naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
see 2003 in the United Kingdom
the broader Blue Is The Warmest Color problem
Can you please elaborate on these? I don't quite understand the references.
I'm not @gattsuru, but I assume the reference to the UK is the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which overhauled their consent structure. It kept the age of general consent at 16, but with penalties for authority figures having sexual contact with under-18s, and established strict liability for such contact with under-13s. But most of the news coverage seems to have been focused on the "equalizing" effect it had on heterosexual versus homosexual contact (previously, the "age of consent" was different in part based on sexuality).
This is presumably related to the movie Blue is the Warmest Color, which portrays a lesbian relationship beginning between a 15-year-old and a woman in her early 20s.
The cultural correlations between homosexual conduct and child abuse are sufficiently strong that even in the mid-20th century it was common to use the word "pederast" to describe a gay man as such. There are various reasons for the perceived correlations, and the "gay rights" movement has worked hard to disentangle the concepts in public perception, which is probably one reason why the Sexual Offences Act was seen as so important at the time. But at the same time, a lot of really popular LGBT media continues to positively portray a variety of statutorily problematic (i.e., ephebophile-not-pedophile) relationships.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11d ago
Yes, it was a post you deleted. I didn't notice until I was tagging your account for the AAQC. I edited the list afterward, but of course the initial notification remained.
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
CW topics are explicitly allowed in Small Question Sunday!
I'm basically with you. I practice something like communism with my family. I think it can probably be successfully done in a collective of many dozens to perhaps even a few hundred humans, but at some point the scale tips and competition for scarce resources has to be managed through something less personal than familial love. Today abundance and prosperity is predominantly the result of trade, which is itself driven by scarcity (no point trading for what I already have). A world with Star Trek replicators and functionally infinite energy would be super cool, but we don't live there now and certainly won't get there by pretending that we do.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13d ago
This Inevitable Ruin, the seventh book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I blasted through the first four books but it has been a bit of a slog ever since, despite some fun "high points" in each entry. At this point I feel sufficiently invested, and the high points sufficiently high, to continue through the books when I have time, but very few authors seem to be able to keep up with their younger selves.
I also wonder how the author feels about the fact that his anarcho-communist hero/worldbuilding is literally sustained by Deus ex Machina. I haven't bothered to dig into the fandom so I have no idea whether the author has commented on this, but I assume the readers have! The sci-fi trope of "preach communism but (accidentally?) notice that it's only genuinely sustainable in a world of magically unlimited resources" is one I've been contemplating for decades now, thanks to Star Trek. It feels like such a self-own except that I imagine most readers don't see it that way.
There is an old saying, old enough that many Mottizens may be too young to ever have heard it, that "it takes a Nixon to go to China." The aphorism points to a political tendency where certain political moves are too "on the nose" for the party that seems most likely to do them, which strangely allows the other party to get away with it. Reverse the polarity and you get the occasional observation about conservatives being hawks but progressives actually starting wars and conflicts (though Trump has, I think, successfully brought that particular observation into closer parity).
So yeah--I wasn't kidding when I said "Trump is a lib," at least by the standards of the US culture war circa 1990. Small government conservatism had its last apparent gasp in about 2009 with the "Tea Party" movement. Trump has already demonstrated both his willingness to mail everyone a check (during COVID) and the consequences of doing so (rapid, albeit not immediate, inflation). Interesting that the total budget didn't really go back down even though I'm no longer getting direct deposits from the federal government. How is all that money being spent now, instead? Who is getting enriched by the profligate feds if it's not individual citizens? But another way of looking at all that is to say--well, now we have more data. Let's try it again!
A Democrat in the same position might face heavy opposition on such a broad distribution, even from their own party--see also "Obamacare," as well as interminable arguments over how "equal" distributions shouldn't be made because there are
more important voting demographicssome people who are in greater "need" than others. Trump isn't going to give us real welfare reform but it might actually take a Republican to manage it, and for the moment, he's the "Republican" in that position. He faces the slim but far from impossible prospect of an impeachment with conviction if the midterms go sufficiently badly for him. As per the usual, he has presented the idea in a garishly populist and self-serving way, but like Nixon going to China, Trump has continuity with his first term in office as the man genuinely shifting the Overton window on UBI.For better or for worse.
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