culture war roundup
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either
I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
3d ago
less than 1% of Israel's GDP
Forget GDP, GDP is just a number. You can't just go out and buy large numbers of artillery shells, JDAMs, advanced missile defence, spare parts. It's not a liquid market, buying more can just make the price go up. Few countries make these things. Israel can't produce munitions at scale because they're a small country, they don't even have a domestic steel industry. They rely on the US for this because America is actually large and has huge stockpiles that are reliably used to replenish the Israeli arsenal. Otherwise they'd just run out of munitions or Israel would have to wait ages to restock, inhibiting their military capacity.
Furthermore, military aid always roars up whenever Israel actually needs it, it went up to about $22 billion in the year after October 7th. See here: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2024/USspendingIsrael
Technically speaking, the there is a law against America giving any military aid to nuclear powers who haven't signed the non-proliferation treaty like Israel but they just pretend it's fine.
Was this last bit about the USAF some sort of typo?
No, the USAF and RAF literally, directly, provide air defence for Israel directly. US F-16s shot down Iranian missiles attacking Israel. Plus US warships nearby fire their expensive ABMs to defend Israel.
the US has never invested ground forces in taking out any military group directly opposing Israel
Saddam's Iraq was an anti-Israel force. Israel bombed their nuclear reactor in the 80s. In the Gulf War Iraq Scudded Israel. In 2003, the US invaded Iraq, in large part due to false intelligence about WMDs which the Israelis contributed. Plus a bunch of US policymakers talked about how the real reasoning was that Iraq was a threat to Israel. See my comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/765/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/162796?context=8#context
After Zizians and the efilist bombing I have tried to pay more attention to the cross section of ethical veganism, rationalists, and nerdy utilitarian blogs.
A Substack titled "Don't Eat Honey" was published. Inside, the argument is made that to buy or consume honey is an unethical act for insect suffering-at-scale reasons. According to the essay, bees, like livestock, suffer quite a lot at the hands of beekeepers. That's a lot of bees. Thus the title: don't eat honey.
The median estimate, from the most detailed report ever done on the intensity of pleasure and pain in animals, was that bees suffer 7% as intensely as humans. The mean estimate was around 15% as intensely as people. Bees were guessed to be more intensely conscious than salmon!
If we assume conservatively that a bee’s life is 10% as unpleasant as chicken life, and then downweight it by the relative intensity of their suffering, then consuming a kg of honey is over 500 times worse than consuming a kg of chicken! And these estimates were fairly conservative. I think it’s more plausible that eating honey is thousands of times worse than eating comparable amounts of chicken
This particular post is high on assumption and light on rigor. It received outrage. Another post on Bentham's blog on insect suffering I recall as higher quality material for understanding. Did you know that composting is an unethical abomination? I'd never considered it!
'Suffering' presents an incommensurable problem. Suffering is a social construct. Suffering is the number and intensity of firing pain receptors over time. Suffering is how many days in a row I experienced boredom as a teenager. Still, science attempts to define and quantify suffering. An equation works out the math: how conscious a cricket is in relation to man, a cricket's assumed capacity to feel pain, the length of time it spends feeling pain, and so on. My prediction is we will figure out the consciousness part of the equation with stable meaning before we ever do so for suffering.
We will manage to rethink, remeasure, and find additional ways of suffering. People always have. Today, plants do not feel "pain", but tomorrow, pain may not a prerequisite for suffering. Maybe starvation becomes a moral imperative. If the slope sounds too slippery, please consider people have already built a (relatively unpopular) scaffolding to accept and impose costs at the expense of human comfort, life, and survival. Admittedly, that suffering may present an incommensurable problem doesn't negate any imperative to reduce it. Find more suffering? Reduce that, too. It does give me reason to question the limitations and guard rails of the social technology.
According to Wikipedia, negative utilitarians (NU) are sometimes categorized as strong NUs and weak NUs. This differentiates what I'd call fundamentalists --- who follow suffering minimizer logic to whatever ends -- to the milder "weak" utilitarians. The fundamentalist may advocate for suffering reduction at a cost that includes death, your neighbor's dog, or the continued existence of Slovenia-- the honey bee capitol of the world. Our anti-honey, anti-suffering advocate has previously demonstrated he values some positive utility when it comes to natalism, but much of his commenting audience appears more in the fundamentalist category.
One vibe I pick up from the modern vegans is that the anti-suffering ethics are the ethics of the future. That our great-grandchildren will look backwards and wonder how we ever stooped so low as to tolerate farming practice A or B. I don't doubt we'll find cost effective, technological solutions that will be accepted as moral improvements in the future. I am not opposed to those changes on principle. Increase shrimp welfare if you want, fine.
My vague concern is that this social technology doesn't appear limited to spawning technological or charitable solutions. With things like lab meat showing up more frequently in the culture war I'd expect the social technology to spread. So far, however, vegans remain a stable population in the US. Nerdy utilitarian bloggers are yet to impose their will on me. They just don't think I should eat honey.
I'm not disagreeing with the factual findings. Literally in the post you're replying to, I said:
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition.
Indeed, the question raised by the petitioner during appeal was specifically "the trial court improperly relied on his current physical condition, age, and stated reasons for seeking expungement". While I don't think that's meritless -- I raised some statutory interpretation questions, again literally in the post that you're replying to -- I do fully recognize that there's absolutely zero chance of them being successful. Likewise, I recognize that because of the commitment's age bringing any serious challenges to would be difficult even were New Jersey and its federal circuit any less biased against gun rights, and because of the petitioner's age and the speed of New Jersey courts, any Second Amendment-related or due process legal challenges would be doomed.
My argument is that these are bad; that they defy broad rights and due process and justice, and yet can't be meaningfully challenged and won't be meaningfully recognized. We've had this distinction before.
T.B. in this case might have failed a test for expungement in a fair system, but he didn't get a fair system. Instead he got one where his rights could be taken away in an ex parte hearing with no due process or representation and standard, and to retrieve those rights he could present only limited information against an explicitly adversarial judge who could moor any denial in anything the judge wanted under any standard of evidence and using any information or no information at all. Indeed, he didn't even get a system interested in pretending to be fair, where the judge can make some handwave toward what T.B. would have to do in order to comply with the law.
There's a trivial sense where they're bad in ways that undermine all of the defenses that you entered this discussion with. But there's a more general one where it's no defense at all to say that the bad procedures are established by statute, and that the biased judges are just part of a biased system, and that there's just going to be people who fall between the awkward interactions of laws that don't mesh together, and that people simultaneously should know that any constitutional or due process arguments would actively doom whatever trivial chance their 'conventional' petition might have and that outside observers can't point to the blatant disregard for constitutional rights or due process.
There are imaginable universes where we are, as a society, so attached to legal formalism that all of these things weigh against constitutional rights, and the constitutional rights lose. There are imaginable universes where all those frictions and safety risks weigh against constitutional rights, and the same happens.
The courts can, have, and did in the last week jump over themselves to protect the rights of a murderer to 'prove' that he might have only planned and assisted with the murder of an innocent woman. The courts can, have, and did jump over themselves to defend an illegal immigrant who beat his wife and allegedly participated in human trafficking from getting deported, with everyone on the Left and their dogs and you specifically talking up the importance of due process.
We aren't in those universes. You know we're not in those universes. That this disagreement is only imaginable for matters that happen to line up with your political goals leaves any argument presented under them as below contempt.
My problem with HBD as it typically discussed in rationalist spaces and especially the Motte is that it is itself a massive Motte and Bailey.
The Motte is that broad differences between racial groups are real/exist.
The Bailey is that the existence of such differences makes racial background the "scientifically correct" means of organizing a society and a key peice of information to be considered when evaluating the individual performance or value of any given person within it.
People who question the Bailey are routinely downvoted to hell and back while being derided as "blank slatists" "denying reality" and having "crippled thinking", yet even if "the motte" is true, its not clear to me that "the baily" follows naturally from this unless someone is already drowning in the woke kool-aid.
You can spongebob meme at me about "dEmoCrAtSaReThErEaLRaCiStS uwu" and call me cringe, but if the truth is "cringe" then cringe i shall be.
As i touched upon below i am increasingly convinced that the reason HBD and other sweeping generalizations about race are so popular amongst priestly caste (academics, politicians, journalists, et al) and on certain parts of Twitter, is that it allows them to absolve themselves of responsibility for the negative consequences of thier policies and behavior. You can't blame me, it is genetics (or some structural "ism") that are the true culprits!
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3d ago
I suppose in that case I have to credit @Chrisprattalpharaptr for making this post which I was served on the volunteer page.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3d ago
but the basic point is valid: the Online Right, insofar as I casually track its movements on Twitter, emphasizes HBD less than it used to.
Liberals used to explicitly believe that their belief system is justified by science, and anything that contradicts it must be not only morally, but factually wrong. This was the background for the rise of the HBD conversation, trying to own those stupid racists by showing how scientifically illiterate they are. After they crashed into that particular wall, head first, several times, and noticed it ain't budging, they decided to avoid the conversation altogether, which is why it also lost a lot of it's utility for the right. It's not even limited to this particular topic, there's a broader trend that Dave Green calls "the death of discourse".
There's a kind of coarser, more vitriolic type of racism and anti-semitism emerging to take its place.
This isn't even specific to the right.
It's a bit of an extended discussion, but at the bottom of this comment I wrote:
The US started supporting Israel after their victory in the six-day war showcased their value as a military power in a region broadly aligned with the Soviets. By the time of the oil embargo keeping Israel on their side during the cold war felt like the right bet to decision makers in the US. You may think they were wrong, but that they thought this was the correct choice seems more plausible than that they were being controlled by a shadowy cabal who had between 67 and 73 achieved total control of the government.
To which the response was:
There is nothing shadowy about the cabal, it's blatant.
I did ask @RandomRanger a little later on to clarify his position:
I mean, maybe I'm being autistic and interpreting too literally your earlier claim that
I don't know how it's possible for the word ZOG to be problematized like it's some crazy, loopy theory when in the case of the US, it's literally true.
but again, if the position is that all US interests are subordinate to Israeli interests and have been since the mid 20th century, then Israel wouldn't face any threats at all (or at the very least, far fewer). Is what I just described your position, or have I misinterpreted it?
But received no response. He's welcome of course to jump in and make his stance on the topic clear, until then, draw your own conclusion; my interpretation is that if he doesn't think Israel is twisting the US' arm, it's only because Israel already owns the US government.
ZanarkandAbesFan
5d ago
Crowstep
5d ago
Anyone else ever catch the eye of their heroes?
I'm half-convinced that link 5 on this article by Scott is based on this comment by me. Admittedly, they are three months apart, but I'd like it to be true. It would also prove that Scott lurks here.
SerialStateLineXer
5d ago
It's in the water. People do it without even knowing.
I haven't watched any of it myself
Thank god. I understand watching the British royal wedding (well... okay, actually I don't), but come the f- on, these aren't the royals. Why is anyone paying attention to them?
Male sexuality is a lot simpler than female sexuality.
Ah, a good thesis for the Quarterly Journal Of No Shit, Sherlock. Yes, Bezos Bad, and like I said before it's not all the women's fault.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Much like I urged to give the El Salvador solution at least the good ol' college try before cursing entire peoples down seven generations, I'd urge to at least try "assimilate or GTFO" (don't know if there are any success stories as stark as El Salvador, though). People respond to incentives.
JulianRota
6d ago
On your 1, I have had some related thoughts that I posted on at greater length here. What mean is I think saying basically "the South should have industrialized more in the 1850s" is a hindsight thing that wouldn't and couldn't have occurred to anyone at the time.
"Couldn't" because at the time of the leadup to the ACW, warfare was, I don't know if this is the best term exactly, but stuck in the pre-industrial ways of war. Winning the day was much more dependent on individual courage, daring, and clever maneuvering of units. The South was actually pretty well-equipped to fight this sort of war against the North already. Industrialized warfare basically hadn't been invented yet at all. The Union stumbled through making it up as they went, eventually figured it out, and proceeded to crush the Confederacy under a mountain of manufactured goods, as all future wars would entail up to the Nuclear age. I don't think anybody had sufficient foresight, or confidence in any such person's foresight, to attempt to optimize for industrial war in advance before it had ever been tried.
"Wouldn't" because, even if we granted the proto-Confederates perfect foresight, to admit a need to optimize for industrial war leads to an inevitable conclusion that plantation slavery is already obsolete and will go onto the old ash-heap of history one way or another before long. In which case, why bother fighting a war for it at all?
Haha we had an interesting discussion on this two years back., so before LLMs were ubiquitous.
The fishing tournament example stuck in my mind enough that I still remember it from time to time as an example of something that's just absurd to be dishonest about, but they do it anyway.
I might broaden it to it just being an epidemic of demolished social norms and declining efficacy of shame as a behavioral deterrent. Being utterly unrepentant and impervious to most social shaming is in fact an adaptive trait in the current social environment.
I hesitate to say a rise in sociopathy, but perhaps now there's a default assumption that all the rules are just there to hobble you and if you choose to follow them whilst everyone else is 'defecting' you're just a sucker, where the only thing that's really 'wrong' is getting caught. Or, perhaps, getting caught isn't the problem, if you can avoid punishment it'll all still be worth it.
Zoomers have been raised in an environment where every aspect of their performance and social status is tracked, by default. Using EVERY SINGLE advantage, licit or illicit, that you can possibly find and implement is presumably seen as necessary to remaining competitive.
My generalized prognosis is that we're in the throes of transitioning to a low trust society
I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds.
Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive." Despite the hate facts that racist neo-Nazis like to spread (such as the PISA score graph with US broken out by race), everyone knows childhood deprivation can explain those outcomes. That's why anyone who's walked around the US and Vietnam can tell you how thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are, and why US blacks and whites of the same SES background perform similarly on standardized tests.
Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis, and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatist hypothesis. Bonus: A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates.
I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.
Creative sex toys, generally dildos designed or themed around fantasy monsters. Some front page examples now include Kragg the Rock Dragon and Reggie the Mothman, along with the more typical werewolf or saytr or minotaur.
Bad Dragon itself is a specific company that pioneered in the field (and has kinda become the Kleenex of sex toys, double entendre not intended) and runs heavily on the furry theme, but there’s a small industry out there. Because of some worker disputes and BD focusing more on male customers, I’d expect most female novelty-seekers to work with a variety of other companies (or chase the zillions of Etsy shops focusing on the field) as well. See The Wandering Bard, or PhoenixFlame Creations, Primal Hardwere, Weredog,co,uk, or Paladin Pleasure for other examples in the business.
Uh, somewhere private, and only if you don’t mind getting blasted with every imaginable fantasy dick (and a handful of vulvas/tongues/butts). All of these are hugely NSFW.
Seconding @thrownaway24e89172's response below. I see this kind of disclaimer for HBD-based arguments all the time (e.g. "there are no inferior or superior races, but...") even though the conclusion they dismiss is usually an obvious extrapolation from the forwarded premises. You might justify the "unequal but equal" mindset by pointing to the special role of women in childbearing, but nevertheless men are still universally regarded as the primary sex, with woman defined in relation to him; Eve was made of Adam, after all. I hate that it's the case and wish it weren't so, but women are definitely seen as intrinsically lesser (in the "great chain of being" sense) compared to men.
With that said, what's your justification for the equal worth/dignity of the sexes despite their unequal ability?
Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?
I'm more on Team Gooner, which I'm sure will surprise absolutely no one, but this metaphor seems to occlude more than it illuminates. I've got some complaints about its accuracy, but assuming it for the sake of this discussion:
`1. Why is this 'drug' different from any other over-the-counter one, not just that people want to restrict children and teenagers from having access, or even that the state gets involved in restricting access, but that it's so vital that state restrictions can put sizable burdens on adults doing things entirely away from minors? Things like alcohol or cigarettes have the obvious physical ramifications that you're pretty clearly -- no one's getting cirrhosis of the dick, here. Am I missing some other parallel, or what distinguishes gooner materials from vidya or youtube or people who get way too into painting minatures or spend every weekend at a sportsball game?
`2. Why is this 'drug' so bad for minors such that we're willing to accept onerous restrictions on adults, and yet not something we need to hold against the adults themselves. There are restrictions like alcohol and cigarettes and the entire DEA. Maybe Texas won't end up being that bad, if only by the standard being set so low, or maybe we're just being cautious because it's so dangerous otherwise?
Or are restrictions going to keep going on from children and teenagers to everyone else? Because a lot of people, including the Texas politicians writing this bill, pretty clearly want to restrict it in general.
`4. Why is it so hard for advocates of these restrictions -- either on minors, or on everyone -- to actually focus on this 'drug'? No one was gooning from a single 1970s Playboy or a couple grainy standard definition videos; it's supposedly something specific to modern porn that's so much worse... and yet the Texas law here wouldn't just cover a 1970s Playboy, but even material softer-core or less overtly prurient than that. Even people here treat hobbyist weird content as at best as acceptable side effect.
`5. There's a model of addictive personalities as responding to spaces they can't get fulfilled otherwise, in the same way that mineral deficiencies can drive people to find weird or even inedible things delicious. In addictions with serious chemical dependency or withdrawal it's hilariously wrong, but gooning doesn't seem to have those things, and some gooners even challenge themselves to go long periods without (... usually in November, for acronym reasons).
That old TLP article has a punchline in the middle about how "Pornography is a scapegoat", and while TLP puts it on ego and narcissism because... uh, well, he's a coastal psychiatrist. There's a pretty mindboggling set of statistics about the sorta thing (not-Aella) people usually do before consensual sex, and everything from dating to marriage to mixed-sex casual meetups are all down the tubes.
Is this missing nutrient model wrong, here? If it's right, might it suggest to something else that's driving more of the changes in behavior people think is downstream of a couple hours on an unexciting hobby and a jacked right wrist? Because if there's something broken in relationship formation well before sex (or, uh, handies), removing that outlet might cause people to start putting a lot more effort into working around the break... or it might end up with a stampede of people going over a creaky bridge held in place by one rivet. And given how broken relationship formation is (especially for <18s and <25s), I'm not optimistic about that.
TequilaMockingbird
Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker
8d ago
Presumably because she is being "low-class"
gattsuru
8d ago
Also, 2A rights are still largely intact? Some states can screw with you a bit or place some minor restrictions on firearms, but none have been able to ban them outright.
For the purpose of federal law, unless theres' been intervening changes to the law or caselaw, 302s don't count, because they're not adversarial or judicial hearings and often run ex parte. They do count for state law, though.
The mental defective side of the bar has been used very widely, if not consistently. And some places will ingest someone who comes to them voluntarily as if they weren't willing (or even treat a voluntary admission as involuntary without undergoing the normal procedures), though thankfully that's one of the few places that courts have been willing to push back on.
But otherwise, yes; federal regulations require that it be involuntary.
I will caveat that many states have separate rules that trigger on voluntary commitment, or don't even require commitment at all (hey, Hawaii!). New Jersey is one such state; applications for a purchase permit require applicants to complete a consent to mental health record search form. While the statute only specifically prohibits giving permits to people with a voluntary or involuntary current committment (no, I don't know why), both state courts and police generally treat it as a blanket prohibition, along with many inpatient procedures. T.B. here isn't even getting to that point, so he can't challenge it, either.
gattsuru
9d ago
[disclaimer: IANAL]
The rule is that all administrative remedies must be exhausted before a lawsuit can be filed (successfully).
This has actually historically had some awkward results. For the VA example below, there was a VA-internal administrative appeals system required by the NIAA, but it would routinely sit on appeals for years. NICS itself has an ATF Relief From Disability program authorized by statute that has been defunded since 1993 and wasn't fast before that. Sometimes this precluded judicial review entirely, other times required demonstrating constructive denial.
That said, this court case here is the lawsuit after exhaustion of administrative appeals. You aren't required to (and are actively discouraged from) bring each matter individually. There's actually a bunch of really complex res judicata rules about bringing a lawsuit over the same legal matter without having a different underlying act, though I don't know them well enough to be absolutely confident that they'd preclude a second lawsuit here.
That said, there's basically zero chance of a successful Second Amendment lawsuit on this matter. SCOTUS has already had fairly sympathetic plaintiffs available, such as Mai v. United States; they've punted. Most successful lawsuits have depended entirely on process or statutory definitions regarding who counts as disqualified to start with. The one exception is the Sixth Circuit, notably distant from New Jersey, and that case depended on the government completely disavowing any current finding of dangerousness or similarity to currently-mentally-ill people.
... while right-wing posters get to regularly accuse people on this forum of being delusional, claim outgroup politicians are "foreign agents", claim that anyone who holds specific positions is "too dumb to vote", etc. without even getting warned most of the time.
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