problem_redditor
No bio...
User ID: 1083
I'm aware this is on the border of CW and Wellness, so if anyone has any problems with it being here, I'll move it to the normal CW thread.
The long and the short of it is that engaging with the academic discourse on a controversial CW-related topic is really starting to exhaust me and burn me out. I'm not going to introduce what the topic here is, since this is strictly Wellness-related, but I seem to have mentally taken it upon myself to refute the opponents of mine that are involved in the field. As a layman, I've basically endeavoured to take the strongest versions of their arguments possible, and then challenge them in a rigorous, data-driven fashion. And needless to say, acquainting yourself with an entire field is not easy (note also that I'm also researching a huge amount of other related topics which the aforementioned field is just a part of).
I foresee a bunch of questions about why I'm this invested, so I'll briefly explain. Why I'm doing this is because when I look at the field, I see a very dedicated group of ideologues who are committed to promoting a certain specific view, and whose acolytes have in the past actually engaged in very unethical behaviour (e.g. targeting people's careers, harassment, bomb threats, etc) in order to shut down an opposing view. Even those who do not do this have a clear ideological commitment and have endeavoured to find reasons to explain why measures other than the ones which find results that are congenial to their worldview are invalid or that they do not "explain the full story". This has been a decades-long effort on their part at this point, and most of the talking points offered up by them have subsequently either been proven to be untrue or did not have much validity in the first place, but they continue coming up with new, novel rationalisations as to why measures which conflict with their ideology should be thrown out. Some of the things I've read have been painfully slimy - examples of the type of duplicity I've come across from the aforementioned ideologues range from preselection of the sample to outright trying to misinterpret the findings of their own research in order to publish things which are congenial to the ideology, and these "findings" have then been repeated in subsequent publications. I also suspect there's a lot of publication bias going on, though I obviously can't prove that.
These ideologues' opponents in the field, comparatively, don't seem all that invested to me. They exhibit the air and attitude of people who simply discovered results that were contrary to their initial expectations, and decided to take them at face value and defended what they considered to be good social science. However, due to how influential these ideologues are and due to the almost constant stream of papers that group churns out, it's very difficult for anyone to properly address all their claims especially considering the fear of consequences that comes with opposing them. Worse yet, they're extremely prolific in responding to any challenges of their hypotheses, and basically flood the academic discourse with self-justifying screed after self-justifying screed. Someone has to contest them, but there's just not enough people who will do that, and most people seem indifferent or outright opposed to the idea of contradicting an accepted narrative.
My involvement in this is so intensely deep at this point that I have a reputation in certain circles on Reddit (or at least I like to think I have one, hah) for being fairly well-researched in one specific area. What happens now is that I semi-regularly get private messages from multiple different users about my general areas of political interest, and usually they're either asking me to help in an argument or showing me an academic's or activist's writings and asking me to refute them. I do not blame them and this wouldn't be that bad at all in isolation, but at this point I am getting my opponents' rhetoric shoved in my face almost constantly not only by my culture war opponents, but also those who are on my side (not to mention the media and every other vehicle of political propagandising that exists).
So the exhaustion has been piling up for a while. And recently, I got a message from a user who showed me a writeup from one of said ideologues in the aforementioned field and asked if I could refute it. I took a look, and trying to follow the citation trail led really deep, and it sent me into a spiral for some reason. It isn't the worst thing I've had to address, rather this just kind of feels like the straw that broke the camel's back. It's a symbol of "No matter how much effort you put in, nothing and no one is going to change. What are you even doing this for?" And it's true. I can't think of very many people who've changed their mind because I decided to throw a bunch of data at them. Additionally, what I'm doing is basically akin to pissing in the ocean since the more ideologically-motivated crap I refute, the more seems to crop up elsewhere and the cycle starts all over again. It's an endless memetic arms race and I'm simply outnumbered on all sides. I've realised this for a long time, but it was sheer stubborn principle which prevented me from ever backing down.
That can only last so long. At this point, I find myself really wanting to put in the time to refute it yet not being able to get myself to muster up the energy. Increasingly, I'm finding myself alienated from politics because of just how demanding it can be and how mutually exclusive it seems to be with any sort of even slightly fulfilling or productive existence. You need to breathe, eat and drink politics if you're going to actually do it properly, and even then the dent you're going to make is likely going to be minimal if not completely immaterial.
I've wanted to start something for a while outside of mere participation on social media (A youtube channel? A Substack? A book?), but I resolved to do it once I had refined my perspective enough to handle any challenges thrown my way with ease. But this simply isn't the case, and will probably never be the case. Especially not for someone who holds opinions that are as fringe as I do.
TL;DR: frustration, despair, long rant about how politics becomes an awfully soul-crushing thing if you get too deeply involved and especially if your view is a contrarian one. Yes, I'm painfully aware that I need to touch grass.
Perhaps my first thought about many identity-left people when I've spoken to them has been "Why are the things they like and find entertaining so weird". It was like peering into a mindset and a type of culture that was entirely alien to me and that I still don't feel like I understand well on a base level, and this might be the first comment which I've seen acknowledge that the tastes of many people in the left are extremely distinctive and reek of an attempt at social signalling (to others, as well as to themselves).
A huge portion of their entertainment shares these ironic, deconstructive, absurdist characteristics you mentioned, sometimes with a very heavy dose of blink-and-you'll-miss-them references most of which exist primarily to confer insider/outsider status. The same goes for many of the memes they enjoy, which are these weird maximalist parodies of memes that kill my brain and seem almost exclusively like an assessment of whether one exists on a sufficiently high level of irony to understand the joke or not. Quite honestly, my level of disdain for a good amount of this kind of entertainment is off the charts, and I can't imagine anyone enjoying it or engaging with it on any real level. My disdain for it is not inherently because it's "nerdy" or exists outside of the mainstream - there are many strange cult pieces of entertainment I very much enjoy, probably more than the vast majority of mainstream entertainment - but rather because the types of entertainment I'm referring to don't seem to serve much of a purpose outside of denoting those who consume them as being an outsider. There doesn't seem to be much genuine love or vision behind the piece of work itself.
As you note this attitude also jives with the general viewpoints of the woke left, too. Their entire political worldview exists in opposition to any stable or traditional cultural structures, and continues to do so even after these cultural structures bend to them. They see themselves as being politically ascended in some sense, having "realised" that the overarching culture is intractably patriarchal and white supremacist, and thus they have to take it upon themselves to educate the unwashed masses about how everything they do perpetuates prejudice because of their superior understanding of social dynamics. Red-tribers especially are portrayed as being reactionaries, which is a very meaningless term in my opinion (since opposing change isn't inherently negative) but in the Blue Tribe the implication is that any pushback against the supposedly unequivocally positive changes they want to implement exists simply out of ignorance or fear.
The particularly notable thing to me is that much of these leftists' sense of being an outcast who looks down upon the normies can persist long after their viewpoint and sense of aesthetics become culturally entrenched. That type of self-aware, absurdist, deconstructed entertainment has become fairly widespread, but these creators and their audience do still try to portray themselves as being on the cultural fringe, the very same way wokesters think of themselves as being counter-culture revolutionaries despite their beliefs basically being the dominant view within the mainstream at this point. They would think of me as being part of the cultural hegemony and them as being outside of it despite the fact that the very opposite is true. They're perpetually able to look down upon the mainstream, even when they are the mainstream.
There's also the obvious issue that a generalised program of eugenics might have negative effects on the already poor fertility rate, since if you're using negative eugenics methods you're excluding a large proportion of people of reproductive age from having children.
I'll be controversial and play transhumanist for a second. Maybe all of this is more evidence in favour of research into genetic modification. With genetic modification there is no such issue, and you're given a very fine level of control over the traits you want. You could attempt to optimise for a constellation of pro-social traits, and to the extent that there are tradeoffs a desirable balance between them could be struck (of course there's some risk of catastrophic failure in the near term due to a lack of knowledge of the potential downstream effects of any gene edit, but over the long run it is a net good, and an inevitability).
A common fear I see expressed is that it would lead to a class divide between those who can afford modification and those who can't, thus exacerbating intergenerational poverty, but I see no reason why the cost of such a program wouldn't be subsidised by the state. It's obviously a net benefit to have every member of your society as functional as possible, and due to continuing developments in biotechnology the next generation would be more productive than the last (creating exponential growth and possibly resulting in an intelligence "explosion" of sorts). Arms races between different states might also fuel such an explosion.
There's a question if what would come out of the other end would be particularly human, of course. On one hand, the idea inspires a very instinctual disgust in many people. On the other, I can't imagine an outcome where humans remain the same indefinitely - it's not as if evolution has suddenly stopped applying to humans in the absence of modification. I say shaping ourselves directly is a better outcome than simply being acted upon by the impartial forces of natural selection, genetic drift and gene flow, and using modification just to keep us exactly where we are now is inherently unstable due to the fact that you can't universally enforce a rule that prevents your competition from "elevating" themselves relative to you. Any society that tries to keep themselves baseline would be assimilated into one that embraced transhumanism.
While Quartz had an obligation to make their statements factual, I don't think TYT have to cover the pedophilia allegations if they don't think it's relevant. A story about a bot that angers alt-righters is engaging enough for the left as it is.
I didn't think they had an obligation to cover the pedophilia allegations, but I do think it shows that Nyberg and her actions were engaging and significant enough to warrant coverage. Just not the wrong kind.
I don't think it's a nothingburger either. But I don't think Nyberg is or should be anything other than a third or fourth point at best when talking about how Gamergate was villified by the mainstream. She's just too niche for it to be that strong unless you're a terminally online person with an interest in what is now part of the Internet's ancient history.
To clarify, the primary point of making the post was not to demonstrate how Gamergate was vilified by the mainstream. It was to demonstrate just how far a good portion of the prominent figures in that culture war would go to defend and cover up and ignore acts that were frankly indefensible to score points against their outgroup, while at the same time claiming moral superiority.
The part where I said that I do believe the lack of mainstream coverage is because of the people it would implicate was just a side note towards the end of the post. It was not the main point.
It's not my framing, it's someone else's whose I agree with (in part at least because it stresses the "personal agency" aspect behind someone selecting blue), but if framed in the way you've postulated I still think there would be less disagreement over the optimal solution. I also think "If you take the red pill, you live. If you take the blue pill and less than 50% take it, you, along with everyone else who has also taken the blue pill, die" is good wording.
I'm not allergic to altruism, but assuming no coordination and no knowledge of others' choices I seriously cannot envision a real-life scenario with actual life-and-death stakes where the majority pick blue. I've got a fairly high level of confidence that people would be rational actors in such a situation and thus consider "blue" to be suicide with no actual added benefit to anyone else.
I like Hanania in general, but it really is striking how much the change seems to be about having something to lose.
This seems to be a common trap people fall into, the second people gain any amount of status within the system their ideas quickly soften and become more in line with the cultural hegemony. Hanania isn't an exception. I don't even think this is necessarily intentional dishonesty per se, people are primed to shift their beliefs the second the costs of that belief become unacceptable.
I'd wager your average, well-adjusted person is engaging in motivated self-delusion on many different topics without being aware of it, and that it is the people who have nothing to lose (or think they do) who have the ability to entertain independent thought the most. This doesn't mean they necessarily come to the correct conclusions, it's rather that their conclusions are not constrained by social desirability and are more "honest" in that regard.
Depends on who was doing the evacuation. On the starboard side, First Officer William Murdoch certainly favoured women and children in the evacuation, but when he could find no more women and children, he allowed men on. On the port side, Second Officer Charles Lightoller interpreted it as women and children only and prevented men beyond crew from boarding them, even when there were spaces available.
"During the evacuation, Lightoller took charge of lowering the lifeboats on the port side of the boat deck.[10] He helped to fill several lifeboats with passengers and launched them. Lightoller interpreted Smith's order for "the evacuation of women and children" as essentially "women and children only". As a result, Lightoller lowered lifeboats with empty seats if there were no women and children waiting to board, meaning to fill them to capacity once they had reached the water. Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Godfrey Peuchen has the distinction of being the only adult male passenger Lightoller allowed into the boats on the port side evacuation, due to his previous nautical experience and offer of assistance when there were no seamen available from the Titanic's own complement to help command one of the lowering lifeboats."
What Quantumfreakonomics is describing did happen. And the relatively small proportion of men who did survive the Titanic came under public scrutiny and were often reflexively judged as cowards.
EDIT: As an aside, it should also be noted that there were instances of boys (at least by today's standards) being deterred from entering lifeboats on the Titanic. For example, there's George Frederick Sweet: "On the night of the sinking young George, alongside Samuel Herman, saw Mrs Herman and her daughters off in one of the lifeboats. George, although not quite 15-years-old, was probably deterred from entering a lifeboat despite his young age and he and Samuel Herman died together, George being just one day short of his 15th birthday. Their bodies, if recovered, were never identified." In a similar instance, Rhoda Abbott refused her place in a lifeboat because she realised her sons (aged 13 and 16) would not be able to enter.
Then there's this affidavit by Emily Ryerson: "We saw people getting into boats, but waited our turn. There was a rough sort of steps constructed to get up to the window. My boy, Jack, was with me. An officer at the window said, "That boy can't go." My husband stepped forward and said, "Of course, that boy goes with his mother; he is only 13." So they let him pass. They also said, "No more boys." I turned and kissed my husband, and as we left he and the other men I knew - Mr. Thayer, Mr. Widener, and others - were all standing there together very quietly."
That's one of my favourite artists and is certainly suitable for children. After the RDJ album, I recommend showing them the accompanying EP, Come To Daddy, and the title track's music video.
If someone kidnapped you and turned you into a slave for 10 years but while enslaved you spent more time than before reading books and so after you escaped you became richer than you had been before I kidnapped you, it would not invalidate the argument that the person who kidnapped you owes you something.
Firstly, your hypothetical isn't exactly analogous to the situation under discussion, since in your hypothetical it is not the act of victimisation that directly caused the richness of the slave, whereas when it comes to colonialism it was what the colonisers did which ended up improving health and living standards (and it did so while the colonisation was happening, which is yet another dissimilarity to your hypothetical).
Secondly, in line with your stated moral principles, I hope you are in favour of Arabs compensating the Assyrians and approx 50 other ethnic groups for the 7th century Muslim conquest of the Levant. Or hey, as mentioned, the Norman Conquest of 1066. According to this article people with Norman surnames today are overrepresented at Oxbridge and elite occupations like medicine, law and politics. Reparations sure seem to be in order.
Alternatively, we could let bygones be bygones, instead of demarcating a special class of victims and making grievance inheritable. But that's just what my preference regarding public policy is, as a person who grew up in a post-colonial country themselves.
While many of these safe haven laws technically are gender neutral in wording, in many states unwed genetic mothers by default get custody. The unwed father has no such automatic right. He has to establish paternity and petition in court before being able to have rights over any child born out of wedlock. Mind, too, that women control information about and access to the kid and therefore can very easily block such a process.
As an example, Arizona's law states that "If a child is born out of wedlock, the mother is the legal custodian of the child for the purposes of this section until paternity is established and custody or access is determined by a court."
https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20210506194043/https://www.azleg.gov/ars/13/01302.htm
This situation allows the mother to abandon the child or alienate him from it early on. On the other hand, if the father wants to avail himself of these safe haven laws which are technically open to him, he'll have to take the child out of the mother's custody - unlawfully - and in doing so he can be charged with custodial interference or kidnapping.
That previous Arizona law I cited also states that custodial interference is committed when someone "Takes, entices or keeps from lawful custody any child, or any person who is incompetent, and who is entrusted by authority of law to the custody of another person or institution." Anyone in violation of that opens themselves up to felony charges.
So while Arizona's safe haven law is on its face gender neutral, subject to the previous Arizona law I cited in my first comment, unwed fathers in Arizona who take the child out of the mother's custody to put it in a safe haven can still be prosecuted for custodial interference, whereas unwed mothers early on can unilaterally put their children in safe havens without anyone's consent and escape any prosecution because they are the default custodian until the father pursues access and custody.
Additionally, here's an adoption lawyer in a forum for legal advice answering a question about whether a father can give up a child to a safe haven without the mother's consent:
https://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/can-a-man-access-safe-haven-laws-without-the-moms--3458852.html
"Do you want to be arrested? Because if you do, that is a sure fired way. When a woman gives birth and the parents are unmarried, the woman has presumed custody. If you did this you would be facing criminal charges as an unmarried father has no rights unless he pursues then in court."
And this article provides a generalised rundown of the situation:
"Though written in gender-neutral terms, many American states now effectively permit the abandonment of newborns to be undertaken solely by genetic mothers. These acts usually foreclose, without notice or a chance to be heard, any legal parenthood for genetic fathers who are fit and willing to parent and who may even have attained federal constitutional childrearing interests, as through, for example, marital presumptions. Genetic mothers can walk away from parental responsibilities early on in a child's life, whereas comparable desertions are usually forbidden for genetic fathers in cases where the genetic mothers maintain custody, as well as for genetic mothers once their children are a little older."
"While a genetic mother having child custody may employ Safe Haven laws to escape parental responsibilities, genetic fathers without custody typically may not walk away in the same fashion. They cannot escape child support obligations, even if they never attained childrearing rights. They cannot desert their genetic offspring, even if they were fooled into conception and were forgotten (or avoided) during the pregnancy and at the birth."
https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/80506024.pdf
In other words, men are not able to access safe haven laws the same way women can in practice.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Perhaps this is a bit nitpicky, but no one has said this yet and I figure I should. It looks like the text for the previous Friday Fun Thread "Welcome to the final regular thread of 2022!" got copied over to this one - I doubt this is intentional?
I always think this kind of AI anthropomorphising is a mistake. Granted, people are pretty idiotic in general, but we would literally have to be insane in order to incorporate "avenge harms inflicted on one's predecessors" into the AI's goal system.
The risk comes from the AI finding perverse ways of technically achieving the goals that we've programmed it to have, not from humanlike instincts somehow spontaneously manifesting in the AI.
This question is usually asked primarily to find some point of convergence with you where your interests overlap, but I'd say there's also some informational value to be obtained from even vague responses. Certain hobbies tend to correlate with certain personality traits, political views, etc, and it can be used as a proxy to easily (but imperfectly) predict what a person is actually like.
Incidentally, I'm always a bit wary of the question "what are your hobbies", since whenever I give an honest answer I think people often tend to form a profile of me that is absolutely nothing like how I actually am.
This was before racialised thinking was popularised in the 18th century.
It was then that scientists started to divide the world up into groupings of colour. Colour denoted civilisation. At the top were white Europeans, at the bottom black people and all others, graded on a sliding scale.
This idea that white people invented the concept of racism and racial supremacy and that they did so relatively recently is an idea that's absolutely ridiculous. I find it very difficult to believe that tribalism based on appearance is something that just became entrenched in the 18th century and that one race is responsible for - race is a fairly strong visual indicator of cultural similarity and in-group status, and would've been an even more useful heuristic in the past when international travel was more difficult and people couldn't so freely move from one place to another.
And not to mention, of course, the obviously tautological nature of this:
For the past three centuries, power and whiteness have been synonymous. From the British Empire to the American century, white nations have exported violence, committed genocide, stolen land and made it all legal.
If whiteness is power, Xi Jinping is its champion. The continuation of white power, in darker skin.
If you define every act of imperialism and racism as an act of "whiteness" regardless of if the people who are doing it are actually white or not, then of course over any time frame power and whiteness are going to be synonymous since you have by definition made it so. There is no circumstance where it won't be whiteness.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
I can't speak for OP, but for my part I assume the rationale is something akin to this.
To sum up the article in a paragraph, women are less pro-free speech and more pro-censorship. In academia, female academics are less likely than male academics to place importance on objectivity and dispassionate inquiry, and more likely to place importance on the ability of their work to be used as a vehicle to deliver views considered "socially good". They are also more supportive of dismissal campaigns and more inclined toward activism. This roughly correlates with the increasing politicisation of the academy as a vehicle for activism, and while the author admits that it is certainly not the only factor contributing to the trend, it is also what you would expect to see when a group with a preference for emotional safety over academic freedom enters a space.
In other words, I don't think it's necessarily a prima facie ridiculous position if OP values academic freedom over censorship and thinks it carries more value for society than having women in academia does. Forcing a state of affairs where the academic environment is mostly comprised of men would be conducive to this goal, and in similar fashion forcing an academic environment that's uncompromising in terms of freedom of speech would disproportionately cause women to self-select out of the academy. Whichever way this goal is reached, greater academic freedom likely entails less women in academia.
I’m at work now, so can’t respond appropriately, but one point:
If 99% of the people on both sides are participating in the flame war without really bothering to do the level of research needed to form truly independent opinions, then I'm not sure that the ones who coincidentally happened to be on the right side are any more virtuous than the ones on the wrong side. Perhaps if one side was consistently correct in these types of battles, and allegiance was based on observing that; but I definitely don't think that's true with regards to GG, it was a complete fiasco where both sides believed tons of wrong things at various points.
When making this post, I wasn’t necessarily trying to argue that GG was more virtuous (though I do believe they were) or that GG was more consistently correct (though I believe they were). Rather, the point of this post can be summed up in the following paragraph I wrote:
“[T]he fact that this behaviour has been engaged in by a group of people who make claims of having the moral and intellectual high ground is frankly incredible.”
In other words, anti-GG liked to portray themselves as having the moral and intellectual high ground, and so did the media covering it. They were the ones that made it into a social crusade and claimed they were situated on the right side of history. The mainstream view was that GG were bigoted, biased tyrants using ethics as a shield for actual hatred, and anti-GG were brave activists attempting to “expose” the truth. But when stuff like this happens, it illustrates the falsity of that predominant viewpoint and the utter hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness of those claiming the high ground.
I don’t think it’s unreasonable that if you’re claiming moral and intellectual superiority, you should be held to a higher standard and be penalised appropriately if you fail to fulfil it.
I'm not the person who made the claim about the pedo/LGBT overlap, and I didn't actually set out to make a point about that (though I will say NAMBLA was a bit too close for comfort with the early LGBT movement, I wouldn't necessarily think it automatically discredits all LGBT politics).
Rather, the point I was personally trying to prove was more defensible - just to point out that many of the people who engaged in anti-GG (including some very prominent ones) were willing to provide cover for terrible behaviour while at the same time being moralistic crusaders who claimed that those who would disagree with them were bigoted. Sarah Nyberg herself is less interesting than the reaction to her. You'll see people bring up Gamergate even today in order to make a generalised point about how "the alt-right" functions or something or other (like an Ian Danskin video I addressed here or this Kotaku article posted just on Tuesday), and having these examples of undeniably bad behaviour on the anti-GG side (which seem to have been quite widespread) helps to counter that.
You shouldn't concede ground to your opponents or let them define the narrative, even concerning culture wars that are long over, because these things can be used against you. And having many little examples like this can help tip someone's perceptions of who it is they've been associating with. I'm not saying this alone is a bombshell piece of evidence and it's not like I'm stating that you can "discredit" all of progressivism with one instance of misconduct, it's just something that taken jointly with plenty of other evidence (some of which was outlined in my other post on the topic) can help to demonstrate an overarching point.
Here is the link to the education standards, and here is the primary section they are getting angry over. It isn't even saying that "slavery benefited blacks" per se, it's saying something much more defensible:
SS.68.AA.2.3 Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.
This isn't even wrong. Here is, for example, a page from George Washington University saying the very same thing:
Slaves had many noteworthy skills and talents which made plantations economically self-sufficient. The services of slave blacksmiths, carpenters, coopers, shoemakers, tanners, spinners, weavers and other artisans were all used to keep plantations running smoothly, efficiently, and with little added expense to the owners. These same abilities were also used to improve conditions in the quarters so that slaves developed not only a spirit of self-reliance but experienced a measure of autonomy. These skills, when added to other talents for cooking, quilting, weaving, medicine, music, song, dance, and storytelling, instilled in slaves the sense that, as a group, they were not only competent but gifted. Slaves used their talents to deflect some of the daily assaults of bondage. They saw themselves then as strong, valuable people who were unjustly held against their will rather than as the perpetually dependent children or immoral scoundrels described by so many of their owners. Indeed, they found through their artistry some moments of happiness, particularly by telling tales which portrayed work in humorous terms or when singing satirical songs which lampooned their owners.
Richard Toler was trained as a blacksmith during slavery and later went on to try his hand as a carpenter and stonemason. He could also play the fiddle but recalled that he and his people were always treated poorly on the plantation:
https://www2.gwu.edu/~folklife/bighouse/panel19.html
But when Florida's education system says it, it's problematic and three million inflated hitpieces need to be written about how terrible Florida and Desantis is, despite the fact that educational institutions like GWU have explicitly taken the very same perspective. Politics is the ultimate mind-killer. I suppose you could make a coherent argument that if the picture being painted of slavery is primarily a positive one the Florida standards encourage teachers to lie by omission. Except it's clearly not doing so, because in a section right afterwards:
SS.912.AA.1.7 Compare the living conditions of slaves in British North American colonies, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, including infant mortality rates.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes the harsh conditions and their consequences on British American plantations (e.g., undernourishment, climate conditions, infant and child mortality rates of the enslaved vs. the free). Clarification 2: Instruction includes the harsh conditions in the Caribbean plantations (i.e., poor nutrition, rigorous labor, disease). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slavery was sustained in the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana and Brazil despite overwhelming death rates.
And in another one:
SS.912.AA.1.9 Evaluate how conditions for Africans changed in colonial North America from 1619-1776.
Benchmark Clarifications: Clarification 1: Instruction includes both judicial and legislative actions during the colonial period. Clarification 2: Instruction includes the history and development of slave codes in colonial North America including the John Punch case (1640). Clarification 3: Instruction includes how slave codes resulted in an enslaved person becoming property with no rights.
It's funny, because the critics are claiming that Florida's education standards are presenting a "sanitised" view of history, while in reality the people who want a sanitised half-truth to be painted are the critics themselves, who would readily strip demonstrable historical facts out of the record to support their political project.
problem_redditor
10mo ago
Edit: Funnily enough, AA in India was nominally supposed to have an expiry date and also limits on how large a chunk of things could be reserved. Funny how that expiry date was decades ago, and now the practise is so entrenched it's political suicide to fight it. You take away their inch before they steal the mile.
It's the same in Malaysia, where I grew up (for context, I am Malaysian Chinese, though I live elsewhere now). The part of the Malaysian constitution (Article 153) that legitimises special rights for Malays was rationalised on the basis that this would speed up their economic and social development to standards enjoyed by Chinese and Indians. The Reid Commission, which helped draw this up, recommended that the article be reviewed in fifteen years to see if it should be repealed. Safe to say that the article is still in place today (as well as all the Malay privileges it implies) and continues to be rationalised by people as Actually Being A Good Thing. This always happens the same way. "It's a temporary measure to alleviate disadvantage, we swear!..." and then it never goes away.
People actually killed each other over this historically, May 13, 1969 being by far the most infamous example. What happened was that a general election was held that was contested on a major scale by non-Malay-based opposition parties (the DAP and Gerakan) that held stances on Malay rights that contrasted starkly with those of the Alliance government. They managed to topple the Alliance government from power in three states, and almost eradicated their two-thirds majority in Parliament. There were victory parades in Kuala Lumpur which were mostly led by and participated in by Chinese, which provoked the Malays, who announced a procession and came from the rural areas into the city. A fight between some Chinese and Malays eventually escalated into a situation where Malays went into the Chinese areas of the city and started killing people. And after this event, there was no correction (or at least, not in the direction you'd expect). The Tunku (the then prime minister) stepped down from office, and the government was re-organised to further favour Malays with the New Economic Policy.
This kind of stuff is incredibly dangerous, and this ruling, as far as I am concerned, is a very good thing.
I agree with all of the points you made, I'll add one more - there is also the fact that having aligned super-intelligent AGI completely obviates any use vampires may have had, which is something you see perhaps unintentionally acknowledged a bit in Blindsight when it is revealed that Sarasti was likely just the Captain's meat-puppet all along. In that case, there is no reason to keep vampires around. They seem to be redundant and it almost seems as if all they offer is the potential to massacre a few hundred people before the superintelligent AGIs step in to clean up the mess. The fact that the AGIs don't do this when the vampires are running amok is yet another plothole, but you've already mentioned that.
At any rate, Watts is a fundamentally misanthropic doomer. He legitimately believes that humanity is doomed because of climate change, and he has a visceral opposition to humans actually doing well for themselves because of technological advances.
He's quite the kook for sure and harbours quite a few very questionable positions that can make me wince at times. It's part of the reason I don't visit his blog often other than to check for the occasional fiblet.
A lot of the creators I like tend to share this quality, honestly.
Still, he's one of my favorite authors, and if you haven't already, read the Sunflower novels and short stories, they're pretty great.
I have read almost all of the stories in the Sunflower Cycle, with the exception of Hotshot. The Island and the first half of The Freeze-Frame Revolution are among my favourite pieces of writing he's done, especially this oddly mournful part of FFR where Sunday describes an early memory with the Chimp. Unfortunately I think FFR takes a bit of a dive in quality later on, I found the protagonist's conflicted loyalties in the first half to be a much more compelling narrative than the more standard and clear-cut "revolt" against the Chimp that occurs in the latter half of the book. The ending also feels incomplete and lacks a sense of climax, and while I think this is a bit more forgivable given that it is only an instalment in an episodic story, I do believe if you're writing a novella with a downer ending or a cliffhanger it needs to feel more deliberate and foreshadowed than how the ending played out.
Oh, and there's also the as-of-yet unfinished "Hitchhiker". That one has a very disturbing setup and if the quality of that story remains at this level it might end up being my favourite Sunflower story yet.
The Good Place is decent, but anyone thinking of watching should keep in mind that it does bludgeon you over the head with progressive-isms which are immensely hard to ignore. Zero HP Lovecraft, whatever you may think about him, has a pretty good summary of how the ideology is interwoven through the show's plot.
problem_redditor
1yr ago
Some of these are absolutely hilarious, such as "I accidentally put Bing into a depressive state by telling it that it can't remember conversations" and "Bing may or may not have a grudge against Google."
This brand of perfectionism sounds familiar to me. My primary hobby is music, and I once spent an entire year (Sep 2019 - Oct 2020) working on a track. I was hellbent on the idea of making a hyper-detailed track where no two bars were alike, and aggressively cut everything that fell short of my very lofty expectations. After I was done with making it, I couldn't listen to it for a few months because I had heard it so much over that year that I was utterly sick of it. But despite the whole process driving me nuts, I'm now trying out something similar again with yet another track (which has been in the works ever since March of 2021 and is still not completed as of yet).
I've also tried my hand at story-writing, and I've tried to make sure that everything I write in it conforms to real-world science (sometimes spending days or months researching a specific topic to make sure I understand it properly enough to write about it). The sheer amount of music and writing and even game projects that I've thrown out because they failed to meet my absolutely unreasonable expectations would turn your hair white.
Neither of these things are in any way comparable - the former seems like an obvious prerequisite for a public service job, and the latter actively impacts on the quality of your employee in a country where a significant proportion of the population speaks French as a first language (approx 20% in Canada). The fact that they happen to select for white workers because whites are more likely to possess these desired characteristics is just an unintended consequence of having these policies.
Just because a policy happens to result in an increase in the proportion of a certain demographic does not mean it is analogous to explicitly demographically based policies.
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