wraelk
11mo ago
The question is, of course, how many of them change their voting behavior based on this?
Because if those votes reliably end up in the same hands every time, it doesn't really matter what their more nuanced opinions are.
wraelk
11mo ago
I've noticed a number of sit-down places, not even chains, that do put the calorie counts on their menu, without this legislation.
wraelk
9mo ago
Still at least implies the toothless guy was attracted to the toothless girl, even if the converse wasn't true.
My point is that it is entirely possible to have consistent principles that result in treating trans people as their preferred gender in most cases, but not when it comes to women's sports. An example of such principles would be the basic liberal/libertarian maxim "let people do what they want as long as they're not harming anyone".
I think this falls under "arguments as soldiers".
Arguing that trans women should not be allowed to compete in women's sports is admitting complexity beyond "trans women are women". It will be torn down by fellow believers as not being fully committed to the cause of trans equality, and will thus be eroded away or at the very least not said out loud.
And only that one seems consistent: arguing that trans women are not women but should be allowed to compete in women's sports anyway would be a weird position to hold. Although people that want women's sports to be removed entirely might fall in that category. I also feel like I've seen a view that was something like "make two different categories that anyone can enter, label one with a cool sounding name and one with a lame 'I'm a weakling' sounding name, and let things work themselves out".
wraelk
8mo ago
The nice part about Nature is that she follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and doesn't care if you outwit her. Find a way to exploit Nature's laws and you just win: find a way to exploit a human's laws, and those laws will change quite quickly.
wraelk
7mo ago
It might say something interesting about the distribution of interest in the movie: some people were sufficiently interested to buy multiple tickets and contribute more towards the movie's success than they had to, and some people may not been sufficiently motivated to see it without a free ticket (although i don't know a lot about how you get a free ticket and it's possible ticket recipients would have seen the movie anyway)
I'm not sure that's negative towards the movie, though: having some people be super excited about your movie isn't uncommon, and it's kind of interesting that we don't see more of this.
Imagine a campaign where feminists and allies subsidize a movie that they think portays women well, to try and get more moviegoers to explore along those lines. Kind of terrifying in what it'll do to movie creator incentives in a Toxoplasma of Rage way, but i don't think people are making a strategic decision not to do it on those grounds.
wraelk
7mo ago
On reddit, the mantra was that the downvote was not an "I disagree" button. If that's not the case at the motte I sure would like to know that.
Despite the mantra, the downvote button is pretty universally used as a disagree button on Reddit: I think the main reason the mantra exists is as a push against the clear regular use.
It's a good question to ask what the intended use here is. I vaguely recall a discussion where it was useful to have a button to push as a way to let off steam in response to a post that you dislike: instead of writing an angry retort that drives down the quality of the discussion, you just push your dislike button and move on to a conversation you can productively engage with. I don't know if mods were involved in that discussion or what their thoughts on that philosophy were.
Certainly with our aggressive modding of tone and the community moderation effort, there's a question of whether downvotes meaningfully imply "this shouldn't be on here": that's what the report button and janitor duty are for, and downvotes seem rather redundant with that.
wraelk
7mo ago
I wonder if modern communication and widespread prevalence of Islam will lead this to be less effective than your examples.
Like with Nazi Germany, the main source of Nazi ideology was Germany itself: if you wanted to learn about Naziism you had to go up against the occupation authorities that were against that. And even if there were Nazi groups that weren't repressed in Italy or something, you'd have a hard time finding and learning from them.
But that's clearly not going to happen here: Islam exists in many countries across the world and will explicitly talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict, so there's always going to be a supply of Islam for anyone in Palestine who wants to learn it.
Keeping it repressed doesn't just mean tearing down the mosques, it means keeping Palestinians from accessing the mosques in other countries, which would mean an unrealistic crackdown on all communication technology in the country, and probably needing to maintain that crackdown perfectly for decades against people from other countries actively seeking to break it.
wraelk
7mo ago
At some point after Iran has established they're going to shoot, I think Israel loses their plausible deniability. "oh no Iran shot them AGAIN? What are the odds?" probably wouldn't come off very well.
Assuming they don't run out of boats and/or Palestinians who would prefer to be shot by Iran than by Israel first, of course.
wraelk
6mo ago
because Christian thought just views punishment differently. “Eye for an eye” is Old Testament, after all.
It kind of seems like when you say "eye for an eye" you mean "makes the whole world blind", i.e. forgiveness instead of retribution. Just to be clear, the Old Testament is in favor of eye for an eye.
If anyone injures his neighbor, as he has done it shall be done to him, fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth; whatever injury he has given a person shall be given to him.
Leviticus 24, 19-20.
wraelk
5mo ago
For some reason, this 24-hour window from Friday morning to Saturday morning seems to always pack a lot of news
This doesn't work for all of your examples, but I think part of it is that companies will often wait until late Friday to make moves that could get a lot of pushback. The extremely-online types will always pick it up anyway, but the normal people will often be less interested because it's the weekend and they've got things to do, so it reduces how much it gets picked up. By the time Monday rolls around the momentum of the pushback is often lost.
Actually, hadn't thought about it like this before, but that's also probably to reduce big stock shifts, give the news time to settle a bit before people get to trade on it.
wraelk
5mo ago
In that example, in wartime that's not "shooting an unarmed man", that's "enemy soldier engaging in act of war" and legitimate target.
Well that's the thing, that man is both. He is an enemy soldier engaging in an act of war and a legitimate target, but he is also an unarmed man.
So there are two rules in conflict, both completely applicable and giving opposite results. What actually happens has a lot to do with which rule is emphasized and brought to the forefront.
There's value in changing brands as a result of controversy, even if the company getting your money remains the same.
If Gillette sales suddenly dip by 50% and Braun picks up those sales, even if P&G ends up with the same number of sales, there are a bunch of factories that are going to be retooled or closed, a bunch of people that are going to be hired and fired or moved to different divisions that may have offices in different areas. Those are costs, and those are visible events among the executives of the company. To say nothing of the cost of running the ad in the first place: while marketing has some issues with showing its actual effects, the underlying theory is you increase your sales.
Yes, it's technically possible for them to just repeatedly bait and switch you: once you're established with Braun they do something exactly as controversial. But what then? You're not going back to Gillette. Maybe there's a third P&G brand that makes razors that you go to, but sooner or later you'll move outside P&G's ecosystem for your razor, unless they're spending even more money to set up new brands as fast as they collapse. Maybe you still buy their shampoo, but it's not like there's a binary "yes they're our customer/no they're not our customer" thing here where once you buy one P&G product they've won. They want your shampoo money and your razor money and your lotion money and every other bit of money they can get from you, and insofar as you move away from that that's a failure of their profit-seeking goals.
It probably won't bankrupt them as a company, but that's probably an unrealistic goal in the first place. What it will do is send a clear signal "hey, doing this thing that you thought would make you money is instead costing you money", and that's both attainable and effective for changing behavior.
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