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token_progressive

maybe not the only progressive here

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joined 2022 October 25 17:28:07 UTC

				

User ID: 1737

token_progressive

maybe not the only progressive here

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 October 25 17:28:07 UTC

					

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User ID: 1737

Think content farms, but fully automated: millions and millions of genuine looking wordpress websites filled with plausible looking nonsense answering every possible question a user can possibly have.

When's the last time you've tried to use Google search to answer a general knowledge question and clicked one of the links that didn't go to Wikipedia, Quora, StackExchange, or Reddit (i.e., some site where humans are moderating the content)? Because that's what's it's looked like for years now. I'm sure you're right that in the future the nonsense will be written by better AI models and therefore take a bit longer to recognize as nonsense. But the existing content farms have poisoned the well enough that I'm not sure I would ever click one those links to notice.

Tik Tok is the last remaining “Wild West” internet platform. Low censorship, low “authority-boosts”, and high anonymity allow for majority discourse like in the old days. It would be hard to gauge the fan reaction without looking at Tik Tok, which (conveniently) is the app that most of his fans use for socializing and discussion. This illuminates how manipulated platforms like YouTube and Twitter are, both because of censorship and because of cancellation fears.

Why should we believe that TikTok, the platform known for going 110% in on "the algorithm", is showing us what is representative of the real world? Especially given that emphasizing polarization is exactly the sort of thing we worry that (foreign adversary) social networks would do.

Of course, teenagers are really difficult to survey, so I don't have a good way to get data, and TikTok might be the best we have.

I hadn't heard about this argument in a while and the comments on your first link reminded me why: Comcast won in the US and got Netflix to pay them money because the US regulators failed to do anything about it. In addition to the double-dipping argument mentioned by another reply, it's important to highlight all of these costs are entirely artificial. Everyone could save a lot of money by the ISPs not refusing to rent space in their datacenters to Netflix, since Netflix's service actually requires almost zero Internet bandwidth due to nearly all of their bandwidth being them sending the exact same data to multiple customers, so more local caches improve their efficiency a lot. Comcast (and other ISPs with their own TV/video interests) is artificially greatly increasing the amount of Internet bandwidth Netflix needs because their parent company owns competitors to Netflix.

Would you mind at least translating the headline? So far I got

  • HISD = Houston Independent School District. I think that's saying it's the public school district covering Houston (and some of its suburbs?) and the "Independent" part is just part of how school districts are named/organized in Texas?
  • NES = New Education System... whatever that is?
  • SD = School District

A UK judge has ordered that that the baby be killed. Her parents have protested this, saying that they don’t think the government should kill their baby.

Now wait a minute, the order is to stop actively keeping the baby alive, which seems pretty different from killing the baby, even if the end result is the same.

The court point of view is that they're ordering the parents to stop torturing their child, and that they can't condone the parents moving the baby to a different country that is willing to torture it. Obviously there's clear disagreement over whether the medical care is comparable to torture.

I don't think the court is obviously right here, but I think you're being unreasonable in claiming they're obviously wrong.

Did people just not know what gender-affirming care was two years ago?

This seems likely. While trans issues have been floating around the culture war for several years now, two years ago, the media was mostly talking about COVID (in March 2021 most people didn't have access to vaccines yet, so COVID, along with the culture wars surrounding it, was still a major news item) and the George Floyd protests (although mostly in 2020, that Wikipedia page says the trial wrapped up in mid-2021; BLM and CRT were very much in the public consciousness). Given that, I'm pretty surprised the sum of support+oppose only changed from 93% to 97%; I'd have expected a lot more "Don't Know" answers to that question, especially two years ago.

The fact that fluids diffuse/disperse is fundamental to my baseline understanding of the physical world. In that what I intuit about physical reality without exercising any thought. I wonder what went wrong for anyone to mask outdoors ever at all and not see the futility of it.

Basically everyone has experience with dispersion in air from people breathing out via seeing visible breath in cold weather or seeing/smelling smoke from someone smoking. The former is generally visible about 1-2 feet away at most while the latter is quite noticeable several feet away. I'm not sure if it's obvious whether viral transmission is analogous to the first, the second, or neither. My layman's understanding is that smoke goes a lot further than viruses because the relevant particles are a lot smaller/lighter, but that's not obvious and I've seen tweets explicitly using the intuition of smelling smoke far away as a justification for outdoor distancing/masking.

The current top comment on the /r/politics post on this is:

“Trump just vowed to push for term limits for members of Congress and a lifetime ban on lobbying for former lawmakers, both of which were promises from his 2016 race — and both of which his White House never sought to adopt in any of the four years he was president.” - NYT

(Post did not include a link to NYT, but here is the source from an article titled "Trump Announces 2024 Run, Repeating Lies and Exaggerating Record".)

I pretty much agree. I wasn't happy about Trump being elected but at first I was hoping there may be some silver lining in him actually being serious in his claims to care about corruption. But that hopefulness didn't last long. (Also, I'm not entirely sold on term limits; I think looking at other structural reasons for incumbency like first-past-the-post elections making it difficult to run an ideologically similar campaign is probably a better idea.)

I am for government getting out of the marriage issue completely and just letting people sign more specific contracts.

That's tempting (and a position I recall arguing for in in-person political discussions pre-Obergefell), but the government has assigned a lot of benefits to married couples including taxes, health insurance, immigration, and probably some others I'm forgetting. Getting the government out of marriage involves significantly changing all of those. Maybe possible, but it would be a large project with a lot of winners and losers on various issues.

I don't understand how this is possibly the court's fault. I haven't heard of this challenge before, so maybe the article you linked about it is misleading somehow, but it sounds like the sequence of events was:

  1. Lindell proposes a challenge claiming he has evidence related to cheating on the 2020 election, offers a $5 million prize to the first person to prove him wrong to the satisfaction of him or an arbitrator he chose.
  2. Someone in fact convinces the arbitrator they have fulfilled the requirements of the prize; Lindell doesn't pay out.
  3. Just now, a court confirmed that, yes, the arbitrator really was convinced and that means Lindell has to pay out.

The court very explicitly did not look at the election claims; they only said "this was the terms of the bet; they were fulfilled, so you have to pay out".


It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.

I'm really not sure why you think evidence of election interference isn't investigated by government authorities (reworded because I'm not sure if law enforcement or the secretary of state's office / election board is the appropriate authority, probably depends on the exact case). It sounds like Lindell didn't have any evidence and just threw together some unrelated obfuscated numbers and didn't expect anyone to call him out on it.

Again, I just felt embarrassment and I was confused about why the adults were overeacting and wondered, as I often did, if they didn't remember what it was like to be a kid.

I definitely remember thinking it was weird when at some point as a kid I realized that assault was illegal for adults but utterly ignored for kids.

So one side gets a Heckler's Veto until they are convinced of the legitimacy of the election?

This, but unironically.

The primary goal of an election is convincing the losers they lost to ensure a peaceful transfer of power. Selecting a winner is a significantly less important goal. If a large portion of the population doesn't believe the election (and therefore the government) is legitimate, that's the road to a coup or civil war. Or at least lower level societal dysfunction as more people reject government authority. It's still a problem even if their reasons appear to be nonsense.

Echoing self_made_human, not telling you the reason doesn't mean they don't know the reason. They might not, but, also, it's standard advice to never give a reason in such a situation. Among other problems, giving a reason makes some people think the reason is a problem to be fixed and then the relationship will happen after all, not merely an explanation.

Commenting on how the Harry Potter world is problematic and proposing fan fiction/head-canons to fix it is a whole genre of Tumblr post that dates back years. If anything, paying attention to the problematic aspects of Harry Potter has become less popular, only because paying any attention at all to Harry Potter has become less popular with the whole "Rowling is a TERF" thing.


It's not a book with that supports the "trust the experts" style of government that's been a staple of leftism for a long time but has ramped up even more since 2016.

This is a strange complaint. YA/children's literature as a genre practically requires authority figures be useless or oblivious (or the problems be so small in scale they're appropriate for adults to ignore) because otherwise the adults would be the protagonists and it wouldn't be a YA/children's story. Harry Potter isn't exactly dystopian fiction, but it sorta fits into the genre of children/teenagers having to do the right thing against an oppressive/corrupt government.

Note that the epilogue of Harry Potter involves the government becoming good and competent once the main characters have fixed the government and Harry (at least, I forget who else) has become part of it.

Progressive positions are wet paper bags.

I frequently hear the same about conservative positions from progressives. I'm not sure there's anything deeper here than "I think my political opponents are wrong." which is trivially true. The main reason I read this forum is because I think it's highly unlikely that politics can be reduced to "my political opponents have bad arguments and are wrong and should feel bad listen to my side's obviously correct arguments", and part of that is trying to learn to steelman conservative arguments.

My understanding is that basically the reason we don't do that anymore is that as the federal positions mattered more, the state legislature elections turned into proxy elections for the federal positions and the state issues were getting ignored. If you're going to have an indirect system for selecting the federal positions, you would probably want to either (1) keep it separate from state elections or (2) decide to go even harder on giving power to the federal government (so it doesn't matter as much if the state legislatures aren't governing).

More out of curiosity than anything else, what queer spaces do straight people want anything to do with?

I'm just relaying the (a?) classic gentrification story: the weirdos make good art / make the place "cool", more mainstream people notice and eventually overrun the place, outnumbering the people who made it cool in the first place, the vibe is dead. When it happens to a neighborhood, it's (negative connotation) gentrification. But the same pattern happens to social spaces. I've heard people talk about it in relation to kink communities and music subcultures.

That is, straight people aren't drawn to the space because it's queer, from their point of view the queerness is coincidental and often invisible. Of course, this is also the story queer people tell themselves; maybe the queer people aren't actually as cool as they think they are.

Despite your woke-as-religion argumentation, you seem to be missing the "Original Sin"-analogue: a major part of the woke worldview is that everyone has internalized biases and everyone should be a work-in-progress of improving themselves by trying to reduce those biases but they will never be 100% successful. From this assumption, they conclude that attempts to ignore group identities will inevitably fail and that creating an unbiased system out of biased individuals requires explicit attention to bias.

Let us not mince words: the role of holistic college admissions is to examine people as whole individuals, to account for every second of their lives and every bit of their cultural context, and to rank them from best to worst. Or, more precisely: to justify and to reify the values Harvard and its co-luminaries use to select best and worst.

No, it isn't. And you clearly show in the rest of your post that you know this is not true. Harvard is not taking a ranked list of individuals and selecting the best N from the list and accepting them or trying the compute the equivalent. They are trying to select the best student body of consisting of N individuals. I'm sure they have some rather high minimum quality bar to be considered, but after that, they're optimizing for group dynamics and various axes of diversity.

One issue is that Twitter has a weird combination of real name and username culture, and this is a definite nudge in the direction of more real name culture on Twitter. Facebook is regularly cited as evidence that real names don't prevent abuse, but they do scare off users only willing to contribute (pseudo-)anonymously. This is, of course, a recurring argument on the design of social networks.

Part of the problem here is that the optimal number of men (from the point of view of the organizers of the conference) is not zero. Having some allies that get their messages about gender discrimination out of the conference is very much so a goal of the conference, albeit not a primary one. Even if they could devise a rule that banned men but not "real" non-binary attendees, it's not actually what they want.

It seems like the actual solution probably looks like getting rid of the recruiters and thereby removing that incentive to attend from people not interested in the supposed main point of the conference.

(This feels parallel to discussions I've been involved in about non-queer people in queer spaces. Although I haven't personally seen such a space get overrun with non-queer people, my understanding is that they generally either have to fight hard to stay queer by being very explicit about being a queer space or end up splitting off and creating a new Really Queer This Time(tm) space every once in a while.)

Is it really that hard?

Strangely, yes. They own a few random really small breweries. Wikipedia lists all of the brands they own, which includes some really small ones that appear tiny and independent at first glance.

This seems like a strange perspective to me. Or maybe I'm missing your point. The Culture War isn't about the positive and beautiful because, and maybe I'm stretching the metaphor here, war isn't positive and beautiful.

Plenty of people are making beautiful arts and crafts of various kinds to enrich their lives and the lives of those around them. That's just not Culture War material.

There was no gay sex in Lawrence. Indeed, there was no gay couple in Lawrence.

The plaintiffs were gay men, charged under Texas' anti-sodomy statute.

I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy. Is your assertion that the facts of the case didn't support the charge so it was dishonest of them to take a legal strategy of "that shouldn't be illegal" instead of "we didn't do that"? (I don't know, maybe they did try the "we didn't do that" line of defense in a lower court and failed? I can't imagine a case based on the word of a few gay men vs. the word of police officer eyewitnesses going well for the gay men.)

That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm, which I thought was grounds for throwing a case out, as otherwise the courts would be flooded with hypotheticals and they already have trouble keeping up with the concrete cases.

Well, that explains Bruce Schneier's most recent blog post "Improving C++". I'm generally a fan of Rust, but acknowledge there's a lot of existing code in C/C++ and rewriting code that works is asking for trouble; we should be making sure we have the tooling to retrofit the appropriate checks into existing code. That is, updating to C++29 or whatever is almost certainly going to be easier and less error-prone than porting to Rust.


Tivoization is the term for the problem you're talking about. And free software advocates have been raging against it since, uh, you could actually find someone who could remember the last time they saw a TiVo. With the recent EU fight with Apple and the Right to Repair movement in the US, it looks like there's a small push in the other direction at the moment. But that's not very reassuring.

It is weird to see an anti-government anti-Tivoization rant given that I've always seen it as an anti-corporate position.