domain:npr.org
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
17hr ago
I don’t think we know enough about ancient Mesopotamia to say whether it was a primitive democracy; given that the King was labeled “king of the universe” I think it’s unlikely. But in any case, “old as history” means “as old as civilization”, and humans are much older than that. Men didn’t form advanced civilization due to any biological impulse or feeling compelling them, but because their intellect persuaded them that it was for the greater good. It required significant social infrastructure to keep afloat: priests, myths, stories, tragedies, rituals, public executions, angry gods.
Reading is as old as written history, but reading is non-biological. It has been lost before, like in the Bronze Age Collapse / Greek Dark Ages. It’s not like throwing, or building a shelter, which all humans know how to do. An example in another animal might be a primate learning primitive sign language. That’s not biologically-rooted, though they can do it. You can train a monkey to ride a unicycle, but that’s not natural or rooted in their biology.
So there’s a very real, and useful, distinction between “humans do this because intellect/reason assures them of a delayed benefit”, and “humans do this because they feel a strong primal urge to do it”. A woman might be compelled by reason to marry an ugly guy if she has no other option; but a woman would not be passionate about it. I don’t think fascism just so happens to take advantage of animal biology to increase passion for the state; I think that this is its functional definition, especially colloquially.
why isn’t Logos biological
Because it is an abstract construct that requires training for a human to either care about or learn. Humans don’t stumble across abstract philosophy in the natural environment.
faceh
17hr ago
I finally got around to using ChatGPT Agent and it is actually, finally, tingling my "this thing has reasoning and problem-solving capacity and might actually be sentient" senses.
Used it for creating a delivery/pickup order from the Sam's Club website. It hunted down the items, navigated challenges that I intentionally threw up for it, and successfully completed the task I gave it, with very minimal prompting to get it there.
Yet another "Future Shock" moment for me, which is happening every two months nowadays. My benchmark is very, very close to being met.
Anyhow: Anyone have any ideas for some non-mundane, but also non-illegal and non-dangerous ways to make use of a slow but reliable personal assistant that can navigate the internet?"
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
17hr ago
Matthew 7:1-3
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
Another one we can lie at the feet of Christianity.
Also, the left has been hijacked by opportunistic arab/islamic in-group pandering.
Yeah, a lot of this discussion is basically delusional in that it treats it as an ideological battle with coherent positions for Westerners to settle. It's tribal for a lot of people. They feel no need to be fair so there's no magic judo trick to be pulled on them. Like any group engaged in competition, they've just learned learned the rules. That pressing a certain button helps their cause.
If they ever won outright the pretense that it's about oppression as such goes out the window.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
17hr ago
My interest in Gurren Lagann improved significantly when one of the most annoying characters in the show died.
incoherent flabbergasted noises
IDK if you read my spoiler note (I wouldn't have in your shoes), but that character was the only good part of the show in my book. I knew we had different taste in things, but don't think I realized how opposite our tastes are until this moment, lol.
Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Never got past the first episode, something about the faux-British setting set me off. I mean to, at some point, if only so I can appreciate the memes better.
Well... for what it's worth I really enjoyed part 1, enjoyed part 2 to a lesser extent, and then really disliked parts 3 and 4 (stopped watching after that). But, in accordance with my newfound realization of how opposite our tastes run, that probably would mean you'd enjoy it? In any case, the British setting lasts only for part 1 (which is also by far the shortest part) so don't let that put you off the show by itself.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
17hr ago
I remember suddenly hearing the verb "judge" a lot in high school from girls. "She was judging me!" "You're being really judgy!" etc. and I was baffled by the usage. My internal reaction was something like... uh, yes? Everyone's judging everyone about everything all the time? Subconsciously most of the time, even? I understood that the girls were not trying to stop others from "judging" per se (since presumably they themselves often made knee-jerk and subconscious judgements about others) -- they simply wanted immunity from criticism about their choices (bad boyfriend, questionable fashion, low status friends, etc). I remember feeling unconvinced by their appeals against "judging" but at the time I couldn't put my finger on why. Nor could anyone else, so it was an effective tactic to immediately shut down any criticism (cf. "you're being inappropriate").
Americans are taught from a young age that we "shouldn't judge a book by its cover," that we should "judge by the content of their character," that we "ought to walk a mile in their shoes," and so on. This stems from a belief in an obscure nameless virtue that's not quite captured by the term "tolerance." The best name for it I've seen (sadly from a writer whose name I cannot remember) is "indiscriminateness.". It's not enough to tolerate your neighbors weird facial piercings/taste in movies/cooking/religion -- to simply let them enjoy those things without trying to stop them -- no, you must pretend (and strive to actual believe) that you can't even see a qualitative difference at all between Christianity/Islam, Michael Bay/Ingmar Bergman, natural look/septum piercings, etc. I think that "indiscriminateness" as a virtue is the fruit of Americans' extreme fixation on egalitarianism and discomfort with any sort of hierarchy or authority.
So what is it "okay" to judge? Everything, I suppose. You cannot stop other people from judging you, at best you can just shame them into lying and saying they're not (which sounds like a worse outcome to me -- now you don't even know who looks down on you!).
If you want to get a hideous septum piercing or due your hair some ludicrous color, please weigh whatever benefit you'd get from that action against the negativity you'll get from others (comments, mockery, rejected job applications) and then, make your decision and own that decision.
To directly answer your questions:
How much should you judge people? All the time. Unless you've been living alone on a desert island you've met a lot for people, so you have tons of data to use. It would be foolish not to use it. Your brain is designed to due exactly that sort of thing (pattern recognition).
On what should you judge them by? Any characteristics for which you have data.
Is there something you think it's wrong to judge people for? No, with some exceptions for leniency on people who have Seen Some Shit (e.g. abuse victims, war fighters/survivors, mentally ill people).
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
17hr ago
They are associated with hipsters (the "slender, bearded twenty-something man from Brooklyn", though I might note that while the hipster lives in Brooklyn he's probably not from there), and fat old guys from the South. Also, not mentioned, lumberjacks. The hipsters wear them ironically because they do everything ironically, and the other groups wear them seriously.
faceh
17hr ago
"Mom Jeans" seem to have come back in fashion HARD.
But as you note they're often paired with a top that is either barely-there or is designed for maximum emphasis of the body's traits.
AnarchyDice
17hr ago
oats_son
17hr ago
Whoa, you must have some problematic associations with suspenders! I hope you feel sorry.
I don't know that I've ever seen anyone wear them seriously except for Amish, my dad, and the only lesbian in my class when she went to a school dance once.
But you can't put that in words without saying what your folk community is, and (for different reasons) neither British nor American wannabe-ethno-nationalists can do that without stepping on rakes, so they use a pictorial dogwhistle.
This is actually extremely easy to do, it's European-descended. These cities were formerly almost-entirely European descended and now European-descended are in many cases minorities in these same places. Many cities and public beaches which were very nice places are no longer nice places, everyone knows that so the images strike a cord. You can't pretend this didn't happen, you're essentially left saying don't believe your lying eyes.
I basically agree with your last point. My own criticism of the meme is that it whitewashes 50s-90s culture which led us to exactly where we are today. Going back to the 80s is not any sort of solution. The rot was endemic to that culture as well, it just had not yet led to the demographic displacement that the meme is lamenting but it was already on the path. A 1970s muscle car is not a good symbol for "the good times" because it's more symbolic of the vapid changes in American culture that led us where we are today.
That's how Anglo-Americans traditionally (read pre-CRA) viewed it. That's not how continental Europeeans ever viewed it.
I think the question has merit. Otherwise Mill wouldn't have had to invent the Harm Principle to solve it.
Consider a church that a large majority of your society attends (let's call it the catholic church, for "universal"). Let's say this catholic church has formal processes that would impose specific penalties on its members if they associate with people deemed unsavory by the institution. This is not a government institution, and yet it possesses large powers of censorship through this simple application of freedom of association.
How is this possible if there is no tension between keeping political expression unsuppressed and the ability for people to freely exclude anyone they desire from their lives?
Libertarians discard the primacy of political expression and focus on property rights. Liberals discard the primacy of freedom of association and focus on political expression. Hence vastly different reactions to some dudes deciding to setup ethnic enclaves innawoods.
But neither of these approaches realizes the original Liberal promise that both political and social freedoms can be fully realized with no contradiction. Because it was a lie.
Tanista
17hr ago
Given this, the best solution is backing one side to break the stalemate and take over, the quicker tge better.
What does this mean in practice? Where do the Palestinians go?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
18hr ago
Yeah, whenever people come out of the woodwork to say things like "Meyers-Briggs is complete nonsense" I roll my eyes, because it's not. Like you, I am certainly willing to believe that the framework is not perfect. Not only is any framework going be imperfect for the reasons you said, but with MBTI specifically some of the categories seem poorly defined. The introvert/extrovert and think/feel axes are really strong in their ability to gauge what a person is like, but the others not so much. So yeah, the system is flawed. But on the other hand, most people I've known tend to get consistent results on tests, and people with similar results truly do behave similarly. So despite the flaws, there is truth to be found there, and the "Meyers-Briggs is complete nonsense" claim simply does not withstand scrutiny under the available evidence.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
18hr ago
Trump did, and the Episcopal Church shut down their refugee organization so they didn't have to help.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
18hr ago
Logos, as a construct of wisdom, is surely non-biological.
Why?
“representatives based on population” are examples of procedures unrooted in biological instinct [...] you could see that happen in humans 100k years ago, or in primate groups
Iceland's parliament is about 11 centuries old. And Mesopotamia had primitive forms of democracy. It's quite literally as old as History. I see no reason to assume it's not as viscerally embedded in human nature as autocracy.
All three systems of government seem to fade into the eons in this way.
Fascism is about Garibaldimaxxing, to the fullest extent,
Fascism is ultranationalist, that's true, but it has neither a monopoly on nationalism, nor on ultranationalism, making this not a sufficiently defining characteristic to base a whole political analysis on, in my view.
Goldenpath
18hr ago
I instinctively pictured the boss from Office Space.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18hr ago
I wish I had it in me, but while I can pump out worldbuilding fluff for hours on end, actual stories with characters and plot are beyond me.
thejdizzler
18hr ago
Looks like Russians have just stormed into the center of both Pokrovsk and Kupyansk. Maybe the Ukrainian collapse has actually begun?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
18hr ago
"This is what they took from us" works at three levels.
The level it is okay to talk about, and is a real case where something has been lost, is that young people looked better in swimsuits back then because nobody was fat. In that specific sense, society is just uglier than it used to be. (If you look at fully clothed photos like high school yearbooks then the effect is less stark because increased wealth means people have better teeth, hair etc. which partially makes up for the fattitude.)
The level where there is an obvious dogwhistle is the mix of skin colours. I think you can make a case that something has been lost here - the idea that there used to be a time (outside a few cosmopolitan megacities) where you could assume that everyone you meet is a member of your folk community. But you can't put that in words without saying what your folk community is, and (for different reasons) neither British nor American wannabe-ethno-nationalists can do that without stepping on rakes, so they use a pictorial dogwhistle. Given the actual demographics of both the US and the UK, skin colour is a good enough proxy for folk community membership for the implied statistical inference to be valid. But the folk community is not actually defined by skin colour and the only people who actually care about the mix of skin colours on the beach as such are white supremacists.
The last point is the silly one. The period between the post-WW2 cleanup and the oil crisis was a period when the core western countries felt prosperous (even though normal-ass economic growth means that we are a lot richer than that now), so vibes-based economics associates the aesthetic of that period with material prosperity. A Tesla Model 3 is superior in every respect to a 1970 model year muscle car, but seeing a 1970 muscle car in the background of a beach photo creates a vibe of "this was a rich society" whereas a Tesla Model 3 in the background doesn't. The only thing that has actually been lost is in your head.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
18hr ago
Well, I'm not a psychologist, so I might have misremembered that factoid. Never heard MB being used in a healthcare setting, last I heard, it had been a mild fad in HR.
Even OCEAN is of limited utility.
wayfarer
18hr ago
everybody else will work for me and I can do nothing, and the rightist fantasy is: I will be able to do as much work as I want to.
various warlord/king fantasies seem to be of "everybody else will work for me and I can do nothing" variety in right-wing decoration, combined with fantasy of being able to execute people you do not like
with no indicator that they know how much effort it would take to be warlord/king or warlord king
very often these people would very clearly fail at being either (and frankly, competition to be a successful warlord would be so strong that person managing it would be at least some minor CEO or sport star or celebrity in our society)
“I will be a warlord” is a very different type of fantasy than “I will be a poet”. Both fantasies, both silly, but silly in different ways.
poet one is not really "I can do nothing"
birb_cromble
18hr ago
Is the man in suspenders a slender, bearded twenty-something man from Brooklyn, or an overweight septuagenarian?
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
18hr ago
I meant to add that the (presumably superior) ASI in the basement universe are intentionally killing off competition. What else are they doing? Nobody in the setting knows! Which excuses you, the author, from having to know or care about at least one set of eldritch deities. This is a highly subjective opinion, but I'd find that more narratively satisfying than the universe somehow prohibiting intelligence above a certain threshold.
I'd recommend you actually write something in your setting, you have at least one guaranteed reader (me), maybe even two or three haha. Just put it out there, I spent many years idly making things up in my head before I bit the bullet and put pen to paper.
I think it's fully acceptable to take into account tattoos when judging people. However the blanket statements you're making seem way way too harsh.
K. Why should anyone care about your personal aesthetic preferences?
This is true in a statistical sense. But the correlation is going to be noisy, and depending on your local culture entirely useless at the low end.
This is only true if the local culture makes this association. My understanding is that Japan is like this to an extreme degree, to the point you get banned from bathhouses. The general association that a couple small tattoos have is nowhere near that strong in most places in NA, and even less so in most large cities.
I'd argue that there's actually a positive correlation between the cost of a tattoo and the the quality of the character of the person in question. (As many "trashy" tattoos will be cheap flashes with no thought put into them, or done outside a regular shop on impulse with no thought for the future. Expensive tattoos are typically planned out with great care, discussed with a well-regarded artist beforehand, with the appropriate weight given to a permanent decision).
And painful? It's really not that bad (from my understanding, I don't actually have any myself). But lots of worthwhile things are painful in the moment.
This is just "I don't like them" again, and says more about you than them.
Again -> perfectly fine to judge someone for having prison-style, or face and neck tattoos, or having cheap offensive tattoos or way way too many. But the blanket statement is going to come off as rude because so many people have one or two tiny or hidden ones, that don't indicate anything significant about their character.
I myself have none, but my SO has a full sleeve, done with careful consideration and consultation with an artist. More are planned. My best friend has a quote from a classic novel hidden under his shirt. One of my siblings has a tiny symbol to commemorate a trip with friends hidden on the side of their foot. None of us are lower-class, we're all high-achieving in our lives, careers, and personal relationships.
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