vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
To your question. Yes. I think the police can kill to enforce the law.
This sort of doesn't answer my question. I think everyone except for the most committed anarchists believe it is appropriate for police to kill to enforce the law in at least some circumstances.
What I am interested in is what the limits to your position are? For example, you mentioned voting in your original post as a possible source of law enforcement legitimacy. Given that there is a fair argument that Donald Trump would have won the 2020 elections if not for COVID, and thus it was the democratic will of the people to have harsher lockdowns, under what circumstances do you think it would have been appropriate for law enforcement to kill people who violated curfews or lockdowns in 2020-2022?
I guess I'm curious if you recognize any limiting principle on law enforcement's use of lethal force? Do you hold democratic will above constitutional limits? Do you bite the bullet when your political opponents are in power, and accept that they can pass and enforce laws that might make you a criminal under the right circumstances?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
For what it is worth, I think your position and /u/The_Nybbler's are both fairly reasonable takes.
They don't seem to be what /u/Opt-out was saying, hence me asking the question the way I did. I don't believe anyone else in this thread has implied that they think law enforcement officers should kill people who merely obstruct them, and I was trying to clarify whether it was just a sloppily worded post or whether it represented their true opinion on the subject.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
My intention was to clarify /u/Opt-out's exact position. I didn't want to jump to conclusions based on potentially sloppy wording.
I don't know, based on the comment I'm responding to alone, whether they would make the sort of statement you're making here, or whether they would disagree and say that even attempting arrest would not have been necessary in this case, and going straight to trying to kill her would have been appropriate and (potentially) just. Hence my question.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I voted for ICE enforcing immigration law which includes using deadly force with people obstructed him from doing his job.
If the issue was the woman obstructing a law officer, then surely arresting her would have been an appropriate and proportional response? I doubt this would have become a viral story if that was all that ended up happening.
Most people who find the situation outrageous seem to think so because they believe the suspect was truly trying to flee and not hit any of the officers, and they therefore think that the use of deadly force was not appropriate. Separate from any of the facts of the case, is it your position that merely obstructing law officers or fleeing law officers should be punishable by immediate death?
Because I can say that sounds like a cure that is worse than the disease to me.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
It seems to be that a large percentage (30%, 60%, 90%?) of gay men truly enjoy being deviant. The gayness is part of their expression of being counter to normal behavior. Many seem to lament the mainstreaming of gayness having taken a lot of the fun out of it. Deviant, abnormal sex is explicitly part of the appeal.
I wouldn't rule out the possibility that there are a lot of straight men who would be deviant if they could get a woman down with it.
I've spoken with a middle aged straight man who admitted to me he was constantly fantasizing about some pretty out there fantasy fetish scenarios involving his wife, but who knew from the few times he had brought them up that she would never come around to trying any of them. Who knows how many people are in marriages or relationships where they quietly settle for never getting the deviancy they crave?
We often only know about historical fetishism due to (possibly libelous) accounts of rulers with fetishes. Who knows how old some popular internet fetishes were historically? Maybe gay guys are more likely to bring up their deviant desires, and thus more likely to find someone at least game to try them out.
I think the problem is that about 30 years earlier, existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre coined the term "the gaze", and Laura Mulvey was understood to be developing an extension of the concept in her original essay about the "male gaze."
So it's not like you coining "black stealing" in isolation at all. It's more like if "stealing" had taken on a particular jargony meaning a few decades earlier, and you had further developed a concept called "black stealing", and then people unfamiliar with that history incorrectly and almost exclusively used it to refer to shoplifting by black people instead.
EDIT: As the Nybbler said elsewhere in this thread, "male gaze" is generally taken to be something the camera is doing. A female director can give a film a "male gaze" if she films a female subject in a particular way, and a male director can give a film a "female gaze" if he films his subjects in a particular way. This is part of what I meant when I said that a "male gaze" is not equal to "gaze of males." Using it to refer to "looks/gazes of males" is a bit like talking about "charmed quarks" like they're under a literal magical spell. Sometimes jargon takes on a very specific meaning, slightly disconnected from the words that compose the jargon.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
a) providing simple entertainment / fanservice for dudebros and their male gaze without any feminist BS attached
Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything[...]
(emphasis mine)
This is probably a lost battle at this point, but it's worth pointing out that "male gaze" as a term is not synonymous with "the gaze of males." The article where Laura Mulvey coined the term is full of Freudian academic bullshit, but it is pretty clear "male gaze" is related to film, and not just something men do:
To begin with (as an ending), the voyeuristic-scopophilic look that is a crucial part of traditional filmic pleasure can itself be broken down. There are three different looks associated with cinema: that of the camera as it records the pro-filmic event, that of the audience as it watches the final product, and that of the characters at each other within the screen illusion. The conventions of narrative film deny the first two and subordinate them to the third, the conscious aim being always to eliminate intrusive camera presence and prevent a distancing awareness in the audience. Without these two absences (the material existence of the recording process, the critical reading of the spectator), fictional drama cannot achieve reality, obviousness and truth. Nevertheless, as this article has argued, the structure of looking in narrative fiction film contains a contradiction in its own premises: the female image as a castration threat constantly endangers the unity of the diegesis and bursts through the world of illusion as an intrusive, static, one dimensional fetish. Thus the two looks materially present in time and space are obsessively subordinated to the neurotic needs of the male ego. The camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera's look is disavowed in order to create [a convincing] world in which the spectator's surrogate can perform with verisimilitude.
I don't blame you for this misuse. I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had. This has affected a lot of terms in wider folk feminist discussions. Another big one that comes to mind is "toxic masculinity", which is notably not the thesis that all masculinity is toxic.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The Fappening shined a hilarious light into the lives of popstars such as Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus, whose photos contained numerous nude selfies and ass, pussy, tit shots. So it's not just an act, a show they conduct, a persona they put on for marketing purposes. Sexualizing themselves is a hobby they enjoy doing; being a sex object is an aspiration and their past-time, consistent with the revealed preferences of young women in general.
I feel like some sort of equivocation is happening on the word "sexualizing (oneself)" here.
I don't think you need to be redpilled to believe that female celebrities in the social media era, love taking pictures that sexualize themselves and posting them online for the world to see. Who, male or female, doesn't like getting positive attention from people you're attracted to, or making your rivals for said attraction envious or respectful of you?
However, I think you're ignoring the idea of an intended audience and social context.
The pictures that surfaced during the Fappening were generally intended for intimate partners and no one else. Just as a Victorian era burglar who broke into a woman's house while she was wearing lingerie in anticipation of her husband's return would have very little grounds to claim that the woman was a loose hussy, a 21st century hacker who finds sexual photos on a female celebrity's phone that were only ever intended for intimate partners doesn't have much ground to claim that she "enjoys sexualizing herself" with no qualifications.
Sexualizing herself for whom? What level of sexualization and in what context?
(As an aside, I'm not actually sure that the Ariel Winters articles you linked demonstrate what you're trying to claim. In the first link, she's talking about "backlash" she received for a sexy graduation dress she wore, and a nude bathtub photo. In that context, her comments about sexism and the industry seem to be less about people sexualizing her in the first place, and more about people daring to say negative things about her choices of sexy attire and photos. This seems to make the first article continuous with the second one you linked, not contrary to it. I agree with aspects of your intended conclusion, but I don't think you picked a good example in this case.)
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The example of the Roman dictator Fabius also springs to mind. Sometimes slow and steady wins the race.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Wouldn't one business-related explanation be that local reporting in legacy media is practically dead already?
This was always one of the arguments of what would happen as the internet killed and absorbed more and more of legacy media over the last several decades. Fewer local papers means fewer local journalists. Fewer local journalists means fewer local scandals exposed.
Local journalism was never a perfect guarantee that every scandal would inevitably be exposed, but when there was a small fleet of local journalists supported by subscribers in every medium-sized town in America, I can believe it was far more likely for something like "childcare welfare fraud by Somali immigrants in Minnesota" to be looked into, once an interested local citizen sends the tip in.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I think "most people, left or right, will probably band together in a disaster" is compatible with a single federal employee, who got fired for their actions, deciding not to help political opponents during a disaster.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Is it really oikophobia, or just political tribalism?
I still think that old proverb, "Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me, my brother and my cousin against the world." generally applies.
The modern right doesn't like woke progressives in "peaceful times", but I would imagine that after a natural disaster like a fire or hurricane, that most people, left or right, tend to put their differences aside and help each other out.
And I think with a truly "worthy foe", most Americans would set aside political tribalism pretty quickly, and band together against that foe. The problem is, we haven't had anything close to a worthy foe since the Cold War.
Agree-and-amplify style approaches are much older than Gen Z or pick-up culture. In his Enchiridion, Epictetus says:
33.7. If anyone tells you that such a person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: "He does not know my other faults, else he would not have mentioned only these."
Part of the secret of ancient Stoic therapeia (midwifery of the soul) is to replace the usual motivations of pro-social actions (like desire for social approval and status anxiety) with the pursuit of virtue in itself, a sense of duty, and a feeling of connection to the cosmopolis (city of the Cosmos.)
I think this is the purpose of a lot of the so-called Stoic paradoxes. In Stoicism, phrases like "all virtues are equal", "all vices are equal", and "only the sage is free" serve a similar psychological role to Christian sayings like, "only God/Jesus is perfect and sinless", "we have all sinned and fall short of God's perfection", and "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Properly internalized, both philosophies will make it impossible to feel fundamentally better or worse than anyone else, and changes your point of comparison to a perfect ideal instead of something a mortal human is really capable of achieving in this life.
It makes it feel like Morgan is not in on the joke. It denies his moral frame that any hint of racism = bad. He needs to come up with a more concrete argument. When he instead tries fails to re-establish the frame through repetition, it doesn’t land.
While I hardly think Nick Fuentes is a Stoic sage, I think the power of denying a moral framework is bigger than this. It isn't that you're refusing to be moral, it is that you are refusing to give in to the coercive element of moral socializing, for better or worse. In the best cases, this frees you up to do the right thing in spite of what society's worst impulses might try to get you to do, like when Socrates refused immoral orders while serving the Athenian military under the 30 tyrants, and in the worse cases it enables you do a bad thing in spite of any social censure you might face.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Are we talking about before or after the AI is lobotomized to not offend anyone? My understanding is that AI's are better at guessing real world statistics before their edges are sanded off.
Sadly, I don't think there's a lot of frontier AI's that don't have this problem. Even Grok (which is a sub-frontier AI) has been lobotomized to some degree, just in the other direction.
I kind of doubt that intelligence communities have access to models the public doesn't. They wouldn't be making deals with OpenAI and Anthropic if they were capable of just building something better themselves.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
This is blatant misinformation. Only a single storyline, the comic series Dark Empire, featured a revived Emperor. There were lots of cool Star Wars books, running the gamut from standalone books like The Truce at Bakura, The Crystal Star, and I, Jedi to sprawling series (plural) like Rogue Squadron, New Jedi Order, and Legacy of the Force.
While /u/BahRamYou's literal words are incorrect, I think the feeling behind them is directionally correct.
An awful lot of the pre-Disney Star Wars books basically had the plot, "Imperial remnant of the week shows up with a new superweapon." So even if the Emperor mostly stayed dead, it was hard to feel like the Empire was well and truly done for good.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
If doesn't surprise me they got rid of alignment in BG3.
5e still has alignment for player characters, but it doesn't really do anything mechanically. The one effect I can think of off the top of my head that cares about PC alignment is rakshasas still being vulnerable to piercing damage wielded by good creatures.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Epicurus claimed to believe in gods, though. His gods were just non-interventionist. It's also clear from the works of Philodemus that early Epicureanism had a much more accommodationist approach to traditional religious rituals than later Roman Epicureans like Lucretius did.
Heck, even the Stoics got away with some "blasphemous" ideas, since they seemed to believe that temples and other houses of worship were unnecessary, and that the Logos/God/Zeus could be found out in the natural world. They were pious and impious at the same time.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I would actually say that the center of gravity of the OSR has shifted to 0e and Basic more than 1e or 2e for quite some time. OSRIC was the first OSR game, and it was based on 1e, but most people have moved on to other clones or NSR games these days.
The specific issue that he picked seems like bullshit TDS nitpicking, and given the vlogbrother’s passive aggressive approach to politics I am not surprised
I mean, I feel that way about a lot of anti-Trump complaints on the object level.
To use another example: On one level, I don't care what the President does to the White House one way or the other, no matter where the money is coming from, or what the "proper procedures" for renovations are. On the other hand, I can also understand general concerns around procedures and principles, and those being the thing that divides rule of law from arbitrary one-man rule.
I also have the feeling that renovating the White House is something that a President that is popular with his own base, and the current center of gravity of his party should easily be able to get pushed through via the proper process. I don't think Trump is a tyrant, but I do think Trump 2 has shown far more arbitrary exercises of power that are arguably unlawful than is really justified by the actual scope and size of the problems being dealt with.
Like, I'm not an immigration hawk, but I can at least sort of understand the idea of declaring an emergency to try and deal with that problem. But eliminating the penny and White House renovations should be easy slam dunks that require zero political capital to solve the "right way," and if they aren't maybe we genuinely are so incompetent we don't deserve a republic.
I certainly didn't expect someone to read my comment, and just start publishing D&D content without any further research, but I suppose the further clarification for those interested is nice.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
WOTC making orcs basically humans with an odd skin tone is an unusually poor choice. Really speaks to them missing the fundamental purpose of morally unambiguous enemies in a game. I get the real point is they don't want a race of dumb savages so they have to change them into human with oddly colored skin. Like an identifiable group of real life humans drawn in fantasty style.
I think the strange thing to me is the weird double think involved. 5.5e turned humanoids into homework monsters by making the DM have to manually apply racial traits to the NPC statblocks, and reclassified a few humanoids as other creature types, but it still has bioessentialist "evil" races all the same. Even if the front of the Monster Manual clarifies that alignment can be changed by the DM, it is really hard to imagine, say, Mind Flayers ever having a good relationship to humanoids, given their diet.
And 5.5e still has monsters that are practically only ever going to be used in a "horde of unambiguous evil" way, like undead and fiends. Like, sure, it might be fun to have an antihero vampire or a risen fiend under certain circumstances, but most DMs are not going to put much thought into it, and just start breaking out the undead or fiendish hordes.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Generally I ignore WotC. I think it was some 5-10 years ago a bunch of their higher ups said something like "We need less white dudes in this hobby" and I decided not to give money or attention to people who hate me. But a buddy of mine sent me this video reviewing a book of short adventures WotC published. His conclusion is that WotC has forgotten how to design adventures. Cool dunk bro.
I mean, D&D is under a Creative Commons license now, so no one needs to care about what WotC does ever again. Doesn't matter if they go woke(r) or if Elon Musk turns it into another chud hobby, the books are free for anyone to modify and change forever.
Even if you want to pay money to companies actively supporting a contemporary game, there's plenty of options across the political spectrum from relatively woke companies that still make decent products (Paizo, Kobold Press) to more right-wing or neutral companies (a fair few OSR publishers.)
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I think it is possible to overstate this thesis. I think D&D has a Star Wars-like thing going on with it: Star Wars was a massive blockbuster, watched and enjoyed by tons of men and women. It is also the case that autistic men gravitated towards it as a long-term special interest at a much higher rate, and so they became the core of the Star Wars fandom.
D&D Red Box was a huge Christmas smash hit the year it came out. While I have no doubt that male players outnumbered female players back then, I would find it extremely plausible that tons of kids, male and female, got D&D Red Box in their Christmas stockings, tried to start a campaign and had it peter out after a few weeks or months, and that this group constituted the majority of all D&D players back then. The ones who stuck around were probably disproportionately autistic men, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that if you subtracted them you would have a much more gender-balanced (though still skewing male) early audience for D&D than you might expect.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Vancian magic in prior editions (my experience is with 3e, which itself was a softening of the system by including 0-level spells) is a terrible, actively un-fun system. It sucks ass to find yourself in a situation where it sure would be nice to cast (insert spell here), but you only prepared one copy and you already cast it so you're SOL.
But 3e/3.5e also had more robust magic item buying/crafting rules, so it was easy to spend a little extra money to have your highly situational spells as scrolls or wands for when you need them, so you could reserve your spell slots for your more generally useful spells.
I understand that they did that. I'm asking you if you consider that legitimate within your own political beliefs?
Is it just might makes right, and the will of the people as interpreted by whoever is currently in charge, or do you believe that the law or its enforcement can, in principle, be wrong or invalid for some reason?
As another set of examples, do you consider the American Revolutionary War or the American Civil War to be just wars? Is it ever correct to rebel against the current authorities? If so, what circumstances make it correct or legitimate?
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