popocatepetl
I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.
User ID: 215
If forced to confront knife-kun with a bat, my strategy would to be lob it at him before he enters melee range. Perhaps the surprise would make him drop the knife or at least nonplus him enough for me to deliver a disabling punch before he stabs me.
As for you guys arguing the bat is better... come on eggheads. Try swinging versus stabbing motions. Even if your opponent has the combat reflexes of a teletubby and can't dodge/disrupt your telegraphed swing, you'll have two fatal wounds in the gut before landing your first blow.
Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"?
Certainly, if it removes the right of red-light running to whites specifically.
Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions?
Still anti-white, because it's legislation that removes a previous privilege from that specific group.
but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacist
In a hypothetical universe where whites had a historic go-on-red privilege, its revocation would certainly be seen as anti-white by white supremacists. And they'd be correct. Even though such a change would be a good idea by my books, removing a specific white-held privilege is an "anti-white law". Likewise, restricting MtFs from female sports where they previously had access locally is an "anti-trans law", even though I agree it's a good idea.
Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.
When the system of female-only sports was first created, the restriction against men joining was definitely an "anti-male rule". Identifying which groups a rule targets is different from condemning the rule.
Still anti-white, because it's legislation that removes a previous privilege from that specific group.
This seems like the opposite of how we talk about laws? I've never seen removal of privilege be declared anti-[group] because they remove privilege.
It is, because people call privileges "rights" when they support them, but they call rights "privileges" when they oppose them. I am a neutral looking from the outside on a ridiculous scenario, and can clearly see "whites can run red lights" is a privilege. In the hypothetical universe where a whites-can-run-red-lights law exists, people opposing the change would holler hell about their natural rights being infringed.
This is exactly where we find ourself with letting MtFs into female spaces. Pro-trans think their "rights" to be treated as female are being infringed; anti-trans are denying that those rights exist.
The situation may seem comical, but during the abolition of slavery and feudalism, slave-owners/feudal lords complained bitterly about their property rights being infringed. Things like that are only ludicrous in retrospect.
Ok, but those laws are not applied specifically to trans people, so they can't be declared anti-trans [...] So in the case of MtFs, the laws are mischaracterized, as they are still targeting men, not trans people in particular.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread."
The intent of the law is going after trans entryists, specifically, even if the language of the law is framed generally.
(let alone anti-LGBT)
Certainly this is obnoxious. The motivation by journalists to generalize actions against tiny minorities with a broader interest group is the same thing behind blacks becoming BIPOCs. If you criticize calling the laws anti-LGBT on these grounds I have no objection.
For one, you're already admitting only white supremacists would see it like that, and in that case I agree, those laws aren't anti- trans, opposition to them is trans-supremacist. But the other issue is that historically trans people had no such privilege.
I am stepping into a hypothetical set by sodiummuffin. The scenario proposed is so ridiculous, if a soapbubble universe where whites could run lights popped into existence, everyone except hardcore white supremacists would wake up to how stupid that is immediately. Our current situation is less ridiculous so people's thoughts are much more confused on the matter.
Likewise, restricting MtFs from female sports where they previously had access locally is an "anti-trans law", even though I agree it's a good idea.
So the sports leagues that never allowed it in the first place are not anti- trans?
They were anti-trans in their inception, though there would not be the language to describe it as such. Again, I am not using 'anti-trans' as a synonym for 'bigoted' or 'evil', but merely descriptively.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
By that definition, most laws are "anti-human". I'm not generally opposed to strict, literal interpretations, but this definition seems to go quite strongly against common sense understanding of "anti".
Sure. I would say that goes unsaid for the same reason that it's the "Department of Education", not "Department of Human Education"; or "Department of Labor", not "Department of Human Labor".
There's no question that journalists calling laws "anti-trans laws" are implying a negative valence. But Folamnh3 called the idea they're anti-trans laws "farcical", which is a bit off when the description seems literally quite defensible. Which was the point guesswho's analogy tried to draw out.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Nobody would call a law against drunk driving an "anti-driving law" even though it restricts driver behavior.
No, but it is an anti-drunkard law.
popocatepetl
7mo ago
- 0% of women want to sleep with your average incel (definitionally)
- Some percent, say 5%, of women want to have sex with a dog.
It is not ~0% of all women who don't want to sleep with the incel, it is tilde 0% (Zorba fix markdown escape pls) of all women he ever met (more plausibly, approached).
He probably haven't met any dogfuckers, either.
To demonstrate the problem a different way: Go to an incel forum, select a thousand incels. Go to a dog competition, select a thousand charming, beautiful, intelligent, expensive male dogs with female owners. Which group do you think will have more sex with female humans in the next five years?
The "incels are less fuckable than dogs" doesn't hold up unless you redefine "incel" much more narrowly than anyone actually does. Your average unemployed 5'6" recessed chin guy on those forums is still more sexable than a chocolate lab.
A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.
Then we may as well say that a law that restricts shoplifting is an "anti-thief" law regardless of how good the law is
Shoplifting laws are definitely anti-thief laws. (andthatsagoodthing.jpeg) Lawmakers do not want people to act as thieves in the context of the shop; in Texas, lawmakers do not want men acting as female ('being trans') in the context of sports.
The reason that anti-trans laws are controversial is that the "underlying principle" you speak of is not agreed upon in society. Two sides cannot agree on whether a biological male entering a female space is a 'thief' taking what he is not due, or a female taking what belongs to her.
I'm denigrating the culture of people who have different traditions around the concept of property ownership!
I think it's fair to say laws against stuffing iphones in your pants are, in fact, denigrating the values of people who would do that if it were legal. Likewise, I understand that, to a MtF, I really am pissing on their sacred values when I block the door to the women's restroom. That the shoplifter and the MtF are in the wrong is an entirely separate question from whether I am opposing them; I am opposing them. I am making an anti-thief/anti-trans action.
you'll have to pony up $8/month for sync
It's cheaper with the .edu discount.
Obsidian changed the price to $4/month yesterday. Pretty negligible unless you're poverty mode, but I already have a good setup, and private github repos are free.
Also, I use more than one vault. Only getting one for $48/year is a bit lame, especially since there's already a 1gb size constraint anyway.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I don't think that's comparable; they're wielding machetes as slashing weapons (rather like bats actually, and doing a terrible job aiming at vitals), while a hunter's knife would be used in thrusting stabs.
The other difference is, unlike machetes, once fighters are within fistfight range, bats cease to be very powerful because of leverage, while the wild flurry of a stabbing knife remains devastating.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Are you a member?
I wouldn't provide value to the group, nor do I think the group would provide value to me (I'm not much of a cancel target). If one of these two variables changed I'd consider giving it a shot.
popocatepetl
2mo ago
Italo Calvino Novels. Put If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Invisible Cities aside because they're so weird I'm only 90% sure they're not complete nonsense. Baron in the Trees and Cloven Viscount are both about the collapse of pre-industrial society, told through a 18th century baron who climbs into the trees and never comes down, and a 17th century viscount who is split on half on the battlefield between his good side and evil side, and proceeds to govern his county well and be history's greatest monster, respectively.
If you're sour against postmodernists — and who could blame you — I'm still in awe of Mother of Learning which I read last August and September. Though what's special about that premise only unfolds over the course of the first two books; it starts as just 'timeloop magic school'. (And it's a shame the prose isn't better.)
"The Pajeet, breeds out of control like a plague of rats. Often defecating out in the open with no regard for its native habitat, the Pajeet spreads across the face of the earth like a cancerous tumor consuming all in its path while the world watches on in disgust and horror. With almost 1.4 billion Pajeets and rising our mother earth buckles under the terrible strain, whilst these creatures rapidly multiply in their own filth, with seemingly no end in sight.”
I've been thinking about Christianity lately. Christians (at least the modern ones) struggle with the question of subhumans. They prefer to thrust the question completely out of mind. "That couldn't happen. There could be no such thing!" is their comforting bromide and thought-killer. Understandably, Christians are afraid to put themselves in the position of judging whether a fellow person could be subhuman. But the unwillingness to entertain a hypothetical reflects a kind of cowardice: you are so afraid of being bad, you won't meditate on what makes the good.
Let me elide the question of whether Pajeets, or a subset of them, qualify. I don't know. This movie is selective. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to imagine the breeding and education of an organism devoid of the divine spark. If you're not a Christian, it's even easier to imagine the creation of an organism without the virtues a materialist uses to define "human". Such a beast is, if C.S. Lewis is to be believed, what God casts into hell after the corruption of pride eats it completely. To materialists, it's some level of sophistication between "ape" and "moth".
If we are to preserve Christian morality, being Christian or no, we must come to terms with God's treatment of the Canaanites, the Hittites, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Subhumans in other words. He killed them. Ostensibly these people had fallen into extreme depravity of human sacrifice, mass rape, etc., and after many generations, these patterns of sin soaked into their very nature. God saved the righteous, but he commanded his people to kill the first two, and he personally rained fire on the others. I've heard protestants claim that this was "old morality" which the New Testament overturned, but this seems exceptionally weak reasoning to me. It endorses morality as something God arbitrarily decides, which Christians deny in every other context.
So there exists a threshold beneath which a "human" does fall below human dignity and should be treated as a beast. At least if you believe in sky daddy™. If you don't, it's an interesting parable to consider for whatever you consider the "source" of morality.
Another possible answer to the question of subhumans is stewardship. My bae Kevin Dolan did a long meditation on this idea, so I won't repeat it. This answer says: the subhumans have value in God's eyes, as we mere humans have value. But that value does not imply the necessity of equality, or the abolition of stewards and bondsmen. Hierarchical relations are perfectly in line with this Christian morality, unlike "modern" post-Christian morality which holds that the divine spark in everyone implies the abolition of rulers and ruled.
I don't have a conclusion, but these are things I've been thinking about.
popocatepetl
26d ago
I even have a toy example I like to use involving an ordinary claw hammer, and how they are four different ways of answering the question "why is this hammer here?"
Its the final cause (teleology) that really gets people upset with Aristotle here. He believed you could meaningfully talk about a dog having sharp front teeth because:
- Material - Enamel
- Formal - "Tooth"
- Efficient - Genetic expression
- Final - To sever meat to eat
Whereas modern scientists are iffy on #2 and hostile to #4.
popocatepetl
26d ago
Good job predicting the motte. I really thought
It's a shame there wasn't a Knowledge option, otherwise we could re-create that scene from HPMOR.
Congratulations on being the only
I bet most of The Motte will (correctly) see that the pleasure machine can provide every feeling the other options might. You could even program the pleasure machine to fool you into thinking you chose something else. And arguably, the existence of the pleasure machine solves any external suffering that Good Works or Power might fix; when others hook up to the grid, the moral dilemma of choosing Pleasure goes away.
popocatepetl
30d ago
How do I read your plot?
It's a well-known graph from this study on the moral differences between liberals and conservatives. (See page 7.) I don't know why they chose a radial graph rather than a sensible line graph, but the brackets represent:
(1) all of your immediate family, (2) all of your extended family, (3) all of your closest friends, (4) all of your friends (including distant ones), (5) all of your acquaintances, (6) all people you have ever met, (7) all people in your country, (8) all people on your continent, (9) all people on all continents, (10) all mammals, (11) all amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds, (12) all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae, (13) all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms, (14) all living things in the universe including plants and trees, (15) all natural things in the universe including entities such as rocks, (16) all things in existence
and the color heat represents relative moral weight a person puts on that group compared to the average person.
Trace had massive reservations about the state of The Motte even in 2020, and we're further down the rabbithole now. Besides, Substack and even X have improved as platforms for mottelike effortposts.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
Sounds like you independently discovered Mari Kondo minimalism. Read her book since she's a nut for throwing things away to increase mental bandwidth.
What are your unconventional mental bandwidth saving hacks?
This is more common than unconventional, since it's the GTD method, but be sure to transfer the noisiness of your brain into a coppermind. For every thought that you anticipate will touch your mind more than once: put tasks in a todo app, high-priority facts like face-name pairs in a flashcard app, notes and writings in a searchable reference app. (I'm use Todoist, Anki, and Obsidian atm.)
For those with anxiety, there's a fourth category I use called recurring worries. Thoughts like 'am I on the right path?' 'why am I wasting time on this?' 'what will people think about this?' etc. I put these in an evergreen note called 'The Worry Bucket' and allocate one hour on Sundays for them. This makes them easier to dismiss and focus for the rest of the week.
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I do not have it, sorry. Pretty sure it was the old site.
So let's concede that your faith is not Catholic, Orthodox, or Lutheran-adjacent but a personal interpretation of faith that allows unbaptized Hindu children into heaven. You probably have a lot of theology to do, but put that aside.
The common Christian response to the problem of pain is a wonderful meme attached below. Suffering is God's chisel to sculpt us. (It is a great meme.)
Can you think of a type or manner of suffering that would falsify this hypothesis? That is to say, a Job-like situation of suffering so meaningless that it could not be didactic? And that if you found it to exist, your current paradigm would have to update? If you can't think of one, what does that rationally mean?
popocatepetl
1mo ago
I think it's reasonable to expect that this God, who I heard of in sermons throughout my childhood, would put in slightly more effort to save the uncontacted heathens than "none at all".
Isn't there an entire strain of christian analysis of history that chalks the rising of the roman state and later the expansion of the european powers as this?
Yes, but there were definitely people left behind in the last chopper out of 'Nam, so to speak. Christians posit an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent deity; thus, even small edge case exceptions are highly damaging to this claim. Why did God not do 100 AD Malaysians the favor he did for Saul on the road to Damascus? Or even just send a missionary or two?
popocatepetl
7mo ago
+1 on the 12 Miles Below rec.
I enjoyed 12MB, but mostly because of the unique setting. The protagonist lucks into all the things that give him power progression, as opposed to planning, training, or using his own unique cleverness to problem solve. IIRC, despite being characterized as a brainy engineer, his major contribution to his own success is using a few Bash commands.
Does anyone here actually "believe" Plato/Aristotle's theory of forms, material/formal/efficient/final causes, and hylemorphism? Or is at all basically nonsense, dreamed up for a want of robust physical science, with 'ball', 'sphere', 'man', 'dog' being just human oversimplifications for matter arrangements?
I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is. Likewise, a law that restricts blacks to chattel status is an "anti-black law" regardless of whether it's actually true blacks can't govern themselves. Trying to say "A law that restricts X group isn't anti-X, because X should be restricted" is incoherent.
Misconstruing the focus of an analogy is a failure mode of debate I'm glad not to see too often here.
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