MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
28d ago
Human societies are much richer than just "reproducing pairs" and gender is expressed . Tearing down the structures of existing society has been a long term project of the left, for which project the politics of transexuality is but the most recent of many tools.
MotteInTheEye
28d ago
I've never heard any reference to "model-minority myth" that wasn't clearly just starting from the axiom that America is racist and minorities can't possibly succeed by any excellence inherent to their genetics or culture. If those are your unquestioned premises, then you can derive that:
- Asians aren't really more successful, the racist society just props them up in a false position to further oppress blacks and Latinos.
- Because "successful Asian" is a role society is asking Asians to play for racist purposes, it is harmful to Asian people who have to either play into it and thus reject their authentic selves, or reject it and fight other people's expectations their whole lives.
MotteInTheEye
28d ago
"I don't really think trans women are women, but if I'm just casually talking with someone and not sleeping with them, I don't want the other person to be unhappy and it's no big deal to say "she" instead of "he." "
The problem is not just that trans activists aren't content with this, it's that it's an inherently unstable position. It is a big deal to say "he" or "she", much of society is built around there being men and women and it being easy to tell which is which.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
Nice job getting people to commit to specific predictions. Even though it's super awkward, this is my favorite norm of the rationalist community, because you don't realize how reluctant people are to make specific, testable predictions until working out the terms of the bet forces them to.
It will be interesting to see whether you win all of them or not, and personally I have updated a bit towards your view of Musk and his companies being more grounded than I thought.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
I don't think the "secret sauce" was ever that immigrants were universally viewed as just as good as anyone else. German immigrants, Irish and Italian immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and now Mexican immigrants have always been viewed with suspicion and some resentment by large segments of the American society they were immigrating to. They came anyway because the opportunity afforded by the runaway growth of the American economy was irresistible to those with incredible grit or just those with no other options. And as a class they worked hard to seize that opportunity and to prove that they could belong just as much as native-born citizens, despite the suspicion they faced.
If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state. If you make it to America, you are effectively guaranteed some share in its riches whether you then work hard or not. This has the two-fold effect of removing the implicit filter on immigrant quality, and of creating larger proportions of the resulting immigrant population who bear out the nativists' suspicions. Also add to that the effect of explicit multiculturalism which weakened the incentives for immigrants to assimilate quickly.
It all adds up to a world where the nativists are increasingly justified in their complaints. If the dynamic driving modern immigration does not change, two out comes are possible. The nativists will eventually be strengthened to the point that they will kill the golden goose, using the power of the state to throw the baby out with the bathwater by cutting off opportunity for immigrants across the board. Or the center will not hold and American society will dissolve into disconnected groups of takers squabbling over their share of a rapidly shrinking pie.
MotteInTheEye
1mo ago
I don't think even this is the right framing. It's not a question of a tiny population of nutjobs of one stripe or another that we hope to disincentivize. We know from history that a large proportion of human beings will kill in cold blood, or at least approve of it, if conditioned and pressured to do so. Apologia and celebration of this killing will only shift the margin of how rabid an anti-corporation true believer needs to be to undertake such an action.
MotteInTheEye
2mo ago
If there is some non-trivial amount of work to re-review each regulation, then a balanced budget would also impose limits on at least the number of regulations. It would be harder to account for the impact of a regulation's scope though. Maybe if it was coupled with constitutionally-backed standing to sue if you are affected by a regulation which doesn't meet strict scrutiny for not being over-broad.
MotteInTheEye
5mo ago
If we are banning for AI posts can we also ban for "irregardless"? The latter is much more offensive to me!
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
Yep, Facebook is still very fit for its original purpose (keeping tabs on friends and family through pictures and posts). It's just that the filler that they give you for the other 99 times that you check your feed during the day is lower quality than the algorithm-selected stuff from the other platforms.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
Your wealth on paper increases, but if you continue to use it from for sheep pasturing then you are not benefitting from it because you are precisely not seeking any rent that matches the value of the land!
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
It took all of fifty years after American Independence before we tried that the first time around.
MotteInTheEye
8mo ago
I can see the case for lost economic productivity, but how could using your own property as a sheep pasture despite opportunity to develop it be in any sense rent-seeking?
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
I find the finger-pointing about who called it what kind of attack and how quickly certain details when out in the several hours immediately following a shooting like this profoundly petty and mean. Once people are actually awake and have had a little while to sift through some reports, there is often plenty to criticize, but it's tautologically true that you would always be able to criticize the first few reports for being incorrect about some details and/or too reticent.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
I'm genuinely confused now, I thought it was common sense that people were favourable towards coethnics and their homelands. Isn't that the whole ingroup thing in a nutshell?
This isn't compatible with even the most cursory reading of I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup, the fact that your ingroup may not be ethnically similar nor your outgroup ethnically distinct from you is literally one of the first thing he addresses.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
It seems like substituting "Abrahamic religions" for "monotheistic religions" in your model makes it fit with fewer epicycles.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
I thought the idea with farmers is that, yes, they start their day at dawn, and DST helps them stay in sync with the rest of the country. Probably obsolete now that a very small fraction of the UK and US populations are family farmers, but I think it's a coherent idea.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
It's a very good question. I would guess that with billions of dollars at stake, they have their ear to the ground in ways that we don't, and they must have some indication that Trump is coming in better prepared to actually get things done this time around, for whatever reason.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
GP's point is that air travel is not analogous to surgery because nobody ever dies from not being able to catch a certain flight (Saigon and Kabul aside).
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
Either I am misunderstanding Blueberry's comment which started this digression, or you and Celestial-body-NOS are. Neither Blueberry nor I at any point said that homosexuality was the sole reason for the sinfulness attributed to the people of Sodom.
I fully agree that lack of hospitality was a major component. What I disagreed with was this statement:
Note that Genesis does not specify exactly what sins the people of Sodom had committed.
I claim this gives a false impression of the account in Genesis which includes a striking account of the wickedness of that people.
Side note: the case for homosexuality not being a major component of Sodom's wickedness is pretty weak. First: homosexuality is only spoken of in the Old Testament in this and one other similar narrative passage (Judges 20) describing exceptionally wicked peoples, and in prohibitions which call it an abomination.
Second: The Ezekiel passage does indeed ascribe miserliness and idleness to the Sodomites in verse 49, but it also continues in verse 50:
And they were haughty and committed abomination before Me; therefore I took them away as I saw fit.
Third: The New Testament in Jude summarizes the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah as "giving themselves over to sexual immorality".
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
if you don't get murdered, or into a car wreck, or overdose, or kill yourself, or your mom didn't attempt a home birth at age 16, you actually have good survival odds. The best in the world.
Is this after making those adjustments for the other countries as well?
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
Even the most agreed-upon doctrines, such as that any sinner can repent and be saved; find dissent in at least a few churches, such as Calvinists with their TULIP.
This is not really true. It's true in the same sense as it would be true to say "material determinists claim that there certain orderings of a deck of cards that can never be created." Some orderings of the cards will never be created, and since material determinism says that the entire course of the universe is already set, in a sense that's equivalent to saying that there are some orderings which "can never" be created. But for all practical purposes it would be a misleading way to phrase it.
The same applies to Calvinism. Calvinists teach that everything which will come to pass has been foreordained by God from eternity. This means that those who are foreordained not to be saved, "can never" be saved. But it's not due to anything special in the person nor susceptible to our analysis ahead of time. Certainly it is not a Calvinist doctrine that certain sinful acts allow us to know here and now someone's predestined fate.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
This is a really strange take, since in Genesis the men of Sodom immediately try to rape the angels that are sent to Lot to warn him to get out. Genesis hardly leaves you wandering what could have been so bad about these people that they were condemned.
MotteInTheEye
9mo ago
I would guess he had some perfect plan for how to destroy the gun without a trace that required him to be in a certain place.
Fair enough if you're complaining about free enterprise that you don't approve of, but it's rather different if the job in question is paid for by your own money taken at the proverbial gunpoint.
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