vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
Not very many of them, however, the typical prostitute does not earn very much(and her job is crazy dangerous, has terrible hours, and is likely extraordinarily unpleasant for much of it). Most sex workers live in poverty, the OF numbers are crazy.
Yeah, people have a bad habit of comparing their salaried work to the top earners in professions with extremely high variance in outcomes. Like, sure, Scarlett Johansson makes absurd amounts of money, but the modal actor or actress is not making much money at all.
vorpa-glavo
11d ago
I struggle to see how these individuals may square this perspective that sex work is valid, despite fitting the bill of objectification. Perhaps there is something I'm missing?
There are sex negative feminists who largely agree with you here. They tend to be anti-porn and anti-sex work.
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
Why do you think it would not work?
The guy who actually leaked Trump's taxes got fired and sentenced to 5 years in federal prison. It's not like Trump never gets fair court proceedings.
Heck, he's won a fair few cases in the Supreme Court during this presidency. I actually believe that if Trump had held the case in abeyance, he would have gotten a just outcome from genuinely adversarial proceedings, whatever that might have looked like.
vorpa-glavo
12d ago
Luckily, we live in a constitutional republic, so occasionally there are checks and balances on abuses of power by one of the three branches of government.
Doesn't mean that Trump isn't in charge of the executive branch. Just means that he doesn't get act like he's an absolute monarch who can do whatever he wants.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
Is that wrong? Are there solid charities out there which are either apolitical or lean conservative which provide foreign aid, but were neglected by USAID in favor of some kind of nepotism?
The obvious place to look would be religious charities, wouldn't it?
Obama and Biden did the same thing dozens of times, for totals far higher than the current fund, for more spurious reasons.
The main difference for Obama and Biden era sue and settle, was that that the people footing the bill for the slush funds were private companies, or where there were large payouts from the taxpayers, congress voted and approved it.
The Trump situation is the current president suing the government he now controls in his capacity as a private citizen for a wrong done to him while he was previously president, by people who he was theoretically in charge of. The money is coming from the taxpayers, and the slush fund is being administered by the federal government. There's lots of ways this could have the whiff of corruption on a different order than the Obama and Biden era precedents.
There's lots of things Trump could have done differently:
- He could have held the case in abeyance until after his presidency was over.
- He could have done the settlement, but have himself administer the fund as a private citizen, instead of having the government administer it. Since he's the wronged party, under a fair settlement this would be perfectly fine. Once money is yours, you can spend it however you want.
- Since he was the executive then, and he is the executive now, he could exercise the powers he has to achieve a resolution (firings, audits, etc.)
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
What exactly is supposed to happen if Party B does not realize they have been intentionally wronged until they control the government?
If they sue the government its just Party B suing the government they control. Of course they win. That is what happened in this case.
The problem with this statement of the case, is that Trump was president when the IRS leak of his tax documents happened. And he's president now.
What Trump could have done is ask the case to be held in abeyance, which would freeze the clock on the case and wait for the case to be resolved until after his presidency finished up. That would have been the usual "avoiding corruption, or the appearance of corruption" version of Trump bringing the complaint that created the massive settlement fund.
vorpa-glavo
21d ago
This proposal is silly, since you're already taking people who have been selected for a particular trait and putting them in a particular place. Let me put it to you, do you think there would be much white flight if you instead selected for blacks with relatively high SAT/ACT scores or who had Bachelor's degrees?
Even if that group is a smaller one, I think you must understand on some level that there are good eggs and bad eggs, even in a highly crime-prone group like that.
vorpa-glavo
21d ago
We also know race blind liberalism is possible, since the United States lives under it (and to some extent Europe). Do you like the system?
I mean, isn't the complaint that it isn't actually race-blind? Either because we're too lenient on black defendants, or because of affirmative action and DEI?
My preference as a heterodox libertarian would be for a race blind system that actually punished people where appropriate. If that means a higher percentage of black people end up in prison, so be it. So yes, I like the theoretical idea of race-blind liberalism, more or less.
We can't have this discussion properly when you aren't actually willing to grant the basic race facts. You don't just grant for the sake of the argument here; you must grant for the sake of reality. Then we can talk about policy. The way it works, though, is that when we try to establish the facts, we get shouted down. So there is no point and there can be no discussion. The facts remain the facts, and the fact remains that the facts remain denied.
I don't think I've ever shouted anyone down for anything here on the Motte.
Don't get me wrong. I've been working my way through books recommended here and elsewhere. But it is slow going, and I'm not yet fully on board with HBD in its most common form here.
My biggest hang up has always remained that I just don't think that establishing the facts of HBD should have much effect on public policy besides immigration. We have the people inside of the country that we have. We can do some amount of voluntary eugenics under a libertarian/liberal regime, but even changing my view to agree with the common HBD consensus wouldn't really change anything about how I think society should be organized. I had already priced in that some people are naturally going to be more violent, or stupid, and I still think we should treat them as individuals and let them rise or fall on the basis of their own merits.
vorpa-glavo
21d ago
Also, on the HBD race debate specifically, the controversy is much older than the Motte, and the same thing happens elsewhere with it. I'm convinced it was all sorted out by 1995 or earlier.
Look, I'm fully open to the idea that I'm totally wrong-headed on these topics, and I always try to keep the idea that I might be biased and believing what I want to believe in view as a possibility. But I genuinely think there are a lot of questions that a lot of HBD people I've interacted with seem ill-equipped to deal with.
For example, if I grant for the sake of argument that the average 85 IQ of African Americans is mostly genetic, and even the part that is environmental is mostly infeasible to change with ordinary interventions, I still have not heard a convincing argument in favor of segregation, which I have seen more than one HBDer advocate for.
Like, I'm fully aware of the "13% of the population commits 50% of the murders" argument, but surely if we were just genuinely tough on crime and caught the bad eggs, there would be no reason for segregation, since the vast majority of African Americans are not murderers? Like, if you just look at averages and standard deviations, then the smartest non-outlier African American in the United States has an IQ of 145. I don't understand why we need a system that segregates that IQ 145 person away from everyone else, just because 1% of his same race cohort are murderers or whatever.
I kind of just don't see why the Steven Pinker-style of HBD-aware liberalism isn't still possible, even if HBD turns out to be 100% true? Do you really assert that we've known since 1995 that such a system was and is impossible with any realistic social arrangement?
vorpa-glavo
21d ago
There’s a reason citizens have “equality before the law.” You surely don’t find the principle alive in science or the animal kingdom.
I feel like you have a bit of a category error here. I don't take "equality before the law" to have to do with the facts about people one way or the other. It is more of a commitment that the legal system tries to make to be fair and impartial to the extent that it can.
Of course, because humans made this system we will fail to live up to that commitment again and again. But when we say that, say, a bicycle thief and a tech CEO are equal before the law when charged with the same crime, we're not saying that they have equal intelligence or abilities, or even equal likelihood to have actually committed the crime. We're saying that we're committed to giving them approximately the same chance to prove their innocence, in approximately the same legal proceedings.
vorpa-glavo
21d ago
What do you want him to do, post FBI crime statistics for the millionth time? Then enter the heritability debate with the gaslighters again? It's boring.
One of the things I always respected about the Motte was the effortposters who were willing to research and put in the work on controversial questions. I find responses like yours extremely disappointing and out of place for what this community used to be.
At the very least, you could link to a past discussion on the Motte or somewhere else that you think did a good job rigorously interrogating the evidence and policy choices, while arriving in the neighborhood of /u/sleepyegg's assertions, so that those of us who are interested in high effort discussions and a free search for truth can have something to sink our teeth into.
vorpa-glavo
27d ago
The final recalcitrant juror is induced to change his mind not by the others successfully convincing him, but by the others socially ostracising and refusing to talk to him.
You are misremembering.
The racist juror is turned by social ostracism, but is not the last to be convinced. (Although I think you could make the case that he realized how ridiculous and unreasonable he was being as the evidence for the defendant's innocence was building up, and his strong priors for guilt based on the defendant's race prevented him from proper Bayesian updates until the ostracism.)
The final juror is convinced when he realizes he emotionally needed the defendant to be guilty, because he reminded him too much of his son or something.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
I mean, generally speaking a child is an 18 year commitment (and socially this is not usually passed on to fathers)
We could do a Spartan-style thing, and only have women "drafted" for the duration of their pregnancy with the ability to give up the child for adoption, with the children being raised communally.
That said, I really don't think any of that is necessary one way or the other.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
I think realistically though, we are probably gonna have take a hard examination at the female end of the social contract at some-point, when birth rates and their implications become more severe and un-ignorable.
Will the implications ever become unignorable?
I'm actually a bit confused by a lot of the right wing concern about birth rates. The people who choose to have kids in the current environment have some combination of genes (personality traits, etc.) and memes that lead to them being more successful at reproducing.
If we do absolutely nothing, the whole problem will sort itself out, because each generation will have a higher share of the reproduction-in-industrialized-information-age genes and memes, and the less fit people with inferior genes and memes that don't lead to reproduction will die out. Why would we even want to dysgenically keep around genes that aren't well suited to reproduction in the current environment?
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
You Are Still Crying Wolf.
I am not "still" crying wolf. I didn't really start being truly, deeply worried about Trump until April 2025.
Before that, I had convinced myself that Trump 1 hadn't been that bad, that despite the weekly outrage articles from the mainstream media, he had mostly governed as any Republican would have. But I really do think Trump 2 has been different.
Where are the criticisms for Biden? Honestly, where are they? Where are the people denouncing the pardons? Calling for them to be overturned, or for the pardoned people to be strung up on things they haven't been pardoned for? Where, in other words, is the action? Where is the demonstration of these values applied to anyone other than Trump? Because I no longer trust anyone who applies standards to Trump due to repeated lessons teaching me otherwise.
I mean, I commented this a year ago.
Biden wasn't really the center of a political movement though, and I think Democrats were a lot more willing to call him out for things like the Hunter pardon. At most, I saw people quietly understanding of Biden breaking with principle to protect family, though I still got the sense there was general disapproval for the pardoning on the Left.
As a third party voter, I have been disgusted by both parties, but I really do think the dynamic is that Obama and Biden did X, and Trump is doing X^2, as /u/lollol put it. It creates a weird dynamic, because I'm happy to condemn them all and say that Trump is still worse in most cases (even if his actions aren't totally unprecedented), but it feels like a lot on the Right are in the position where they both need Trump and are happy that he's punishing the people that they hate, and so they're unwilling to engage in more than light critique with hedging like, "the only difference is that Trump is doing what everyone always did out in the open."
Technology does play a role. We have condoms, the pill, antibiotics, cell phones, and a whole host of things that make it much safer to be a prostitute these days.
Humanity will always have the oldest profession, but we really are living in a technological golden age for prostitutes, where a ton of the risk has been taken out of it, though obviously not all of it.
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