PossibleAstronaut
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User ID: 789
PossibleAstronaut
1yr ago
My criticism is that your post reads like your ultimate priority is ensuring your kids can accumulate as much status as humanly possible. There are aspects of this that are reasonable to care about, as a parent: keeping them out of poverty, crime, or damaging social dysfunction. But what's the point of maximizing returns beyond that? You say you've gone through the usual parenting strategies, which presumably takes care of the essentials -- why is ensuring your kids develop good character not the natural priority then?
No, it's not pure namecalling, I pointed to a specific substantive and conduct problem with OP while namecalling him: It's one thing if some honest ignorant person really doesn't get that pedophilia is wrong, it's another if the main thrust of a person's post (history, based on some comments on another thread) amounts to flaunting his pedophilia and making vague allusions to auxiliary issues for plausible deniability. I don't plan to revisit this issue outside of complaints to staff, but it's extremely hard to understand why you think namecalling is the problem next to that.
"no, u mad" followed by 1.6 thousand words are quite good evidence I hit my mark and a nerve.
Millstone.
The "I'm actually very confident and inevitable!!" insistence rings a bit hollow when the only thing you end up actually expressing is the same set of stock excuses every guilty man craps out to talk others out of punishing him. "W-wait, they're coming for you next!!" isn't a convincing case when some weakman bluehairs use it to justify freeing convicted rapists to prevent repressive capitalist state apparatus from destroying the global working class, and it's even less convincing from a "guy" who doesn't even have enough balls to directly defend those perversions he loudly pretends to believe aren't a big deal. You're not "bold," you're a basic degenerate e-begging for just enough reluctant validation to avoid the (entirely correct) conclusion that he must soon apply millstone to neck, and that you have to do it by fearmongering the board into adopting a position of political and organizational impotence, before the fear that their enemies might possibly challenge them to control some expression of political power, should make that much plain. I doubt that big spiel about "le moralism" must be a big comfort to someone who spends his life running like a roach to hide under the fridge whenever someone turns the lights on, but I guess I really can't expect much better; after all, being a pathetic manipulator is the evergreen face of noncery.
PossibleAstronaut
1yr ago
Mark 1.0 is not justified if you include enough assumptions to make this properly analogous to anti-abortion assassinations, namely the inability to advance such an effort (given general apathy towards abortion laws at best and antipathy towards peacetime political violence) to a general prohibition, or even prevent choice abortions from completing through other means (it's not very evident that assassinating an abortion doctor deterred women from seeking abortions, while assassinating the exterminators presumably gives their victims a chance to escape).
And while someone can start to contrive more scenarios where this might seem preferable, it's worth remembering that Christianity demands Christians do take the "upfront cost" of assassinating very seriously (even if they don't quite commit to pacifism), and the uncertainty of even the most convincing 300 IQ plan makes the certain cost very doubtfully acceptable.
These are all very very obvious points so I don't have cause to think OP is acting in good faith.
PossibleAstronaut
1yr ago
The original Little Mermaid was a cartoon, but the fact she is animated didn't wreck your immersion? Or the fact that she is a mythical sea creature with a talking singing crab et al? Why particularly is skin color the thing that breaks your immersion? This isn't a gotcha, I find it legitimately perplexing.
Animation is the choice of medium -- that always has to be taken for granted to establish suspension of disbelief for all fiction.
The other two points are either the setting in essence or an ordinary extension of the setting's logic (why wouldn't there be talking fish in a world with magical sea creatures?)
The casting is unlike the first two because, just like ROP, its point is to make you conscious of topics outside the setting's context. That sort of commentary isn't always bad -- but it is bad when the commentary takes the form of the fiction's existence itself and its execution doesn't involve playing a part in the story. Noticing that the Little Mermaid is black now happens entirely apart from the actual story of the Little Mermaid, and it comes off as the blatant coattail-riding it really is.
PossibleAstronaut
1yr ago
I don't get the problem.
There are three problems:
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Thematic: The explicit purpose of casting non-white actors was to "better represent" the modern world; so that people will think or feel in different ways about others (or those like themselves). This is nonsensical because including constant reminders of "the world today" is inherently contrary to immersing the audience in a fantasy setting. Nobody watches Middle-Earth to think about New York. Whatever case you might have for such casting decisions on *other *grounds, this specific angle made it artistically destructive. It's especially bizarre where the elves and dwarves are concerned, because neither of them are supposed to be human, yet they both have exact analogues for human racial variation.
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Political: Tolkien was an English author who created Middle-Earth to substitute a lack of extant Anglo-Saxon mythology. Removing this for "inclusion reasons" not only denies the value of people developing specific histories or cultural works, but declares it an active problem, and posits that only universal stories are legitimate. It's especially tasteless because one of the strongest themes in Tolkien's writing is the tragedy of peoples' decline and disappearance -- the Ents are doomed to extinction, the Elves will leave the land, the Dwarves are a shadow of their former selves, and Numenor is entirely destroyed.
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In-universe: Even if we ignore 1 and 2, ROP does not involve races in a way that makes sense in its type of setting. Humans live in kingdoms or villages, and the modern mass transportation that creates diverse cities today isn't the norm. Why so many unlike people live in the same place could be explained within the story, but it would make significant demands of the setting and plot. In LOTR, for example, Easternlings appear in Middle-Earth because they were recruited for the War of the Ring -- ROP has no such situation. It's taken for granted that this can happen because such situations are normal in (parts of) the modern (largely urban, Western) world, -- they're not normal in a world dominated by the horse and cart, and ROP was clearly more invested in thinking about the former than the latter.
PossibleAstronaut
1yr ago
Immigration and race aren't imported -- the European Union (which Hungary is a member of) had enough problems with both a full year before the Trump campaign made them the salient discussion topics in the US.
This doesn't fit how I use ethnicity, how nearly anyone I know uses ethnicity, or how most literature (meaning everything from fiction, articles in the popular press, or academic concentrating on the subject -- Connor, Kaufmann, and the literature on ethnic nationalism more generally being good examples) uses the word. The popular conception of "ethnonationalism" as opposed to, say, civic nationalism with the stipulation of jus soli is further evidence. That aside, you can just look at the word's own etymology.
I would also disagree that it's used an euphemism -- in my own writing (both on the sub and elsewhere), I've insisted on using ethnicity because it denotes more specific groups of the same basis (ancestry) as race, which is important when someone has to deal with international comparisons (where, for example, "black" could denote a group including both African-Americans and Kenyans, or just the former), where the distinction between broader races and specific ancestry-groups will create unnecessary confusions if ignored. I don't think there's a better word for doing this (even something like nationality is better, if still somewhat inadequate, for the sort of relation which OP is describing), or one more commonly used for such purposes.
Once you've declared all men are created equal and have inalienable rights, etc. it's not a big leap to all people are created equal and have the same inalienable rights etc.
The entrance of "equality" into voting politics (later the flagship suffragette cause) came with slavery, where the non-personhood of slaves was constantly justified on grounds of moral inferiority. This is disanalogous to whatever sense of equality played a role in gender matters because it was never the dominant belief that women were not human or morally less-than, unlike the slave. They were seen as infantile and in need of wardenship under a man's discretion, for similar reasons as children. Children who, it bears repeating, retain all such restrictions without ideas about their in-equality (or really any protest around their unequal treatment) being remotely widespread. The critical point is that distinctions were essentially role ethics -- and that moral equality would have implied role equality was not really a given as it was with black slaves, and isn't today. Equivocating the two was suffragette rhetoric, and this view is just the consequence that suffragettes created by victory; there isn't a strong reason to think causation went the other way around, especially when many other more daily and tangible gender-based role demands persisted long after the suffragettes won.
So, of course, taking the simplifying assumption that a certain conception which was a product of successful political activity was always the dominant view makes said activity seem inevitable and obvious. But thinking that contentious, loaded ambiguities don't change in use over 100s of years isn't a reasonable way to think about history.
PossibleAstronaut
1yr ago
That's just an extremely silly equivocation between morality as a social norm and morality as the actual prescriptions of the norm. A vegan dictatorship that microchips recalcitrant carnivores would thus insulate itself from the admonishment of "ethical backwardness" -- just not in the sense anyone cares about.
PossibleAstronaut
1yr ago
Does Biden credibly strike anyone as individually competent enough -- to the extent possible in a society as complex as this, meaning, as a uniquely competent leader -- to actually fulfill that requirement?
Snidely implying that Ambiguous Bad Thing Definitely Has to Happen Again for no reason is not a good argument.
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