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vorpa-glavo


				

				

				
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vorpa-glavo


				
				
				

				
2 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 18:36:07 UTC

					

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User ID: 674

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Maybe we'll get a quick case clarifying the legal question of whether states can legally revoke ratification, and whether Congress is legally allowed to impose ratification deadlines. I think it would be sensible for the Supreme Court to rule that states can revoke ratification before an amendment has been passed (but not after), and that Congress can impose deadlines for ratification.

But it's kind of a pointless battle anyways, isn't it? Under current case law the 14th and 19th amendment already do most of what the ERA would do, and despite people like Hananiah pushing for it, I seriously doubt the majority of Federal statutes that prevent discrimination against women are going anywhere. And even if they did disappear, 23 states already have state constitutional provisions protecting the equality of men and women under law.

I think this is a good example of the difference between the Goddess of Cancer and the Goddess of Everything Else.

Evolution had one chance to program our values, but it is imperfect and hackish. So instead of optimizing us for "make lots of babies with your own genetic code", it optimized us for the intermediary, "have sex with an attractive member of the opposite sex." For most of human history, those two notions were connected, but then we invented birth control and contraceptives, and we switched from the rule of the Goddess of Cancer (who says "KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER") to the rule of the Goddess of Everything Else.

While hanging out in rationalist and pronatalist spaces has helped me to appreciate the appeal of Bloodtopia more, I think my heart is still in Ideastan. I just can't commit to calling childless people like Sir Isaac Newton or George Washington "failures" in some ultimate sense. I think in spite of the fact that they didn't have biological offspring, they altered the future trajectory of humanity so radically that the contribution of some random breeder just can't compare.

I would rather give in to the excitement and mystery of where the Goddess of Everything Else takes us, than stick to the tried and true, but stale world of Bloodtopia.

There's clearly a market opportunity for non-woke game publishers. But could they get devs?

I think the problem with any endeavor like this is that you end up with the "Christian music sucks" effect. You're hiring from a smaller talent pool, and so the works that get created are going to be, on average, of worse quality, and if a work gets too preachy it can be a turn off to some people.

Just as I'm sure there's not many non-Christians earnestly watching "God's not Dead", I assume that most non-anti-woke people wouldn't line up for an explicity anti-woke game.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb talks about why this happens in Skin in the Game. You can read the relevant chapter here.

Basically, the most intolerant minority tends to win, when there aren't high transaction costs to cater to them. Jews won't drink non-kosher beverages, but gentiles will drink kosher beverages, so most drinks in the United States are kosher. Back when restaurants still had smoking sections, a non-smoker could sit in a smoking section and not smoke, but a smoker couldn't sit in a non-smoking section and smoke. Etc., etc.

Relating this back to woke, anti-woke and non-woke. I suspect most people who are anti-woke will still buy most woke games. They might grumble about female protagonists, unappealing female characters, and every romancable character being Schroedinger's bisexual, but most of them will still buy a triple-A game that has all these features. On the other hand, the woke and non-woke will not buy a game whose explicit purpose is to reinforce anti-woke ideas (anti-trans, anti-cosmopolitan, conservative, trad, anti-LGBT, etc.) As a result, games end up either woke or non-woke, with a vanishingly small contingent of anti-woke games catering to a tiny segment of the market.

I don't necessarily agree that the intersex argument for trans acceptance is a motte and bailey, any more than the "dolphins have hairs" argument for dolphins not being fish is a motte and bailey (under a morphology-based taxonomy scheme of animals.) Trans activists who bring up intersex people are using them to point to a weakness in people's unreflective definitions of sex, and then adopting a "lumper" position that trans people should be included under their identified sex because of that ambiguity.

There's a few possible places that argument could go wrong:

  1. It could be the case that intersex people do not exist, or are easily and uncontroversially able to be categorized as one sex or the other. (Thus a merely two category system is tenable.)
  2. It could be the case that intersex people do exist, but that there are easy and uncontroversial membership tests for "man"/"male" and "woman"/"female" that can be easily used to categorize non-intersex people. (Enabling a straightforward three category system.)
  3. It could be that the boundaries of sex are indeed fuzzy, but that for splitter-related intuitions we don't want to include trans-women among women, and trans-men among men, even if we might allow intersex people membership in those categories. (Two categories with fuzzy, ambiguous borders.)

For my own part, I do think the existence of intersex people is a good argument for "sex" being messier than commonly believed (the same way that I think ring species and occasionally fertile hybrids point to the concept of "species" being messier than commonly believed), but I don't really use that as my argument for trans people. Instead, I have something closer to a socio-legal "adoptive sex" model, where a society can create fictive "sex" categories the same way that adoption can create fictive "parent-child" relationships. Each society or subculture gets to decide what the package of rights and privileges associated with "adoptive sex" are, and so might chose any variety of constructions surrounding bathroom inclusivity, prison inclusivity, and sports inclusivity. For my own part, I'm really only a partisan for there being some sort of protections for employment, housing and financial services, since I tend to think those are the most impactful domains, and I'm okay with less important private businesses denying services or discriminating in most other domains, since I tend to think the market will work itself out in the long run.

Whatever else you may say about capitalism, it does tend to erode discrimination under certain conditions. Black people needed a Green Book from the 1930's to the 1960's, but today every gas station wants the public's money enough that the the only color they care about is your green cash. I doubt McDonald's will ever start denying service to trans people, gay people, etc.

The US doesn't work all that much like Rome; we have no dictator, and no consuls to appoint them.

I beg to differ. While we don't have the formal office, I would argue that both Abraham Lincoln and FDR both arguably fill the "dictator" role in American politics. Though of course, the American tradition is for the "dictator" to die or be killed in office, rather than to have them voluntarily cede power back to the republic.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think Trump is definitively a dictator in the Roman style. I'm saying that one reading of his Napoleon tweet is that he's positioning himself as a Roman-style dictator, thus justifying the extra-legal way in which he had been advancing his agenda these past few weeks.

While I have expressed my concerns on the Motte about the health of our republic as a result of Trump's actions, I don't think the republic is quite dead yet. Our republic was already sick from an Imperial Presidency, and a cycle of Crisis and Leviathan, but the way Trump has chosen to carry out his agenda is increasingly worrying, and I'm someone who mostly lurked on the Motte during the Trump I years and agreed with the consensus about Trump Derangement Syndrome.

If Trump had just used his Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court to push through a legislative agenda through the usual means, I would have mostly just rolled with the punches and shrugged my shoulders. Republics, what can you do? But he's bypassed congress, and seems to be hell bent on doing as much as he can on his own. Even if the administrative state needed a serious culling, I would have been much happier if it had been done via Congress and the Courts, instead of by another executive embodying the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency.

I agree. The question was meant to highlight the problems with Originalism and similar positions. The Founding Fathers were wise, but in setting up a government of limited powers, they failed to account for a very obvious case like acquiring new territory. Thomas Jefferson was only the 3rd president of the United States - it didn't take long for the cracks to show.

The Founding Generation were all alive to see how inadequate the Constitution of limited powers they had crafted was. It didn't take long for people like Alexander Hamilton to try to craft a national bank, or for presidents to hide the fact that they were engaging in clandestine naval warfare without congressional approval or oversight, or for the Supreme Court to seize the right of judicial review, or for Jefferson to decide the treaty power includes the ability to acquire more territory. I'm sympathetic to Originalism, and I think in an ideal world it would be how the law was actually interpreted, but the ink had hardly dried on the Constitution when the first violations of its framework happened.

The abortion case is only complicated by the question of whether or not destroying a fetus is "doing harm". If you agree that it is, then an abortion is clearly morally wrong as just about every ethical system agrees that "doing harm" is wrong.

I don't think that last part is true.

Virtually every ethical system allows for "doing harm" in a number of circumstances, whether it is a doctor cutting off an arm to save a person's life, a military killing enemy combatants, or killing animals to eat them.

In fact, the most famous philosophical thought experiment around abortion, Judith Jarvis Thomson's violinist is specifically constructed to argue that even if abortion is doing harm to a human being, it would be morally permissible. (Personally, I think the thought experiment really only succeeds in arguing for abortion in the case of rape, but that's neither here nor there.)

I see shame as the most powerful tool in the social toolbox. It needs to be used sensibly, and using it too much and too trivially is going to make it harder to use it for the things it needs to be used for.

This basic idea is one of the major breaking points between the ancient Cynics and the ancient Stoics.

The Cynics were famous for their shamelessness, which they achieved through rigorous exercises designed to desensitize themselves to shame.

Zeno of Citium was a student of Crates, the third scholarch of the Cynics, and he was assigned the task of carrying a pot full of lentil soup through the pottery district of Athens. Lentils were an incredibly low class food, and carrying them out in the open was basically admitting you were gutter trash. Zeno, who had been a wealthy merchant before a shipwreck stranded him in Athens, kept trying to hide the lentils under his cloak and be as inconspicuous as possible with them. Crates realized what his student was doing, and broke the vessel Zeno was carrying the lentils in, causing lentils to dribble all over Zeno's legs, and embarrassing him enough that he fled the pottery district, with his teacher calling after him, "Why run away, my little Phoenician? Nothing terrible has befallen you."

Zeno was constitutionally incapable of cultivating the extreme shamelessness that Cynicism demanded, so he founded a less severe philosophical school that found a balance between the extremes of Cynicism, and the irrational and unvirtuous masses: Stoicism. In many ways it was still quite demanding, and had its own exercises designed to instill excellent character and healthy emotional responses in its adherents, but in a way that was a lot more attractive and achievable by a wide variety of people.

I agree with you Maiq, that shame is an important social tool, but I also wholeheartedly believe that cultivating a resistance to shame is important as well. Having a strong enough moral character to go against the crowd or the people in charge is important. It's the kind of strength that let Socrates refuse to obey an unlawful and immoral order while serving in the army during the reign of the Thirty Tyrants. It's the strength that let Helvidius Priscus speak truth to power to the Emperor Vespasian, for which he was sentenced to death - a sentence he submitted to with equanimity.

I think this is a weird aspect of how the idea of freedom of speech has developed in the West. Nowadays we view it as a right that governments are obligated to protect, a limit on state power. But for the Greeks and Romans, the virtue of parrhesia (=frankness of speech) was something that a person of excellent character did because it was the right thing to do in spite of the risk of consequences to themselves. In a way, I think the thing missing from all sides of the cancel culture debate are the Helvidius Priscus-es. Where are the sages of strong moral character on the Left or Right, who rather than whining about the injustice of their cancellation, simply nod and say, "You will do your part, and I will do mine: it is your part to kill; it is mine to die, but not in fear: yours to banish me; mine to depart without sorrow."

You should consider formatting your post to be a list to make it easier to read.

To actually answer you question, you might check out Data Secret Lox, which is another part of the rationalist and rat adjacent diaspora, with its own group of regulars.

EDIT: Removed formatting point.

I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.

Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.

Whether the quote is trolling or not, many in the X/Twitter replies were taking it at face value and affirming their support of the underlying sentiment. Someone in another thread said we need a "Kremlinology" of Trump that is attuned to knowing when to take what he says seriously or literally, and I agree in this case.

I would argue that if Trump is being literal with this tweet, then he is basically positioning himself as a "dictator" in the original Roman sense of the word. Someone imbued with emergency powers in order to save the republic in a crisis. The problem is that nobody actually appointed him to do that. Like, you could argue the American people did, but a 51/49 victory should not a Roman-style dictator make. 51/49 is "reform immigration, lower taxes, use the bully pulpit to get as much of your agenda through congress as possible" territory. It is not, "take all the power you need to save our republic, but please give it back when you're done" territory.

I simply do not share the belief that Trump couldn't have done most of what he wanted to do with the Republican majority congress and Supreme Court. He just chose to do it in a legally dubious method instead, and that's the main thing that concerns me.

EDIT: There's also the component where he's posting it on Lupercalia (Feb 15), the same day Mark Antony tried to crown Ceasar king. Even if it is god-tier trolling, then I've got to say I'm not amused. I actually care about my republic. (Thanks /u/SoonToBeBanned for reminding me of the Lupercalia connection.)

The United States was not meant to be a "democracy." Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as "A republic, if you can keep it."

While there were certainly people in the founding generation who saw a place for a heavy democratic element in the United States, such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, I think it is fair to say that most educated gentlemen around the time of the founding were steeped in a tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato where "democracy" was the term for a bad form of government by the many.

Despite Alexander Hamilton advocating for the current Constitution, his original hours-long presentation to the Congress had a much stronger executive, and Hamilton famously told Jefferson, "The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar." There's many ways to interpret this statement, but I think it is obvious that Hamilton hadn't completely shaken off the monarchical thinking of an Englishman, and wanted a strong central authority as the best guarantee of liberty for the people.

Federalist Paper 51, written by Madison, describes how the checks and balances of the United States republic are meant to function. The whole letter is worth a read, but I will focus on one part:

A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.

An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department? If the principles on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test.

(Emphasis mine.)

Schlessinger's The Imperial Presidency, and Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan both document how this vision failed from different angles. Schlessinger examines the history of the growth of executive power, and the various techniques presidents used to get their way - from operating secret naval wars without congressional approval and oversight, to the use of impoundment to appropriate funds earmarked by congress (which was eventually eliminated after the Nixon presidency, due to his perceived abuse of the power.) Higgs looks at the way that crises created opportunities for the federal government to seize ever greater power, and while it is not limited to the growth in presidential power, it is impossible to ignore all of the emergency powers Congress ceded to the President across the constant cycle of crises.

Higgs was writing in 1987, and Schlessinger in 1973, and the trends they described have only continued.

And so we come to the present day, where Donald Trump became President on January 20th, and began what some are calling an "autocoup." On a diverse forum like this one, I am sure that there are at least a few monarchists that would be thrilled if that was true. I'm sure I can't convince them that an autocoup would be a bad thing, if that is, in fact, what is happening. But for the classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives and centrist institutionalists, I want to make the case that the way things happen matters as much as what is actually happening.

Some are defending actions like Elon Musk's DOGE dismantling the Department of Education without any apparent legal backing, by saying that this is what Trump supporters voted for.

But this simply isn't true. Or more accurately, that's not how this works.

I repeat: America is not a "democracy." America is a republic with checks and balances and a rule of law.

To the extent that we have democratic elements in our republic, then I certainly think that Trump and his supporters should be able to do what they were elected to do. If they want to pass an actual law that gets rid of USAID or the Department of Education, then let them do it. If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service, and give it unlimited power to control federal funding, then they should pass a law to do so. And if they can't get the Congress they voted in to make it happen, too bad, that is how a Republic works. The same applies if federal judges or the supreme court strike down a law or action as unconstitutional. One person doesn't just get the power to do whatever they want, without any oversight or pushback from the legislative or judicial branches.

I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.

EDIT: Typos.

If we're talking about ancient political philosophy, I tend to prefer Aristotle's politeia to Plato's aristokratia. A mixed constitution with all the best aspects of aristocracy, monarchy and democracy and with checks and balances to reign in the weaknesses of each of those systems seems like a better way to constitute a society than by trying to cultivate a truly virtuous and wise ruling class. I also feel like Aristotle's methodology (researching the constitutions of 158 Greek city states to see what makes them tick, and then distilling his findings into a book on politics) is more likely to arrive at viable, real world conclusions than Plato's comparatively more limited exposure to different constitutions. (There's also the fact that Plato's efforts to make Syracruse into his ideal republic ended in disaster, and resulted in his later political work "The Laws" being much less ambitious and utopian as a result.)

Plato was undoubtedly a genius, and his systematic approach to philosophy meant that he is often a great starting point, but I definitely don't think he should be taken as the last word on anything. He had a tendency to be lost in the airy heights, and I think a more grounded pragmatic approach can often outdo him.

My impression is that she's a trans woman. Things like putting "and no I am not a man" in her bio, and talking explicitly online about her UTI, and the proportion of posts about gender vs everything else.

Funny, my reading was just that she was a troll, especially because her bio has "[...] you can call me a troll until your throat hurts." My money would be on "cis male troll" before it would be on "good faith trans woman", but only because a username like "just a woman" feels like something neither a cis nor trans woman would make, and certainly not in this space.

The Imperial Presidency is a bipartisan creation more than a hundred years old, not something created in 2008. Of course, point out all of the abuses of power by Democratic presidents - they're an important part of the story. But don't ignore the way Bush Jr. used signing statements to attempt line item vetos, or Reagan's actions in the Iran-Contra affair, or Nixon's abuse of the impoundment power, or if you want to reach back to the Civil War, all of the things Lincoln did that were clearly unconstitutional.

While I would characterize myself as broadly left-of-center, I still have a strong libertarian strain, and I've become increasingly convinced of the importance of Federalism over the last few years as I've turned more of my attention towards Renaissance and Classical political theory. I'm happy to condemn abuses of power whether they're Democratic or Republican, since I increasingly see myself as not being at home with either of them, even if I have my preferences.

I was mostly happy to nod along and agree with the far more able posters here, who condemned Biden for his abuses of the pardon power. I have no illusions that in the counterfactual world where Kamala Harris was elected president, many more able and interested critics would have taken the stage here and condemned her every abuse of power. But I would say that the forum has been strangely quiet about Trump - not that nothing has been said, but far less than I expected. And so, I felt the need to step forward and make my case, even though I know I am far less well-equipped than some of the posters here.

I'll be the first to say that the end of the American Republic doesn't have to be the end of America. Maybe we'll pull a Rome, and enjoy an empire that will last 300 years or more. (Or perhaps "Empire without end" if we believe Virgil.) I don't pretend to know. But in the moods where I was willing to put on my pragmatic hat, I actually felt like America was a largely functional society that got a number of "big questions" right. We're wealthy, powerful, and our institutions are mostly compatible with a life of flourishing, even if few people make choices that can actually result in flourishing. I was worried about some of the things Obama and Biden did, and wasn't thrilled at many of the things Kamala would likely have done, but I am genuinely worried from a little-c conservative point of view that Trump might actually kill the goose that lays the Golden Egg.

Many of Trump's actions I have no real issue with. Let him have silly symbolic victories like renaming the Gulf of America and Mt. McKinley. Of course, he should be able to use executive orders to dismantle DEI programs that were created with executive orders in the first place. But I would feel a lot better about him dismantling the Department of Education or USAID if he was doing it with Congress by his side, instead of by giving admin access to the spending system of the Treasury to a random citizen. He certainly had the votes and the momentum to create an actual DOGE and give Elon Musk power the right way.

"Kindness" isn't a virtue.

I mean, if you've read Cicero's On Duties it is. According to Cicero (following the Stoic philosopher Panaetius), kindness/beneficence is a component of the cardinal virtue of justice. It is in this mode that the subordinate virtue of generosity is thought to fall under justice.

Now, Cicero's idea of generosity is limited, and he thinks that we should always keep enough to fulfill our obligations to our friends and families, and he also draws the analogy of your obligation to strangers being at about the level of helping a stranger with directions, or lighting someone else's torch when you already have a fire going (e.g. acts that don't require much from you in terms of time or resources.) A person with enough resources can, of course, go above and beyond what is morally required of them, and that is virtuous and good if they do.

I'm kind of curious about your response here, so I'm hoping you'd be willing to make it more concrete. Can you pick out the top one to three posts from Scott that you think are contradicted by his current position on HBD?

I'm not sure if I follow on the connection between HBD and Mistake Theory vs. Conflict Theory. Surely, the following can both be true: 1) IQ differences between groups are real and explained in part by genetic differences, and this affects the kinds of societal institutions that can be successful, and 2) it is better to treat policy disputes as debates where facts and evidence could theoretically make everyone converge to the correct prescriptions for society (mistake theory), rather than treating them as a war (conflict theory.)

Heck, going back through Scott's original Conflict vs. Mistake article, I find:

Mistake theorists think you can save the world by increasing intelligence. You make technocrats smart enough to determine the best policy. You make politicians smart enough to choose the right technocrats and implement their advice effectively. And you make voters smart enough to recognize the smartest politicians and sweep them into office.

Most of that, except maybe the part about voters seems completely compatible with HBD. Even taking the voters into account, through a combination of voluntary eugenics, and public education you could theoretically raise the societal IQ and show that mistake theory is a possible path to a successful society.

I mean, aren't there plenty of old stories about sluts getting away with it and becoming respected members of the community? The biblical prostitute Rahab got picked up as a model of "hospitality, mercy, faith, patience and repentance."

While helping the Israelites deal with their enemies is a good way to "earn" her redemption, that still sets a precedent that loose women can become part of the common fold.

But isn't Luigi Mangione from a rich family? It seems like people on Tumblr that I follow still stan him (and are posting joke quizzes asking if he's hot), so it's not obvious to me that he's an underdog in this way. Like, sure, he's objectively poorer than the CEO, but I think a lot of the "appeal" of the assassination is the "righteous fury" at insurance companies, which many Americans have had bad experiences with.

I just think the picture is at a bad angle. In this picture, Aloy looks fine. She's not a supermodel or anything, but she looks like a woman.

You didn't even link the report by Axios.

I second /u/orangecat. I truly appreciate this forum, and all the work you mods put into it.

There really isn't anywhere quite like the Motte.

Now I want to know whether "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is someone's kink. Surely not?

I assume /u/FarmReadyElephants was referencing bimbofication fetishes, and I have also observed a huge overlap between transwomen and bimbofication fetishes online.

It seems far less common for people to fantasize about people becoming smarter, and so I doubt there's been a lot of kink around being forced to do derivatives of an integral.

Mostly, my "grand unifying theory" of kink is that most fetishes (in the non-clinical sense) involve sexual power dynamics filtered through an "unusual" power hierarchy. So gigantification/shrinking fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of size, bimbofication fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of intelligence and low class beauty norms, weight gain fetishes are dominance-submission dynamics filtered through the lens of weight, etc., etc.

I suspect that normal human psychology in both men and women goes out "looking" for power hierarchies to internalize, and that most people in our society converge on a broadly overlapping set of hierarchies (wealth, beauty, class, height, etc.) Those hierarchies then play a role in what a person goes looking for in a sexual partner. But in a subset of the population, they become fixated on a single power hierarchy, like height, weight, or intelligence and so when the internalized hierarchy interacts with their psycho-sexual development, it manifests as a fetish.

I suspect that "being forced to find the derivative of an integral" is off the beaten path of power hierarchies, though I suppose it could have overlap with teacher-student roleplay.

EDIT: I no longer endorse this post. USA Today and NPR for Northern, Central and Eastern Kentucky have both run stories that confirm that the Jackson, Kentucky NWS office was staffed the night of the tornado:

Fahy said Jackson workers were called in May 16 work the overnight shift to coordinate with emergency management personnel and issue warnings throughout the night. The Jackson office had a full staff that he described as an “all-hands-on-deck” situation due to the extreme storm.

“The deaths were not attributable to the staffing cuts,” he said. “Everybody was there last night. We had a full team.”

In a statement, the weather service said the Jackson office had additional staffing and support from neighboring offices through the weekend.

As USA TODAY reported before the Kentucky storms, the weather service has had to scramble to cover vital shifts. For the first time in decades, not all forecast offices have “24/7” staffing, according to the weather service union.

I still believe it is irresponsible to leave offices unstaffed, even if there is some ability to move neighboring employees around when they're expecting storms, but this is much less bad than I initially believed. I think I'm going to take a break from the Motte for a bit. I do love this community, but I have not been doing a very good job contributing to it.


On May 15th, the New York Times ran a story about how DOGE cuts had left parts of Eastern Kentucky vulnerable while it was under moderate threats for extreme weather:

Tom Fahy, the legislative director for the union that represents Weather Service employees, said the office in Jackson, Ky., was one of four that no longer had a permanent overnight forecaster after hundreds of people left the agency as a result of cuts ordered by the Department of Government Efficiency, the initiative led by Elon Musk that is reshaping the federal bureaucracy. (emphasis mine)

This morning, May 17th, it became apparent that eastern Kentucky had been hit by an overnight tornado that killed dozens.

I was honestly speechless when I read that.

This is what London, Kentucky looks like after the tornado. To quote someone who put it much more eloquently than I can:

Of all the disasters I’ve studied, tornadoes scare me the most.

They come with little warning and can erase entire communities in minutes — even seconds.

There’s no four-day lead-up to prepare like we often have with major hurricanes, and the winds of these storms can far exceed the most violent tropical cyclones.

In those few moments before one hits, especially if you’re sleeping, you’re at the mercy of your local weather station.

If someone is watching, they can issue a warning in those critical minutes before it’s too late.

Those few minutes after an emergency alert is issued are the difference between life and death.

[...]

Tornado warnings were delayed because of reduced staff. Those critical moments — a midnight warning to your phone waking you up, giving you precious seconds to find shelter — came too late for some.

My political stance has been evolving, but I'd describe myself as a state capacity libertarian.

To me disaster preparedness and relief are obvious, bread and butter, parts of the federal government. Sure we do stupid, wasteful things like give people flood insurance that lets them build and rebuild houses in the same vulnerable spot over and over again, when we should probably just heavily incentivize them to rebuild in a less risky area. Sure, with any given disaster there's going to be criticisms about how Biden did this or Bush did that. But I've always felt mostly positive about my tax dollars that go to disaster relief and preparedness.

I've had a growing sense of unease over the last few months as I saw reports of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announcing Trump administration plans to end FEMA, and reports about National Weather Service cuts back in April. I'm gutted that the easy predictions of these moves leading to unnecessary deaths has come true.

A part of me had hoped that Trump and Musk's Department of Government Efficiency would cut a lot of genuinely unnecessary spending from the government. When it was drag shows in Ecuador, even I as a rather Trump-skeptical person could admit that even a broken clock is right twice a day. But it was also clear to me that they were cutting with a chainsaw, not a scalpel. The images of Elon waving a chainsaw at CPAC feel a lot more hollow now. The man has blood on his hands. 27 people are dead in Kentucky because DOGE and Trump thought that it was "more efficient" to just let people die, instead of keeping overnight forecasters on staff.

Back in 2020, FEMA estimated the value of a statistical life at $7,500,000. By that standard, when doing the cost-benefit analysis the government bean counters are supposed to value 27 deaths as a loss of $202.5 million. I wonder how much it costs the government to staff permanent overnight forecasters in eastern Kentucky?