domain:pedestrianobservations.com
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Yes, looking at women(other than your wife) in bikinis is sinful… but Jesus also says that those who lead others to sin are more sinful- he specifically says it would be better for them if they were killed.
JarJarJedi
1d ago
Obviously I am considering Jews to be a single race in this context, just like Israel does.
Israel does nothing of the sort, Israel does not have racial policies. You completely invented this, out of nothing, and you pretend this is "obvious". It's not obvious, it's you saying things that are not true. Stop doing that.
just like South Africa was a very racially diverse country under Apartheid
No, much more diverse actually. Which you would have known if you knew anything about Israel beyond a bunch of fourth-party packaged woke slogans, but you don't, do you?
Still, the laws of Apartheid made it a country designed first and foremost around the well-being of white people
And Israel doesn't have laws like that. Which again is very easy to learn, if only you tried.
they do not have civil marriage
They do. Ask me how I know? That's how I got married. The marriage in Israel is a bit complex topic, but it's not too hard to learn about it. Again, you didn't even try.
And of course it is completely unreasonable to expect Israel not to take Syrian land that is just there for the taking,
Syria is at war with Israel, and repeatedly refused to sign a peace treaty. When you start a war and lose it, that's what happens. When you are dumb enough to continue the war after losing it, that's going to happen to you again. And yes, it's completely unreasonable to expect from Israel to not act as they deem necessary to protect their borders. If Syria didn't like it, they should have signed the treaty long ago, when Israel offered it. They wanted to keep the state of war instead, because they were unable to admit being defeated by filthy Jews. They are now living with the consequences of it.
This tired talking point about double standards being applied to Israel is the most worn out argument that is just based on playing the victim.
"Tired" is not as strong an argument as you may think it is. If you're tired of hearing the truth, keep being tired, the truth doesn't change from it. Israel has been and continues to be attacked by Arabs - from Hamas to Iran to Husites to Hezbollah to others. All those people eventually find out the dear and grave costs of such actions. Israel does not need to "play" anything - Israel can defend itself very well, it's you and other Hamas defenders who are whining and crying and claiming they are victims - fresh after murdering thousands of Jews and still keeping hostages in Gaza. What they are suffering is the direct consequence of their behavior.
Israeli Arabs are excluded from conscription, so they are not equal.
Yes, they have the privilege of benefitting from all services Israeli society has to offer, without having to risk their lives to defend it. Still, many Druzes and Bedouins serve, and I am sure if a particular Arab citizen wants to contribute voluntarily, he will be afforded this opportunity. If the inequality consists of having less chance to be murdered by other Arabs, then I don't see it as a huge problem, and neither see the Israeli Arabs.
Driving people together is a typical precursor to cleansing.
Nobody "drew them together" to Gaza - they went there voluntarily and they resist all efforts to relocate them anywhere - except, of course, capturing the territory of Israel and cleansing it of the Jews. And their population grows by 2% every year, which is faster than Israeli population (1.5% a year). That's some shitty cleansing.
I have a hard time believing that you are arguing in good faith if you equate a free nation state to a ghetto.
I do not, you do. You said there are "ghettos" - I say they do not exist, what existed in Gaza was completely autonomous self-rule by Gazans, with complete and full withdrawal of any Jewish presence and Israeli control. And the only thing that was asked from them is to please stop trying to murder us. Gaza answered to it by trying to murder Israelis even harder - and succeeding to murder thousands and kidnap hundreds on October 7. That was completely voluntary action from their side, and now they are suffering the consequences of it.
I have seen no poll that shows that all Palestinians are in favor of killing all Jews
Not "all", but 80 to 90 percent. Look up any poll on support of Hamas. You are trying to construct a ridiculous sentence by claiming every Arab in Gaza, including just born infants, is in favor of killing every single Jew. Of course in this ridiculous form it is not true. But it is true that overwhelming majority - about 80 to 90 percent, usually, though it varies with time, but is never not overwhelming majority - of Gazans support Hamas, and their goal of destroying Israel as a state, capturing its territory and murdering as many Jews as they can while doing it. It's their official and well known goal, they have never hidden it, they have gleefully filmed themselves doing it, they have bragged about it repeatedly, and they promised to do it again as much as they can. Israel knows that, and the result of it is what you see now in Gaza. In fact, Israel repeatedly, multiple times, for months, asked Gazans to do one single thing - let the people they kidnapped go, let those Jews live and be free - and they always refused. They will find out there is a price for such actions, and will keep finding out until one day they decide to do what other, more smart, Arab populations decided - that the dream of murdering the Jews and kicking them out of Israel is not worth the pain they will suffer trying to fullfill this dream. That this is no longer the goal they want to spend their lives achieving. Then we will have peace.
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it.
There's a saying about this..."so open-minded his brain fell out."
I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way.
Okay, so you're a solipsist, not a nihilist [edit: fixing a brain-fart]. This is not an improvement.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
The New York Post ran an article about this a couple days ago, and the comments were variations on the following themes:
- You can't compliment women anymore!
- This intrudes on free speech
- This law probably doesn't apply to immigrants
- They were wearing enticing clothes; this is entrapment
- The women were too unattractive to deserve catcalls
- The police need to focus on actual crimes, like grooming gangs, not this penny ante bullshit
- This is Sharia law
- This is a dumb idea that Democrats probably like
I'll admit to admit that it's a bit unfair to judge conservatives as a whole based on the New York Post comment section, or any online comment section for that matter, but I don't think I'm going out on too much of a limb to suggest that conservatives in general think that busting people for catcalling, or even viewing it as a police issue, is stupid. The culture war angle here is that if you replace "catcalling" with "panhandling" the polarity reverses instantly. I have no doubt, based on prior stories the Post has run on panhandling, that if they ran a story about how some American city did a similar crackdown on begging we'd be hearing about how it was about time that a mayor grew some balls and cracked down, and that all those people should be locked up in mental institutions or forced to get real jobs.
In essence, though, whether we're talking about catcalling, or panhandling, or various other things associated with homelessness, what we're really talking about is obnoxious behavior that occurs in public, and the right to be obnoxious in public.
The class of ideas I’d like to name is more intentional than that.
Consider feminism as a set of ideologies versus feminism as a political movement. Different feminist ideologies are quite varied, but the political movement is more or less united by the idea of increasing individual women’s freedom of action.
If you ask in the abstract, “What should family law look like?” then different forms of feminism will give very different answers. But if you want to know whether the feminist movement will support or oppose a given change to family law, you can simply ask whether it will grow or shrink individual women’s freedom of action. Likewise, pro-life types of feminism are often closer to other forms than those forms are to each other, but opposing abortion runs against this principle and so gets one labeled an enemy.
I think that increased school funding is a similar rallying point for a different coalition. Depending on the issue, money may or may not address it. But money is always a socially acceptable reason to give for the problem, rather than criticizing your allies, and it’s something the coalition wants anyway.
People legitimately support school funding or women’s freedom as they understand it, so it’s more than toleration. But it’s not necessarily their terminal value, either. It’s more of a means that has been elevated by social dynamics to the status of an end.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
Women shouldn’t be allowed to wear bikinis in public, but neither that nor speedos nor the Borat swimsuit justify potential violence the way a particularly forwards/lewd catcall would.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
I mean, maybe. But my entire life has been living in a boomer project of trying to uplift these communities... to no impact what so ever. Build them critical infrastructure and they destroy it. Give them free resources and they just have as many kids as it takes to reduce them to their prior squalor. At the end of the day, they live like that because they choose to live like that. At least in so far as any of us choose to live any particular way while struggling with the human condition. It just seems that the human condition they struggle against seems to be on the extreme tail and at a horrifying scale.
A society that is 1-2% horrifying unreformable anti-civilization monsters might be able to get away with putting them up in nice abodes, letting them have a terrifying number of children, and generally dealing with the disproportionate drain on society this minority creates. When that rises to the level of a voting block of a country, it gets into "I don't fucking know man, it's literally impossible to accommodate them all, they're gonna drag us all down with them!"
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
There 100% is. Women walking around in their underwear is an unfortunate commentary on the state of society; it’s not directly threatening.
07mk
1d ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable.
I don't think anyone knows this with any meaningful level of confidence. The heat death of the universe through entropy is the only thing that I can think of that could guarantee this, but I don't believe we have a complete-enough understanding of physics and cosmology to state with 100% confidence that that's inescapable.
Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
This is perfectly cromulent, but also, I think most people would prefer to live a beautiful long life over a beautiful but pointlessly short one. And the thing about prolonging versus ending life is that it's asymmetrical; if you prolong life when human civilization is barely lumbering along in a state of senility, there's always the chance in the future that that civilization becomes beautiful and prolonged. If it ends in a blaze of beauty, then no one ever gets to discover if there was a way to have a prolonged beautiful civilization. Believing that the end of civilization/humanity is worth it as long as my own principles and values got met by the last generation requires a God-like level of confidence in the correctness of one's own values. Which points to faith.
Which is also perfectly cromulent! I just wish people would talk about this honestly and openly.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I understand you cannot be brought around to prosocial motivations.
Who do you expect to pay your social security and wipe your ass when you’re old? Is it a work until MAID plan?
2rafa
1d ago
I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown.
Very unlikely if you speak to anyone who has been catcalled in England.
07mk
1d ago
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the frouts of progress.
It's certainly perfectly cromulent to judge that as good and even better than the alternative of a civilization that keeps chugging along in a way that improves people's lives compared to not having civilization - and even improving the amount by which this is an improvement - without enjoying the fruits of progress, where progress here refers to the types of societal changes pushed for by people identifying as "progressives," rather than something more generic like "improving over time" or "moving forward." I don't think this is a common sentiment, though; what I see by and large is motivated reasoning that circumvents the issue altogether, by adopting a genuine, good faith belief that progress - again, referring to the specific meaning alluded above, not the general term - not only won't result in civilization ending within a generation, but that progress will help make civilization more robust against ending.
As a progressive, I would say that the odds that I'm mistaken about the goodness of my ideology - and more generally that people who agree with me are mistaken about the goodness of our ideology - is sufficiently high that I have a general preference to hedge my bets by having humanity keep moving forward long after my death. It's possible that we'll create literal heaven on Earth that you and I can enjoy until we die as the last humans to have ever lived, but it's also possible that, when good, intelligent, well-meaning people do their best, in good faith, to implement ideas that I consider to be good, this actually creates a hell on Earth that we all have to suffer through before we die as the last humans to have ever lived. I would prefer to avoid that.
If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
The way I see it, the point of civilization is to organize humans in a way that helps make both surviving and thriving easier or more likely for them. Not uniformly or monotonically, but in some vague general sense. Which some/many people see as a good thing worth sacrificing for, even if no one ever enjoys the fruits of progress, again, by that specific meaning referenced above.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.
This is just as often reversed on immigration, though.
Lib: We need immigrants for economic growth, to bring in young productive people to support social security programs, to do jobs that are otherwise difficult to fill. Immigration makes America stronger!
Con: What does American economic growth matter if it doesn't benefit Americans? I'd rather see the American economy grow or collapse on the strength of Americans, than sell out my country to foreigners to get stronger.
Purity is typically a conservative basis for morality in Moral Foundations Theory. Refusal to compromise on one's beliefs is the essence of having beliefs, of having principles. Life for the sake of life is the philosophy of bacteria, the life has to mean something, be something.
TwiceHuman
1d ago
These questions are all meaningful to me. I'm weird, though. I'm not even particularly good at math.
I hate dynamic programming, but it seems that you can't "jump ahead" when calculating prime numbers. This feels like computational irreducibility. The world in which this property exists, and the one in which it doesn't, are meaningfully different.
The Collatz conjecture, and BB, relate to the ability to generate large things from small ones. It seems relevant for this question: Can you design a society which is both novel and stable over infinite time? Would it have to loop, repeating the same chain of events forever, or is there an infinite sequence of events which never terminates, but still stays within a certain set of bounds? If we became all-powerful and created an utopia, we might necessarily trap ourselves in it forever (because you cannot break out of a loop. If you loop once, you loop forever). It may also be that any utopia must necessarily be finite because it reaches a state which is not utopian in finite time.
Some other questions are about the limitations of math. It's relevant whether a system of everything is possible or not (if truth is relative or absolute). If trade-offs are inherent to everything, then "optimization" is simply dangerous, it means were destroying something every time we "improve" a system. It would imply that you cannot really improve anything, that you can only prioritize different things at the cost of others. For instance, a universal paperclip AI might necessarily have to destroy the world, not because it's not aligned, but because "increase one value at the cost of every other value" is optimization.
I also have a theory that self-fulfilling prophecies are real because reality has a certain mathematical property. In short, we're part of the thing we're trying to model, so the model depends on us, and we depend on the model. This imples that magic is real for some definitions of real, but it also means that some ideas are dangerous, and that Egregores and such might be real.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable. Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
Btw I think extinction rebellion is named that because of mass wildlife extinctions rather than human extinction.
Lazuli
1d ago
There's no centralized repository.
If the program's mission is to whip people into writing publishable work every day, there should be a place where anyone can read the pieces. I hope the organizers offer some insight into that.
Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits?
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
1d ago
Modern India, modern South Asia are completely dysgenic hellholes with terrible human capital. India of all places, stands out here because castes ensured clusters of higher IQ people in the elites which is also why you see many Indians doing well.
Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
The alternative is the empathetic part of the brain continuing along in pain from the knowledge that humans no different from itself are living in abject poverty and destitution. It could cry out, "Why do you do nothing for your fellow man?" - but it would be simply silenced by the retort "They are not my fellow men." This dovetails nicely with some of the alt-right "empathy is weakness" messaging that's been floating around.
But maybe it's more along the lines of prosperity gospel, "I deserve this because I am special / chosen / of higher genetic quality": a defense mechanism against self-doubt that the only thing separating you from such a life are a coin tosses of fate. It would be crippling to spend every day contending with the possibility of living that way due to random chance, and so it's better to destimulate the brain and rationalize it away with a convenient belief system.
Not that it's been solicited, but my take is that the world changed too fast for India, and India grew too fast for how the world has changed. I see a similar story in the favelas in South America. Some peoples had the joy of riding the wave of modernization like surfers, and others were hit in the face by the break - like a Maxim gun nest firing on charging Ndebele warriors. To your main point, could the sociopolitical structures that Hinduism built play a role in India having not been prepared for modernization?
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
Well the jogging stark naked guy is probably crazy. Even if not though, streaking is way more wholesome than flashing!
As you say though all this is quite culture relative and I often think about how a woman willing to ditch the head scarf in a very repressive country is doing something that must feel brazen to her and read as overtly sexual to men around her.
faceh
1d ago
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending.
What can I say, I live here.
I'd like to see what else is out there in this gigantic universe.
If Civilization recedes in my lifetime, there's a serious chance it won't come back to the tech level necessary to get off the planet. At which point, we are STUCK here until a rogue asteroid smashes us, solar flare fries us, an alien Civ shows up, or some other cataclysm. Eventually the sun dies out too.
Then its game over for reals.
If there is any real purpose, any endgame, any way to discover the answer to the last question, it's probably only accessible to Kardashev II and above civilizations.
But really, I just think its more fun for everyone if civilization continues. One thing I think that is fair to say about most of human history: MOST of humanity was not having fun MOST of the time. Quite the opposite. Wars suck. Famine Sucks. Manual labor for sheer basic survival sucks. So civilization receding will suck.
We should be trying to have more fun.
But since we're bootstrapped sentient primates running on ancient murder monkey software and have access to nuclear weapons and we're bad at large-scale coordination, maybe this was always our fate. But I prefer to believe not.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
TBH I think I'm struggling with a culture and language barrier, but would it be fair to summarize your rebuttal as "Hinduism didn't fail India, India failed Hinduism"?
TwiceHuman
1d ago
Here's some of my own insights, hopefully some of them are new or useful to you. I will compare artistic people to those who try to understand the world. The "critique society and power" group can be dismissed as politics/tribalism/activism/preaching, it's part power-struggle and part mental illness, so I will exclude it.
Academic communities tend to have a consensus, and to punish those who challenge it. This is much less prevalent in artisic communities, as most people there recognize that many different styles can be appealing for different reasons. You could argue that this is a kind of tribalism, but I think it's also a way of viewing the world: That there's one correct answer (that truth is unique), that truth is universal (rather than possibly local), and that everything can be made legible (that logic and math is sufficiently powerful to explain everything which can be explained), and that you can unify everything without ruining it in the process (that a theory of everything is possible).
Artistic people do indeed share a part of themselves when they share their art, or at least reveal something about themselves. This doesn't happen much in academia, you don't have to take responsibility for the discoveries you make, for they're true or false independently of you. Academia is about discoveries where art is about creations.
I also think that bad art is harmless to other art, and mostly harmless to other people. Making a mistake in academic work could potentially harm a lot of people, or slow down progress of "the whole". This punishes experimentation.
Finding flaws in work is a costly mental heuristic. It's basically conditioning yourself to only see the bad aspects of things. But while this seems to make academics treat eachother harshly, I find that this is less rare in artistic spaces. What usually happens instead is that artists are extremely hard on themselves and their own work, but encouraging of other people. I think artists who are unhappy with their own are similar to people who undergo plastic surgery again and again. Staring at something for too long seems like a bad idea, be it your own work or your own face.
The mean of the distributions of personality traits also seem different between the two groups. Artistic people are more subjective, less analytical, more social, and they tend to expand their worldview until they get lost in it, whereas many mathematically minded people tend to reduce reality to abstract models and thus tend towards nihilism and simplicity. I'd also argue that scholary types tend to have bad taste by default, - you have to be a bit of a pervert to want to look beneath the surface of everything (unlike artists, who appreciate the surface, or use it to conceal the depth of life that they cannot deal with)
I think that artistic people and academic derive enjoyment from different things. I love correcting people who are wrong, I think it feels really good when I get a new insight, and climbing the mountain of knowledge is also a joy in itself. Art is beauty, the joy of creation, it's experience, and it's anti-nihilistic. Art is quite human, whereas the objective is simply anti-human (another user on here probably disagrees very strongly with this, but I did the math)
I've once heard that intelligence is inversely correlated with instinct. It could be because instinct is innate intelligence, and that this competes with generalized intelligence, since the latter has to be able to overwrite it in order for you to update your beliefs and adapt to a new environment than what your innate intelligence is fit for. It could also simply be a trade-off between developing yourself, and aligning yourself with something else until you yourself disappear. Do you want to chop off a part of yourself in order to fit in, or will you believe in that part of yourself and work to make it more appealing?
I guess that people of a field tend to grow tired of teaching beginners because they have to explain the same things maybe 50 or 100 times. First time I saw somebody use Popper's paradox of tolerance as an argument, I though "Hmm, something about this doesn't seem right". Now I simply tell them "You're acting in bad faith, and you know it. You also don't know what comes before or after this quote, since you've never read the paper that it's from. You didn't think it through, you merely copy-pasted it because it seems like an authority which agrees with you". Of course, if somebody is so put off by stupid questions, I think they should just delete their stackoverflow account.
Finally, have you noticed the general tendency towards homogeneity? Everything is becoming more alike over time. Academic people are contributing to this problem, wheras artist people don't seem to be. Academia is, from my perspective, excessive order. Many artistic people are a little bit chaotic because they're a little bit crazy, but I personally like that
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
1d ago
But how horrifying is it to hear that, since we must treat women as indistinguishable from men, and since that's clearly untenable, the solution is to abolish women‽
This reminds me of a pair of comments on either /r/SSC or /r/TheMotte (sadly I did not save them) where 2 philosophers of the highest kind had a discussion about how consciousness in women was a mistake by evolution. In the ensuing fallout, both comments were deleted, and quite possibly both accounts as well. One of my favorite "elmo watching the nuclear blast" moments.
The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor. This is what I have come to believe is the foundational problem of modern India. Land reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Behavioral reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Even political reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Why did your tribe, your caste, grant them endless reservation, government employment, political power? Because you could not stand against it! I have met many extremely intelligent higher caste Indians, far more intelligent than me. This is clear by their extraordinary success in the West, especially by niche subgroups like the Tamil Brahmins, the Iyers and Iyengars and so on.
But in the homeland, they were too weak to conquer their own common people. This is the ultimate failing for any ruling class. You must save India before you can do anything else. I respect that your religion neither destroyed you nor saved you, but it is not important now.
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