quiet_NaN
20hr ago
Similar to actual predators, they often impersonated minors, actively approached other users, then tried to lead them to other platforms to have sexually explicit conversations (which is against our Terms of Use).
I don't know how else to read this besides "'vigilantes' are similar to predators". It sounds like a defense attorney arguing that the cop who impersonated a drug buyer is just as bad as an actual drug buyer, on the sole basis of their actions being superficially similar.
There are a lot of things we let cops do which we do not let random citizens do. If you try to by drugs from a cop and get arrested, "but I was running a vigilante sting operation" is not going to fly.
From my understanding, all relevant parties on Roblox appear as minors. The actual minors appear as minors. The child buggerers pretend to be minors because that is much more likely to be successful -- a 14yo might send nudes to what they perceive as a 15yo, but not to some 30yo creepy dude. The vigilantes pretend to be kids because otherwise the predators would not be interested in them.
Crucially, none of the parties knows the identity of the other party. If two bi-curious 14yo girls trade nudes, then that could be two girls (or 15yo boys!), or any of the five other combinations.
Both the predator and the vigilante have an interest to lure their conversation party off-site and then get them to do something incriminating.
An ethical vigilante would just sit there and wait to be hit on, then play the reluctant-but-willing-to-be-persuaded minor. Even then, that would be rather icky, because there is always a chance that the person on the other end is a minor. Flirting with someone who poses as a minor and might be a minor is bad. And if they go off-platform and the first thing the suspected predator does is sending them a nude selfie which confirms he is indeed a 15yo kid, they might be on the hook for CSAM.
And simply joining with a username like fluttershy_2011 and talking about MLP all day waiting for some creep (or boy) to hit on you might not work very well for vigilantes. So they might take a more active role instead, which would be even more problematic.
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
From your 2nd link
he did show “some response to younger females” in phallometric testing, but he agreed to take therapy in light of the finding
TIL.
We have discussed this before. As Scott writes when describing US sex taboos:
Acknowledging even the slightest attraction to anyone under 18 makes you a monster, but people who are just slightly older than 18 - even by one day - are called “barely legal” and feature especially prominently in sexual imagery.
Personally, I suspect that a majority of men are hard-wired to be attracted to any fertile-looking female. Some might be more into teen porn and some might be more into MILF porn, but very few will say that B cups or D cups are a hard no in the same way a beard and a cock are for most men.
So I do not think that measuring if the perp gets a boner from the average 15yo female is going to be very crucial information. If he has two brain cells to rub together, the next hooker he will hire will be of legal age. Who gives a fuck if it is a 19yo who could pass for 15 or if she is a 30yo MILF?
Personally, I also do not think that we should take all the information which affects re-offending probability into account. If the perp was sexually abused as a child, has a brother who is serving time, comes from a bad neighborhood, was raised by a single parent, has a father with a criminal record, is black, is unemployed, or is irreligious, that could all be statistical risk factors for re-offending.
But criminal sentencing is not only about preventing re-offending (even if harsher lower the risk of re-offending after release -- which may or may not be the case). It is also crucial for a stable society that it is seen as broadly fair. In fact, this very discussion is about a way in which it is unfair!
In my opinion, besides the specifics of the case, sentencing should only be based on prior convictions. Of course, the defense is free to argue that the accused has found god or is really into MILFs or whatever.
Also from your 2nd link:
At the top end, Canadian law requires that judges take immigration consequences into account in sentencing “provided that the sentence that is ultimately imposed is proportionate to the gravity of the offence and the degree of responsibility of the offender.” At no point did we explicitly legislate this: rather, in 2013, it was decided by the Supreme Court, in a judgment authored by now-Chief Justice Richard Wagner.
So the case with the 15yo sex worker sting was not an activist judge, but simply a judge applying the law as it is.
I certainly think that the SC ruling is bad. I mean, it is good that courts can take into account consequences outside of criminal law when determining what punishment is appropriate. If someone has spent a decade on the run in shitty conditions, or had his marriage or professional life destroyed by his deed, that might be factors to reduce their prison sentence compared to someone who experienced no negative feedback. If you know that the defendant will get deported after his sentence either way, you might shave off a year off the sentence (on the assumption that most citizen criminals would not take that trade).
However, doing this proactively -- to avoid issuing a prison sentence because it would have further unpleasant consequences -- seems silly. I mean, I can construct a case where the predictable consequences of a 90 day prison sentence are deportation to Afghanistan and getting beheaded by the Taliban, and I can see that a judge would be unwilling to sentence someone to their death for a minor crime. But this is not the case here. Staying in Canada as a permanent resident for another four years before getting his citizenship does not seem like undue harshness.
the value of a sex-offender-free workplace
Hard disagree here. If you really think that workplaces should not employ convicted sex offenders, are you then willing to pay them unemployment benefits for the rest of their lives? Or do you think they should just get the death penalty, or be forced to beg in the streets?
The idea of criminal rehabilitation requires people to find employment. After an offender has served their sentence, they should join the workforce again.
For professional licences, there are sometimes higher standards, because these come with a lot of additional responsibility. You do not want a habitual drug dealer as an officer of the court, or drunk driver as a doctor. Because of the privileges offered by such jobs, we want to filter for people who take laws extra serious, on the presumption that if they do not take general laws serious, they might also cut corners in professional regulations.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
There were certainly Amish people around in 1920. Most certainly, they did not have credit card processors or antibiotics or solar panels.
Of course, even in 1920 the Amish likely depended on outside trade for a few crucial supply chains, because their shtick is rejecting technology, not insisting on 100% autonomy. I suppose they did not refine their own iron, for example.
This is why I said a few million of them could exist independently rather than saying they could be autark on the level of a few villages.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
The etiquette about displaying and acknowledging sexual desirability is certainly complicated. Outside of bedrooms and strip clubs, either is normally clad in plausible deniability.
Walking down most streets in the daytime is not a place most people intend to be judged sexually desirable.
I think that plenty of women (and some men) spend quite a lot of effort on looking hot in public spaces. Of course, one could also argue that the causation is the other way round -- they know that they will be judged either way, and find it preferable to be judged hot than to be judged not hot.
Normally, the judging -- which I think is done both by men but also by other women -- is of course more subtle than a wolf whistle or an outright remark on one's tits. More stuff like "nice top", or even non-verbal, I think.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I would argue that all of these benefits (which I do not dispute) can be captured very well by the QALY/$ picture -- just add a term for quality of life effects on people other than the patient.
From a purely medical system costs picture, they are all externalities.
Still, from any non-terrible POV, GLP-1 drugs will at the latest be worth it at least when the patents run out and they can be sold for what it costs to produce them.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
it seems odd that my tax dollars payed for the research, and now I would have to pay the Danes, as it were, to use it.
I don't see the contradiction. Basic research is mostly funded through taxes of Western countries, and here the US was most prolific. This research is then made available to the public (though sometimes you have to pay Elsevier, which sucks).
Pharmaceutical companies then use that basic research to discover active ingredients and go through the long, grueling and expensive process of getting them approved as pharmaceuticals. In return, they get temporary monopolies ("patents") on their active ingredients. There is a lot to criticize about how this system works. Details about what can or can not be patented, and how the latter means that nobody will pay to turn it into approved pharmaceuticals. Drug pricing both generally and within the US in particular. That the financial incentives make it much more profitable to sell lifestyle medication to rich Westeners than to cure debilitating diseases in the developing world. The general role of the medical priesthood as gatekeepers which determine which substances I can or can not put into my body.
Criticizing that in this case, one of the companies which holds the patents is nominally Danish (Eli Lilly is nominally US -- but at the end of the day, most are publicly traded and probably have campuses in multiple countries) seems rather low on that list.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".
I do not think that this is true. Amish civilization would probably be sustainable with a few million humans. And even a technological civilization could probably work with less than a billion people (though with higher friction -- tech development would take longer, and there would be less entertainment with very high production costs).
Also, not having kids is something which is very strongly selected against both in biological and cultural evolution. If TikTok caused 90% of societies to stop reproducing, human civilization would still be fine in the long run.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I do not think a significant number of Republican voters believe that bad things (for them) will result from Trump's policies and are willing to suffer for them. You can tell because Trump doesn't talk that way, more or less ever. They think that the policies Trump is pursuing will result in the instant improvement of their lives.
This might have been true at the beginning of the year, and still be true for a majority of people who will be badly affected by his policies. I am not sure that it will still be true at the end of his administration, depending on how bad his policies will get. He got a trade deal with the EU which will increase revenue and not directly hurt US industry (but I am less optimistic about the long term effects for the US hegemony). However, a trade war with China still has the potential to wreck the economy. Likewise, cutting medicare has the potential to be ruinous for a lot of his voters.
Most people have some awareness of their relative economic situation under different administrations. They suck at attributing it to specific policies (and often make off-by-one errors when policies take long to yield results) and economic effects unrelated to government policies, but they will notice if they are better or worse off. A few idiots will double down on their partisan preferences when things go badly for them, but I am hopeful that many will not vote for the leopard eating people's face party after having their face eaten for 3.5 years.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I just googled "medicare GLP-1 costs", and found this article:
Trump wants Medicare to pay for your Ozempic treatment. Taxpayers may foot the bill for billions in fraud
I am happy to hate Trump because he cuts of GLP-1 for millions. I could probably be persuaded to hate Trump because he wastes billions of dollars on GLP-1 drugs.
Unfortunately, I can not help but notice that both reasons to hate him seem mutually exclusive. While it is nice to know I can hate him no matter what he ends up doing, until he moves out of that superposition of bad options, I am stuck in a state of cognitive dissonance.
The annual US revenue of Novo Nordisk (Semaglutide) seems to be 45G$, while that of McDonalds is 25G$. Likely, NN's profit margin is a bit higher, so they could afford to out-lobby fast food.
--
The question if GLP-1 drugs are a net positive financially for the medical system is extremely cynical. Given that the lifetime patient costs mostly occur in their last years, it basically reduces to of the obese cost more before croaking than the non-obese or not. From a purely financial consideration, the most effective intervention (short of killing them outright) would probably be to offer free base-jumping courses and equipment to medicare patients. The government might spend 10k$ per death caused, which would be a lot cheaper than bypass surgeries, chemotherapy or keeping a dementia patient alive for a decade.
The compassionate, EA-ish metric would be cost per quality adjusted life-year (QALY). Both measles vaccines and doing a full-body MRI scan for tumors once a month are interventions which would boost the QALY of the median patient. But the former is pretty cheap and pretty effective and the latter is very expensive and not very effective, so we pay for one and not for the other.
For GLP-1 agonists, a lot depends on the cost per month.
That fortune article with their moral panic about fraud mentions:
The government recently estimated that covering GLP-1 drugs for obesity would cost Medicare alone $35 billion from 2026 to 2034.
What they forget to mention is that this is peanuts. If half of the patients enrolled with medicare get GLP-1 drugs, that is 35M patients. So the cost per patient per year would be 200$. That is a factor of 60 less than the sticker price of 1000$ a month! If somehow every obese American defrauded the US government into paying 200$ per year for GLP-1 drugs, that would be even better.
I do not think that this is happening, though. I recently turned to biopiracy to knock a few points of my BMI (I will write an article about my experiences on LW at some point), and I will likely spend north of 100$/year on peptides from China. Of course, the medical system will not have patients reconstitute peptides in their kitchen and inject what they think is the correct dose using insulin syringes with no medical or pharmaceutical oversight. Even weekly subcutaneous injections of saline would probably cost 500$ a year.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
and just being seen by them as you go about your own business.
Well, some guy who is jogging stark naked through the city is also just going about their own business, and yet we treat it as actively getting into someone's space in most of the Western world.
I think that I can understand where the puritans would come from at least in theory. If I were in a business meeting and the woman across from me was sitting there bare-chested, I would be annoyed because her tits would be hijacking my attention. By contrast, if I go swimming in the lake and see some women tanning topless, I think 'yay boobs'.
I realize that this is totally dependent on culture. Some guy from Saudi Arabia who has never seen the hair of a woman who was not his wife or relative might get similarly distracted by seeing a woman without a headscarf. And some guy from a society where clothing was not a thing and people masturbated during social gatherings all the time might consider me a terminal prude, but would perhaps freak out when people were eating meat during a business dinner.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
"unwanted behaviour directed at an individual with the purpose or intent of humiliating, disrespecting, intimidation [sic], hurting or offending them"
I think that the intent of the actor is a much better standard than the interpretation of the receiver.
For example, if I was in a jury, you would have a hard time convincing me that someone who wolf-whistles intends to humiliate the recipient. It seems reasonable that in the mind of the accused, he would merely be acknowledging that the recipient is judged sexually desirable, which is not an insult.
Even a sexual invitation might not meet this standard, in my mind. "Hey babe, wanna have some fun with me" is likely to make a jogger uncomfortable, but might be a serious suggestion on the men's part. In Victorian England, that would be the kind of insult which leads to duels, because it implies "you look like the kind of woman who would fuck men she just met on the streets". Today, there is nothing wrong with women fucking men who just cat-called her.
Of course, if the woman was wearing a hiab instead, I would assume that the man had concluded that the woman was very unlikely to be promiscuous and was just trying to insult her by implying otherwise.
Likewise, "why don't you gag on my cock, whore!" seems pretty clearly intended to humiliate. The defendant might claim that the humiliation was just instrumental for getting sex because he thought that the woman was into that, but that does not change the mens rea. Of course, if he can prove that his victim had explicitly opted into being sexually humiliated by random guys in the street, it would be fine.
Honking a car's horn except to warn of danger is already a traffic offense. If the driver wants to argue that she was causing a danger by being distractingly sexy, then that raises doubts about his general ability to drive a vehicle in the Western world, unless she flashed him or something.
By contrast, single remarks which merely felt insulting to the recipient -- e.g. by someone who does not know the rules or is just gambling on low odds -- should not be a criminal matter. People feel insulted by all kinds of statements directed at them specifically or not. Personally, I think it depends on the odds. If a verbal behavior will feel offensive to 60% of women in the same situation, but also leads to 10% of them being flattered, that seems very acceptable from a criminal law point of view. If 95% would feel deeply offended and less than 0.1% would be flattered, things look different.
As an unfortunate consequence, this probabilistic standard would mean that the line of what is acceptable would depend not only on the woman and her situation but also on the guy. So a 25yo Chad driving a Tesla might be allowed to ask a given woman if she would be interested in "having some fun", while a 60yo homeless alcoholic with a beer belly might be on the other side of the dividing line.
While it would be possible to replace the person of the speaker with a generic standard person for the purpose of determining if the success chance meets the threshold, I think that this would decrease overall utility.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
suicidal intent always means depression, without exception
I find this view fascinating, like flat-eartherism or young age creationism. Like learning about the biotopes around hydrothermal vents which work without any sunlight and are utterly alien to any life forms I regularly interact with.
9/11 was not a self-help group for depression gone horribly wrong. These jerks were fully expecting to respawn in heaven and be rewarded for their great deeds. Their final moments were the best moments of their lives.
Even a pure suicide without any intended side effects can be very rational. The caught spy biting on his poison pill is a well-established trope. He is not depressed because he is anticipating getting tortured and betraying his secrets.
If some comic book super-villain captures a person and her loved ones and tells her that she can either kill herself and save her loved ones or she will spend the next month first watching her loved ones being slowly tortured to death and then being tortured to death herself, suicide is an entirely rational response.
A toy model of endogenic depression would be that it just imposes some mood penalty, which adds to situational modifiers. So a person who had just been dumped by their girlfriend (-30), buried a parent (-40) and got caught in the rain (-1) might not attempt suicide, but a person who was also melancholic (-20) might.
Or one might describe depression as an epistemic attractor state -- a strong belief that one's life is shitty which is self-reinforcing through confirmation bias.
I generally support interventions to prevent suicides if it seems likely that the mood penalties can be fixed or that the patient can be moved away from that attractor state. Turning a depressed person into a non-depressed person is much preferential to turning them into a corpse.
But at the end of the day, people's emotional baselines differ, and it is not up to outside society to tell them if their permanent modifiers make their life worth living or not. And I would fire any therapist who could not agree to that on the spot as fast as if they had suggested that I should just let Jesus into my heart.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Making sure that they're not killing more people than the assisted suicide law allows is actually important; if they have no way to make sure, they shouldn't be doing it at all.
Suppose that you are a Swiss marriage registrar, and that Switzerland does not want to facilitate marriages where one or both partners a coerced into marrying. There are approaches with very different costs to filter these out. You could just keep a lookout for people who look unhappy or nervous. You could have a separate private chats with both the groom and the bride and mention that there are ways out for people who are coerced. You could require both of them to separately talk to a psychologist for an hour. You could require both to undergo psychotherapy for a year. You could just declare defeat and refuse to marry anyone, because it is not possible to know what motivations people have for sure.
In reality, you will probably not do that last thing generally -- even if you are fine with not having marriages, the same argument would also extend to employment contracts, loans, purchases, sex, etc. Or few people would argue that as you are quite likely to be able to smuggle a few grams of cocaine in a truck without it getting detected by customs, we either should abolish customs or stop international trade.
The assisted suicide case here was not even a matter of consent. But I will be sure that sooner or later, a case where consent is violated will appear. The chance that the evil family of some rich guy will kidnap their beloved pet and threaten to torture it horribly unless they opt for MAID is low, but not zero.
There is a conversion factor for violating the autonomy of those who would really want to live to violating the autonomy of those who really want to die. We probably disagree about the magnitude. From a utilitarian standpoint, I think that we should not minimize the suffering of those denied MAID.
Suppose a djinn offered you to prolong your life by a decade. If you accept, they will flip a coin. Heads, you get to live in the 98th percentile of happiness. Tails, you get to live in the second percentile of happiness (for your age cohort), with no way out. They also reveal that you will be 70 at the time your extra decade starts.
Personally, my answer would be fuck no. Sure, that decade in the 98th percentile would be sweet -- travelling, having sex with a great partner, enjoying life without being trapped in the rat race, playing with your grandkids. But the horror of the 2nd percentile would be much greater. You body failing, your mind fogging -- but not to the point where you do not notice any more, without social contacts, getting bedsores in some retirement home, in constant pain, waiting for a death which will not come for a decade.
In reality, we are not subject to the veil of ignorance imposed by the djinn. We can just ask the 70yo's what their quality of life is and if they want to die or not, and we will mostly get accurate answers. Nobody suggests randomly murdering elderly in the hope that they might welcome death.
So the next djinn offers their deal, which is the same as before, only you have a way to die before the decade is over -- say by stating your wish to die on seven subsequent days. They warn you that it is possible that someone will pressure you into taking that option even if you are in the happy branch.
This seems like a great deal to me. Sure, I lose some utility in the happy branch, but I also reduce the suffering in the pain branch by a factor of 5000.
The answer to this is "only take patients from places where they can legally get documents", not "stop asking for documents".
Luckily, this is not how liberal governments deal with foreigners whose governments are uncooperative. If you are a refugee from Iran, and the regime hates you and will not give you any ID documents, then a reasonable country would recognize your plight and try to work around it, not just ship you back to Iran because without ID you can not stay legally.
The Swiss people (or their representatives) have decided that humans in Switzerland should have a right to assisted suicide. Why should they deny this to foreigners just because their backwards government is uncooperative?
quiet_NaN
4d ago
No, a casual fling would not have been an advantage in the ancestral environment, because one or both would have been killed by the rest of the tribe, and they sure as hell wouldn't have pitched in to raise the kid.
Woah. Here I was irresponsibly speculating how mate selection might have worked in the ancestral environment when I should have just asked you because you know exactly how it was.
Contrary to common belief, the ancestral environment was not the biblical Middle East. We can infer from the relative testes size of humans relative to other primates that women were unlikely to mate with different men during their fertile period compared to Chimps but probably still somewhat likely compared to Gorillas. Of course, there are all kinds of confounders -- the most important one probably is that with humans, female fertility is not obvious.
The existence of biological fatherhood explicitly seems to be a rather recent discovery made by early agrarian societies, probably in the context of domesticating animals, and gave rise to patriarchy. Different pre-modern societies have very different attitudes to fatherhood. I will grant you that a gene which made you bash the head in of anyone who fucked your wife (if you can get away with it) would probably have been select for, though.
From a genetic fitness point of view, cheating is a numbers game. As you point out, getting caught cheating in a society where it is against the social norms will probably severely limit the male's genetic fitness. On the other hand, fathering a child which will be fed by some other guy gets you a lot of fitness for basically free. If the likelihood of getting caught is high, the punishment is severe and your legitimate opportunities for procreation are plentiful, then cheating is maladaptive. If the opposite is the case, then it is adaptive.
For women consenting to cheating, the potential gains are much lower (unless her husband is infertile). In a society with little property and no Swiss bank accounts, any bribes were probably not worth the risk (if the society was strongly anti-cheating). The main reason would be that the guy she cheated with had a higher genetic fitness than her husband, which would benefit her child. OTOH, if ancestral societies had opinions about female infidelity, they probably had no sophisticated theory of culpability and consent. Telling your husband "Tribesman Urgh tried to touch me, tell him to stop" would be one thing, but if you were raped in the context of intertribal warfare, you likely had little to gain by telling your tribe about it.
It was also one in which the sexes were segregated, meeting the needs of the tribe as their sex allowed.
I do not think that they were segregated as nuns are from monks. Sure, they had mostly different roles, and at times these roles might have separated most of the men a day's march from the women. I will also grant you that their life was a lot more communal, so texting "honey I have to work late" while you had an affair in some motel was not a thing.
But the ancestral environment was also not as dangerous as a horror movie, where slipping away from the main group for a minute (especially to have sex) is a death sentence.
is it really so hard to imagine that humans didn't evolve mate selection, it's just something that has been passed down from generation to generation
I think a lot of basic sexual behavior is innate. If you raise teens without any sex education and give them the opportunity, they will sooner or later figure out sex on their own. I also think that basic sexual attraction is innate. Probably something on the level of "I am into boobs-havers".
A lot of specifics are then learned, as your brain matches the kinds of humans it sees to its rough templates. If high heels and red lipstick are a reliable predictor of the wearer being a sexually available woman, and your brain is wired to be into women, then you might end up associating that with this.
I also think that some things are mostly innate turnoffs, though. Facial asymmetry. Birth defects. Clear signs of sickness, or starvation.
I am sure that there is some primitive tribe where being small and weak is considered attractive in men, because there is some tribe for everything, but in the ancestral environment, muscle mass and size was likely capped by lifetime nutrition. So you are not selecting for giantism genes, you are simply selecting for "was able to secure a good calorie intake for himself", which is a very desirable trait, so I would suspect that there is a genetic predisposition towards preferring larger men.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Yes, post version history also requires a way for mods to make versions invisible to the users.
Besides your example, there are some categories of content which I think the motte server admin has no interest in hosting. Personal information posted accidentally or maliciously. Copyright infringement. Content which is illegal for other reasons in their jurisdiction.
Unlike Wikipedia, we do not have enough Admins/mods that hiding revisions even from them would become a concern, though.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I believe that the Christian right, which is the camp of most pro-lifers, see non-procreative sex as inherently sinful.
There are probably some people who really hate abortions but are fine with fucking around, and will get their daughter an IUD at age 12 so she is protected from pregnancy, while also being fine with her experimenting with her 14yo boyfriend.
But the modal pro-lifer would emphasize that abstinence until marriage is the only 100% effective birth control. (For perfect use. For hormone-laden teens who do not typically get married before 20, I think that the Pearl Index for abstinence would be rather abysmal.)
Take the official Catholic position (my emphasis):
Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15) Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)
So it is not that abortion is very bad and using a condom or getting a sterilization after your fourth kid is a little bad -- they are all similarly worthy of condemnation. At the end of the day, at least the pope cares little about unborn kids being killed and a whole lot about people having deliberately non-procreative sex.
I think from a Catholic theology point of view, abortion, sodomy, sex outside marriage, sex within marriage with contraceptives and masturbation are all mortal sins. If you commit any of them and are not cleansed by baptism or confession, you go to hell. Might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb, and all that.
In conclusion, I think that the CR does not see single motherhood as a punishment for fornicating women, but simply as a natural consequence of her act which should be her cross to bear. But the underlying idea seems to be that during the heydays of Christianity -- in the good old days -- the choices of a woman were (1) marriage, (2) chastity (e.g. becoming a nun) or (3) being a fornicator, which meant to be an outcast of polite society. (Sure, gays and lesbians could always fuck around without biological consequences, but at least for men there were severe legal consequences instead.) Birth control and abortion have changed that equilibrium in a way which leads to a lot more sexual immorality especially from women (as men were probably always going to whorehouses). If birth control is illegal, then a woman are much less likely to engage in PIV sex outside marriage and will have their hands full with their kids instead of dyeing their hair green and studying feminism, or something -- I do not claim that I would pass the CR ideological Turing test.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Travelling to Switzerland to get MAID will impose much lower externalities on society than most other suicide methods.
Leaving aside obviously bad suicide methods like trains, you will in any case place your corpse in the way of people who did not sign up for this. EMTs. Loved ones. Police who break your front door after the neighbors complain about the smell. Random members of the public.
I have it on good authority that there are also other Swiss jobs than suicide assistant. They know what they signed up for, you pay them for handling your corpse and all the paperwork.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
If she brought forged legal documents that can't be checked, they can have a policy that treats patients who show up with uncheckable documents as patients who have no documents.
I hate to break it to you, but most legal documents are basically uncheckable. Even a notarized document can likely be faked without too much trouble. Government-issued documents (id cards, passports, banknotes) are certainly harder to forge, but also require someone who is familiar with the safety features.
If legal documents are even an issue, the whole point of having them instead of taking someone at their word is so that they can be checked; if they cannot, they are useless.
That is not at all the point. The point is that verbal statements reported by third parties are notoriously unreliable. If Susan says: "Bob said I can sell his car", that is bound to create a he-said-she-said situation. Nobody will ever untangle if it was a honest misunderstanding or if one of them was lying.
This is why Susan needs a signed document to sell Bob's car. Can she easily forge Bob's signature? Sure. But that is now a serious criminal offense! If it is found that Bob never signed the paperwork, she is looking at jail time, and can not claim that she just misunderstood Bob's intention.
With assisted suicides, the difference is that nobody is going to put Susan's urn into jail.
I am sure that for every such sob story, there is also a sob story where someone could not get their next-of-kin to sign a paper stating that they were aware of the patient's intention to opt for MAID. A patient in Ireland would be hard-pressed to compel a relative to sign such a document through the court system. Likely, they would get themselves committed.
So I can totally understand that Swiss law does not require patients to provide a notarized genealogy with all the relevant death certificates to prove that whom they say is their next of kin is that.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Moses brought back "thou shalt not kill" from Mount Sinai, it had more exceptions to it than any rule stated so fundamentally should possibly have. It did not apply to people from other tribes -- killing the kids of enemy tribes was fine. It did not apply to people found guilty of any of the numerous crimes which were punished by stoning. Or being willing to sacrifice your kid if God gaslighted you into thinking that this is what he wanted. And don't even think about non-human persons.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Specifically, it would be nice if we could revoke its status as a "superweapon"; all too often, certain unsavory individuals will use "you're making me suicidal!" as an emotional manipulation tactic to immediately end all rational discussion and assert the priority of their own immediate desires.
Way ahead of you. If someone threaten to kill themselves to get something from me, I will happily call the cops and they will spend a night or two in an asylum. I have done it before. It is unlikely to restrict the patient's long-term autonomy, and will put an end to further blackmail attempts. (Not that I would stick around such a person, these days.)
OTOH, when someone were to tell me about suicide plans which are not conditional on my behavior, I would probably let them do it if I came to the conclusion that they had made up their mind.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I think that for a typical liberal woman not looking to conceive, the preference order is:
- not get pregnant (using birth control)
- getting an abortion
- giving birth
So birth control is absolutely preventing abortions. It is also preventing some babies being born.
Of course, the pro-life crowd has largely not embraced birth control as a method to prevent abortions, which is telling. While I get that there are age-old Christian objections to abortions specifically, I think that a lot of the point of being pro-life is to want to punish women for a sinful lifestyle. "If you fuck around, you get punished by being a single mother."
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Suicide is fucking barbaric, and honestly pretty selfish.
That depends on the alternatives. If you want to argue that jumping of a tall building after we have reasonable legislation for assisted suicides, I agree with you.
But as long as such legislation is not in place, my attitude is fuck society. I would still prefer methods which are unlikely to endanger or traumatize others, but if society does not provide a non-messy way out, they can hardly expect me to stay alive just to avoid making a mess.
Look at it this way. I believe in my autonomy to decide if I live or die (within the obvious biological limits, until we can get around them). I would happily blow the brains out of someone who is attempting to murder me. If some 6yo sees this they will likely be traumatized, and that is bad, but at the end of the day I value my autonomy over my life more than the kid's lack of trauma. I do not think that this is unreasonable, and few would suggest that I am not justified here.
But this autonomy is a double-edged sword. Wanting to die is just as valid a choice as wanting to continue to live. I would not blow my brains out in front of a group of kindergardeners if I have a better choice, of course. But at the end of the day, my autonomy comes first.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
And only now, as the modern world is becoming increasingly ignorant of traditional arguments against these things do we consider them "good ideas". They're chesterton's fences. Other examples are IoT, online IDs, social credit scores, mass immigration, censorship laws, guilt by association and "fact checking".
- IoT and online IDs and social credit scores are becoming a thing because technological progress makes them feasible. In 1994, when most people were offline and the few which were online were mostly running PCs with Windows 3.11 and a modem, a dishwasher costing twice as much with a BNC port to connect to a home network which 98% of the population did not have would not have been very successful. Today the hardware costs are basically nil and most customers have WiFi in their kitchen. That does not mean that these are good ideas! Mao simply did not have the tech level to track which of his countrymen were good commie citizens and which ones were bad at the level of granularity, but I think he would have liked the idea.
- Censorship is an ancient idea. When the first warlords turned into nobles at the dawn of civilization, they very likely reacted badly to anyone claiming that Kodos would make a better king than Kang. You put "fact checking" in scare quotes, and I get it -- calling biased fact checkers neutral and objective does not make them so. My personal approach to fact-checking would be bottom-up. Rather than having a fact-checker in chief appointed by the president, I prefer random bloggers who have a track record of being credible in my book (i.e. Scott Alexander). I would also add that fact checking has become a thing because populists have increasingly told the public laughable lies. A lot of politicians lie, but GWB lying about WMD in Iraq (which CNN was not in the position to call BS on) is different than Trump lying about Immigrants eating cats and dogs or the size of his inauguration crowd. News organizations should call bullshit on provably wrong claims of fact. (Like SA, I have a bounded distrust for MSM. They will certainly report selectively and apply spins, but they will rarely conjure a story out of thin air. My distrust for Trump is unbounded -- if he told me the sky was blue I would go outside to check.)
- Guilt by association is likewise ancient. In Rome, the smallest legal unit was generally the family. It mattered little who in a family had committed an offense, the head of the family was on the hook for paying the fine.
- "Mass immigration" is likewise nothing new for the US. In 1850 and 1930 and 2000, about 11% of the census were foreign-born. In 2022 it was about 14%. More, but not dramatically so.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Assisted suicide is never needed. Suicide is trivial, and obvious.
An able-bodied person has a million ways to kill themselves. It looks very different when you are paralyzed from the neck down and lying in a hospital bed with a heart rate monitor connected and a reanimation team on standby.
Reading between the lines of your post, you are saying that a person of sound mind should have the right to kill themselves. But for most rights people have, there is an assumption that they also have the right to hire others to secure their rights.
- I have the right to buy a car => I have the right to send a properly authorized agent to buy a car in my name.
- I have the right to defend myself (in some circumstances and jurisdictions) => I have the right to hire a bodyguard to defend me.
- I have the right to freedom of expression => I have the right to hire contractors to spread my ideas (e.g. running a webserver, or a billboard campaign) instead of just yelling them at random pedestrians.
- I have the right to face my accuser => I have the right to let my attorney cross-examine my accuser.
- I have the right to masturbate => I have the right to hire others to masturbate me (in the civilized world, anyhow).
Now, society can impose reasonable restrictions on what agents I am allowed to contract -- I can not send a 10yo to sign a contract in my name, and I certainly can not hire them as a prostitute.
Garden variety suicides are unregulated. You can't imprison a dead person, so there is little society can do to deter them. This leads to a lot of messes. Bystanders become traumatized, or get killed. People who survive but at large costs to their health. People who die on an impulse action they would have regretted five minutes later.
With homicides, there is a wide understanding that there are different categories, that some are vile crimes while others are tragedies or even completely justified. With suicides, there is little distinction that way. The lovesick 16yo and the 60yo cancer patient who jump of a bridge are lumped together in one category.
Rather than leave it up to chance who gets to die, I would prefer legalized but regulated suicides. Let the people who are of sound mind and have a stable commitment to end their lives do so with a minimum of harm to themselves and others, and delegitimize unilateral suicides. "If you want to exit the building, we ask that you walk out through the corridor and the front door and not try to jump through the closed window."
Well, he was trying to hire what he believed to be a 15yo sex worker, not luring 8yo's into his van.
While I think that putting him in a person with authority over minors (e.g. teacher, youth pastor, pediatrician) would be a bad idea, I also think that jobs where he just might have occasional contact with minors seem non-problematic. Car mechanics typically do not spend a lot of time alone with kids, for example. Nor do construction workers.
In most jobs, you have fewer opportunities to groom minors during working hours than you have once your shift is over. Even working in a supermarket would be fine. Sure, there is some chance that he ends up with another 15yo alone in the market, but "trying to get random 15yo girls to do sex work" is much stupider than "trying to hire a 15yo sex worker".
More options
Context Copy link