problem_redditor
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User ID: 1083
Just the Wikipedia page on the paradox of tolerance suffices, which features a direct quote from Popper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
Less well known [than other paradoxes] is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.—In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant. We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal.
It's fairly clear that Popper's original formulation of the paradox of tolerance was in large part about being intolerant of people who are themselves intolerant to open, rational debate and who are ready to win arguments using force. You cannot have things like free speech if you aren't willing to suppress people who would take it from others.
Now it has been warped into "Tolerant people accept all [attributes]. So people who express opinions which aren't accepting of all [attributes] need to be suppressed by any means necessary". And it should be noted that what constitutes "not accepting" under the progressive formulation of the term covers an absolutely massive scope. Belief in aggregate group differences that create differential outcomes, disbelief in progressive narratives of intergenerational guilt, and even opposition to actual race and sex discrimination promoted by the woke coalition are all categorised on a scale of intolerant to Literally Denying People's Right To Exist. At this point it covers practically every instance where someone disagrees with progressive talking points.
The hilarious part is that in Popper's original formulation of the paradox, the very people quoting him would be the "intolerant". They misuse Popper's paradox of tolerance to justify silencing the speech of their outgroup, and don't see how this makes them exactly the type of "intolerant" people Popper was talking about in his paradox.
You are getting flak here, but I agree and I sympathise with your core principle in that I, too, don't really care about the race of the people in an adaptation. Why these decisions were made is more my concern, and I don't think there's any possible way to separate the work itself from the larger social and political context that these decisions were made in.
I think one of the best windows into this is to look at historical fiction and how it is portrayed. As a case study let's look at the film Mary Queen of Scots. It casts Lord Thomas Randolph, who was an English ambassador, as a black man. He was not. He was Caucasian. Meanwhile, David Rizzio - Mary’s Italian secretary, who in real life was of white Mediterranean ethnicity, is portrayed by a Puerto Rican actor. So why did they portray it this way? Is it because they simply thought the actors could pull off the role? No: "Defending her adaptational decisions, the film’s director Josie Rourke acknowledged “we know that the characters that Gemma and Adria and Ismael Cruz Cordova [play] were white” and hence “those are people of color playing those who were historically not people of color.” However, Rourke, claiming influence from her theater background, asserted she demanded at the outset of studio discussions that she would not “direct an all-white period drama”. Instead, in justifying her choices Rourke contended her work was “a restorative piece” and that through her casting decisions “the past becomes the present”." Another example of this occurring is in Vikings, where Jarl Haakon, Norway's de facto ruler from 975 to 995, is portrayed as a strong, independent black woman.
Of course the woke will argue that criticisms of these decisions have nothing to do with a desire for seeing historical accuracy. I will give them this: They're correct about that. The historical inaccuracy of these adaptations isn't in and of itself what makes people angry. But they're wrong that the critics are motivated by bigotry and just not wanting to see black people in their films. What makes people angry (generally speaking) is the fact that the decision was an attempt to promote their personal political agenda at the expense of accuracy and integrity, and that it is considered taboo to speak about this even when the creators openly admit to it in public. And of course, this is not just the case in historical fiction but also completely fictional settings where people will often fill the cast to the brim with PoC and women and gay people regardless of how realistic it is for that setting, and regardless of how true it is to the original work if they're adapting an existing IP.
These were ideologically motivated decisions, not ones made in the interest of doing the work justice. As another user here noted (I think this was on the old place?) the point of these kinds of adaptations are "not to make changes out of respect to the source material, but to vandalise the original property to the point where the adaptation is unmistakable political graffiti, with the subconscious intent of proving that they are able to exact their political will anywhere and everywhere without being challenged". And when fans of the IPs point out the clear insincerity, they get lambasted for being horrible racists and sexists and homophobes who Just Don't Like Women And Minorities.
This is why they can't just make new IPs - it's not just nostalgia-baiting. It's more that nothing from the predecessor culture can be allowed to survive untainted. They openly admit to having those intentions, too, only in nicer language. We need a new, updated version of Cinderella with a feminist narrative, a gatekeeping gaslighting girlboss protagonist and a black, "genderless", drag queen-looking creature that is supposed to be a Fairy Godmother, and where the evil stepmother is only the way she is because a man victimised her. All your beloved idols, your myths, your practices will be perverted to serve the successor ideology, and you will remain quiet while we co-opt everything.
When Progressives Defend Pedophiles: The Curious Case of Sarah Nyberg
In my previous thread about Gamergate where I challenged a speech Ian Danskin made on the topic for UC Merced, I said it would probably be the last thing I would write about the incident for a long while, and this is certainly flouting that.
But this writeup is not about the core issues of Gamergate. Rather, it's to highlight an egregious instance of misconduct from the progressive camp that is far too damning not to write about. It's definitely old news now, but sometimes this stuff needs to be dusted off so it won't languish in some archived page in the asshole of the internet where progressives would undoubtedly rather have it stay.
So who is Sarah Nyberg?
Sarah Nyberg (srhbutts on Twitter) is a trans woman who became a prominent anti-Gamergate figure through constant attacks on Gamergaters on various forums and articles. Included among the things she's participated in is repeatedly dragging 8chan through the dirt over accusations of child porn and for being an "active pedophile network".
However, just 6-10 years before her involvement in anti-GG, Nyberg herself was an open pedophile who actively defended pedophilia, posted borderline CP on the forums of FFShrine (a site she ran), and also actively lusted after her 8 year old cousin, whom she called her little girlfriend (often abbreviated to "lgf"). This hugely came out in the mainstream when a series of videos was made about her by TheLeoPirate, and culminated in an article being made on Breitbart about her... leanings.
The original "slam dunk" evidence against Nyberg came from a series of WebCite archive pages, which came directly from FFShrine. Unfortunately, they can no longer be accessed - there is a reason for this, but I'll address that later. For now, just keep in mind that the primary trove of evidence that was initially used to indict Nyberg is currently missing, but they are online in various forms, in screenshots, videos and so on. Regardless, one can start building an extremely strong case for her pedophilia - and can do so even without the benefit of these sources.
The first part involves proving that the "Sarah" on FFShrine was in fact Sarah Nyberg, and that's a trivial task, since FFShrine was outright registered under her name. In addition, here she is on her main Twitter account, openly admitting to it being her site.
GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over.
Oops.
In addition, Sarah has had more accounts under different names. The email her site was registered under was called retrogradesnowcone.gmail. com, and you can see a user called retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums admitting they run FFShrine. And just to properly cement that retrogradesnowcone is Sarah, here is Sarah on Twitter approvingly posting a Ravishly article with her face in it with the caption "my face is out in the open", and here is a Hotornot profile called retrogradesnowcone with the very same photo of Sarah's face in it. Sarah also shares her pictures under her handle retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums here.
In short, srhbutts on Twitter, Sarah on FFShrine, and retrogradesnowcone on the Venus Envy Comic forums are all the same person: Sarah Nyberg.
To begin, let's look at the logs on FFShrine. While the WebCite pages directly archiving the chat logs from FFShrine are not directly accessible anymore, there are images on the internet, taken from there, which are still up. One can also confirm that these WebCite archives contained in that pastebin page were directly archived from 2005 FFShrine logs when combing archive.is for archives of the WebCite pages.
Among the images of the WebCite logs floating around, there are a few which are quite incriminating. Like this one, where Nyberg openly admits to being a pedophile, admits to being attracted to her younger cousin, Dana, calls her her little girlfriend, and states that "let me see Dana and I will get you all the silverware you can eat". Here, Nyberg says again "Dana is my cousin that I miss very much <3" and notes she doesn't know what to tell her cousin's parents to make it not seem weird. Then states she wants to kiss her, although don't worry, she wouldn't unless her cousin wants to learn how to kiss or something. Here, Nyberg confirms that Dana is 8 years old and here, Nyberg admits Dana gives her erections.
In addition to this, a former user of FFShrine, Roph, also uploaded further leaks of FFShrine IRC chats to his own website, slyph. org. Although slyph. org is no longer working, you can download the zip files of these IRC logs once uploaded there at archive links such as this one (warning, the logs will auto-download). Things get even worse here, and here are some of the more incriminating sections of the logs:
In file 2006-12-29.035011.html, Sarah posts a bunch of links to photos on 12chan and asks "how old are they", along with one she calls "cute ^T^". The response from a user called thetruetidus is "below 10 - Sarah ???"
In file 2006-12-30.101829.html, she posts links to online organisations for "girllovers and boylovers", then again posts a bunch of links to photos. Then subsequently says this:
(18:55:54) Sarah: yea i no
(18:55:56) Sarah: there' sa nipple
(18:55:59) Sarah: alert alpott
In file 2006-12-31.015010.html, she posts yet another set of links to photos on 12chan (which, by the way, makes her denunciation of 8chan incredibly hypocritical), then says when linking one of them:
(11:18:27) Sarah: [LINK CENSORED] she looks drugged :(
The response from other users is as such:
(11:19:43) LiquidCruelty: The one where she looks drugged
(11:19:44) Sarah: LiquidCruelty
(11:19:45) LiquidCruelty: that's CP
(11:19:51) LiquidCruelty: I can see underage twat
(11:19:52) ivorynight: ya
(11:19:54) ivorynight: i see some vagin
Sarah's response is to say that "nudity isn't CP, also I can't see anything", and in response LiquidCruelty and ivorynight state "Oh bullcrap" and "well take some vitamins and try harder, I know you went over this with a magnifying glass". In another section from the same file, Sarah states she's 6 on the inside but admits "I just turned 21".
To further confirm the veracity of the logs, there was a period of time where the latest IRC chat lines from FFShrine were embedded on her video game music download site Galbadia Hotel, archive pages of which Roph posted on KotakuInAction. Let's see some of these chat logs (which are direct archives of the page, by the way):
On 2006-01-29, Sarah states "thank heaven for little girls" and expresses concern over the fact she "only sees her lgf a few times a year". When asked when she's seeing her again, she responds "at the very latest I will in summer sometime. my dad wants to go visit her place because he wants to go fishing there and I'd tag along and hopefully convince him to go fairly regularly !" On 2006-03-05, Roph asks her "so who is dana? =o". She responds: "dana's my lgf ^________^ - little girl friend !" It's notable how well the content of the logs embedded here match up with the ones previously mentioned, and the fact that she continuously tries to get close to Dana just to get herself off in secret without informing anyone of what's happening is frankly quite unsettling (and that's not even addressing the posted pictures of children). And just to confirm that the Roph who owned slyph. org and posted the IRC chat logs is indeed the same Roph in the FFShrine IRC chat, here's him linking to slyph. org in the Galbadia Hotel IRC chat lines.
In addition to the evidence from FFShrine and all the related sites, there's also her postings on the Venus Envy Comic forums under the handle retrogradesnowcone. In this thread in the Venus Envy Comic forums on 2006-01-14, Nyberg openly admits "for the record: yes, I am a pedophile. no, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. no, I don't-- I wouldn't ever-- have sex with children. no, I don't look at child porn." Just remember, this is someone who later in the year went on to say "nudity isn't cp" on FFShrine and decided it was perfectly acceptable to post photos of a potentially drugged kid on internet forums - photos which users went on to identify as having "underage twat".
A user named DJ Izumi, in that thread, goes on to post chat logs from elsewhere where Nyberg, again under her retrogradesnowcone handle, talks about her "lgf" and says an array of other questionable things. Such as:
Quote:
[01:20] [LINK CENSORED] > nambla ;-;;
Quote:
[01:27] that site I tried to show you? it's a site for lesbian pedophiles. jftr
Quote:
[01:57] ;-;; this is making me miss my lgf
[01:57] lgf?
[01:57] little girl friend.
Quote:
[03:08] I don't think it's right to do sexual things with a child, not because a child can't consent, but because in the context of society it can really @#%$ them up. in a more sex-positive society I don't think it'd be a problem
Quote:
[03:11] I'm attracted to (usually) about 6 to 12. been attracted to as low as 4 but that's atypical
If further evidence is still required, I'd also note that Nyberg was known as a pedophile as early as 2007, long before Gamergate was a thing. As user ItsGotSugar writes about FFShrine in October of 2007: "Another character [on FFShrine] was Sarah, an administrator who was allegedly a pedophile. (Don't ask me whether "she" was really a girll; it was hard to tell.) I think Sarah had been expressing an unhealthy fixation on children from the very beginning, and I could only hope it was all some disgusting in-joke that had gone on for too long." Similarly, in 2010, 4 years before Gamergate existed, user BasilFSM notes that "You know what the worst thing about this Sarah is? She/He's a known pedophile. That's deplorable in itself."
Furthermore, in this interview with Milo there's this accusation by an anon called "M" accusing Sarah of initiating inappropriate roleplay with her, despite knowing that she was underage, and she would say things like "mommy tickle me where it's wet". And later on in the interview M states that her claims were ignored on Twitter. Keep in mind, this is an unsubstantiated allegation, but it is an unsubstantiated allegation that aligns with what we do know about Sarah. While this alone is not something that the argument of Sarah's inappropriate behaviour can rest on, the contents of all these disparate pieces of evidence align so well with each other that it's honestly quite implausible that all of this has somehow been faked by Gamergate (a common accusation by anti-GGs looking to defend her).
Nyberg herself on Twitter and elsewhere has also made statements that often basically are tantamount to an admission that these logs are hers. Apart from the open admission by srhbutts that "GG hacked into my server to get 10 year old logs to harass me over", there's this Twitter thread wherein she tries to defend herself with this response: "View the unedited logs. Everyone behaved in similar ways".
Eventually, Nyberg writes a medium article responding to the whole thing where she never concretely refutes the claims against her, never even claims the evidence against her has been faked, but defends herself by stating that she was "just being an edgelord". She states "Chat logs from an IRC room I was in nearly a decade ago were leaked to gamergate. To say the contents of those logs were not flattering would be putting it lightly. They are, in some ways, much what you’d expect from an early-2000’s chatroom of 4chan expats trying too hard to outdo each other for shock value. Even with that context, much of what I said was gross and disturbing, and I have no interest in defending it. Since then, I’ve learned that intent isn’t magic, and a playground of the taboo isn’t particularly conducive to moral growth. That I’ve grown past the person I was back then is something I am deeply and forever thankful for." She tries to paint it as regrettable teenage edgelord behaviour (she was 21) that she's grown out of, paints the people accusing her of being a pedophile as acting in bad faith, and casts herself as a victim of Gamergate harassment.
So even Nyberg cops to these logs being hers. And it's noticeable how her response to this is the anti-GG version of The Toxic Gossip Train. Even a good portion of the comments on her medium article are incredibly disgusted with how she treats the whole thing, with one stating "I’m sorry but I don’t think you get to just wash your hands of it and claim edgelord status. From the looks of it you were pretty deep into the role. Vieweing, discussing, and distributing child porn. That’s not edgelord that’s criminal." Another states "Pedophilia is a serious accusation. The evidence against you is disturbingly accurate. Your sob story won’t help you." In the same fashion as Miss Ukelele, the point of this post is not to issue an apology, she's essentially trying to trivialise her acts, claim victimhood and scold people into shutting up about her behaviour. It is true that "teenage edgelords" claim extreme views all the time, and sometimes objectionable ones. But what Nyberg did clearly falls far beyond that.
Yet in the light of Nyberg's medium article, the progressive crowd immediately comes out celebrating her and calling her stunning and brave. Here's Leigh Alexander's reaction (yes, that Leigh Alexander) as an example:
Definitely read it.
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643799292067610625
It's amazing how over and over again the women targeted by these nobodies have the grace to make their experience useful to others
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643800965943005184
anyway remember to please respect and support women in your field always, and do not define them by these experiences others created
https://twitter.com/leighalexander/status/643803653082644480
Writer for Houston Press and Cracked Jeff Rouner had a particularly flabbergasting reaction, which was to send Nyberg a photo of his kid wearing her new hoodie to cheer her up. He would later go on to delete this post.
In contrast, other people who knew her from way back when start picking apart her article. Roph notes "Sarah is right in that ffshrine had “edgelords”. I was one, too. I visited 4chan almost daily, used the current hot memes and phrases, joked about stuff. Shared the funny, hot or shocking meme images. Many people there did. Then why does nobody give a damn about any other user in all those logs (which are absolutely genuine, don’t get me started)? Because none of us were paedophiles. An open, proud, adamant, often very defensive paedophile. Defensive of paedophilia. Often justifying it through various arguments. Attempting to normalise it."
Plasmatorture, a former mod on FFShrine, notes "The amount she talked about it and the great lengths she went to convince everyone that she was a suffering martyr for having these feelings she knew she could never act on (supposedly) made it pretty damn clear she wasn't just trolling. That's like 5+ years of playing the long con. No troll has ever had the patience for that." CoryMartin similarly notes "The members of FFShrine and other communities you and your members mixed with (crankeye, kefkastower) didn’t interpret your ongoing demonstrations and admissions of pedophilia as you being an edgelord: they took it as you being an actual pedophile. It was taken as fact, and you had no issues with people knowing it at the time. I believe I was around 14 then, and it certainly creeped me out. Either you’re incredibly inept at comedy to the point where even people who interacted with you casually on a daily basis thought you were serious, or you’re deliberately lying to cover up something about you that most people would find deeply troubling. I think the latter is far more likely."
Now, all of this would just be hearsay if we didn't have the chat logs, as well as Nyberg's own admissions that she did in fact author these logs. However, with these corroborating pieces of information, they become part of an ever-strengthening case against her. Yet despite this evidence, news articles often gave her the Zoe Quinn treatment, painting her as an Oppressed Victim which Nobody Had Any Reason To Be Angry With, such as this article by The Verge that links to Nyberg's genuinely terrible medium article as the only source on the topic and states that she was "subject to one of the biggest and nastiest organized harassment campaigns of Gamergate".
After the initial video and after Nyberg's sordid internet history came to light, anti-Gamergaters started attempting to damage control to an almost incredible degree. One instance of this was when Randi Harper posted lists of Gamergate supporters on public facebook groups. To be charitable, these people publicly associated with Gamergate, so this doesn't constitute doxxing. To be less charitable, part of her stated reasoning for engaging in this behaviour was to "take the attention away" from her pedophile friend Sarah Nyberg. Other anti-GGs, including currently prominent YouTube voices such as Dan Olson of Folding Ideas, were there and openly encouraged this behaviour, with some calling it "noble" of Harper to divert attention away from Nyberg's pedophilic behaviour. All this can be found in Crash Override, the anti-GG chat group Zoe Quinn and others were using to coordinate plans.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:22 AM] Randi Harper: i'm talking to amib in DM.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:29 AM] Randi Harper: all of this is going to take the attention away from sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:32 AM] Dan Olson: and the second biggest #GamerGate Ultras, is fully public.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:37 AM] Randi Harper: i'm going to become GG enemy #1, i'm hoping.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:41 AM] Charloppe: ty for that randi
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] SF: That's really noble of you.
[04/01/2015, 9:43:48 AM] Charloppe: she needs some peace right now
And:
[04/01/2015, 9:48:38 AM] Athena Hollow: <3
[04/01/2015, 9:48:57 AM] Athena Hollow: They had to fucking SCOUR FOR MONTHS to find the shit on sarah.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:03 AM] Athena Hollow: and got fucking LUCKY on that.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:13 AM] Athena Hollow: fuck them.
[04/01/2015, 9:49:26 AM] Athena Hollow: they joined a goddamn public facebook group. fucking morons.
Notice what Athena Hollow in particular says about this. There's not even a denial of what they found. She only cares that GG got "lucky" by discovering Sarah's pedophilic behaviour and she's angry they could use it as a cudgel against anti-GG in general. This is what an unprincipled tribalist looks like. Imagine being so utterly unscrupulous that you would provide ballast and cover for a pedophile to win internet points against Gamergate.
It gets worse. You know why you can no longer access any of the original WebCite caches that were used to implicate Nyberg? The reason is because of an upstanding citizen called Izzy Galvez, who was another anti-GGer who was also part of Crash Override. In a Twitter thread, he gleefully posted images of him actively working to conceal evidence of Nyberg's pedophilia from the public (archive link here). The images in question demonstrate that he sent emails to WebCite claiming the material was being used for harassment, which resulted in WebCite making the snapshots of her domain unavailable to the public.
Not only did Galvez actively try to conceal information, he also attempted to manufacture misinformation to try and paint the logs as faked. He makes a post on GamerGhazi supposedly providing screenshots that supposedly show that the logs were last edited in 2015, therefore they were were "tampered with by GG" to add pedo material. The screenshots actively redact any identifying information about the site to make it appear that these are from FFShrine, but as this source notes in reality these screenshots came from Roph's backup of the logs in slyph. org, and not actually from the FFshrine website. In other words it "only proves that Roph uploaded files in 2015, NOT that the files were edited in 2015, or that they were created in 2015".
There's plenty of other instances of progressives trying to provide cover and ballast for Nyberg, such as an article by Margaret Pless entitled "5 Reasons Why I Stand with Sarah Nyberg" (which was then fully rebutted by this medium article called "5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Stand with Sarah Nyberg"). But of course, any discussion about Gamergate isn't complete without a discussion of how RationalWiki has covered it.
RationalWiki, as you can imagine, fervently defends Nyberg, courtesy of an obsessive anti-GGer called Ryulong who frequently vandalised the Wikipedia and RationalWiki articles on anything even slightly related to Gamergate, and who was even funded by GamerGhazi after he posted his GoFundMe on there and it was stickied by an admin. Because of Ryulong, RationalWiki is hosting two contradictory (and false) defences of Sarah Nyberg: "Timeline of Gamergate" claims that Nyberg was simply "expressing disgust at pedophilic roleplay" (this is completely unsupported by the link they use to back it up). "List of Gamergate claims", on the other hand, tries to state that, okay, "she made claims of being a pedophile, but she has since said was her and her friends making 4chan-style trolling jokes at each others’ expenses" - a claim that, as you can see by the evidence provided so far, is based on an attempt by Nyberg to misconstrue her own behaviour. A recent (2021) attempt to correct these false claims on RationalWiki by a person called Doris V. Sutherland resulted in the edits being completely reversed by a user called TechPriest, and the argument eventually reached the talk page. Without warning, Doris was then completely banned by the RationalWiki moderators, with the only rationale being "gator sock" - despite the fact that if you read Doris's article she is clearly not in favour of Gamergate.
Doing research on this post made me want to scrub myself with sandpaper, and the 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. Unfortunately, most of the incriminating information now resides in heterodox news sources at best, now-defunct blogs and sites that have to be reached through archive links at worst, and as a result this information has pretty much disappeared from the eyes of the public. Most "authoritative" sources and large scale collections of information are strictly policed to make sure that reporting is sufficiently congenial to the progressive viewpoint, and the only thing the public ever hears is a skewed view of the entire affair.
This is, in real time, how history gets written. Once all the dissenters disappear for good, all this stuff will be forgotten, and the only thing left will be a bunch of seemingly authoritative articles that will cause people to harbour a distorted view of how the culture war actually played out.
Quite frankly, the "man strong and powerful, man subjugate women who are dependent on him" perspective is an incredibly reductive conceptualisation of traditional gender relations which I unfortunately see bandied around ad nauseam. You can't just hold everything else to be the same “well ceteris paribus men are stronger” and extrapolate the entirety of gender relations from a single principle.
There are major sources of social power women possess, informed partially by people's preferences towards protecting women and a general women-are-wonderful effect. For example, there's the Moral Machine Experiment where a preference for protecting women was found in almost all countries, even many "patriarchal" ones. The result of unwillingness to harm women compared to men has been replicated in many, many different studies. And it holds when studied not only in a questionnaire context wherein people are merely quizzed about it, but also in experimental, real-world contexts. People are less likely to hurt women for personal gain, drivers leave more space for a cyclist who looks female, people are more willing to label male violence against women as a crime than the reverse even after controlling for perceptions of injury, and so on. As to the women-are-wonderful effect where people perceive women more positively, that too has been confirmed and replicated in multiple studies.
The rallying cry of feminists with regards to relationships in the past is always the legal doctrine of coverture. "Women weren't allowed to own property or enter into contracts!" Actually, they were, if they were single. Marriage changed the legal status of women from feme sole into feme covert, and sure, a feme covert could not own property (her property, goods and earnings belonged to her husband) and a feme covert could also not enter into contracts in their own name. This is technically true, but it is also a misleading half-truth. This analysis leaves several important things out, namely the male responsibility that stemmed from marriage. Husbands had a legal responsibility to support their wives, and what was considered "necessaries" for a wife was dependent on socioeconomic status. So a rich man could not simply leave his wife in rags, feed her gruel and claim she was technically being supported. The next thing to note is that the husband, along with taking ownership of all of his wife's property, also took responsibility for all debts. If the family needed to buy goods on credit or otherwise take on debt, well, the husband contracts for the family, so inevitably, the debt is under his name, and the responsibility for paying it falls only on him. Remember, failure to pay that debt could result in imprisonment. These were some of the risks and costs that the husband took on under coverture.
Furthermore, if a wife was not already being adequately provided with her necessaries by her husband, she could buy necessaries on her husband's credit (this was called the law of agency). She was basically given the ability to act as her husband's agent. This is important because it means all debt contracted on behalf of the family's maintenance (whether made by the husband or the wife) was held to be the husband's debt. And defaulting on the debt meant he could go to jail. Husbands had some recourse if the wife was spending way more than she needed by telling traders not to deal with her in the future, and sometimes cases were brought where husbands were not held liable for the debts, but IIRC in such cases it was not the wife who got in trouble - it was the trader who bore the loss. Furthermore, in reality some wives actually seem to have gotten their husbands in legal trouble through overspending. As I said, under coverture, husbands were the only ones who could be thrown in jail for debt, and this was a significant risk for men in the marital position.
To build on this, here's an interesting statistic: In the eighteenth century, the vast majority of imprisoned debtors in England and Wales were men (all estimates of the sex ratios of imprisoned debtors are over 90% male), and it is likely that coverture was a very big reason why. Yes, women had to trade something for protection and provision (something I do not view as unreasonable, considering the costs that undertaking the role of provision and protection placed on men - it is only fair that there be reciprocity). And sure, it was a bit of a restrictive marital contract for women who wanted to take on more of an active role even if that meant they had to assume risk they would otherwise be shielded from. But it wasn't only restrictive for women. Men did not get to say "Hey, I want my wife to manage all the marital finances if that means she takes on all the risk of default and also assumes responsibility for supporting me". Men did not simply get to abandon their role because it didn't suit them.
And in practice, sex roles were not nearly as strictly prescribed as coverture stated. Women could and did participate in public sphere work, did a lot of purchasing for the family, managed the household property, and exercised a large amount of agency over the household economy generally speaking. When the family defaulted, men went to debtors' prison, but their families often followed them into these debtors' prisons. Both sides' responsibilities and rights were shared to a greater degree in practice than was stipulated in law, and ultimately the idea that women lived in some state of subjugation is a myth.
And moving away from the strict topic of relationships, the idea - that because men hold positions of formal power, society will favour men - is called into question when you look at multiple sources of evidence. Men do not act as a collective male "us" against a collective female "them". A study examining the raw and adjusted gender gaps in defendant pleas, jury convictions, and judge sentences from 1715 to 1913 at the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court in London found that women were consistently treated more leniently - they were less likely to be subjected to the most severe form of punishment, even controlling for observable case characteristics. One of the posited reasons for this was that: "Given that males were deemed responsible for the welfare of females (their wives) in the home, it certainly seems feasible that they carried this duty over to the courtroom. ... [O]ne can think of judges and jurors as being less likely to convict females because of their positive taste/preference for protecting them."
The male:female suicide rates in the past also seem to contradict the idea that the system back then favoured men's preferences over women. In England and Wales the suicide rate was much, much greater for males than it was for females in the nineteenth century. Males committed suicide 3 to 4 times as often as females. According to this article: "The male rate was consistently higher than the female rate over the entire time period although the male to female (sex) ratio rose from 3.3 in 1861 to 4.0 in 1886 and 1906 and subsequently declined steadily to its lowest level (1.5) in 1966 before increasing again". This was similarly true in places like Switzerland. This article notes that "At the end of the 19th century, the suicide sex ratio (female-male ratio) in Switzerland was 1:6. 100 years later the sex ratio has reduced to about 1:2.5." Men must be the only historically "privileged" group who historically did more labour, who historically were given longer sentences for the same crimes, and who were historically far more likely to commit suicide compared to their supposedly "oppressed" counterparts.
Another note on historical female power: The social/moral power allotted to women seems to be pretty immense - the White Feather Girls in WW1 handed out white feathers to men in civilian clothes, marking them out as cowards if they did not enlist, and after that recruitment increased significantly - volunteering surged by a third during the 10 days after the first mention of the White Feather Girls in the news. Those young women who struck men at the very heart of their masculine identities - bestowing them a feather telling them "If you don't go off to be maimed or die, you are no longer a man in the eyes of some brassy chit you've never even met before and will probably never see again" - were exercising a classic female form of social power. And many men went because women's censure had the power to drive them straight into the teeth of death. Here is a recounting of one such case.
I think all of these things are enough to lead one to at least question the idea of historical female oppression. This seems to have just become a point of dogma, it aligns with our instinctive perceptions of men and women, but it's just not correct.
EDIT: added another link
I'm trying to stay away from politics for now, but I feel a bit compelled to add to your comment.
As someone who's been involved in them before, Internet communities dedicated to the arts are probably the worst in this regard. There was a Discord server I was in a couple years back dedicated to a specific electronic band where the very same thing happened to me, except it was more farcical than this. So, some background - I was an early user of the server, I was casual friends with one of the mods there, and while little interesting conversation could be found from them they were at least pleasant to talk to. At first, the server was a fairly low-key place where one could talk about a certain artist's works, share their own music, etc. I came to be known as a regular there.
At some point, after an influx of new users, the server took on an explicitly political bent, despite (if I remember correctly) a rule stating no politics in the server. People would speak at length about politics and always from an incredibly progressive viewpoint, and when people would bring up concerns about the politicisation of the server the response was "Some people don't have the privilege of not thinking about politics". You had regular bashing of people like Jordan Peterson in there. You had users openly endorsing sentiments like "I hate men", stating that there was value in these open and unabashed statements of group hatred because it might enlighten people about their "privilege". The progressive conceptualisation of identity-based privilege and oppression, as well as the directionality of that oppression, were all taken as unchallengeable fact in that server and it never needed to be rigorously proved or demonstrated, just asserted.
Quite predictably, there was also talk about the underrepresentation of women in electronic music. The answer was always that some nebulous socialisation of sorts dissuaded them from trying their hand at it. Inherent or innate factors were not considered. As far as I know, no studies on the gender difference in empathising-systemising (E-S) or the impact of E-S on music preferences were ever linked there. It's also worth noting that the server at this point was also filled to the brim with purportedly gender-dysphoric people who identified as something or other. IIRC, one of the most political people on the server at the time I was there was a trans woman from Iran. I remember this person posting video of their "interpretive dance" which basically consisted of them uncoordinatedly jumping up and down on their bed while a song played in the background. I swear to God, I am not making this up.
I made quite a lot of attempts to argue that politics should be out of the server, that it didn't belong in a server dedicated to an electronic artist, and nobody really acted on it - instead, they continued having political discussion in complete contradiction to the rule. Eventually, I decided that if they didn't want to adhere to an ethic of "no politics", I would not be bound by that rule either. When they were having one of their many progressive-leaning discussions, I decided to outline some of my problems with that ideology in as polite and moderate a fashion as I knew how. I garnered responses, and before I could answer them a moderator came in and stated that things were "getting too political". The politics rule was conveniently invoked, and the entire conversation was shut down in a manner that allowed progressives to have the last word.
I left the server for a bit, and when I came back, things didn't seem to be that much better. I had only a bit of time to speak with some of the users there before I was abruptly banned from the server, and a longstanding friend of mine (who was still in there) posted me the text of conversations involving the mods - including the one who I was friends with for a good while - where they were shit-talking me. Stating that I had expressed "harmful things", and that I "creeped them out". My "harmful" take was stating that the relations between the sexes aren't characterised by oppression.
Apparently the topic of my banning still comes up with some regularity every now and then in that server.
This whole thing is genuinely hilarious, the fact that the "mummy" bears an uncanny resemblance to E.T. and the repeated assertions by the press that scientists managed to "draw DNA evidence using radiocarbon dating" makes this perhaps the most unintentionally funny thing I've read in a while. Guys, I measured the velocity of a moving car using mass spectrometry, please believe my results.
At this point, I would be glad to never hear about ayy lmaos again - I'm actually interested in the topic but the ayy craze has crossed the line into sheer parody. It's particularly frustrating because there are more credible (albeit circumstantial) pieces of evidence out there they could grab onto like the Viking Lander biological experiments, but their case has hinged around ridiculous UFOlogy and eyewitness testimony and now apparently they're resorting to using ridiculous E.T. looking mummies that obviously aren't faked at all.
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.
One of the things that was remarkable about this campaign was how overwhelming the Yes campaign's resources were.
The amount of resources there are behind progressive politics is pretty much always immense, basically every influential institution was supporting Yes. At the entrance of my train station, there were Yes campaigners outside for days, handing out flyers to people. Even bodies that should strictly be impartial such as local governments (City of Sydney) were putting up advertisements all over the place telling people to support the Voice, which is frankly inappropriate and clearly overstepping the bounds of their ambit. As you note, it ended up being very clear that this was not some grassroots campaign for change, but a well-funded, dominant group filled with people who have an overwhelming influence over what the public gets to hear and see.
It's also very clear that the well-funded progressive elite, the people who populate the opinion-setting parts of the media, academia, and various other institutions, have hugely lost touch with the rest of the country and simply don't care to listen to them. Then every single time people turn against their policies, there always seems to be such a great amount of surprise and dismay that people would disagree with them, and a knee-jerk assumption that the reason for lack of support can simply be chalked up to stupidity or racism. Perhaps some of it is performative, but I do think that they really believe it.
I've been refreshing the counts for the past few hours, and this referendum failed even harder than I thought it was going to as well. 60% rejecting the proposal and losing all states is a pretty damning result for The Voice. I'm particularly surprised by Tasmania's rejection, because it was a state that Yes supporters were relying on to support the referendum, and surveys before the referendum indicated it might vote yes.
Something that Mundine stated in the aftermath of the referendum results did resonate with me quite heavily:
Warren Mundine, the leading no campaigner, has credited his side’s focusing on migrant communities for helping defeat the referendum.
Mundine spoke to Sky News, noting “some of them come from countries where they were second-class citizens” and were open to a message about the voice causing a divide.
We knew that the migrant community is 50% of Australia, either born overseas or their parents have been born overseas. We deliberately target that group.”
I'm the kind of migrant that has experienced this, and am incredibly opposed to affirmative action. Progressives might think their ideas are revolutionary and new, but their mindset of victimhood, group accountability and unequal racial treatment on that basis is basically endemic in many third-world countries, and many migrants have been on the wrong side of policies that look and quack a good amount like progressive politics.
As a result, I was in support of No from the very beginning, and though I couldn't vote in it I am happy with the outcome of the referendum. If the Voice had ended up with too much influence it would essentially have been a permanent, constitutionally mandated lobbying group which constituted an outright subversion of a proper and impartial democratic process, if it ended up with too little influence it would have basically been useless. Both would have warranted a No vote.
problem_redditor
8d ago
To be a bit flippant, I feel that in order to consider this a stain on your character, you must have dysfunctionally low levels of Machiavellianism, way below the average and possibly to the point it constitutes a pathology.
You haven't done anything wrong.
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.
problem_redditor
10mo ago
...Yes? Nobody is disputing that class mattered and that second class men fared worse than first class men. None of that invalidates the fact that men in every class were less likely to survive than women.
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."
I agree that the mainstream consensus view of GamerGate is almost entirely false - but I don't see how you would go about changing it, or how that's likely to be a particularly beneficial use of time compared to other issues one could work on?
I'm not saying I'm personally going to change the mainstream consensus view in its totality. For some further context about why this exists, I did research on this "9 year old drama" specifically to try and present a different perspective to someone in my personal life who was exposed to the culture war at least in part through Gamergate and had certain preconceptions around the topic that weren't quite correct, and who also watches Dan Olson's channel - and this is drama that Olson was involved in and is relevant to an appraisal of his character. Trying to convince someone in meatspace is more valuable than trying to convince someone on some anonymous forum who doesn't know you. I decided that since I'd already done the work some of it should be put up since someone might find it useful. If it really invokes so much ire that this gets brought up at all, I won't put it up here and I'll exclusively write about other things.
Moreover, I'd suggest that posts like the top-level one here, to the eyes of anyone who isn't already deeply enmeshed in GamerGate-related drama, are going to come off as obsessive and weird. No casual observer would read that post and change their mind on GamerGate. It's too bogged down in trivial detail, and frankly comes off as a bit too close to cyber-stalking for comfort.
Frankly, being "obsessive and weird" is the only way I've ever gotten anywhere when it comes to politics, and when I'm writing here, I'm not typically writing for casual observers nor am I writing for the purpose of optimising my optics. I'm writing to make sure everyone can independently confirm every claim that's been made for themselves. A strong sense of skepticism and the ability to get yourself to sift through an impressive amount of trivial details almost no one would care about is the only way you're going to be able to handle the sheer wave of terrible reporting and misinformation that's thrown your way, and if that comes off as strange to some people, so be it. I suppose I've typical-minded too much, but I also don't feel like there's anything wrong with trying to get a full and comprehensive picture of how a situation played out.
I have a partner who likes cities. He has always seen himself living in one, and has a certain affinity to the culture and outlook of many city-dwellers. I am having trouble understanding or sympathising with his viewpoint, and vice versa.
This might seem tangential, but bear with me:
I went to the Blue Mountains over Easter - for the unacquainted, it is a large wilderness area outside of Sydney and a World Heritage site. It’s probably one of my most frequented excursion spots due to its proximity to the city, yet it’s a completely different world out there.
The first thing I noticed, as is the case virtually every time I leave a major urban area, is that the silence and solitude is palpable. You can leave the window open and not be assaulted with a storm of noise (which occurs in the city even on the 13th floor of a building, I can attest to that). Leaving for the great outdoors is quite a good way to clear away the mental clutter that accumulates when you are overstimulated for a long period of time. I’ve done this whenever I get the chance, and it never fails to reset my brain. I listen to music a lot in my normal day-to-day life, but here it just felt wrong to do so.
Another thing that stuck out to me is that you can actually see the stars come out at night. The older I get, the more I appreciate this feature of being outdoors. The ability to look up into the heavens on a quiet night and see the universe above you is something that just doesn’t get old.
The natural environment is breathtaking, too. There are dry sclerophyll forests heavy with the aroma of eucalyptus and dotted with the golden blooms of wattles, rainforest-lined valleys and canyons that plunge to depths of 500 metres, beautiful little waterfalls and mossy creeks that swell after rain, and so on. One night when I was there, I did a night hike to a cascade named Cataract Falls, armed with only a headlamp, and when I turned off the light there were glow worms all over the place. The waterfall was like a natural amphitheatre covered in these shining little blue lights, and it was hard to tell where they ended and where the stars began.
I think this, along with many other experiences, has led me to an inevitable conclusion: I really detest city life.
They’re overwhelming, impersonal, noise-filled, cluttered environments, where you’re virtually forced to rub shoulders (in the literal sense) with people if you want to leave your house, and which are incredibly aesthetically alienating, especially ever since the utilitarian commodification of architecture got started, the trend that Bauhaus and other such design schools put into motion.
Keep in mind, Australian cities are probably less “vibrant” and less dense than, say, North American ones. I routinely hear Australians complain that they have no real cities, that everything closes early and that the nightlife is nonexistent, they consider Australia a country you go to for the outdoors and not the city life. Sydney itself is a reasonably well-maintained city, there are no seedy strip malls and it’s fairly walkable - but I still find it to be far too crowded and too noisy for my tastes, and find that the culture and views of the cosmopolitan urban-dwellers range from insipid to downright irritating.
The conveniences that cities offer are nice. But I am frankly struggling to think of any significant conveniences that are offered in a city which aren’t also offered in a small to medium size town that offers far greater recreation opportunities. If you can get a reasonable range of food and lodging, and some medical care, I find that sufficient. If the goal is thriving nightlife, constant activities, cosmopolitan feel and being able to go places at any time of the day then sure, cities are The Place To Be. But I place zero value on any of these things.
Cities are places I live in solely for work-related reasons. I have lived in many, and they are places I would never live in given the choice, and it makes it really difficult for me to even put myself in a frame of mind where I see it as the optimal way to live. Ask him about any of the things I mentioned, and he’ll reveal that none of it actually matters hugely to him. He finds these less urbanised places dead and depressing, a viewpoint which I could never understand - after you’ve lived in a city for any amount of time, it feels interminable - like an endless randomly generated series of the very same hedonistic pleasures expressed in slightly different ways.
Perhaps it really is just tribal affiliation - he identifies more with the outlook of those in the city and less with those in more rural areas. For me, it’s the very opposite.
I’m not sure what the point of writing this post is, I suppose I’m sourcing hot takes. It’s a difference that we’re both somewhat adamant about, and that may cause issues down the road - so maybe I’m asking to understand, or maybe I’m asking if anyone else here feels the same as I do.
In the US, where people and income are easier to keep track of, a third of custodial parents who are owed child support receive nothing.
I looked into the Census Bureau source that this statistic is based on, and the data seems to be based off self-reports by custodial parents, it is not being based off any kind of formal tracking of child support (that method of doing things poses problems too, as it does not include payments made through unofficial channels, but I won't get into that at the moment). Here are some selected quotes:
In this report, child support supposed to be received refers to the amount due as self-reported by the custodial parent. This amount includes both formal, court-ordered support (awards), as well as informal support agreed to between parents.
Of the 6.4 million custodial parents with child support agreements, 88.2 percent reported that these agreements were formal legal orders—established by a court or other government entity—while 11.8 percent reported informal agreements or understandings.
A total of $18.6 billion of child support was reported as received by custodial parents, amounting to 62.2 percent of the $30.0 billion that was supposed to be received in 2017 (Figure 6). ... Overall, custodial parents reported receiving $20.6 billion directly from non- custodial parents for support of their shared children in 2017, which included $2.0 billion received by 505,000 parents without child support agreements.
The technical documentation, which can be found here on the Census Bureau's website, notes this, too: "All household members 15 years of age and older that are biological parents of children in the household that have an absent parent were asked detailed questions about child support and alimony." It is asking the custodial parent, the one with the child in their household, not the non-custodial parent. And looking at the questionnaire used to assess child support payment makes it very clear that the intended target of the questionnaire is the recipient, not the obligor.
Here are some more selected quotes:
S300INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ARE ABOUT WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN ACCORDING TO THE (AGREEMENT/UNDERSTANDING/COURT ORDER/COURT AWARD)
IF THE RESPONDENT TELLS YOU WHAT THEY RECEIVED, PROBE TO MAKE SURE IT WAS WHAT THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO RECEIVE
S313a So you said you were SUPPOSED to receive $X (per month, per week, every other week, twice monthly, per year) (including back support), is that correct?
(1) Yes (2) No
===>_
S313b How much child support, in total, were you SUPPOSED to receive? ENTER THE AMOUNT
===>$,_ .00
S326INTRO DO NOT READ
THE NEXT QUESTIONS ASK ABOUT THE CHILD SUPPORT THE RESPONDENT ACTUALLY RECEIVED
S335 What is the correct amount of child support you ACTUALLY received in 2013? ENTER DOLLAR AMOUNT
===> $,_ .00
I could not find an equivalent questionnaire asking the non-custodial parent what they paid.
This is not, in any way, a trivial source of bias and needs to be kept in mind when you're using these statistics, but the Census Bureau does not disclose this as being a significant limitation of the data - despite the fact that they have used this methodology for a while and despite the fact that this census data has been used for decades to drum up huge social scares around deadbeat dads with no acknowledgement of the possible bias involved.
These caveats were outlined decades ago by Sanford Braver, who states in his book "Divorced dads: shattering the myths" that to answer these questions completely accurately, respondents would have to remember twelve to twenty-four different payments over the past year. In the absence of precise information, many if not most respondents will just try to make up a best estimate, which is a circumstance that allows for an incredible amount of bias to enter into one's results - even worse when you consider that many people are deeply angry at their exes. And if the census officials come to their conclusion based on reports by custodial parents that is going to hugely distort things, the effect being that the results will come with a built-in bias against non-custodial parents.
Braver conducts a study himself where he solves this problem by asking matched sets of custodial and non-custodial parents, and unsurprisingly, custodial parents (mostly mothers) report a much lower percentage of payments made than non-custodial parents (mostly fathers). 13% of mothers report receiving nothing despite being owed support, but only 4% of fathers report paying nothing despite being obligated. When looking at the overall payment statistic, divorced mothers report receiving between two-thirds and three-quarters of what they are owed, and fathers report paying better than 90 percent of what is owed. If we were to do what the Census Bureau did and interview the non-custodial parent only, child support nonpayment is barely even a problem at all!
He states, after this, "I am certainly not arguing that interviewing only fathers is what the Census Bureau ought to have done. I don't believe that noncustodial parents' reports should be uncritically accepted as truth, either. To me, it merely points out how erroneous the present practice of accepting the mother's report as truth without qualification is. When studying something as emotionally wrenching as divorce, it's nearly impossible for people to answer without bias. Indeed, both parents' reports are likely to be biased. In the absence of trustworthy objective official data to the contrary, it seems safest to assume that noncustodial parents are probably overstating child-support payments made, and custodial parents are probably understating. Thus, the truth lies somewhere in between, and our findings can best be thought of as "bracketing" true child-support compliance. In short, we must conclude that how much child support is not being paid remains in substantial dispute, but the amount being paid by divorced fathers is almost certainly higher than most official estimates. Deadbeat divorced dads are nowhere near as numerous as the stereotype portrays".
As to the divorced dads who don't pay, Braver notes that you can’t assume that this represents wilful noncompliance - the single biggest factor relating to nonpayment is typically unemployment and when you exclude fathers who experienced a period of unemployment from consideration, the compliance rate rises dramatically.
EDIT: a small correction
So, I belong to that portion of gay men who are completely uninterested in women. I have never felt particularly attracted to women in any manner nor feel any desire whatsoever to have sex with them. If a woman propositioned me, I would indeed turn her down. Perhaps it is my autistic inability to see things from others' perspectives, but the idea that women are so impressively attractive to men to the point that men are willing to endure the contradictory and punitive norms around courtship that are placed on them (which is apparent even from an outsider's perspective) is frankly wild to me.
I absolutely think that a portion of people in the rainbow community are reacting to social incentives and there are those who do so in order to extract benefits from the current social environment (non-binary being a popular one in certain circles), but there are people who are exclusively gay.
I notice that I am confused.
Frankly I've noticed I can't predict at all how people will react to things here, or what the basis is for people liking or disliking a post. People here will consistently upvote, say, source-less rants about how they feel like immigrants degrade their home country as top-level posts (which I find to be immensely low-effort content), but will react badly to other posts even if more well sourced. I also don't feel like my post clearly broke any rules in a way most of the other contributions here already don't.
I mean, I understand that people don't necessarily care about this, and that's perfectly fair. There's lots of things I come across here that I don't personally care about either, but I just ignore it and move on. It's a consequence of being in a general purpose political community. I certainly don't go on to leave pithy, low-effort comments about how little I give a shit about what's been posted. I also don't think that it's completely irrelevant to the current political climate.
It seems that people here upvote and downvote posts based on a completely alien set of criteria to me, and I'm too much of an autist to predict what's acceptable posting and what isn't. The only thing I can find that's consistent is that even here, speaking about Gamergate in 2023 is low status, and will be treated as such. It's the closest thing to something everyone has silently agreed not to touch, and doing so is considered a faux pas.
While it is true that Lightoller's behaviour was not necessarily replicated among other officers (something which I acknowledged), you seem to be trying to equate "They allowed men onto the boats sometimes" with "there was no chivalry involved" which doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Other officers did in fact prioritise women and children.
Furthermore, your isolation of that "33% survival rate" statistic and selective presentation of it is also misleading. First class men on the Titanic survived at rates lower than third class women.
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.
So I've recently watched the Netflix adaptation of The Three-Body Problem. One of the central plots of the show (and from what I can gather, also the book series) seems to be disappointingly half-baked, especially considering that the plot device is the namesake of the show and the title of the first book.
Something that's established early on is that the San-Ti (or the Trisolarans) live in a chaotic three-body (really a four-body) system that can't be predicted, and despite having the capability to enter into lungfish-like dormancy their civilisations kept being wiped out due to not being able to predict when destructive climatic shifts would occur. You could, however, probably predict the chaotic orbits of three bodies solely through simulation, the aliens would probably be capable of this. The issue for us and why it is "unsolvable" is that there’s no simple one size fits all solution where you can plug in initial starting conditions and predict the state of three bodies at any point in time - but you can move each ball a little bit as a small amount of time passes, and then recalculate.
Of course, methods which iteratively compute position can and do deviate from reality, a small error can result in large deviations in the model over a very long period of time, but you can minimise error to a very high degree. And if you’re living on the planets themselves, you can constantly update the state of your simulation every time your model observably deviates from reality. So an iteratively computed model, continuously updated to align with current state, would probably help them avoid dying off at any given point, because T = 0 keeps being reset and you only ever need to calculate T + 1.
Note also, these are aliens that can unfold a photon’s higher dimensions, inscribe a supercomputer onto it, fold it back down, send it to a target site then communicate instantaneously with it via quantum entanglement. Aliens capable of incomprehensible space magic aren't capable of simulation, apparently.
So here's an admittedly fairly trivial matter that's been on my mind lately. This is a bit of Fun, bit of Wellness, take it mainly as a lighthearted question because it's really not weighing on me too badly all things considered.
It's Friday and I'm home after 10 hours poring over numbers in Excel spreadsheets. I find that after a workday like this it's hard to get myself to do anything at all, it's almost as if there is a daily quota of mental effort I can expend on things. Once I devote all of that to preparing people's financial statements, income tax returns, business activity statements and so on I can't devote any more of my focus to my own projects and endeavours. Not to mention memory limitations, I am now using a significant portion of my storage capacity to track goings-on at work (made worse by my clients' numerous demands, which I will mention later) and remember the appropriate accounting and tax treatment for various matters as well as the relevant circumstances of each of my clients. The work itself isn't necessarily super difficult in and of itself, it's just that there are a lot of clients asking for a lot of different things.
It's quite hard to coordinate anything after work too, because my clients are often absolute fucking children who expect they be catered to on a timeframe that suits them - for example, they want things to be done at a certain time yet sometimes take forever to provide the information necessary to do the work they request, and their delays sometimes require me to stay long after close of business. Yesterday, I had scheduled something with a family member at 6pm, and near close of business the client returned with over a dozen transactions they wanted me to process (while this is something that happens on Thursdays the client usually provides the relevant info earlier in the day), and I was forced to complete the work hastily and hand it over to a reviewer - who unsurprisingly found errors. Said reviewer was not happy about that, and I have stopped planning anything after work because of this. Compared to other stuff that's happened though, this is a small matter - this same client requested that we do work over the Christmas period for them, when the office is closed and people are expected to take annual leave. Please note, they sprung this on us in November, when almost everyone else working on the client had already made travel plans, and as a result I might be the one who has to do that work.
I can't really list anything significant I do outside of work at the moment, because as it is right now the work week smashes me enough that I can't build up the level of focus necessary to actually do things. In other words, I feel as if I'm becoming my work, and I'm not sure if I like that.
How do you not be a boring person after work? Help, please.
I was trying to provide a steelman, not necessarily forward sets of policy preferences of my own (for my part, I don't think a policy proposal that enforces a mostly-male academic environment is doable in the first place, not because I think it would be bad for society but because it's effectively useless as it's too far out of the Overton Window - the second % female drops below a certain threshold, regardless of the reasons for it people will start taking umbrage at it). I also don't think there would have been an explanation I could've given that would have been satisfactory to your specific set of moral preferences.
In any case, I don't think there's anything wrong with applying quantitative thinking to social issues. Different groups of people are different on aggregate, and they shape societies in distinct ways aligned with their preferences. Trying to ignore that when policy-making is folly, in my opinion.
At the moment, Nyberg has 13.3K followers on Twitter, which is a fairly high number considering her last post was in 2018. The people who defended her, such as Dan Olson, are fairly prominent even now (Olson is a fairly popular YouTube documentarian nowadays, who's roughly BreadTube-adjacent). He accused 8chan of hosting CP and yet changed his twitter handle to include "Butts" in solidarity with Nyberg.
Even granting the idea that she was, it would be wrong to say that the entire story was suppressed.
I'm not saying the entire story was suppressed, rather that the reporting about this subject has been slanted and that the media has been silent about this in a way they wouldn't be if the shoe was on the other foot. For you to consider something as "suppression" it basically needs to be scrubbed from the internet, which clearly isn't the situation we're talking about here.
This is rather something that hasn't reached the mainstream because no mainstream news sources will report on it in any honest way, and the ones that do report on it from what I've seen have simply painted Nyberg as the victim, such as this Quartz article that alleges that Gamergate spread "baseless accusations of pedophilia" about Nyberg. The Young Turks were willing to cover her, but not to talk about her pedophilia - to talk about her Twitter bot. It seems that the mainstream certainly doesn't consider her insignificant enough not to report on at all, rather they would rather just not report on her in the "wrong" way.
I'm not saying she was as nearly as big a deal as Sarkeesian or Wu, but this situation most certainly wasn't a complete nothingburger, either.
In contrast, I find it exceptionally hard to sympathise with this sentiment, given the state of the overall culture. It's been quite surreal to watch various women taking offence at the fact that in a few places online, some of which have been sequestered, men are saying mean, denigrating and in their opinion untrue things about women.
I've seen it put like this: "[This] upsets you. You find it unjust and unfair and unjustifiable. What if that was what you saw when you watched CNN or MSNBC? Read Slate or Salon or the Guardian or the Washington Post? What if it was constantly trending on Twitter? What if your HR department instantiated it in company policy? What if your union promoted it as a true fact that needed rectifying? What if the American Psychological Association, in their guidance for treating women and girls in crisis, was promoting the ideas espoused by /r/TheRedPill and recommending treatment practices based on them? What if this narrative had convinced your country or state to reverse hundreds of years of jurisprudential advances, and return to an era where due process is an inconvenience that should be abandoned? That's what men see when they turn on the TV or open the newspaper. It's what they're confronted with when they come into contact with the criminal justice system, or the mental health profession."
The high-status, influential, thought leaders of our time do in fact promote such negative narratives about men, and it's ubiquitous in our institutions to the point that it's overtly endorsed by governments and many prominent organisations. Such viewpoints have actively influenced law and public policy. And yet a commentator on some nowhere forum online can make @FarNearEverywhere "want to introduce mandatory castration for all men". Well, I suppose in some way you kind of understand how the "extremist" redpillers feel, then.
I understand how this would be frustrating to some women who find themselves attacked when they personally did nothing to contribute to that state of affairs, and I do wish gender relations weren't the way that they currently are. But quite frankly, I don't think many women understand that this kind of thing is just daily background noise for men. And if the red pill is a response to anything at all, it's a response to the fact that said anti-male cultural trends have been allowed to go on for so long without any significant correction. Even if their defection is anti-social, it's a reaction to incredibly dysfunctional social conditions that they did not create. You can't make situations that resemble a boot stamping on a human head forever and expect people to never chafe under it and never create their own compensatory rhetoric - this is just a classic example of "You reap what you sow".
Would I like to see better sexual relations? Yes. Do I think things are headed somewhere bad? Absolutely. But the redpillers did not start this, they don't have institutional power, and in accordance with this they are not the ones upon whom I place the obligation to change first.
EDIT: clarity
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