e.g. Kevin Durant made it quite clear that he did not appreciate people making his heartfelt expression of gratitude to his mother into a cheap joke), and generally happens months or years after people have been nonconsensually editing the original photo/video to their heart's content.
Unlike editing a photo of Trump so it looks like he's riding a skateboard or whatever, I don't think it's hard to understand why editing Alice/Bob's publicly posted photo to make it look more sexualised than the original is crossing a line: there's a significant possibility that people might mistake the edited photo for the genuine article, and Alice/Bob will take a reputational hit, as people will assume that they are the kind of person who shares thirst trap photos for public consumption. Even if the photos are obviously fake (as in the recent Taylor Swift "deepfakes", which look more like the kind of stylised fetish fanart which has been around for years before LLMs were a thing), I think it's still demeaning to reduce a real person to the status of a sex object without their consent. But DignifAI is the opposite of that - you're editing a photo clearly intended to titillate to make it look a photo which was not intended to titillate. It's easy to understand why people might be upset that their reputation has suffered as a result of strangers erroneously believing that they are the kind of person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers - but if you are a person who posts thirst trap photos to titillate strangers, how will a photo of you edited to look like you're dressed more modestly affect your reputation at all? Taylor Swift saying "It's disrespectful and demeaning for people to create or edit photos of me which reduce me to the status of a sex object" is a legitimate complaint; a Twitch thot saying "I don't appreciate people taking photos of me which represent me as a sex object and editing them to make me look like an average woman"? Not so much - if for no other reason than, for most of her life, the Twitch thot in question is an average woman. The titillating clothing and makeup that a Twitch thot wears when she's performing is a kind of costume, and all DignifAI is doing is showing what she (might) look like without the costume. Is it wrong to distribute a photo of Corey Taylor without his scary Slipknot mask? I don't think so.
By analogy, if Bob posts a public photo of himself wearing regular clothes, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a swastika T-shirt, that's a shitty thing to do, and obviously created for the purpose of defaming Bob. But if Bob is an outspoken neo-Nazi who posts a public photo of himself wearing a swastika T-shirt, and someone edits it without Bob's consent to make it look like he's wearing a plain black t-shirt - well, so what? (None of the above is to imply being a neo-Nazi is morally equivalent to being a Twitch thot or OF girl, obviously - it's just to illustrate that reputational hits aren't symmetrical as some people seem to think.)
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
1yr ago
it doesn't go far enough in developing a positive public perception of Jews
What bothers me about extant accounts of rampant anti-semitism (in the United States) is the same thing that bothers me about claims like "police are murdering unarmed black men by the thousands"--they're just empirically false. Anti-semitism (in the sense of being anti-Jew) is indeed rampant in many countries in the Middle East--and yet Americans are much more likely to report unfavorable feelings toward evangelicals, and much less likely to report favorable feelings toward Muslims... and so on, and so forth. In fact, in the U.S. no religion is viewed more favorably, on balance, than Jews.
I don't much care about the Holocaust. I don't deny that it happened, I certainly do not share your doubts (as I've encountered them in the past, anyway) about most of the empirical claims made by prominent historians on these matters. But I do think the Holocaust was not special. Wholesale slaughter of ethnic, religious, and political outgroups is the story of human history, and Jews are neither the most recent victims, nor the most numerous. I think it is a better world where we are driven to do that sort of thing less, preferably never, and to whatever extent "Holocaust education" creates that world, I don't have any serious complaints about it. But I do find it absurd to lean on past slaughters in pursuit of present aims. I had nothing to do with slavery in the American South, I had nothing to do with World War II. The people still fighting those battles, from whatever side they fight them, are boring to me.
One good technique is to put in characters that are politically sensitive and then just never call attention to it.
But even this is a culture war move--this is the classically liberal "color blind" approach. I think it's a great approach! But I am assured by the badly-named "anti-racism" crowd that the "color blind" approach is bad. We get this in the recent "Secret Invasion" scene where Fury leans on Rhodes for some color-based solidarity--using aliens as a stand-in wasn't enough, we had to get some explicit discussion of segregation so everyone knows that the only message that matters is (as Scott recently put it) "re-enacting the 60s civil rights struggle."
Can we, like, do something about that? Have some main characters who start out married, and end married, and the story is never about their difficulties in marriage?
Sometimes, yes, but I remember someone in the last ten years (Yudkowsky?) pithily observing that it is almost impossible to write an engaging story about mature individuals making responsible choices. Without conflict, where is the catharsis? In fact I have seen (and personally very much enjoyed) a growing number of counterexamples in recent years, mostly in anime, indie games, and Nintendo titles (especially stuff like Animal Crossing)--a sort of "comfort food" genre that (for probably obvious reasons) attracts more women to traditionally masculine media. I note that even, say, Stardew Valley does not quite meet this mark, given the pressure imposed by the clock and the calendar. But many "overpowered protagonist" anime titles do seem to hit this mark--Farming Life in Another World, for example.
Hammerlock is just a guy who likes guys, and he's worried about his old fling, and this is never turned into a Explicitly Political Thing, and that's cool.
I think Key & Peele's "Office Homophobe" helpfully illustrates the difference--except that there are real, fairly serious disagreements about this, often discussed under the heading of "visibility." The point of "Pride Parades" is often explicitly articulated as visibility. During the "sexual revolution," the winning legal argument for pornography as "free speech" was that pornography is a special kind of argument for a different kind of world--a world where people are less perplexed and uptight about sex.
I feel like you make some good observations here but you only seem to be thinking about one half of the discussion, namely, the half where you want to know how you are supposed to "decide what [human characters should] look like both in terms of dangly bits and skin color." The other half of the discussion is, why do you need to decide that? Not in the trivial sense (you have to decide that because, if you're going to have human characters at all, they must be plausibly human), but in the deeper sense of how your artistic choices are going to be driven. Do you "need to decide so your game is marketable?" That will give you a different answer than if you "need to decide so you don't offend your development team," or "so your plot makes any sense," or "so your game meets your/someone else's threshold of realism," or whatever.
So if you want to include a "trans" character in a game, my first question is, "okay, why?" And to be clear--"I just feel like it" is perfectly acceptable as an explanation, if all you care about is art for the sake of art. But in most contexts, either your "trans" character is going to be "invisible" in just the sense you observe, or they are going to be so visible that your cultural milieu makes it a "thing." For it to not be a thing would require a world (either the one we live in, or the one in the game) where "gender markers" are slim-to-nonexistent. Feminist scholar Sally Haslanger once wrote, "when justice is achieved, there will no longer be white women (there will no longer be men or women, whites or members of any other race)." She (and many feminists) seem to really believe that the biological differences between men and women can be of no particular moment in an egalitarian world, to the point where we don't even have language to distinguish such things. Gender eliminativism, however, runs strongly counter to the gender essentialism expressed by most transsexuals today. To create a fictional universe where being trans is not noticeable, and yet trans characters are also not invisible, you can't create a universe where some characters are trans, you have to create a universe where there are no socially constructed gender norms.
I guess what I'm bringing myself around to is the idea that transsexuality just is a political identity, as surely as "Republican" or "Democrat." Either a trans character is noticeably violating gender norms (in which case, they are calling attention to themselves) or they are living up to gender norms (in which case, they are invisible). Just as you'll never know whether that background character is a Catholic or a monarchist or a /b/tard unless it comes up in the storyline, you'll never know a video game character is trans unless it gets advertised in some way.
But probably you should care about that approximately as much, and for approximately the same reasons, as you care about making sure there are enough Muslims or women or incels in your game (which, depending on your game, might matter anywhere from "not at all" to "a whole damn lot"). Depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about race is pretty easy, given the medium of video games; you see characters who look wildly different, and you see that nobody cares. Forget Uhura; check out the friendship between Han Solo and Chewbacca! But depicting an in-game society where nobody cares about gender requires you to build an in-game society where nobody cares about gender, which like... as long as we're a sexually dimorphic species for whom pair-bonding is (at least temporarily) necessary for procreation, that's probably flatly impossible. But in a transhumanist society where body-swapping is feasible and the act of sex has been obsoleted by an infinite variety of pleasure-generating technologies, basically everyone is going to be "trans" by contemporary standards.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
In short: why? If you want to make propaganda, make some propaganda. If you don't want to make propaganda, then either non-attention-called trans people or an allegory for trans people will be varying shades of possible depending entirely on what else you're demanding from your game. A realistic 1920s noir thriller where one character happens to be openly and noticeably trans and nobody cares will fail to be authentic, and this will invite totally understandable criticism (in fact, it will obviously be propaganda, even if you prefer it not to be propaganda). A cyberpunk RPG where you can give your character breasts and a penis, by contrast, is unlikely to attract the same kind of attention (even though it will still probably attract some complaints).
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
Yeah, sorry, @ArjinFerman is correct, though I've certainly seen both versions. "Magic dirt" is a shorthand way of criticizing arguments that seem to be about places when they should be about people, on account of there being nothing magical about the specific dirt people live on.
Don't sleep on this excellent Caplan piece. The man is a national treasure.
In "Lawsuits are the Hitman of the State," Caplan makes the case that the Texas "Heartbeat Act" is functionally equivalent to workplace discrimination laws that punish racist or sexist remarks.
(One thing I would be interested to see further discussion from Caplan on is the development of the idea that having a "job" is a "right," but he doesn't go into that in this piece. Basically, the Constitution is a document of enumerated powers, meaning the federal government can't--in theory--do anything the Constitution doesn't explicitly allow it to do. But the judicially-crafted breadth of the Fourteenth Amendment, combined with loose interpretation of the Commerce and Tax-and-Spend clauses, metastasized through the 20th century into today's rather grabby American legal system. This has given rise to the idea that you haven't just got a right to your own labor, but that you have a right to personally profit from other people's capital, at their expense, even if you contribute nothing of value to the enterprise.)
Something I really like about Caplan is how concise he manages to be while making absolutely cutting points:
The government starts with the blatantly illegal goal of banning “bigots from expressing their opinions in a way that abuses or offends their co-workers.” Then instead of respecting those limits, the government’s judicial branch gets creative: “Murder’s illegal? Fine, we’ll hire hitmen instead.” By affirming liability, it dangles piles of cash in front of potential plaintiffs to terrorize employers into banning what the government, legally, must allow.
Precedent on what counts as "government action" is remarkably unhelpful in understanding these things. Georgia v. McCollum (1992) is all about how a defendant in voir dire acts as an organ of the state when they select their own jury, and therefore are forbidden from considering race when seeking to exclude potential jurors. This, even though in virtually every other regard, as Justice O'Connor then noted, "our [past] decisions specifically establish that criminal defendants and their lawyers are not government actors when they perform traditional trial functions." Whether any particular action counts as "government action" proscribed by the Fourteenth Amendment does not seem to depend at all on who actually took the action, in other words, but only on how the Court wants the case to come out.
So I think Caplan is dead on, here--the Civil Rights movement basically shredded any kind of principled interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment, in pursuit of socially-engineered results.
I think there's a lot of stupid stuff happening in this article, but this may be the most egregious:
I don't know how anyone can say with a straight face that smart, ambitious young people of any color face any truly objectionable obstacles to living a life of choice and value. This is probably one of my biggest annoyances with grievance culture and identitarianism generally: it is a philosophy of total Nietzschean ressentiment, a gospel of pure unanchored envy. "I want more, I deserve more" is a whinge that is just totally hollow coming out of the mouth of anyone with an IQ over, say, 95. There are ample opportunities to be pursued; people just don't want to bear the associated costs. They want things handed to them. Put every single white person into North America and Europe, expel everyone darker than Sardinian fisherman, and I would expect everyone to quickly settle to within a stone's throw of the socioeconomic strata they occupied previously. Nobody is keeping you down, but you.
And sure--anti-white racism is real, and can be every bit as virulent and destructive on an individual level as any other kind of racism. So let's not be racist. There are many interesting arguments for separatism. But right here in the United States people are already free to enjoy some amount of separatism, if they care enough to look for it. There are black majority colleges, Asian majority cities, whole damn swathes of desert owned by pseudo-sovereign American Indian tribes--what's to be gained from cutting ties with them any further? Wealthy, predominantly white suburbs with good schools and attractive amenities are a real thing, and if you're a white person who can't afford to move to them, that's because you haven't earned a place there, just like the non-whites who complain about the existence of wealthy white suburbs. The problem isn't that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists (though it is almost certainly true that CNN is run by a bunch of self-loathing racists), the problem is that people can't accept that their problems are almost never the result of systemic anything, and almost always the result of their own internal inclinations and capacities.
I have big, big complaints about the ways we deal with race in the United States, but I do my best to make those complaints from a place of principle--and the principle that governs much of my thinking is that attaching your self-conception or your politics to a group identity instead of to individual merit is stupid. My political enemies are wrong because they think that Blackness and Queerness and Whiteness are important. White identitarians are the poster children of "battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster." They embody everything they think they can destroy. They are often the enemies of my enemies, but the fact that I regard leftist identitarians as a depressing blend of idiocy and mendacity does not make me willing to abandon my principles to join hands with white identitarians. Theirs are not arguments I'm willing to support unconditionally, as soldiers; theirs are arguments I reject for the same reasons I reject leftism.
You can't convince me that white nationalists are right without convincing me that social justice warriors are right, too--and the reverse is also true.
More options
Context Copy link