BANNED USER: By request
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Hyperbole is bad
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User ID: 92
Banned by: @netstack
Why do I (a white person) want to inflate white people's statistics? Either I care about accurately representing reality, in which case splitting the groups seems sensible, or I care about not giving people ammunition to advocate for (e.g.) affirmative action.
I feel like I’ve lived a sufficiently goody two shoes life to be allowed to say that no, not everyone has been an edge lord.
That said, I don’t think people should be punished based on opinions they held years ago.
Trying really hard to out-contrarian the folks who think that mile time would be a better filter for IQ than college admissions, huh?
There are a billion second-order arguments for and against any conceivable policy. If you're going to posit meaningful indirect effects of policy changes you're going to need to bring some kind of evidence to the table to make it interesting. Otherwise why should I take this any more seriously than a recommendation to let kids steal more (so would-be thieves understand that stealing is mean), or that giving money to poor people makes them worse off (because it makes them dependent on welfare)?
Without evidence, I'm inclined to KISS: the main effect of allowing kids to bully each other is more kids suffering under bullying. This is bad, so we shouldn't let kids bully each other.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
This is a good example of why bagging the whole film industry together is so lossy -- yes, there are directors who like to insert overt political messaging in their films, but Nolan (or James Cameron, Wes Anderson, etc.) do not.
As a kid I assumed that since it wasn't obvious the director of Jurassic Park and Raiders of the Lost Ark were directed by the same person, then directors must not matter very much. As I get older I've begun to appreciate that this attitude was naive.
What counts as a business? How many guns can you sell from your collection before you cross the threshold? How fast can you turn around and sell a gun after you buy without fear of breaking the law? This law is ambiguous on this
As OP writes it, the law is ambiguous. Hence "skirting the law" does not mean "carefully staying inside the bright red lines", it means "nobody knows if you're breaking the law until you're in court".
If you want to argue he clearly wasn't breaking the law then I'd be legitimately happy to read it, but right now I'm leaning towards "law makers trying to make it legal for you to sell your grandpa's private collection when he dies probably weren't trying to make it legal to buy and sell 150 guns, with no extenuating circumstances, in two years".
The meat of your objection is that wignats would have to violence to achieve their policy goals, but ... that's true for every political movement ever.
I hate to state the obvious, but just because Jimmy Carter and Joseph Stalin both used "violence" to achieve their policy goals does not mean I can't prefer Carter for killing fewer people and pursuing better policies than Stalin.
/u/TheBookOfAllan is making the entirely defensible claim that the cost of deporting/imprisoning/killing millions of Mexicans is incredibly high compared to typical policy goals and compared to the benefits. It's not helpful to respond that it's no different than enforcing vehicle registration.
While I appreciate a top-level post talking about VisionOS, you seem to be claiming that keyboard/mouse is the moat around high-income tech jobs that keeps out "the strong and physically capable", which seems crazy to me.
Typing speed doesn't meaningfully affect an engineer's productivity (except maybe in the low-complexity world of undergraduate projects). A new operating system isn't going to increase the percent of people who can use threads.
What stops more people from becoming software engineers is that it's hard.
Keyboard and mouse still hold the crown.
It’s shocking to you and me, but most people spend more time using a touch screen than using a mouse and keyboard. Modern UX prioritizes mobile experiences over mouse/keyboard.
But you don't know whether you can prove it or not until you end up in front of a judge. That's got to have some sort of chilling effect.
It seems to me there are two axes here: vague versus concrete legislation, and restrictive versus unrestrictive. Complaining that the current system is too restrictive (or not restrictive enough) for private companies (or public organizations) seems like a fairly interesting debate. But I really really don't think you want to be asking for concrete legislation that irons out all the ambiguity, like "only these 5 industries can ask math questions during interviews", "you can only require applicants to write essays if their job involves writing more than 4 essays a year", etc.
Passing the buck on to judges is how systems try to avoid insanely idiotic edge cases that inevitably comes from extremely concrete legislation -- judges are the political organ trusted with discretion and judgement.
Yes, that makes the legal system less predictable (which is bad), but the alternative is not "incredibly concrete legislation that doesn't have any terrible edge cases". The alternative is "iron-rules bureaucracy that follows a brain-dead flow chart" -- i.e. precisely the system that people on here like to complain about.
Granted, "prove x is true" can be incredibly sane or downright impossible, depending on how sensible your judge is. I just don't think there is really an alternative here that isn't worse. Similarly, note that the rules on this website are also pretty open to interpretation, and you may get different rulings from different mods. Nonetheless, trying to simply write more concrete rules could never actually work.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
It's worth noting that "fair fight" spaces have their own failure modes, notably that people interpret their opponents uncharitably and take opportunistic potshots. One of my favorite things about quokka spaces is that they avoid those failure modes.
Also "status" is absolutely a thing in masculine spaces, which is one reason why "I'm sorry, I was wrong" is never seen here.
Are 3 minor pieces worth about a queen? Certainly not, what nonsense! TypeDoesNotExist. Pieces don’t have values, all that matters is checkmating your opponent.
But since I’m not the physical embodiment of a trillion trillion trillion GPUs… I’m going to need a way to model the chess game that’s a bit more sophisticated (read: “wrong”). And if you start telling me piece values don’t exist I’m going to call you out for excessive pedantry.
This is how I feel when people complain that free will is incompatible with determinism. Like, yeah, you looked at the quarks and didn’t find any free will particles, sure. But that says nothing about whether I should keep modeling other people (and myself!) as agents with goals, who run some kind of shitty statistical inference, and who respond to incentives.
I’m not the embodiment of a trillion trillion trillion GPUs, so I’m not going to be modeling my barista as a complex set of atoms when I’m ordering my coffee.
My best guess is Christianity/traditionalism are popular arguments here, mainly because they act as a foil for progressivism -- the benefits of radically different systems put the costs of progressivism into sharper relief.
I suspect the vast majority of our community would have been against white nationalism/Christianity/traditionalism before the 1960s, and would be against it today if it actually regressed to that point. I think they'd change their tune quite quickly once millions of Mexicans were living in tents across the border, or teachers were telling their kids they have to believe in God or they'll go to hell, or their daughters weren't allowed to go to college.
Whether they don't bring this up because those scenarios are so unlikely they're not worth mentioning, or because it ruins their catharsis while railing against leftists, is probably more a narrative question than a factual one, but I really doubt the readers here were pro-Christian when Christians were more influential and (e.g.) trying to stop Evolution from being taught in schools.
In that sense, it's probably more true to say that this forum hates ideologies that are currently messing with their lives (Progressivism is seen as the primary culprit today), rather than that it hates Progressivism or likes Christianity specifically.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
I'm making the specific point that "Why do you care if HBD if true if you got yours?" is an insane response to somebody talking about how belief in HBD shapes their view of their community.
Imagine if OP was talking about how his family has a heritable disease and half of them die before they're 40. It'd be insanely callous to say "Why do you care? You tested negative for the disease, right?"
Downvoting posts that are valuable enough you don't want them deleted is also bad behavior; @greyenlightenment deleting downvoted posts is giving TheMotte exactly what it's asking for. If that makes TheMotte a worse place, that's not on him. It's on us.
If TheMotte doesn't want people to delete comments that contribute to the conversation, it shouldn't be downvoting comments that contribute to the conversation. If you want those comments to persist, my actionable advice is to upvote comments that you think are valuable, but that you think are going to be downvoted.
This is actually a much better reason to upvote than the absolute "quality" of the comment, because 5 "high quality" comments that are all saying the same thing provide a single comment's worth of ideas. If TheMotte wants ideological diversity, it should vote in favor of ideological diversity.
Instead people upvote comments they agree with and downvote comments they disagree with, and then wonder why we all believe the same thing.
Israel announces largest West Bank land seizure since 1993 during Blinken visit
This is particularly jarring after Biden has made more overt moves indicating he'd like to see deescalation, most recently the (failed) UN ceasefire resolution.
Most striking to me, personally, is the overwhelmingly negative sentiment on r/neoliberal.
For those who don't know, /r/neoliberal are very pro-Biden (and anti-Trump), generally pro-free market (and hence anti-anti-capitalist), and (imo) generally see themselves as moderate Democrats. Until today I'd have characterized them as pro-Israel, but this seems like a marked change. A top 1% subreddit changing its political beliefs is pretty rare.
I want to say this foreshadows a change in broader public support, but perhaps I'm a bit late to the party -- Gallup has already shown dropping support for Israel generally:
Fifty-eight percent of Americans, down from 68% last year, have a “very” or “mostly favorable” view of Israel. This is the lowest favorable rating for Israel in over two decades. At the same time, positive opinions of the Palestinian Authority have dropped from 26% to 18%, the lowest since 2015.
(Last sentence is just to give some context: yes support for Israel has dropped, but, it's worth noting, so has support for Palestine)
And, perhaps to be expected, this is most pronounced among young people:
Young adults show the biggest decline in ratings of Israel, dropping from 64% favorable among 18- to 34-year-olds in 2023 to 38%. Middle-aged adults (those aged 35 to 54) show a smaller but still significant drop, from 66% to 55%, while there has been no meaningful change among adults aged 55 and older.
I can't imagine that whatever Israel has gained in the last year is worth the long-term cost of burning its support with the next two generations of Americans.
Reading Sotomayors and Jackson’s dissents all I can think is: “this is an excellent example of why affirmative action needs to be banned”
A post that is 100% culture warring, and booing outgroup scores (+44/-5) and has no mod action. If the majority of readers here want to read posts that dunk on leftists, then they should expect to run out of leftists to dunk on.
Either we all need to spontaneously coordinate and suppress our base instincts, the mods need to start cracking down on culture warring (as distinct from analysis, which is what the Culture War thread is purportedly for), or we all need to make peace with the fact that our community has exactly the amount of ideological diversity that we deserve.
Edit: previous discussion
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
The discussion about payment processors earlier in the year included discussion of controversial topics (incest, bestiality, sexual exploitation of a minor, rape, non-consensual mutilation), and the change you link to today includes those.
However, the most recent announcement also says the restrictions are "to comply with regional laws", and includes much more general pornography:
- post any content that is obscene, illegal, unlawful, fraudulent, defamatory, libelous, abusive, lewd, invasive of personal privacy or publicity rights, harassing, hateful, racially or ethnically offensive, or encourages conduct that would be considered a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, violate any law, or is otherwise inappropriate.
- post any content that appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in light of community standards where you are located or where such content may be accessed or distributed, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value, or otherwise violates any applicable obscenity laws, rules or regulations.
In other words: I don't think these most recent changes are driven by payment processors. I think they're being driven by states like Texas making hosting porn more legally fraught (i.e. the same thing that made Pornhub pull out of Texas).
This would be fine if he had anything to back it up, but his only "evidence" is complaining that there are no Chinese Feynmans... but there aren't any Feynmans in the 21st century.
Incidentally, by my count 7 of the last 50 Nobel laureates in Physics and 3 out of 16 Fields Medal winners were Asian.
It's worth noting that this is roughly inline with Asian representation at Harvard today (14%) and most Nobel laureates were born before 1950 -- research labs weren't really accessible to a billion Asians then. So not sure how meaningful those numbers are in either direction.
(Side note: interestingly, Fields Medal winners cannot be older than 40).
All this is now verboten. All games have some random fucking girlboss lecturing you about your privilege. There are no more offline servers. All behavior is closely monitored and you get suspended. Mods get you banned. It's the worst fucking dystopia I could have ever imagined being a 90's PC gamer.
I am a white man who games fairly regularly and I have never had a lecture about my privilege, nor have I been banned.
I'm also sad about the death of LAN parties, but it feels very weird to complain that social norms (and their enforcement) on non-LAN servers are not the same as on LAN servers. On a LAN server the enforcement comes from your friends, but external enforcement is absolutely required for public servers. Rule enforcement means that League of Legends today is much more enjoyable today than it was in 2012 (because there is less flaming and intentional feeding), and definitely better than if there was no enforcement at all.
Yes, lament the death of LAN servers, but try to appreciate that a tyranny under social-defectors is not actually better than tyranny under a company preventing that defection. Ultimately public servers are common spaces, while your basement is private.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
Could you make your comment a little more concrete?
Are you conjecturing the man in this story didn't respect his parents enough, and that that is the fault of liberal policy? Or that his parents didn't teach him self-control, and that is the fault of liberal policy? That this kind of aggravation happened less often in the 1950s because people went to church, and liberal policy is driving people away from Christianity?
Right now the your fourth option is vague, and it is appropriately supported with a vague appeal to some idealized past.
Great, now compare those European countries with the United States.
Or do it with South Africa's 2021 GDP instead of its 2004 GDP (34% higher) or its 2002 GDP (50% lower).
I'm not going to argue for or against your thesis but your argument is not compelling.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
Since you now know this comment exists and haven't modded it... it seems like my comment was accurate?
I'm mentally unhealthy enough that I've tracked my reports and gone back to see if mods actually did anything, and I've concluded my reports just waste moderator time.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
I’m guessing OP cares about their community’s well-being, not just their own intelligence.
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Hyperbole is bad
1yr ago
I consider the correct target for penalization/responsible for externalities to be the gay men who lied about having the disease (as in they were confident about it, not just at risk) and spread it to others. I mean, that's not just for gay men, anyone who non-consensually and knowingly infects anyone with anything deserves punishment.
I get where you’re coming from, but imo you’re mostly going to encourage people to not get tested. I think you’d have to punish people for spreading it unknowingly, which actually has the reverse effect (people will (hopefully) want to get tested regularly).
It seems like a non sequitur to try to tie a BBC documentary to this. The burden of knowing what you’re doing is an order of magnitude higher for state actually using it to execute people than it is for some guy making a documentary.
So when an execution that was expected to result in loss of consciousness in seconds actually takes minutes (that’s probably worth mentioning in your comment), it seems completely kosher to criticize the institution that just put somebody to death in a terrible way — a BBC documentary from 10 years ago is not a valid shield.
If someone holding their breath transforms your humane execution method into something that results in minutes of suffering, that’s a black mark on the method and people are allowed to criticize you for not knowing or not caring.
But yes, I agree if this happened in California the response would probably be different.
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