sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1mo ago
I think you're missing the point of her analogy. A law that restricts trans behavior is an "anti-lgbt law" regardless of the truth value of the underlying premise and how good the law is.
Is "white people aren't allowed to run red lights" an "anti-white law"? Would it become an anti-white law if it was overruling a lower level of government, like if some municipalities were allowing white people to run red lights and the state government passed a law saying they couldn't make racial exceptions? Yes white people are more restricted than if they got an exemption from traffic law, but nobody describes the lack of such an exemption as anti-white, not even white supremacists. But this means that describing a law that restricts X group as "objectively an anti-X law" is just a way to smuggle in assumptions about what laws are reasonable. I think Folamh3 assumed the implicit argument was that those laws were unreasonable, not that they were anti-transgender in the same way that "Chinese-Americans need to pay income tax" is anti-Chinese, because otherwise the argument doesn't make sense.
Notice that guesswho didn't describe segregation of sports by sex as anti-male, despite men and boys being the overwhelming majority of those restricted, likely due to believing that the segregation is reasonable except for when it applies to people who identify as transgender.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
The U.S. produces 51.5 million acres of hay and 37.3 million acres of wheat per year. So setting aside all other forms of animal feed, more land goes to producing hay alone than to wheat.
However, I think that Zeke was referring to small mammals getting killed during harvesting, which my googling suggests is more due to increased predation from loss of cover than getting chewed up by machinery.
Which is why I'm pointing out that raising cattle at scale involves harvesting even more land. Estimating the effects on animals from cropland is difficult, but it's not a comparison that favors beef to begin with.
sodiummuffin
7mo ago
What does it mean for an organization to secretly know something? Is the idea that organizations like the ADL have internal emails and fundraising plans where people write "Here's what we're doing to make people more anti-semitic so that our fundraising goes up"? But if there was such communication it would be leaked. Is the idea that this is instead a plan kept entirely secret within the minds of key leaders? But not only would that make it difficult for the plan to perpetuate itself across generations of leadership (as those in on it are replaced by true-believers), why would those leaders have such a goal? You mention that it benefits ADL fundraising, but the ADL doesn't have a mind and doesn't want things. People act in the interest of organizations insofar as they want it to succeed or are incentivized by the organizational policies/structure, but if nobody is writing "Fundraising by creating anti-semites" fundraising plans and promoting/firing people based on adherence to them it's hard for that sort of coordination to function. Meanwhile there are people who want the ADL to succeed independently of organizational incentives, but mostly as a subgoal of promoting their ideological goals.
Now, it's more plausible that individuals might hit on a strategy like "troll the Nazis to show how much we're needed" because they think this helps their ideology. But they aren't going to do it to "increase ADL funding by increasing the general level of anti-semitism" because that's not a goal of the individual people who are inclined to join the ADL. At most some fraction might believe that increasing anti-semitism encourages Jews to move to Israel and thus ultimately makes Jews safer. And while it's possible for evolutionary forces on organizations to shape them in ways that their individual members aren't aware of, the ADL is old and one of a handful of prominent Jewish groups, that doesn't sound like very strong evolutionary pressure.
Similarly I am always skeptical about claims like "[Company] is cynically doing [controversial culture-war thing] as a secret profit-maximizing strategy, nobody involved really cares." Even when they openly claim it is a profit-maximizing strategy this is often bullshit reasoning backward from ideological demands, like companies citing dubious "Diversity improves decision-making" research as an excuse for affirmative-action policies. Culture war is strongly driven by true-believers, not cynics weaving intricate plans to maximize corporate profits or non-profit fundraising. When subversion happens it is almost always members of a formal organization subverting it on behalf of their memeplex, not the other way around.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:
It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time).
This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.
https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/
Even the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has helped spread erroneous information. At the final National Gathering in Edmonton, one of the Commission’s information displays stated that, after 1920, criminal prosecution threatened First Nations parents who failed to enrol their children in a residential school. This falsehood, one frequently repeated by supposedly reputable journalists, is a reference to a clause in the revised Indian Act that said children had to be enrolled in some kind of school, a clause that was little different from the Ontario government’s 1891 legislation — nearly 30 years earlier — that made school attendance compulsory for that province’s children up to the age of 14, with legal penalties for failure to comply. Other provinces had similar laws.
And the “criminal prosecution”? The penalty specified by the Indian Act for the “crime” of not sending a child to school was “a fine of not more than two dollars and costs, or imprisonment for a period not exceeding ten days or both.” And as with provincial laws regarding school attendance, there would be no penalty if the child was “unable to attend school by reason of sickness or other unavoidable cause... or has been excused in writing by the Indian agent or teacher for temporary absence to assist in husbandry or urgent and necessary household duties.”
Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:
In 1921, when the revised Indian Act solidified the compulsory attendance of Indigenous children in some kind of school, about 11 percent of First Nations people were enrolled in either a residential school or a federal day school. By 1939, that figure had risen to approximately 15 percent of the First Nations population, but the total enrolment of 18,752 still represented only 70 percent of the 26,200 First Nations children aged 7 to 16. Not until the late 1950s were nearly all native children — about 23 percent of the First Nations population — enrolled in either a residential school (in 1959, about 9,000), a federal day school (about 18,000) or a provincial public school (about 8,000).
And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:
For most of the years in which the IRS operated, between 10 and 15 percent of residential students were absent on any given day
Day school attendance was far worse. In the 253 day schools operating in 1921, only 50 percent of native students were showing up, and until the 1950s, these poorly-funded, inadequately-staffed schools consistently had absentee rates in the 20 percent and 30 percent range. In the 1936-37 academic year, to choose just one example, attendance in Indian day schools sank as low as 63 percent. The only residential school in Atlantic Canada, at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, was established in part because two previously-established day schools had been forced to close due to poor attendance. Some of the reasons for this absenteeism — the movement of families to areas where seasonal work beckoned, the need to help out at home during the Depression, and the opportunity to take labouring jobs left vacant by servicemen — are understandable, and it is worth noting the the TRC Report acknowledges that very few parents were ever charged or convicted for keeping their children out of school. But children who aren’t in school aren’t getting an education.
The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.
Many deaths resulted.
Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html
In response to the issues Tucker had raised, Indian Commissioner David Laird reviewed the death rates in the industrial schools on the Prairies for the five-year period ending in the summer of 1903. He concluded that the average death rate was 4%. He compared this to the 4.4% child mortality rate for the ten Indian agencies from which students were recruited for 1902. On this basis, he concluded that “consumption and other diseases are just as prevalent and fatal on the Reserves as in the schools.”
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
It's pretty annoying that 16 years ago Yudkowsky wrote a blog post that was deliberately unintuitive due to scope insensitivity (seemingly as some sort of test to spark discussion) and as a result there are people who to this day talk about it without considering the implications of the contrary view. In real life we embrace ratios that are unimaginably worse than 1 person's torture vs. "3↑↑↑3 in Knuth's up-arrow notation" dust specks. People should read OSHA's accident report list sometime. All human activity that isn't purely optimized to maximize safety - every building designed with aesthetics in mind, every spice to make our food a bit nicer, every time we put up Christmas decorations (sometimes getting up on ladders!) - is built at the cost of human suffering and death. If the ratio was 1 torturous work accident to 3↑↑↑3 slight beneficiaries, there would never have been a work accident in human history. Indeed, there are only 10^86 atoms in the known universe, even if each of those atoms was somehow transformed into another Earth with billions of residents, and this civilization lasted until the heat-death of the universe, the number of that civilization's members would be an unimaginably tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, and thus embracing a ratio of 1 to 3↑↑↑3 would almost certainly not result in a single accident throughout that civilization's history.
A more intuitive hypothetical wouldn't just throw out the incomprehensible number and see who gets it, it would make the real-life comparisons or try to make the ratio between the beneficiaries and the cost more understandable. The easiest way to do this with such extreme ratios is with very small risks (though using risks is not actually necessary). For instance, lets say you're helping broadcast the World Cup, and you realize there will shortly be a slight flicker in the broadcast. You can prevent this flicker by pressing a button, but there's a problem: a stream of direct sunlight is on the button, so pressing it will expose the tip of your finger to sunlight for a second. This slightly increases your risk of skin cancer, which risks getting worse in a way that requires major surgery, which slightly risks one of those freak reactions to anesthesia where you're paralyzed but conscious and in torturous pain the whole surgery. (You believe you have gotten sufficient sunlight exposure for benefits like Vitamin D already, so more exposure at this point would be net-negative in terms of health.) Is it worth the risk to press the button?
If someone thinks there's something fundamentally different about small risks, the same scenario works without them, it just requires a weirder hypothetical. Let us say that human civilization has created and colonized earth-like planets on every star in the universe, and further has invented a universe-creation machine, created a number of universes like ours equal to the number of atoms in the original universe, and colonized at least one planet for every star in every universe. On every one of those planets they broadcast a sports match, and you work for the franchised broadcasting company that sets policy for every broadcast. Your job consists of deciding policy for a single question: if the above scenario occurs, should franchise operators press the button despite the tiny risk? You have done the research and know that, thanks to the sheer number of affected planets, it is a statistical near-certainty that a few operators will get skin cancer from the second of finger sunlight exposure and then have something go wrong with surgery such that they experience torture. Does the answer somehow change from the answer for a single operator on a single planet, since it is no longer just a "risk"? Is the morality different if instead of a single franchise it's split up into 10 companies, and it works out so that each company has a less than 50% chance of the torture occurring? What if instead of 10 companies it's a different company on each planet making the decision, so for each one it's no different from the single-planet question? Even though the number of people in this multiverse hypothetical is still a tiny fraction of 3↑↑↑3, I think a lot more people would say that it's worth it to spare them that flicker, because the scale of the ratio has been made more clear.
The point is that "gender" meaning "gender identity" and "gender" meaning "gender roles" are different and incompatible definitions, and applying them to individual cases gives very different results. Under a gender-role definition of gender (which approximately nobody actually uses except in a motte-and-bailey fashion) Andriy is not a man due to defying the strict gender-role currently mandated by Ukrainian society with unmanly flight. Under a gender-identity definition of gender Andriy would be a man based purely on self-identification, even if the only difference from a stereotypical woman is a Twitter bio saying "he/him". Whatever definition is used it cannot coherently be both, and so "non-binary gender identity" is not meaningfully based on defining gender as "a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex".
Nevertheless, when pro-trans people use the terms, they mean them in the senses I have described.
The "difference between gender and sex" argument has actually fallen out of favor in trans-activist circles in recent years. It's now fairly common to see explicit arguments that trans people are whatever sex they identify as. But even before it was never really used consistently. For instance various governments have implemented plans to be more inclusive of non-binary people by letting people choose "SEX: X" on their driver's licenses, and apparently nobody involved in this process takes the opportunity to make it say "GENDER:" or even notices the distinction.
sodiummuffin
3mo ago
I do not think you are being nearly skeptical enough towards the account, not just regarding the possibility of deliberate lies but regarding how distorted memories can get regarding emotionally-charged events from 20 years prior. Have you ever had the experience of someone telling you a story regarding a grudge repeatedly over the course of years, and noticing it increasingly differ from your own recollection of the original story until you're pretty sure it's complete fiction? The way that, for instance, "X said Y, I bet that means he was thinking Z" becomes "X said Z"? (And then sometimes, upon further rumination, "X said Z, I bet that means he was thinking A" becomes "X said A".) If you haven't, trust me when I say it happens. Records like emails can tell you the actual contents of the email if you assume they weren't fabricated, but a lot rests not on them but on the context of the narrative surrounding them.
misrepresenting himself as having a "Don't ask, don't tell" arrangement with his wife
As an example, this is a description of the arrangement between two other people 20 years ago. It could easily mean that, for instance, she had agreed to the arrangement but exhibited some amount of jealousy, or something Dawn interpreted as jealousy.
lying to affair partners about having multiple simultaneous affairs
Meanwhile this could easily mean "had sex with me without mentioning that he had already had sex with someone else".
Or take this from the excerpt you tweeted:
From 2002 through 2020, all of Singer's female co-authors were women with whom Singer had been sexually involved, or to who he had made clear his sexual interest.
How the hell does she claim to know this about all his female co-authors for almost 20 years after their supposed relationship? For reference here are his publications. This made me curious enough to download the original complaint, but there's no elaboration or evidence provided that I can see. The language of "made clear" is of course great material for distorted interpretations and memories, all sorts of meanings become "clear" when you're nursing a grievance for 20 years.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
There are immigration policies other than "white ethnostate" and "open borders". Mass immigration sufficient for your concern to happen would presumably come from countries that suck to live in, and countries that suck to live in rarely have many high-quality immigrants. Even under the current U.S. immigration system, demographic replacement has little to do with the small numbers of highly-selected immigrants, it's the reproduction rates of the population groups already in the U.S. and the ways for low-quality immigrants to bypass that selective system.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
I do not know of any polls about how many Ukrainians believe people born with a "non-binary gender identity" exist, or that people should avoid "misgendering" them, but I doubt it is a significant number. I do not even know if anyone has invented "non-binary pronouns" in Ukrainian, I assume a few Ukrainians on Tumblr have done so but I do not know of them successfully convincing major Ukrainian institutions that their adoption is a civil rights issue. Searching finds an article about a soldier who identifies as "non-binary" and says that "some even used my she pronoun", with no mention of "non-binary pronouns" as a concept. Ukrainians are of course not using singular they as a pronoun to indicate "non-binary" people, since less than 30% speak even "some English".
By comparison, in a 2023 poll 44% of Ukrainians supported common-law same-sex marriage and 30% believed same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt children. I do not think it is useful to base your understanding of major world events on bizarre gotchas against conservatives from /r/politicalhumor.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Anyway, I have literally never seen this mythical Western pro-Palestinian pro-Hamas "liberal".
He might be thinking of polls like this Harvard-Harris poll:
In general in this conflict do you side more with Israel or Hamas?
48% of those 18-24 said Hamas. Of course siding with Hamas more than Israel doesn't necessarily mean approving of Hamas or of the attack. However there is a question about the attack:
Do you think the Hamas killing of 1200 Israeli civilians on Israel can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians or is it not justified?
51% of 18-24 year olds (and 48% 25-34, and 24% overall) said it can be justified by the grievances of the Palestinians. That said, I am suspicious of these poll results and wonder if they might be because of the specific wording of "can be justified", if some interpreted it as meaning "someone could theoretically make an argument trying to justify it" rather than "I personally think it was just".
It's a bit of a stretch, especially because it corresponds to the general lower level of support for Israel among the young. But some of the other results also call it into question. The prior question had a lower percentage siding with Hamas over Israel. 54% of the same age group (45% overall) answered "Should law firms hire or refuse to hire law students who supported Hamas and the attacks on Israeli civilians?" with refuse to hire, indicating at least 5% who would support blacklisting themselves. (It's pretty striking how support for free-speech in younger generations is so low that support for blacklisting rises even as support for Israel falls.) Or I guess some people might interpret "support" as people donating money to Hamas or something. 62% of those 18-24 say the "attacks on Jews" were genocidal.
I don't know if there's a poll asking about support for the attack with better wording. Best I could find with a quick search was this one which didn't make Hamas/Israel support a binary choice:
22% of college students say they sympathize with Hamas and 26% with the Israeli government
And this one which asks about the attack but again in a potentially ambiguous way, and just college students again:
The poll finds 86% of college students saying they’re aware of the Oct. 7 attack on Israel. And of that share, 67% describe the attack as an act of terrorism by Hamas, versus 12% who see it as a justified act of resistance by Hamas. Another 21% describe it as something else other than an act of terrorism or resistance.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Moving to Mars, space
This has virtually nothing to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve technological advancement and thus feature in science fiction and futurism.
Changing sex
This has little to do with transhumanism except insofar as both involve altering your body with future technology. Transhumanism is centrally about making the human condition better, not sidegrades like becoming the other sex.
Freezing our body, brain to come back later
This is a small part of transhumanism in that it is a specific speculative method for using current technology to survive long enough to take advantage of possible future transhuman technology.
Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so. Curiosity is one thing, but living in a different era, what sort of culture shock would that be like, how our if place would you be, and living forever would be equivalent to hell as far as I'm concerned, similar with Rice's vampires.
This is the only part of your post about a central aspect of transhumanism.
When people are dying of some disease like cancer, or when their family and friends die, they don't want it to happen. The longevity aspect of transhumanism is just the same thing but thinking more long-term. Maybe you think you'll gladly commit suicide when you hit 80, but actual 80-year-olds don't seem inclined to do that. And certainly people don't seem to prefer death to "culture shock". Sometimes people make peace with death, but this seems to have more to do with having to accept something you can't change or it being your only remaining escape from suffering than actually being happy with it. They also don't like it when their strength or eyesight fails them, or when routine parts of life become painful or difficult. Transhumanism says that we should use technology to fix those problems if we can, the same way we have used technology to fix other perennial problems of the human condition like starving to death or nearsightedness or being eaten by wolves.
There are other aspects of transhumanism besides life extension, though as the most pressing concern it is the most prominent. Intelligence enhancement would be the second-most prominent, and is a natural extension of how we value the contributions of genius scientists/etc. and do things like implement universal education to help children be successful and contributing members of society. And then minor stuff like giving yourself extra senses or superstrength or whatever is cool but not actually important, so it often features in fiction but rarely comes up in actual transhumanist writing.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
sitting members of Congress - who are saying "yeah I've seen some of the evidence, and it's crazy, and there's something here we need to look into", then it makes explanations involving hallucinations and weather balloons less plausible.
It makes hallucinations much less plausible, but I don't think it really does much about misidentified balloons, glare, something on the camera lens, camera image-sharpening algorithms combining with those others, etc. See the videos in this Metabunk thread for examples. I don't think congressmen have any special skills to distinguish whether a fast-moving blob on an aircraft camera is a spacecraft or a visual artifact. And while people like pilots and intelligence agents might be better, it isn't really their area of expertise either. They're focused on dealing with real planes, not every weird visual artifact that can happen. On the scale of a country you can cherrypick enough things that coincidentally seem alien-like to be convincing to many people, including many government officials. But if it's ultimately all formed out of random noise you'll never get that definitive piece of evidence, just lots of "that blob was crazy and we couldn't figure out another explanation", which is the pattern we've seen.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
The binding force behind all "woke" modern movements is anti-whiteness.
A handful of years ago the most prominent SJW focus was feminism, by far. Race got some obligatory mumbling about intersectionality and how white feminists need to listen to the lived experiences of women of color, but then everyone went back to what they really cared about. For that matter the SJW community has been a breeding ground for new identities to champion, like non-binary, demisexuals, otherkin, and plurals, with non-binary being the main one to get traction outside of a handful of sites like Tumblr. The SJW memeplex has relatively little to do with the specifics of the groups it claims to champion, making it quite mutable.
That doesn't make the anti-whiteness any less real, race-based prioritization of the COVID-19 vaccine alone killed tens or hundreds of thousands of white people. Even if future SJWs refocus on plurals or something, it is likely that without sufficient pushback captured organizations like the CDC will continue quietly making decisions like that about race. But don't assume they're dependent on any particular identity group or expect them to remain the same while you try to position yourself against them.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
had enough reach that those victims received threats from other people
But the threats don't have to have anything to do with the reach. Everything Alex Jones said about Sandy Hook came long after it was mainstream in conspiracy theory circles. The idea that those involved were actors didn't catch on because of Jones. It caught on because of that one Robbie Parker video from the day after the shooting where he comes across as suspicious, which has been incessently posted on /pol/ since it came out and supplemented with various additional coincidences. 4plebs doesn't go all the way back to the shooting but you can see the discussion back in December 2013:
http://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/text/robbie%20parker/order/asc/page/1/
Meanwhile Alex Jones was claiming that the shooting happened but was a false-flag orchestated by the government. If we go by this Media Matters page he didn't start parroting the "actors" thing until 2014. It's hard to judge since obviously I obviously don't watch him myself but it doesn't even look like he talked about it much, the grassroots conspiracy-theorist interest was much greater. But nonetheless the legal system blames him for other conspiracy theorists because they share the same beliefs, without proving that he caused those beliefs.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
On imageboards "meme X" has connotations similar to "gimmicky", "not serious", or focusing on shallow viral (and often comedic) appeal. For example Goat Simulator is a famous meme game. It is often insulting, but not always, though it is more likely to be insulting when applied to something that is not obviously a meme. Neko-Arc in the fighting game Melty Blood is universally understood as a meme character whether you like her or not, she has bizarre gameplay elements, is a chibi catgirl, and one of her moves can result in covering the screen with a Twitch overlay while she shows up in front as a streamer, covering up important parts of the screen like the health bars. The Bongcloud is a meme chess opening. Ron Paul was a meme presidential candidate, as were Kayne West, Deez Nuts and Trump, but Trump ended up proving he was more than just a meme. Of course while Trump wasn't a meme candidate in 2020 anymore, he was still a meme president. Anarcho-capitalism and Maoism Third Worldism are meme ideologies.
Some years back, calling things a meme in the above sense as a (often not entirely serious) insult was particularly popular on imageboards. Calling women the "meme gender" was a meme that arose around then. The thread that a screencap was already posted of seems to have been the origin, there were a couple "meme gender" comments before that but they didn't get attention. If you read the replies it looks like someone thought of the more serious "women are more likely to follow social trends" interpretation even then. But the primary meaning is more saying that women are too much of a gimmick, like how it would get old if you made a fighting game with only two characters and one of them was Neko-Arc.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)
The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.
sodiummuffin
4mo ago
Reddit has porn anyway and it's all performative theater
How is that a bad argument? Do you just mean that the people supporting the law are sincere in believing it will be effective? Because yes they're presumably sincere, the vast majority of political campaigns are, but Reddit seems like a pretty good example of why it will be so ineffective.
Either the law doesn't include general-purpose user-generated sites like Reddit/4chan/Imgur/Twitter and it does nothing to prevent access to pornography, or it does and ends up requiring blocking most of the internet when they don't implement an account system and ID verification just to view their sites. I don't know the statistics but I wouldn't be surprised if general-purpose sites were more popular sources of porn than dedicated porn sites. Further complications include how to treat sites that ban porn but still have plenty of it, like post-2023 Imgur - some sort of bureaucracy to judge their moderation practices? And piracy sites like thepiratebay or nhentai are even less likely to implement such a system, so you have to block them and their mirrors, something institutions have been pretty bad at doing even when focusing specifically on piracy.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
About the same time, Starlink terminals stopped working in newly liberated territories at the Ukraine-Russia front lines in the Kherson region. Ukrainian officials later said that was because the speed of their reconquest had pushed forces into areas Starlink that had “geo-fenced” to prevent Russia from using the service.
It was remarkably difficult to find this. Most of the news coverage, especially more recent news coverage, presents it as implicitly nefarious and either doesn't know or doesn't bother to mention that Ukrainian officials have stated what the issue was. Other than this Associated Press article the only other one I saw mentioning the actual reason was this Financial Times article quoting a third party.
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.
Starlink was made free throughout Ukraine so I think it just works if you have a terminal without needing an account. Doing authentication separate from owning the device seems impractical, for many military purposes you want it running continuously and it's not like you want it to start demanding a password (that soldiers have to memorize) any time it loses power. By comparison apparently Ukraine has been supplied with some SINCGARS encrypted radios, they work like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SINCGARS
When hailing a network, a user outside the network contacts the network control station (NCS) on the cue frequency. In the active FH mode, the SINCGARS radio gives audible and visual signals to the operator that an external subscriber wants to communicate with the FH network. The SINCGARS operator must change to the cue frequency to communicate with the outside radio system. The network can be set to a manual frequency for initial network activation. The manual frequency provides a common frequency for all members of the network to verify that the equipment is operational.
But something like that doesn't work for Starlink, you can't have someone at SpaceX talk to the user and confirm he's Ukrainian every time a Starlink terminal is turned on.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Same as everywhere else, the people who made the decision are true believers who think this is a great idea for the Navy and/or for their moral/ideological goals.
As I see it, the military is probably the last place that would be under pressure to go woke - the Left hates it unconditionally and passionately anyway, it is impossible to "cancel" it in any meaningful way, you can not really orchestrate an ideological boycott against the military...
There's a weird tendency to personify institutions and act like principal-agent problems don't exist, like how people will tie themselves in knots trying to come up with explanations about how corporations with SJW institutional capture are actually profit-maximizing. Why would someone with a Navy recruitment job care more about "doing the best job possible to slightly improve Navy recruitment numbers" than "making the world a safe place for LGBTQ+ people"? Even more importantly, why wouldn't someone with such an ideology sincerely believe that he can do both? People are biased about the merits of their ideology in other circumstances, they don't turn that off when they're making decisions on behalf of an institution. They can tell themselves something like "This will boost recruitment by showing the Navy is an inclusive place for young people, anyone bigoted enough to object is an asshole who would cause problems anyway." and believe it.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
"Immunized" is taking it much too far given how the percentage of teenagers who identify as trans/non-binary/etc. has exploded. And I would guess that, by most measures, their net positions on trans issues are more pro-trans as well. Rather I would say that they are much more polarized due to the increased salience of transgenderism and transgender ideology.
If your contact with the concept of transgenderism is learning that the T in LGBT refers to crossdressers and once hearing a joke about thai ladyboys, you are likely to be tolerant and not care about weirdos doing weirdo things. If instead it is seeing a whole friend group at school trying to convince a member that he's trans/non-binary because he has long hair and isn't masculine enough, or seeing an attention-seeking person go trans and police "misgendering", or encountering the trans part of the online SJW community, or seeing public figures like Cosmo/Narcissa and Jim Sterling blow up their lives, or at least hearing about it in the media with the constant drumbeat of pro-trans rhetoric and with news stories like MTFs competing in women's sports, you are going to approach the issue in a different way.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
there are risks for women alone at night in confined spaces with strange men
This argument always struck me as strange. An elevator literally opens its doors on its own and has more traffic than a normal room, it's halfway to being a hallway. Under what plausible circumstance does it pose more of a risk than a normal room? The timeframe that you can't leave it is a matter of seconds. Anything you could do in that timeframe (like groping/stabbing/purse-snatching someone) can be done elsewhere by attacking by surprise. The thing that stops someone from attacking you isn't that you can open the doors without waiting 10 seconds, it's the combination of most people not being violent criminals and the violent criminals getting arrested.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.
An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit. It's like if, for example, someone criticized the National Organization for Women for giving Mattress Girl their Woman of Courage award even after the text messages came out discrediting her rape accusation. And then you responded with "Sure it looks like she falsely accused him in retaliation for him breaking up with her and/or for the personal benefits, but NOW has 500,000 members, can you prove the majority of them share her motive?" Clearly they don't need to, the relevant members of their organization hold to a "Believe Women"/"Believe Survivors" ideology and so a single liar with sufficient skill at invoking the ideology was all it took. But instead of just being a response to a single incident, it's WPATH establishing a medical standard. And instead of being an openly non-neutral activist organization, it's the most prominent independent organization setting standards for trans healthcare, one that countless medical institutions listen to.
This then provides valuable insight into the validity of WPATH's decision-making processes, like knowing a medical/scientific organization wrote the conclusion of an argument first. And as I said in my other post, it also gives us valuable information about the processes of institutions that continue to take their recommendations seriously or "that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect". For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to. However, many other authorities like the American Medical Association have not. If a lot of institutions are making decisions on the subject are heavily influenced by social justice ideology, that is valuable information in judging this split. And yes, I already knew that so it's not going to shift my opinion very much, there's already been varying levels of other evidence like the mass-resignations complaining about ideological pressure a few years ago at the NHS's only gender clinic for children (since shut down as of a few months ago). But a lot of people think things like the shift to maximally "gender-affirming care" are just about following the evidence rather than ideological pressure and so this provides a valuable test case.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
If SCOTUS explicitly clarifies the Civil Rights Act as protecting all races equally
Are there rulings saying it doesn't? I'm not familiar with the subject but I would have guessed that it is already interpreted that way but the selective enforcement happens at some other stage of the process.
This isn't how ideological groups work. They do not hold power by being all fanatics who would support the same policies regardless of their factual beliefs about the world. Nor do they have unlimited ability to hold onto power if public opinion turns strongly against them. There are some people like that, but they rely on support from the much larger numbers of people who buy into mainstream "anti-racist" arguments premised on factually incorrect beliefs. Most supporters of any ideology are aligned with it by some mixture of traits like factual beliefs, trusted information sources, formal principles, and informal biases. Many of them can be persuaded by chipping away at their factual beliefs and their trust in their current sources of information. If mainstreaming HBD failed it would be because the vast majority continued denying it, not because people accepted it and then just shrugged. Affirmative action doesn't have majority support already, it hangs on through disproportionate elite support, but that doesn't mean it can continue to do so even if you persuade a large chunk of public/elite supporters.
Compare to libertarians. In theory principle-based libertarians shouldn't even care how effective libertarianism is, right? The justifications are stuff like Freedom and the Non-aggression-principle, not effectiveness. But of course it's not a coincidence that they generally believe libertarianism is effective as well. There's presumably some libertarians who would, for instance, oppose conscription even if they sincerely believed it was the only way to prevent being conquered by a communist nation, or support open-borders even if they thought it would result in statists taking power or otherwise end in disaster. But most wouldn't, and in fact I've noticed a notable number of libertarians and ex-libertarians online who became alienated from hardline libertarianism based on stuff like believing that open-borders would end disastrously for liberty. And once you get into actually trying to set government policy alongside people who don't care about principled libertarianism, of course "Privatizing X will end terribly for everyone, but we should do it anyways because Freedom" isn't an argument anyone makes.
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