domain:web.law.duke.edu
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
The interesting thing about social norms and equilibria though is that they interact strongly with intentions. In other words, whereas in the past catcallers may well have reasonably intended flattery, nowadays (arguably), they can't possibly think that because it's been made so clear to them that their attention is unwelcome.
yofuckreddit
1d ago
No, I wouldn't, for many of the same reasons (including that I know I couldn't compete). As you mention, it may be fun to leave with everyone else.
One of the people I met training for it was a woman for whom it'd been a dream of for a long time. She was a traveling nurse and so had accumulated the PTO, and was running through Wilson's Ramble with her male boss to get ready. Her bf got jealous and she'd broken up with him because of it. I never really figured out how I felt about that at the end of the day, but I have a family with young children and was able to line this up. ~40+ days and 2 weeks are very different animals though.
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
As you allude to, there's a 'reasonable person' standard. Someone could flash a woman hoping the woman would be excited by the sight of some random unexpected genitals in their eyeline. But that's unreasonable. A reasonable person would understand that they are more likely to cause upset, so the only reasonable intention we can impute is a malign one.
With catcalling, it seems to me pretty unreasonable in 2025 to imagine catcalling might be welcome, so even if a given catcaller wishfully thinks it will be taken as flattery, British society has (arguably) reached a point where the only response to this is 'Give me a break, pal'. Among my own male friends, certainly, I would flatly disbelieve one of them who said they thought catcalled women liked it and they were doing it to flatter them. I'd tell them, 'Really? Or do you get off on upsetting them, because that's what you're mostly doing.'
With the walking in a string bikini example, depending on the location I think this would very possibly be done with mischievous intent. Except at a beach though I think that's a pretty strong example. Tight leggings or bare midriff is more likely the disputed case and I think a woman dressed thus would be within her rights to say to someone offended, 'I wasn't thinking of you at all'.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
and just being seen by them as you go about your own business.
Well, some guy who is jogging stark naked through the city is also just going about their own business, and yet we treat it as actively getting into someone's space in most of the Western world.
I think that I can understand where the puritans would come from at least in theory. If I were in a business meeting and the woman across from me was sitting there bare-chested, I would be annoyed because her tits would be hijacking my attention. By contrast, if I go swimming in the lake and see some women tanning topless, I think 'yay boobs'.
I realize that this is totally dependent on culture. Some guy from Saudi Arabia who has never seen the hair of a woman who was not his wife or relative might get similarly distracted by seeing a woman without a headscarf. And some guy from a society where clothing was not a thing and people masturbated during social gatherings all the time might consider me a terminal prude, but would perhaps freak out when people were eating meat during a business dinner.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
1d ago
The prominent Donald Trump supporter and private security executive Erik Prince says he has a 10-year deal with Haiti to fight the country's criminal gangs, and then take a role in restoring the country's tax-collection system.
In an interview with Reuters, Prince said his company, Vectus Global, would be involved in designing and implementing a program to tax goods imported across Haiti's border with the Dominican Republic once the security situation is stabilized.
He said he expected to wrestle control of major roads and territories from the gangs in about a year. “One key measure of success for me will be when you can drive from Port-au-Prince to Cap Haitian in a thin-skinned vehicle and not be stopped by gangs,” Prince said in the interview.
Prince would not comment about how much the Haitian government would pay Vectus Global, nor how much tax he expects to collect in Haiti.
A person familiar with the company's operations in Haiti told Reuters that Vectus would intensify its fight against the criminal gangs that control large swathes of Haiti in the coming weeks in coordination with the Haitian police, deploying several hundred fighters from the United States, Europe and El Salvador who are trained as snipers and specialists in intelligence and communications, as well as helicopters and boats. Vectus's force includes some French and Creole speakers, the person said.
Haiti used to collect half of its tax revenue at the border with the Dominican Republic, but gang control of key transport routes has crippled trade and cut off state income, a report commissioned last year by Haiti's government and several multilateral organizations found. This has undermined the government's ability to respond to the crisis or deliver basic services, the report said.
Other security firms working in Haiti have raised questions about how Vectus would hold onto cleared gang territory as well as the wisdom of channelling resources to private security firms instead of the country's own security forces.
thejdizzler
1d ago
I think this kind of thing actually does affect life right now. There’s a qualitative difference in what life is like in a civilization that is alive, growing, and still believes in itself and what we have now.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I feel like I need to see the actual encounters being solicited and/or prosecuted to have an opinion on this. Making it illegal to hit on women in public is left-coded (feminism run amok), but arresting flashers on public transportation is right-coded (tough on street crime). Which one of these is, “sting operation on catcalling hotspots,” closer to? I have no idea.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
I don't disagree with your opinions much, it's quite hard to find any sources that are untouched, beowulf for instance is said to be heavily inspired by Christianity.
I don't agree fully with Norse mythology being substantially different, I can't discuss that in detail since I'm not as caught up on the scriptures, not do I know any real Norse Pandits if they even exist now.
I was raised christian (though I'm not anymore) and traditional teaching is very clear that avoiding sin is a communal project, i.e. you're supposed neither to directly sin, nor to make someone else sin. See the literal Enemy, Satan, whos' most dangerous attribute is making humans sin, not the fact that he himself sins.
Hinduism isn't strictly defined by Vedas, the Vedas uplifted India, it was a Bastion for the world for thousands of years and produced works that in some domains remain unmatched. Beyond just spiritual practices, linguistics and literature, the sciences were pretty advanced too.
A pagan Europe would not have sent hit squads instead of missionaries to most places. Europe did well because the spiritual inwards facing faith is always an esoteric path that's reserved for the few.
We have a saying here which translates to "you don't seek the divine, the divine allows you to find it". Hinduism is mostly coded in ethnic identities and in the spiritual side, if you choose the former, you ensure that there is no "world is one" pan Islam or pan chriatianity rally in your city where both the groups are made up of migrants, if you choose the latter, you'll realise god. It's not for me to convince anyone, people have their own beliefs and I respect that, trying to socialogicially break down religion can only be done if it's dead, the way we view sacrifices to Moloch.
There are dharma sutras which had a tradition of discussing morals, codes of conduct etc that made sense, these were not seen as words of god, so yes, there are in fact actual traditions that specifically existed here to appeal to nerds who were not religious but wanted good social outcomes.
I'm a Hindu because of birth, it was the only thing that kept my civilization ahead of the world for a millenia, it keeps dysgenics away but that's not why I pray. I pray because it's true and other socialogicial benefits are just added benefits. This is a very privileged answer so I recommend checking out dharmasutras.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Your first impulse was the right one. A person without kids musing about why legacy doesn't matter is the same as a person without sex organs musing about why sex doesn't matter.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
Responding before reading the whole thing is indeed my weakness.
SecureSignals
Training the Aryan LLM
1d ago
The attempts at a preservation of a nobility were carried out here in a much stricter sense.
Right and that's my point. There's very clearly a modus operandi in what you could call "Aryanism." This is well embodied in Greek/Roman religion, I agree it is very influential in Hinduism, but Norse mythology is something clearly different.
Norse Paganism isn't that Christian though
But if you're trying to understand European, pre-Christian worship then I am very hesitant to look towards a religion in which the central figure was created after Christianity and very obviously influenced by Christianity. And the most important texts were written a thousand years after Christianity and preserved/transmitted (potentially even subversively editorialized) through Christian sources.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
"unwanted behaviour directed at an individual with the purpose or intent of humiliating, disrespecting, intimidation [sic], hurting or offending them"
I think that the intent of the actor is a much better standard than the interpretation of the receiver.
For example, if I was in a jury, you would have a hard time convincing me that someone who wolf-whistles intends to humiliate the recipient. It seems reasonable that in the mind of the accused, he would merely be acknowledging that the recipient is judged sexually desirable, which is not an insult.
Even a sexual invitation might not meet this standard, in my mind. "Hey babe, wanna have some fun with me" is likely to make a jogger uncomfortable, but might be a serious suggestion on the men's part. In Victorian England, that would be the kind of insult which leads to duels, because it implies "you look like the kind of woman who would fuck men she just met on the streets". Today, there is nothing wrong with women fucking men who just cat-called her.
Of course, if the woman was wearing a hiab instead, I would assume that the man had concluded that the woman was very unlikely to be promiscuous and was just trying to insult her by implying otherwise.
Likewise, "why don't you gag on my cock, whore!" seems pretty clearly intended to humiliate. The defendant might claim that the humiliation was just instrumental for getting sex because he thought that the woman was into that, but that does not change the mens rea. Of course, if he can prove that his victim had explicitly opted into being sexually humiliated by random guys in the street, it would be fine.
Honking a car's horn except to warn of danger is already a traffic offense. If the driver wants to argue that she was causing a danger by being distractingly sexy, then that raises doubts about his general ability to drive a vehicle in the Western world, unless she flashed him or something.
By contrast, single remarks which merely felt insulting to the recipient -- e.g. by someone who does not know the rules or is just gambling on low odds -- should not be a criminal matter. People feel insulted by all kinds of statements directed at them specifically or not. Personally, I think it depends on the odds. If a verbal behavior will feel offensive to 60% of women in the same situation, but also leads to 10% of them being flattered, that seems very acceptable from a criminal law point of view. If 95% would feel deeply offended and less than 0.1% would be flattered, things look different.
As an unfortunate consequence, this probabilistic standard would mean that the line of what is acceptable would depend not only on the woman and her situation but also on the guy. So a 25yo Chad driving a Tesla might be allowed to ask a given woman if she would be interested in "having some fun", while a 60yo homeless alcoholic with a beer belly might be on the other side of the dividing line.
While it would be possible to replace the person of the speaker with a generic standard person for the purpose of determining if the success chance meets the threshold, I think that this would decrease overall utility.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
1d ago
issue being much more pressing and therefore developing differently in modern-day India.
The people from aristocracy here have notably higher amounts of steppe ancestry, though phenotype isn't a 1 to 1 with your genotype. The attempts at a preservation of a nobility were carried out here in a much stricter sense.
Norse Paganism isn't that Christian though, the idea that all of what we see in their folklore is heavily inspired by Christianity cannot be true for all of their folklore. Tom has listed plenty of them in the work he does with his own revival and many go agaisnt Christian values. It includes Anglo mythology as well.
Greek/Roman paganism remains the supreme representation of pre-Christian, European worship.
Its unfortunately dead and still differs from innate values many live by. They can't draw inspiration from that which is forgotten and also isn't appealing. My central theme is that the values they find within texts found south of the Indus are appealing because they carry the sMe same values they wish for which they cannot find in Christianity and also in Greek lore, which is also why the modern revival movement, the non larpy parts lean towards germanic myths.
The entirety of It's Such A Beautiful Day by Don Hertzfeldt (also the creator of Rejected) is a big comfort movie for me, but in particular I watch the part detailing Bill's family history, the mediation on death in the middle of the film, as well as the finale again and again and again. There is a lot in this film that resonates with me; it's bizarre and existential and scratches an itch virtually no other film does.
In the hands of anyone else it would have been pretentious, absurdist schlock, but there's a sincerity to the film that makes it feel meaningful.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1d ago
And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
A note on motivations.
I often see people making arguments of the type of "we need to get fertility rates (across the board, or maybe just for group X) up otherwise human civilization will collapse".
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. If human civilization ends after my generation, I'm fine with it. Of course I want living standards to continue to be good during my generation at least, but that doesn't mean that I have any attachment to the idea of wanting to maintain human civilization 100 or 1000 years from now. And if human civilization continues after me, I'm fine with that too. I don't care much one way or the other.
Humanity has been doing this whole reproduction thing for hundreds of thousands of years now. Repetition and quantity is not the same thing as quality.
I get that it feels different if you have kids, which I don't. I might be interested in having kids, but I'm not sure if I want any or not yet.
In any case, if you have kids, I didn't force you to have kids. I hope your kids do well, but it doesn't change my fundamental calculus.
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. I love the smell of flowers, the look of sunshine in the sky. I just see no clear positive advantage to continuing the species. Or to ending it. Like I said, I'm neutral on the matter. If the species continues, cool. If it ends, cool. I don't want to end, and I don't want any currently alive humans to end, but to me the idea of continuing the species beyond that is very abstract and I really don't care about it.
Aapje58
1d ago
First of all, anybody who ever set foot in Israel knows Israeli society is incredibly racially diverse - Jews come from Europe, from Middle East, from Africa, from a huge number of places.
Obviously I am considering Jews to be a single race in this context, just like Israel does.
And of course Israel is full of other religious and ethnic groups - Christians, Muslims, Bahai, Druze, Bedouin, Circassian, I could be here all day.
Yeah, just like South Africa was a very racially diverse country under Apartheid. Still, the laws of Apartheid made it a country designed first and foremost around the well-being of white people, establishing a racial hierarchy, where other races were tolerated at best, with far lesser rights. Non-Jews are not treated as first-class citizens in Israel. So the goal was to create a racially pure society where the only equals that white people met would be other whites.
Note that this is not the same as a racially pure country, where only one race is tolerated in the country. Slave-era US states also had the goal of a racially pure society, but were obviously far from a single-race state.
And South Africa did its best to ensure racial purity by intermarriage laws. While Israel doesn't go as far, they do not have civil marriage, and all marriages must happen under religious laws that restrict intermarriage. And religion is of course very strongly linked to race.
It is just torturing the definition of "race" to describe a completely normal and common thing - a national state. Israel is the state of Jews in the same meaning as Japan is the state of Japanese, China is the state of Chinese and Greece is the state of Greeks.
No, you are torturing the definition of race. Greek citizenship is based on whether the person is legally living there, not their race. Greek nationality law does have a provision to expedite the naturalization of 'ethnic Greeks' according to Wikipedia, but that merely requires the person to have a parent or grandparent that was born a Greek national. So their legal definition of ethnic Greek does not seem to be actually ethnic. It doesn't matter if that parent or grandparent is ethnically Greek, Albanian, Roma, Jewish, etc, as long as they were born a legal Greek citizen.
This is different from Israel, where they will let in Jews who have been in the diaspora for very many generations, but not people who were actually born in the territory of current Israel, but that fled during the 1948 Palestine war.
except that somehow Israel is held to insane and impossible standards never applied to any other nation.
All these 'insane and impossible standards' are only insane and impossible if you consider the goal of a racially defined state that gets to steal land from people to be legitimate. For example, it's basic international law that refugees should be allowed to return to their homes after a conflict, but in the case of Israel this is somehow suddenly completely unreasonable.
And of course it is completely unreasonable to expect Israel not to take Syrian land that is just there for the taking, just like the international community is totally fine with Russia taking territory. Only Israel gets criticized, you see. No one is funding Ukraine so it can defend itself.
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. That way you don't actually have to defend the behavior, which is often indefensible.
Even though Israeli Arabs (of which many do not identify as "Palestinians" at all and do not want to live under Hamas rule) have exactly the same rights and citizenship as everybody else
False. Israeli Arabs are excluded from conscription, so they are not equal.
But most discrimination happens through laws that are ostensibly neutral, but applied unequally. For example, the law on removing the citizenship for 'acts of terror' is not applied equally to Jewish terrorists. In fact, Israeli soldiers have been known to just let Jews commit terrorist attacks: https://www.btselem.org/node/216862
So if an Arab commits a terror attack, he can lose his citizenship and be kicked out. If a Jew does so, the Israeli military is there to make sure that the terrorist doesn't get hurt. Very considerate.
You can't even keep it straight in one sentence. You can't accuse Israel in both ghetto-ising the Arab population and ethnically cleansing them - it's the diametrically opposite actions
So when Hitler was using ghettos to isolate the Jews from support by non-Jews and to make it easy for him to implement his final solution, he was actually accidentally protecting the Jews by putting them into the ghetto?
An interesting take on history to be sure.
In ghetto, you put the bad people into a confined space, in cleansing, you remove them from the space.
Driving people together is a typical precursor to cleansing.
Anyway, my claim is not that the Israeli leadership has a singular goal. They have more and less radical elements. Some want mere ghettos, some want ethnic cleansing and a few seem to want a genocide. None seem to want a viable Palestinian state (or states).
if you let Arabs have their own territory, rules by themselves [...] that's a ghetto, bad thing.
I have a hard time believing that you are arguing in good faith if you equate a free nation state to a ghetto. Setting up a straw man where you, without any evidence, claim that I would call a free Palestinian state a ghetto is not a basis for a debate.
And you don't have to look far and wide for it, you just ask anybody in Gaza what they want. They will tell you - they want to "free Palestine" from Jews. [...] . Not equal rights with the Jews but the Jews dead.
You are treating a diverse group of people as a single hive mind, which is just another form of strawmanning. I have seen no poll that shows that all Palestinians are in favor of killing all Jews. I find it extremely unlikely that is the case. But please provide the proof if you have any.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
These are very half formed thoughts. Musings really. So take everything I'm about to say with a grain of salt.
I think a lot these days about what makes a civilization. I definitely lean towards the line of thought that culture is downstream of genetics. If you replace a people inhabiting a land wholesale, you get a different nation and a different civilization. I harp on IQ a great deal, but there are all manner of uncorrelated or weakly correlated personality traits that influence a civilization at scale.
And then I look at the fall of the Roman Empire. On the one hand, there is a story that can be told where the Roman Empire became just another economic zone, too decadent and corrupt to bother with the labor of maintaining it's own existence. On the other hand there is a story where Christianity somehow carried the seeds of Roman greatness through the ages so that they could flourish among dozens of different people's in the successor Kingdom's in Europe where the rapacious barbarian's settled. They were taught to settle, cultivate, and have a lower time preference. It's hard to imagine a pagan Europe, where Christianity had never been invented. I don't think anyone can figure that counter factual. But it does appear, or at least a story can be told, that the religion of the Roman Empire which outlived it, helped elevate the dozens of tribes that brought it down in it's place.
Although I suppose there is also a discussion to be had about the role of Christianity in allowing infinite rapacious barbarians inside it's open doors these days. I donno, I can see it both ways.
To address your post more directly, even were I to assume that ancient aspects of the Pagan Hindu faith are the only living, practiced Pagan tradition between some far flung Ayran common ancestor... what does it have to offer me to "retvrn" to it? Compare the post-Pagan European society to a Pagan India today? You can make the appeal to some sort of authentic ancestral legacy, but it takes more than that to sell me. There are a few peer nations that seem to have something over on modern day European civilization which I would consider taking a lesson or two from. India is probably in the bottom quintile of that list.
Or to phrase it another way, take what Christianity did to recivilize Europe in the aftermath of one of the most devastating civilizational collapses since the Bronze Age Collapse, and compare it to what the Vedas have done to uplift India.
TwiceHuman
1d ago
I sort of disagree, but only because I do not agree with the definition of "powerful" or "high-status". From an aesthetical, logical, and spiritual perspective, these people possess traits which only mimic good development. From an evopsych perspective, I'm more neutral: Social status is high value in a sense, but excess sociability is also a sign of weakness and therefore low value.
Powerful men might think that this benefits them, but that's only because they're elite normies. Above average in many areas, but not truly intelligent, and therefore unable to consider second and third-order effects. In short, it's locally beneficial and globally harmful.
I agree that this is causing the power-law distribution to get steeper
It's just begging the question though- according to ancient myth the colonizers who constructed the temples to Apollo at Delphi and Delos were the race of hyperboreans emerging from the northern-most land in existence. Of course Apollo himself represents a Northern European phenotype and physical ideal- Apollo was called "the most Greek" by the Greeks themselves. It points to a common ancestry with the warring tribes that did the same on the Italian peninsula- as foundational colonizers. An important element of those myths was to preserve lineage of the noble class, with the issue being much more pressing and therefore developing differently in modern-day India.
In contrast, the earliest archeological reference to Odin ever is the 5th century AD, centuries after the development of Christianity. But we know Tyr was worshiped for thousands of years before that before being eclipsed by Odin. The Edda was written in Medieval times, hundreds of years after Christianity. Norse Paganism is not a better representation of pre-Christian Germanic worship, given it was established after Christianity and was clearly influenced by Christianity. Greek/Roman paganism remains the supreme representation of pre-Christian, European worship.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
It's just harder to establish an intent
Right, so, one of the things I allude to in my original post is that this bit is really vague in UK law, as best I can tell. Sometimes it seems like "harassment" under UK law requires specific and directed intent, but sometimes not. And even when intent is required, the kind of intent is usually something like "intent to cause distress or shame." But of course screaming "NICE GAMS," while it might very well cause embarrassment to the admiree, is perfectly consistent with intending to make a woman feel good about herself, rather than to cause distress or shame. So when you say--
The catcaller is manifestly trying to get a specific woman's attention and prevent her from going about her business undisturbed
--this seems at least half mistaken. The catcaller wants to get someone's attention to pay her a compliment, albeit perhaps a compliment she'd rather not receive. (Is it also "catcalling" to yell putative insults at a woman, e.g. "whore" or "slut?" I think maybe this also would qualify as catcalling, but then the vulgarity and more aggressively threatening content of the speech seems to more clearly establish hostile intent.) Disturbing her "business" does not seem to be a necessary (or indeed generally intended) aspect of catcalling.
Likewise, UK law seems to think that you can direct harmful intent without a specific target in mind--for example, using PSPOs to forbid people from protesting near abortion clinics. Merely holding a sign that says "abortion is murder" near an abortion clinic need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual. Likewise, wearing a diaphanous string bikini to walk around a busy pedestrian area need not be done with any intent to impinge on any specific individual, and yet a reasonable person might well find it an alarming sight--and doubt that it was done with anything less than mischievous intent.
This gets into questions of constructive intent. If you know or should know that your actions result in X, did you intend X?
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