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popocatepetl


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 04 22:26:05 UTC

I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.


				

User ID: 215

popocatepetl


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 1 user   joined 2022 September 04 22:26:05 UTC

					

I'm the guy who edits every comment I write at least four times. Sorry.


					

User ID: 215

I think cutting off a child's sexual organs meets a very clear and universal definition of "sexual abuse".

Equivocation. Sexual abuse for my entire life has refered to using children for the sexual gratification, not just "abuse that involves primary sexual characteristics". Why not call it "child abuse" or "child disfigurement" except to free ride on the negative associations of the term? Same with "grooming".

I'm honestly shocked believe its almost certainly an indictment of the American right there haven't been terrorist attacks on gender clinics and assassination attempts against transition doctors.

That would only build political capital for the other side. Regardless, if the only correct response to the government/society doing something horrible were a terrorist attack, no decent man would yet survive. Be nice until you can coordinate meanness.

This is what we're talking about. this is what the American right believes. And the boomercons are so poisoned by "tolerance" they're actually letting it happen.

And people here believe AI apocalypse is three years away. Why aren't they bombing Nvidia factories and sabotaging electrical converters?

Is English your first language? 'Literally' these days is often used for derisive emphasis. "My boss is literally a jackass", "What a literal retard you are", etc.

To be clear, your English writing is perfect and I wouldn't suspect anything usually. But literally does not mean literally literally, literally.

Man, I wish you were right, but it's time to give up the ghost. "Literally" is used for emphasis much more than for its original meaning. The fact @FarNearEverywhere assumed @Testing123 was using "literal virgin" as an expression of disgust shows that even highly literate people are using sense two as the primary definition these days.

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.

What’s your issue with brain modifications? We’ve already massively modified our brain from homo erectus and I’m pretty happy about it.

Yes, "you're" happy about it. The non-human entity that succeeds us will be happy, too.

Assuming happiness or sadness is even a factor for it.

I believe men's lives as expendable in the defense of women and children is a satisfactory social arrangement, possibly the only sustainable one*, extremely honorable, and probably encoded somewhere in our genes. Has there been any culture in history that demanded something like "Return with your shield or on it" of women? I believe that's probably impossible.

* With the ALOHMNBIDTAI proviso ("All Lessons of History May Now Be Irrelevant Due to AI")

I disagree with Lewis. In an alternate universe where Pontius Pilate let Jesus off with a whipping and he later died in a cholera outbreak, you could still have a religion based on his ministry of the Kingdom of God — the infinite grace of the Father, the equality of sinners be Him, the need to forgive debtors as one's debt has been forgiven... it's a spicy take on judaism. Without the resurrection, "Christians" might teach the same doctrines, but grace wouldn't be mediated personally through Christ.

If tomorrow, incontrovertible evidence came out that the apostles lied, you could still salvage a religion from the wreckage. Christians would have to perform some interprative surgery on the parts of the Bible where Jesus claims to be God — maybe make it like Buddhism where any enlightened person can be God? — but there are already stretches in biblical interpretation, as is.

Did you leave out a word or two here?

One word:

'IMO a large part of the reason social media platforms outmoded message boards is that [they] provided lurkers and semi-lurkers a "no effort" way of showing content creators that people were seeing and appreciating them.'

So the verb "provided" corresponds to "social media platforms", not "message boards". The meaning is backwards from what you thought I was so saying. Reddit and Twitter provide an easy engagement buttons for lurkers. Old forums did not.

Some of them provide an upvote feature or even upvote/downvote, but many don't.

Some forums have added upvotes nowadays, yes. Around the time Digg and then Reddit were on the rise, though, phpBB forums usually had nothing. Some had a karma system where you left messages for other users, but critically, these features were karma-gated. So lurkers could not "commend" or "upkarma" a post they found interesting. This was supposed to encourage quality participation. In practice, content creators would get less reaction for their effort. You could post on a social media platform and see the number +30 next to your comment, or on a forum and get no reaction.

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.

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.)

There is no objectively measurable art

You're only thinking of aesthetic considerations. The craft of modern architects, designers, engineers, educators, bureaucratics, welders etc etc blow their premodern equivalents out of the water by any objectively measurable metric. Like, say, how much weight a bridge can support. How far an athlete can train themselves to throw a javelin. Only in totally subjective considerations is there even an argument to be had -- which I attribute to people's predisposition to ancestor worship and IAmVerySmart-signaling status games.

Please tell me: do you believe my art teacher telling me I should come to school in women's underwear to get in touch with my true self qualifies as grooming? [...] I've brought this up twice now, and nobody in the "groomer is a slur" camp has deigned to state their opinion on it.

A teacher who independently "goes rogue" and talks to a student about their underwear should be reprimanded and the incident should be investigated. But that is also the case for a teacher playing a multiplayer videogame with a student, or driving the student home, being alone in a closed room with them, etc. Those actions are not intrinsically evil. Whether they are "grooming" depends on the intent which is unknowable. So schools have protocols to regulate student/teacher interaction to make sure teachers never do anything that gives the appearance of foul play. When teachers break protocols, they (should) get investigated, disciplined, and possibly fired.

My problem with "groomer" is that it is motte-baileying. It is equating secretive intimate behavior like you're describing with (a) a trans activist teacher talking about transgenderism informally with students, (b) school psychologists helping transition a child through formal channels with the full knowledge of school admins and their colleagues, and (c) generally, encouraging children to abandon their birth gender or addressing the child as their non-birth gender, in general.

For the record, I do not support (b) and only partially support (c). However, activities (a), (b), and (c) cannot reasonably be called "grooming" and calling them that is using an intentionally inflammatory insult IMO.

You usually need a little more analysis than a link and a summary for a toplevel post 'round these parts... This is one of many studies seeming to show the covid vaxxes are less effective than hoped / advertised in 2021. Why does this move the needle more than what we already know?

I'm curious as to what makes you so passionate about this issue. I have to admit it's just not that interesting to me. It just feels like Daily Show level dunking on the proles.

The equivalent might be multiple effort posts trying to argue against flat earthers, Nation of Islam, Bush did 9/11, or astrology.

A lot of Motters seem at least mildly sympathetic to fake vote counts in 2020. (The election being 'stolen' is a much squishier topic, but let's limit things to fake ballot-casting or vote-tallying.) Given my other belief that posters seem unusually insightful on other topics, this makes an important discrepancy. Is there really something to it? Or are these posters hyper-irrational and I've misjudged them all this time?

If a large chunk of The Motte started signaling interest in flat earth, 9/11 truth, astrology etc, I would be more interested in investigating those claims, too, either to credit those claims or to discredit The Motte.

We anti-transhumanists need a schelling fence of some kind or other... why not erect it attempts to tinker with the reproductive process? Even if it's not an entirely rational line in the sand, neither is setting 18 years as the exact line for age of consent. Would you be open to getting salami sliced on that issue? One year, we agree 20 is okay. Next year, the debate goes, if 20 is okay, why not 19? Then, if 19 is okay, why not 18? If 18 is okay, why not 17? 16? We've been through this enough times that you'll have to define pedophilia.

Maintaining a line is important.

It might be relevant to note that nearly the entire Uvalde Police department seems to have been mixed race latino

I think it’s more that Uvalde is a small town. You don’t expect to deal with that kind of thing there, whereas I’m sure every major metropolitan police force has real school shooter training.

It looked like "making a business decision" to me, not poor planning. As @faceh just posted upthread, they were afraid that the shooter had an AR-15 and knew they'd take casualities. It's unfortunate they weren't equipped to respond to the situation safely. But in any functional non-decadent society, armed men are expected to charge into danger when the community's children are being slaughtered.

Either the men didn't consider the children to be "of their community", or they knew deep down they lived in a low trust dysfunctional society that wouldn't hold them to account for abdicating their fundamental responsibility as men.

This is partially downstream of immigration and ethnic diversity weakening the country's civic bonds, though I don't draw a straight line between the ethnic makeup of the police and their business decision.

We've done an epic's of navel gazing on this. I don't think what you're saying is true, or "truer" than a similar narrative you'd see on /r/politics about conservatives just not liking science.

The two competing theories common here are (a) It's group dynamics. People with relatively mainstream beliefs are less motivated to hang out here, more likely to leave due to evaporative cooling; and people do not bother discussing what mainstream beliefs they have here, because they have other places (b) modern leftism has become highly correlated with a brand of social justice ethics which does not countenance debating or platforming nazis, and people who subscribe to it are repelled by The Motte's basic constitution.

Now that we have vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and microwaves, what need for men to marry at all? They can just do those five minute tasks in between coming home from their Real Jobs and settling down to have fun with online porn, online gaming, and ordering drugs and booze online.

This, but unironically. Especially since men's standards on those tasks tends to be considerably lower than women's.

I often think of the economic ramifications when I see memes about single men's apartments. You can see the outlines of the pod, but the pod seems to be arriving quicker than AI will fill in the role of the mediocre men with their tedious infrastructure-maintaining jobs. If a third of young Gen Z men will never marry, and another third will end up divorcees with their wages garnished, and they're happy with a $499 gaming console and a $249 TV, what happens to the economy?

I guess the answer is the state will have to find some way to expropriate a larger portion of these men's wages to ensure they can only afford the pod if they provide a lot more surplus value than they used to, ensuring that incel pod guy must still seek technical certifications and work 40 hours at his lame construction job. Will they be able to squeeze blood from that rock is a salient unanswered question.

There was a good motte post awhile back about the ancient Mesopotamian origin myth of women luring wild men playing in the mountains down into the cities to farm. But in the 21st century, the wild men are slovenly gamers and the women are preaching harpies.

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You're saying christianity forces us to believe dogmatic, but positivistically void claims like "the bread becomes flesh in an abstract manner". Progressivism, meanwhile, forces us to believe Jamaicans and Jews are equally fast at sprinting.

I guess that's true if you compare catholicism to wokeism, which is a fundamentalist branch of progressivism. But, as always, I'm not sure I agree with NRx that extreme blank slatism and communism were inevitable extrapolations of liberalism; that as soon Jefferson penned "all men are created equal", CRT and HAES were a matter of time. I think, if backed into a corner, progressives can reduce their claims to abstract, unfalsifiable ones, just as christians did.

Catholics believe man was created in God's image — this idea is safe, because scientists will never capture God in a dragnet for analysis. In the same way, early, non-fundamentalist liberals believed all men housed an ineffable equal dignity — this idea is also safe, because the human-rights-granting organ apparently can't be found via autopsy.

Evolution and HBD imply that catholics and liberals are wrong. But it's merely in the way that seeing a man living in a slum implies that he's poor; without seeing his bank account, one can come up with any number of excuses why he's actually a billionaire who chooses to live in a shack.

Is Jesus Christ the Son of God, begotten not created, coeternal with the Father, who died for the forgiveness of sins and will return in glory to bring life to the world?

If the answer is yes, then you stay within Christianity, and no amount of church heresy about sexuality can change that.

Likewise: is Muhammad the final prophet of God, and the Qur'an the true word of God, directly dictated to the prophet by the archangel Gabriel?

If the answer is yes, then you should become a Muslim, no matter how good or bad Christians or Muslims might be on the subject of sexuality.

......

But the core claims matter.

This perspective always strikes as odd from an outsider's perspective. To me, the divinity of Jesus or the prophethood of Muhammad are clearly the legitimization methods, not the essence, of their respective religions. "You should believe X because Y." Imagine an alternate universe where Muhammad taught Catholic doctrine on grace and God's kingdom, preached radical forgiveness and against material wealth; while Jesus related the Quran to his disciples, who subsequently waged Ghazwah against polytheists to protect the faith and bring fellow monotheists under a protection/patronage system. I would still pattern match the first as Christianity and the second as Islam despite the "core claims" being reversed.

Of course, the moment one becomes cynical enough to meta-reason past these legitimization claims and choose a belief set on its own merits, one has ceased to be religious in any appreciable way, and might as well just make up one's own beliefs.

Please, for the sake of ideological diversity, do not downvote well-expressed opinions you disagree with.

What is good for goose, is good for the gander. I support free speech of those who support free speech. Those who support censorship, deserve to be censored. "Pronoun policy" which penalizes people for speaking what they perceive is true, amounts to censorship.

The Motte also has a code of manners that others find stifling. Is that censorship? Many an outsider has come here and said "@some, you're a nazi" or the like, believing honestly that you're a nazi and thinking they had good factual reasons for thinking so, indeed, feeling a moral duty not participate in the social fiction you're not a nazi. They got modded. Instead they had to rephrase their ideas in an abstract, motte-friendly way.

"Mr. Elliot Page, all transmen are women" is perfectly comprehensible.

Of course, places with pronoun policies also tend to censor the ideas themselves. But in principle requiring he/she is no more censorial than what we do here.

I don’t think there’s anything “Shadowy” about the U.N. or their explicitly stated goals.

Yes, but "To achieve our stated goals, we will manipulate social media to amplify accusations of sexual misconduct, creating a chilling effect against casual sex that reduces fertility" is a strategy that, if it exists, exists in the shadows. As do whatever organs the UN is using to enact said strategy.

This approach would be dubious IMO, as casual sex rarely results in children these days, and the hypothetical blowback from the ploy being discovered is immense.

Unless you're suggesting the coordinators have such an iron grip that discovery or blowback are non-factors? In which case, why are they pussyfooting around the issue with sneaky psyops rather than just putting contraceptives in the water supply or something?

Every major liberal social movement of the past century has one goal in mind: sustainable development.

Your ideas suppose the elites are amazingly powerful and coordinated in pursuing this end, but at the same time, they've contented themselves with a 100 year policy of slowly changing gender roles through ad hoc puppeteered social movements, rather than just enacting the New World Order and having done with it.

Smart ≠ highly analytical and inclined to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.

Disagreed. They are the same.

But you are touching on the part where @curious_straight_ca errs. Smartness can be good because it allows you to navigate society better than non-smart people who don't analyze the world right/at all. On the other hand, it might lead to you inventing calculus, molecular wave theory, or special relativity while your non-smart peers go out to the club and flirt with girls. (Those guys ended up with 0, 2, and 3 kids respectively.) More likely, you could unheroically become engrossed in a useless but fascinating system like chess openings, futurism debates, or rationalism.

It's also possible smartness might make you piss off your tribe and/or develop mental disorders. Smartness is not an unalloyed good, probably because it leads to in depth discussion, introspection, navel-gazing.

IMO it's not about forgiving Hitler — and by extension the Nazis — but about forgiving the conservatively four in ten people around you who, like the 1930s Germans, would support the othering, de-statusing, disenfranchising, detaining, deporting, and even destroying of a weak outrgoup minority. (Really I think it's more like eight in ten, but they have different outgroups they'd attack.)

It's psychologically devastating to know people are like that. Finding a way to forgive and integrate this and other sordid parts of human nature is the only way to go back to being happy, once you know.

Yes, but jews are significantly smarter than anglos. You would expect them to be overrepresented compared to anglos, just as anglos are overepresented compared to blacks. The IQ gaps between the three groups are roughly equidistant.