You also seem to have some personal beef with "vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives". I'd suggest dropping it. This is not the kind of discussion forum for your personal grievances.
I didn't read him as having any beef with them. To summarize what I believe is position is: libertarians usually are people whose personal issues with "square" conservative society are minor and not substantive, and they could easily just negociate for acceptance of them (acceptance of minor risk taking with regards to personal health, acceptance of interracial relationships with ethnic groups that seem mostly compatible) rather than agitate for the destruction of functional societies.
The vaping heterosexual white men with Asian wives line just points out how for the most part they're still heterosexual and white. That they don't consider gender/sexual anarchy to be optimal solutions since they don't for the most part use themselves the freedom it gives them, and that they are the kind of white people who move out of neighborhoods at the first signs of diversity-fueled racial unrest. But most of them are very smart, so they often write the best most convincing arguments against conservative norms, which are then picked up by people who do want gender/sexual anarchy and believe homogenous societies are inherently deficient.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
If I were the Conservatives I would swear that if this law gets adopted, when they get the majority they are likely to get, they will immediately abrogate it and replace it with one that only applies to a list of named persons consisting of all MPs who have voted for it, with a provision that it should be prosecuted by law enforcement to the fullest extent it can be.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
And I think the fully-generalized-counterargument to tearing down any Chesterton's fence that's starting to emerge is that if you allow even one fence to be torn down even with good reason, its tearing down will be used as a fully-generalized-argument to tear down every fence.
The example I can think of being gay acceptance/rights/marriage. There are good reasons I think to believe the fence that were holding them back was obsolete: wealth and technology is such a force multiplier that our societies are no longer in a demographic race against their neighbors, so we can afford to let off the natalism and hostility to pairings that don't lead to births. But that opening was then used to argue that ANY social objection to any orientation, sexual identity, etc... is Wrong and Bigoted.
Honestly I'm at a loss as for what to do. I guess the solution is to personally calmly keep evaluating fences and not let myself be influenced by the whims of the era, but I admit I do understand why conservatism-minded people are worried about cedeing any ground at all anymore; each time they do the bulldozers go on a rampage.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
It sparks an internal and social reflection that we would even entertain the notion that a banana taped to a wall is art, therefore, it is art.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Ah, you are misreading me, it's not Theodore Dalrymple who's the extremist political operative, it's the communist commisars who deployed propaganda knowing full well that its purpose was to humiliate.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
They are willing to criticize other adults, including teachers or even their child’s other parent, directly to their kids or in their hearing. It’s an important part of growing up to understand that authority figures are flawed and human, but perhaps it’s a little scary and destabilizing to believe that, at 12, you know better than the people with power over your life.
Honestly, that's an important thing that I hadn't considered and I'm really glad you mentioned it.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Doesn't seem unfalsifiable to me: just find statistics on boys who were brought up as girls (or vice-versa) but never actually claimed themselves to be trans or the other gender once they had agency in the matter.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Well, that's specifically what I was talking about too!
If you're in a large city with a big East Asian population with some effort you can usually find the small places that exist to cater to that community instead of "the locals" and they will usually have smaller menus and much better food. But serving Chinese in particular is a tough one because China is big and its cuisine hasn't homogenized the way Japan's did for instance, and Canadians have no idea what Chinese people eat. It's probably simpler for the restaurants to just go with what their customers expect to see on the menu: every single variation of noodles/rice/dumpling/soup with chicken/pork/beef/shrimp, overly sweet sauces that is general tso's flavored, lemon flavored, peanut flavored, fish sauce flavored... rather than have to explain to confused Canadian who felt adventurous enough to go a chinese restaurant, but not THAT adventurous, that she might actually enjoy the braised tendon or the chicken feet.
I'm expecting that the difficulty and variety of bosses will ramp up as I get deeper in, though, since Margit, Leonine, Erdtree Avatar, Godrick, and even the Ancient Hero of Zapor all felt like variations of each other to some extent.
I have to stress that it is a fantastic game that I'm nitpicking and that expecting otherwise is stupidly unrealistic, but sadly I believe this to be the biggest problem with the game, that as you keep playing the map/dungeon/level structure and the boss design, that felt so natural at the start, ends up feeling increasingly game-y. But then again, expecting otherwise is insane; a game that large could not have had hundreds of dungeons with the same intricateness as a bespoke-made Souls game, hundreds of bosses with all different movesets, etc...
pigeonburger
2mo ago
A college friend from Luxembourg and I were in Montreal once and a homeless man asked us for money. He was shocked and said that would be unthinkable in Luxembourg.
It's probably that I've become desensitised but Montreal is not even really bad with this, we might have the proper balance of how to treat them. The police, barring extreme circumstances, do not let the homeless cluster until they become a problem. The real trouble tends to start when they interact with one another, if they're spread out they might panhandle and annoy the public a bit, but they don't often get violent.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
Maybe if OP or his brother has a talk with the teen afterwards about the movie they could highlight the philosophy. Maybe I was just thick, but when I was younger it eluded me how Hollum was a weak leader, I accepted the crew's stated reason for their dislike of him.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
It doesn't replace deep frying. I prefer deep fried in cheap fat over air fried in premium fat.
But there's ways of avoiding wasting too much fat deep frying. Pan/pot/wok size and shape is crucial.
pigeonburger
5mo ago
You'll pick up on the terminology as you read the series. Very fun read, I hope you enjoy it!
pigeonburger
6mo ago
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
That quote refers to situations where someone is spending money in the hope that a market correction is incoming. I'm not spending money, I'm accumulating it.
Why not?
Because that is in no one's interest.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
I had fun roleplaying a bit and making my own personal cannon. I unlocked the killing spell, and never used it on anything smarter than a Troll. It was a little silly that the killing spell got treated so badly, but I created a literal mountain of bodies without the killing spell.
There's a huge bit of hypocrisy in the way that you can learn an explosion spell and routinely aim it directly at people and that's not unforgiveable. But the Imperio spell, which (if the game allowed it) could be used to force an enemy you would otherwise be forced to kill to surrender is an Unforgiveable Curse.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Unless telework affects your availability for some of your tasks (which is to say that some of your work has to be done in person and thus telework complicates scheduling), I wouldn't consider it to be a concession from the employer and thus not worth any amount of pay.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
Game sense, it's usually called, and yes, once a base threshold of athleticism is achieved it's the biggest factor for success in most sports. With some exceptions, as american football and baseball do have players whose job is mostly maxing unidimensional athleticism, but not all of them. Game sense is still the top skill of an american football quarterback.
To an untrained eye, watching sports you see a very chaotic situation and don't understand why some players are so revered, they just seem to be lucky to find themselves in a position to score a goal and other players in that position would have had similar success rates. But then over time, you figure out how most of sports is about putting yourself in that favorable position.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
It is quite powerful yes. And it gets worse when the algo gets involved. TikTok know what videos you lingered more on, so it knows what to serve you more of, even without giving it any explicit sign that you like it, and it hones in on superstimuli that tickles YOU specifically very quickly.
pigeonburger
9mo ago
Yes. It's not a waste of energy to understand his actions in the sense that if you have to make a decision on his actions, like voting for or against him in an election, you need to act wisely and justly. But it doesn't really matter to YOU whether it was driven by vice or vertue, I was simply pointing out that you can't really tell whether something outside of yourself is good or bad; you can't know all outcomes, and you can't know other people's internal thoughts. All you can really know is your own.
Now this is one of the parts where Stocism tends to lose some people, but Stoics, like most ancient virtue ethics philosophers, consider that ethics are simple and innate. When we're close to nature, we do not need to be taught that being rash, cowardly, mean and violent is bad, it "feels" innately bad. Likewise being wise, bold, nice, and calm feels good. The Crusader or the Jihadist who commit large scale murder are doing so because instead of focusing on themselves and their actions, they focus on the world, which they see as "evil". And trying to correct the world directly blinds you to your own actions. If instead of focussing on whether the world or other people are good or evil, he were to think "is my conduct virtuous?" as he's about to massacre an innocent, he would likely come to a different conclusion. You can commit an awful lot of evil when trying to improve the world, that you wouldn't be committing if you were trying to improve yourself.
pigeonburger
11mo ago
Fishing. I haven't been in years, I desperately yearn for it.
pigeonburger
1yr ago
Pain is: a prompt for corrective action, a learning opportunity, or pointless and should be moved on from... Pain is never: an excuse to inflict misery on others, a way to increase your status, an indication of your worth as a human being...
A kid who learns this would in my opinon be well equipped to deal with life.
It's because feminists have framed the question of rape as something "men" as a group do to "women". Not a highly contemptible subset men, but men in general.
If you could have a societal debate about how to stop bike theft WITH bike thieves and their solution was "lock your bike better", you would rightly answer them "no, if we're all on the same page about stopping bike theft here, then the solution is that you JUST STOP STEALING BIKES!". But of course, bike thieves are not interested in these societal debates, they don't show up to them. So it's okay to assume they will keep stealing and it's appropriate to suggest solutions that work around that.
But as I've mentionned feminists have framed the question of rape as being something "men" perpetrate, so when men show up to societal debates and helpfully suggest mitigation strategies they get the same treatment as our hypothetical bike thief who shows up at a how to avoid bike theft debate. And the contemptible subset of men who commit those rapes are not interested in the debate and obviously don't show up.
*EDIT: And I think it's important to note here that feminists aren't necessarily completely wrong here. Think of the prevalence through history of armies "raping and pillaging" after conquest. Of how recently it was that it became unacceptable for husbands to force themselves on their wives. There's a lot of men throughout history who we probably would think of as normal for their time, not a particular small subset of them, who would consider doing what you want with a conquered people's women or forcing a wife to "her duty" as normal behavior.
pigeonburger
2mo ago
Following posting this comment ( https://www.themotte.org/post/900/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/193633?context=8#context ) regarding a law that I believe should only apply to those who would want to impose it on the population, I have been playing in my head with the idea of a "Higher Standards" bill for politicians. The idea would be that all laws apply maximally to elected officials; in situations where prosecutors or judges find themselves with any discretion in their ability to prosecute or punish crime committed by an elected official, even in their personal life, they should forced to start their process from the point of the harshest possible position. They would be forced to prosecute jaywalking, the slightest driving infraction, etc... and start the mental accounting for sentencing / fining with the longest sentences or highest fines before any mitigating circumstances can apply. Details as to whether it would apply to actions before the enactment of the bill, or to accession to public office could be negociated either way. A grace period could be left open to allow rewriting laws before it applied.
I see a lot of positives coming out of such a bill. The main one is to urge restraint in writing laws. Legislators pass laws knowing that it is unlikely that they would ever be used against them and care very little that these laws are held over the population like the sword of Damocles that could at any moment be applied by a prosecutor looking to make an example or please a private sponsor. If you want to vote for a law criminalizing piracy, you should yourself be able to account for every single piece of digital content you have. If you want to curtail "hate speech" you better be damn certain that whatever comments you make today on either side of the Israel/Palestine conflict will not be considered "hate speech" by the standards of tomorrow, etc... While I don't believe it would stop all of it, I think it would force legislators to reconsider some laws that achieve little but make technical criminals of very average people for widespread actions.
Other benefits I see is that it would encourage legislators to pay attention to the technical minutia of the laws they're passing, outside of the pork they're able to fit in it and how it will play with interest groups. It would also discourage criminals from running for office.
I struggle to see negatives; technically it could discourage effective would-be politicians from running for office if they believe that this is going to be weaponized against them. And I guess it would be a struggle to pass as politicians obviously would hate it, but without any arguments to bring forward I think they would find it hard to convince their constituents that voting against it is anything but voting against their interest. And it would take only a few fairly clean politicians to make some noise in favor of such a bill, willing to trade the benefits of future criminality in exchange for the large boost such a clear pro-plebeian move would give them.
I guess it could also be argued it's a very legalistic, low-trust society move, which I would concede, but that's the point I believe we are at in much of the west. That when the system is seen as benevolent it is fine to leave cops with the discretion to decide, for instance, when it's in the public's interest to disperse disruptive people for vague reasons like "loitering" or to punish antisocial speech as "hate speech", but when I do not trust the system, until that trust is restored I would rather know exactly what the rules of the game are, and so I want lawmakers to be highly interested in making sure that rules are crystal clear too.
So are there any negatives I'm not seeing? Has any similar law been enacted elsewhere and what has it led to? I see lots of references in the anglosphere to proposed bills claiming to hold elected officials to a higher standard, but for the most part it seems like it's either object-level transparency laws (which of course, we need too, but won't encourage restraint in lawmaking), too vague or obviously meant to be solely weaponized against the proposer's rival (laws against "lying", or against "contesting election results" or whatever else of that kind).
pigeonburger
19d ago
On a sidenode which highlights the fuzziness of such groupings, I regularly joke, my wife's annoyance, that quebecers are latinos. If latinos "speak spanish in the americas", then you're omitting brazilians. If they "speak a latin language in central and south america" you're excluding mexicans. If it's "speaks a latin language in the americas" you include them both, but also quebecers.
Ultimately to get "latino" to mean exactly who everyone understands it to mean, you end up with a very artificial grouping.
Jonathan Haidt identified the group who bucks this trend as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic). It can feel like these people's values are dominant in the population if you live in a WEIRD enclave but as you mention, globally and even just in more conservative areas they really aren't, even if they are still able to hold an outsized amount of influence due to the concentration of mediatic, economic and political power in WEIRD enclaves. Haidt identified that WEIRD people tended to compress all moral judgement to the harm/care and cheating/fairness moral dimentions, wheras conservatives (and non WEIRDs) had a more multi-dimensional moral judgement.
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