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FtttG
1hr ago
The is/ought distinction is not real.
What? You don't see any distinction between "this is the way things are" and "this is the way things would ideally be"? This ten-year-old child died in a house fire through no fault of his own And That's a Good Thing?
Tree
1hr ago
We disagree on the is anyway. The is/ought distinction is not real. That's why we disagree on the ought.
Tree
1hr ago
I'm more of a case by case guy, but I think that's true on average, in the modern west. But that's culturally dependent. It's more typical in history for parents to let the daughter drown, because a dowry will have to be found for her, while a son will stay in the house and have the obligation to provide for his parents in old age.
You're basically saying it's a fact of nature that parents prefer to send their daughers to college rather than their sons. Now, they do. For most of history, they really didn't.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
1hr ago
Treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex is going to... require treating people as if they are not different on the basis of sex!
The standard TERF position for decades has been that sex is a biological reality, but gender should be abolished. The unique vulnerability of female bodies as compared to male bodies necessitates certain accommodations like female-only spaces, but most aspects of “gender roles” can and should be done away with. You could argue that this is a fine line to walk, but I at least think it’s internally consistent.
FtttG
1hr ago
I think people are whitewashing their political opinions by calling them ‘facts of human nature’.
Is/ought distinction. I never said it's a good thing that most men feel an instinctive protective urge towards female people (regardless of their capacity for bearing children), I only said that they do, in fact, feel this.
Corvos
2hr ago
This might be confounded by presence of firearms. Getting close enough to someone for GBH is more dangerous if they might have a gun; conversely people might beat their opponent down harder to reduce the risk they draw a firearm when you look away.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2hr ago
we are here to protect you please go stand by the stairs
FtttG
2hr ago
It would also be interesting comparing rates of e.g. grievous bodily harm between Scotland and Scots-Irish-colonised regions of the US.
Corvos
2hr ago
I see. My assumption would be that criminals are much less capable of getting guns in Scotland than in an American state (even one with restrictive laws) and therefore that this points to Scotland's murder rate being abnormally high. A comparison to Scot-descendant groups in Canada would be nice.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2hr ago
What makes you think pillarization will happen — or, more specifically, that "blue America" will tolerate the existence of a parallel "red" hierarchy?
Corvos
2hr ago
Do people image from geostationary orbit? It's MUCH further away than other orbits: https://satellitetracker3d.com/track?norad-id=60179
I assumed that most imagery was doing using low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that watch from 500km - 700km up, like the SENTINEL satellites, and these only have recurring orbits on a period of days, although some of these programs have several satellites following the same orbit.
Whereas geostationary satellites are 35,000km away and mostly located in the equatorial plane. I would have thought they struggle to get good images.
Am I mistaken about how imaging works? I'm not an expert.
FtttG
2hr ago
Not universal, but widespread. I do acknowledge there are exceptions. I don't think my psychology is representative of masculinity as a whole, and I don't think you should draw the same inferences from your psychology either.
You’re saying if a man sees a boy and girl drowning (perhaps his children, perhaps not), he always saves the girl?
I think the average man would be far more likely to save the girl than the boy, yes.
Tree
2hr ago
You make universal claims about male psychology I can refute with a single example, me.
You’re saying if a man sees a boy and girl drowning (perhaps his children, perhaps not), he always saves the girl?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
3hr ago
Hm, does Compact have any links to the German magazine of the same name?
I don’t think so, no. Although funny enough, the name “Compact” comes from the idea of a “new compact” between left and right. Social conservatism and economic socialism. One might say that it’s rather… third positionist. (Although in practice most of their takes are very basic bitch and milquetoast.)
FtttG
3hr ago
That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple.
You can always add more epicycles. At least in my experience, a man striking an elderly woman is widely seen as a more heinous crime than a man striking a wheelchair-bound man.
Tree
3hr ago
I think people are whitewashing their political opinions by calling them ‘facts of human nature’. You say most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm, but in numerous cultures it was normal to beat women. In honor cultures, even related men can kill them for a smile. Obviously rape was widespread, etc. This isn’t the feminist litany of oppression, men suffered terribly too. I just don’t think you can look at all that and see the instinctive urge to protect women. And I personally don’t feel the discriminatory urge to save a random woman over a random man.
Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties.
That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple. Doesn't have anything to do with the inherent biological value of women.
pak chooie
I think the typical English onomatopoeia for spitting is "ptooie" or "ptoo". It has a rather childish connotation, though, and I don't think I've ever seen it used for spitting in disgust. In such a situation, a native Anglophone normally would just write "(spits in disgust)".
FtttG
3hr ago
They're described as some of the most restrictive in the US, but I don't know what that means in practice.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
The trouble with untruth is that it is hard in advantage to know when it will be harmless and when it will lead to disaster.
Myths work okayish even if most people do not believe that they are literally true. Most people who partake in the Star Wars subculture do not believe that there was a historical person named Luke Skywalker in a galaxy far away. They still can dress up as wookies and go to conventions or debate minor points of Jedi philosophy online, but they are much less likely to engage in harmful actions than a subculture which believes their myths are literally true.
FtttG
3hr ago
I wasn't debating whether it was rationally justified. It's simply a fact of human nature that most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm (an urge they do not feel when it comes to male people, or at least not nearly to the same extent), and that this urge does not discriminate on whether the woman in question is capable of bearing children or not. Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties. So your claim that women are only valued for a "doing" (i.e. the ability to bear children) doesn't really seem to describe male psychology accurately.
Corvos
3hr ago
modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts
Are guns banned in Massachusetts?
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
Overzelous knocking down of 'perceived untruths' can produce a lot of collateral damage;
If someone says "those that are found guilty on good evidence should be punished" then that does imply some caution against not punishing the innocent on flimsy evidence. Here, the ideal is clearly not "do not hold any beliefs, for they may be false". If you kick out a true belief A and believe not-A or end up agnostic about A, then your map will match the territory less well than when you started, and this is very much contrary to the spirit of the saying. I mean, it does not even say "reject any beliefs for which on reflection you have insufficient evidence", it only asks you to abandon beliefs which have been proven false.
As a rationalist, I believe that beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. A belief which can be destroyed by the truth, i.e. a false belief, will not be a reliable tenant.
Also, no beliefs exist in isolation, they form networks, and a false belief is more likely to prop up another false belief than a true one is.
Now you can carve out an exception for some personal things where the belief has other clear advantages despite being somewhat inaccurate. Believing your partner is a nine when a impartial analysis would determine that they are actually closer to a seven is probably permissible in most cases.
As mentioned, I'm currently reading Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success, his account of how culture shaped human evolution. It includes a chapter in which he argues that culture can impact on human biology without genetics being involved. Some of these seem straightforward and uncontroversial: London taxi drivers developing unusually developed memory centres because of the cognitive effort expended in memorising thousands of winding back streets was an example I'd encountered over a decade ago. There was also some breathless discussion of placebo, nocebo effects, and the phenomenon wherein a witch doctor puts a curse on someone and the person really dies because they expect the curse to kill them (all of which made me sceptical for the reasons outlined here: worth bearing in mind that this book came out nearly a decade ago, and probably took several years to write). But there was one example he gave that I was especially iffy on.
Henrich claims that men raised in "honour cultures" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)) have elevated cortisol and testosterone reactions to perceived slights. He goes on to argue that regions within the US which were colonised by Scots-Irish settlers (i.e. Borderers) still have vastly elevated rates of murder and other violence compared to other regions, even after controlling for other factors like race*, poverty and inequality. He argues that the explanation can't be genetic (i.e. people of Scottish descent are unusually prone to violence and aggression), pointing out that modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts. His explanation is that "honour culture" shapes human biology at the hormonal level, causing men raised in the South with no genetic predisposition to violence and aggression nevertheless to violently overreact to perceived slights which a more civilised man would brush off. (The obvious implication of such a causal explanation is that the South needs to be colonised educated on how to be more like their Northern betters. PERMANENT RECONSTRUCTION!)
I don't dispute the claim that growing up in an environment in which aggression and violence are valorised could cause your body to pump out more testosterone than it would otherwise - that sounds entirely plausible. And yet, for a book which is essentially all about selection effects, it strikes me that there's a potentially obvious selection effect that Henrich is overlooking. The Scots-Irish borderers who left the British Isles to colonise the United States were not a randomly selected cross-section of their home society: it seems plausible that those who left were disproportionately likely to be unsuccessful at home, perhaps unable to hold down a steady job because of chronic drunkenness or propensity to violence. Ergo, the elevated rates of violence in Southern states could have a (partly) genetic explanation after all. At the minimum, I feel like Henrich could have gestured to this explanation, or acknowledged it as a potential contributing factor. In a book entirely about gene-culture co-evolution, it seems like a missed opportunity to tell a story like "for genetic reasons, the people who colonised these regions of the United States were unusually prone to violence and aggression, and this helped to foster a culture in which it's seen as appropriate to react explosively to perceived slights, exacerbating the salience of traits which a different, more agreeable culture would have taken pains to ameliorate".
*So he's not explicitly denying the 13/52 meme, but rather claiming that it's ultimately caused by white culture rather than black biology or black culture.
A telltale sign that someone's putting words in your mouth. Where did I say anything about the relationship between parents and their children, or parents' desired level of educational attainment for their children sorted by sex? I was talking specifically about the male urge to protect female people from physical harm. There isn't even any contradiction between an intense desire to protect women from harm and a chauvinistic attitude towards female educational attainment.
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