banned
TheDag
Per Aspera ad Astra
8mo ago
I see some posters that for some reason can't stay civil here and get routinely banned, but then are able to keep a civil tone over in the ACX open threads, even when talking about politics.
What gives???
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
8mo ago
Banned for mangling Warren Zevon.
No, but seriously, even if you think someone is trolling, don't respond like this.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
“Which means that obviously you can’t support it.” Wait, why not? “Because it’s fascism!”
This is where you misunderstand me, because you seem to have mistaken me for a leftist, rather than a far-right extremist who thinks the American Revolution was a mistake.
It's not me, but our elites who say you can't support it. And you won't be allowed to until they're removed.
In short, it’s just a rhetorical trick to prevent his ideological opponents from supporting social conservatism.
Again, you have me placed wrong.
the only acceptable conservatism in a modern Western country is one that doesn’t actually conserve anything, just drifts leftward more slowly.
Again, this is the position promulgated and, more importantly, enforced by our elites, and which has been absorbed by too many on the right in our country. We on the right need to stop conforming to what's "acceptable" in favor of unacceptable right-wing positions.
Of course, voters are finally wising up to this and voting MAGA, AfD, FPÖ, etc.,
Which shows an improvement in attitude… but not strategy. As the saying goes, if voting could change anything, it would be illegal. That's why Trump Derangement Syndrome — as far as the people who rule us are concerned, MAGA must be crushed, no matter what it takes. AfD is going to end up being banned in the name of "defensive democracy" and "never again."
The problem is that the people who rule us are not going to allow us on the right to do anything that might actually work, not so long as they're alive. Our first priority should be figuring out how we're going to deal with them.
Followup from a post I made in transnational thread about systemic child sexual abuse by a banned islamic cult in Malaysia. This post will actually focus on the concept of disproportionate Noticing, but the background leading to this actually could spawn a whole seperate thread about moral hypocrisy.
Summary: Malaysian police raided orphanages operated by a network of business entities linked to a banned islamic cult in early September. Sexual abuse (actual sexual abuse, not western diminished agency stuff) of 600+ minors aged 1-17 was the cause for the police launching the raids. Civil administrative incompetence, financial corruption and 'other inducements' are contributing factors to the failure of the religious authorities to police their own, to the great suffering of children. Yet not only is western media ignorant of this, what media does exist seems to focus on issues regarding migrant rights and statelessness.
https://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/malaysia-babies-for-sale-101-east/index.html
CW angles: STOP NOTICING BIGOT Indonesians and filipino illegals sell their children to richer malaysians, whether they are childless chinese looking for a pureblood han (the only good outcome) or criminal gangs looking for kids to maim and pimp out (the most common outcome for brown kids). Sex tourism in southeast asia is not restricted to rich whites coming to spend tourism dollars, there is a flourishing regional demand for child prostitution. A little commented but readily observed reality here is that islamic regions have higher predilection for sex with minors.
https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1177268/FULLTEXT01.pdf
Criminal statistics on pedophiliac incest are also Noticed, just as in Europe. To protect the rights of children names are rarely disclosed, but indicative hints (multigenerational households in rental apartments) or cases where the judges exercise discretion to name the convicted largely show the preponderance of muslims as sex offenders.
The aggressive downplaying of the severity of the child sexual abuse to pivot onto high concept issues such as citizenship and rights strikes me as a stark contrast to the discourse surrounding Canadian residential schools or Australian aboriginal rehoming. English language media framing of this issue seems to aggressively downplay the complicity of the Malay authorities and consumers who abetted and consumed the goods produced by the cult. To be extremely clear, the sexual abuses of children was facilitated by a cultified interpretation of Islam that the cult members practiced, which encouraged pedophilia, coercive polygamy and social control strategies. The Islamic morality enforcement authorities did not act on this - it is speculated that the police (who are ostensibly secular but nevertheless staffed by malay muslims) deliberately avoided informing JAKIM about the investigation/raid to prevent JAKIM from interfering or covering up the cults activities. Yet, english language media, especially what little western media covers this, is running its own narrative interference by downplaying the sexual abuses committed by brown muslims. Without a white or white adjacent enemy to aggressively pin all crimes hypothetical or otherwise on, the issue in question becomes philosophical migrant rights issues instead of visceral child sexual abuse.
There are many horrible takeaways about this case, but the most relevant here is the contrast between residential schools mass graves and this GISBH mass sexual abuse. If whites are there, their guilt is automatic and eternal. If browns do bad things, its their culture and whites must support them lest they lose their unique diversity.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8mo ago
It's specifically hostile annexation that's banned, where you take territory/people by force over their wishes. There's some degree of grandfather clause for existing state boundaries, but supporting rebels to get what the rebels want (as opposed to what you want) is generally OK (at least as far as the norms go; the state being rebelled against can retaliate).
The Donbass rebels were fine as far as the norms went; other states were free to back the Ukrainian government, and the Ukrainian government had some degree of cause of action against Russia (not that Russia cared), but Russia wasn't breaking the norms. Russia coming into Ukraine under its own auspices to chop off bits of it and annex them to Russia, that's breaking the norms.
Tretiak
8mo ago
These issues only take front and center stage in nations that are so incredibly well off and affluent, they'll bring conflict to areas where there is none so they can take up some righteous cause they think they'll find some sense of misplaced meaning in. And they'll get wound up over the most insignificant matters to feel a sense of superiority and self-importance. Case in point...
Before my Reddit accounts got banned for wrong think, I used to occasionally watch a guy with quite a large following on YouTube who became something of an activist for the industry he was in; and also had a Reddit account that was fairly widely known. One day he posts a video of a topic that quoted a Reddit user who was a big player in a different industry, and who I followed for a long time, independently of my knowing that this channel ever knew who he was. So I wrote to the channel saying "hey, I saw you followed Reddit user X on a video you made the other day, he has also posted a great deal about this newer topic you are now covering in other comments; you may want to check him out." He thanked me back, and then the same night, posted a video full of links I had sent to him (his video is still up last I looked) and gave his perspective on things. A bunch of users in the YouTube comment section immediately started replying with all sorts of conspiracy remarks, because they said some 'different' Reddit user, unknown to either of us, had posted the same verbatim series of comments in a different subreddit. The channel then immediately put out a quick video the same night, saying he made the other video private, asking what the hell happened, inviting his subscribers to help him figure it out and said he'd look further into it tomorrow.
So the following day, I hop on the channel's Discord. A bunch of users are gathered there in a fervor, and I immediately grew wide eyed and wondered what the hell I walked into. A bunch of enraged morons who are fans of said channel, were trying to piece information together, essentially that had the effect of doxxing this guy. I announced who I was and said "hey, I'm the man who broke the news to X the other day, I think this is what happened..." First, one of the Discord users tried putting the walls up, pumping me for information and not wanting me to explain the matter to everyone else. Then he tried taking my information and giving it to others, announcing before them that 'he' personally found the 'secrets' or background information explaining what happened. I then basically sidelined this guy and dropped the full explanation of things before everyone, and people then kept asking me questions, but I refused to provide any further information, because I could see an online mob was allowing themselves to get whipped up into a frenzy, probably to go and harass this Reddit user, accusing him of some sort of conspiracy, and bringing out the torches to make his life difficult. Not to mention this self-appointed idiot 'leader' of the group who saw his 15 minutes of fame opportunity arrive, to become 'important' to some group of idiots and make a name for himself. The channel then saw this Discord chat, and made the video public again and moved on from the matter.
All that happened was there was some random Reddit user plagiarized the comments of this other Reddit user, and went around posting his comments in other subreddits, probably because he had low self-esteem online and this was his way to feel good, copying the comments of a very intelligent Reddit user so people would 'admire' him, or get some misplaced sense of meaning or purpose in what he was doing. And yet this official Discord group was turning itself into a base of operations to antagonize the shit out of this other innocent person. And the worst part about it was, this Discord group was sad and pissed off that there 'wasn't' a conspiracy. They really wanted to go to war, probably with the idea that their righteous investigative work would win them social brownie points and approval and get them a pat on the forehead. The point of all this being that people will radically attach themselves to all kinds of moronic causes, for all kinds of reasons. In some of those, there is a real culture war that is going on. In others, it's more revealing of the individuals involved, what they're lacking in life, that they'll involve themselves in things that make no sense to the average person.
2D3D
8mo ago
Islamic faith schools funded by successors of a banned islamic cult is found to have sexually abused hundreds of young boys under its care. Penetrative sodomy is common, and the children were taught to sodomize each other. Most of the children are offspring of polygamous marriages arranged by the cult as rewards for members. The financial power of the cult is speculated to be due to links with the religious enforcement board.
The embarrassment to the Malaysian muslim establishments are multifaceted: The governing party has failed to use its available tools, particularly the JAKIM and JAIS Islamic enforcement authorities, to clamp down on extant religious school abuses and it was the police that raided the GISBH facilities.
The opposition cannot capitalize on this failing of the government, because they are an explicitly islamosupremacist party and islam, being perfect, cannot possibly have done anything wrong, so the political hay is being made of the fact that the (muslim) government is oppressing muslims rather than the abuse having happened in the first place.
The muslim community is angry and embarrassed that such perversions occurred, because it is the filthy kuffar who indulge in perversions, not the pious muslim. (muslim sex offense rate is... something not for this thread)
The only reason GISBH was actually brought to public attention is that it is a banned cult. There are other madrasas with horrific sexual abuses as well, but lack the cult management. There is a potential CW effortpost on Islamic cults in Southeast Asia and their corrosive effect on Islamic authorities, but this Transnational Thread is not the place for such a post.
cjet79
8mo ago
Lots of things were different back then. We were on reddit and the culture war was red hot and banned in a bunch of other places. And there are also places like culturewarroundup that allow bare links and they are far deader than theschism. If anything the comparison suggests theschism strategy is a better viable long-term option. Neither us or them can compete with X in terms of sheer content of bare links and subjects being discussed. But we can compete on enforcing some minimum quality standards.
Look, I know this is a lost cause. But I wish you guys would at least acknowledge the point about low effort top posts leading to high effort comments.
I feel like I've never disagreed with this point. I might have even said somewhere that it is easy for bad quality comments to generate good discussion. But I also feel it suggests that you are entirely missing the point I am making.
I think our actual disagreement is on the effect of permissive top level comments. You seem to think it's positive sum. I think it is neutral sum, or possibly a little negative sum.
We are generally getting a similar number of high quality comments each month. And that amount is limited by the number of users.
The people that write quality comments have told me before that they like having their comments read and discussed. I also share that preference. Its rare for me to want to type out a quality comment that is just going to get buried and read by only one person.
The place where you get the most attention and discussion is at the top level. That attention is limited by how many top level comments are above you, and how recently that thing has been discussed. Bare links fill up the top comment slots and bury posts faster. And you can easily get your topic sniped before you finish writing a quality comment.
I don't even understand your mechanism for how permissive top comments increase the number of quality comments. I understand how it increases total comments, but that isn't something I care about.
I sympathize with this in regards to full prohibition of alcohol unless you live in a sufficiently fallen society. Sufficient problem and prohibition is not only justifiable but a moral imperative and you are extremely unreasonable if you are not willing to consider that there is a red line. If your society has enough of a problem with alcohol abuse then it should be banned no question.
For example alcohol prohibition towards Indian "native" Americans is a no-brainer. It is extremely destructive towards them and makes them dangerous to others as well. Both how alcohol affects them, and the general problem of alcohol abuse in their community, is an example where the skepticism must be towards those who decriminalized it, at the expense of the people affected.
The trade offs in comparison to the examples you mention aren't there. Still, I also sympathize with considering idea of freedom even if it causes harm, provided the harm isn't large enough or comes with other significant benefits. Alcohol is damaging enough that the weight would fall in favor of prohibition except for one reason.
The only reason I don't support prohibiting it is because it is so entrenched culturally, and there is historical continuity and significance. So there is a more significant trade off because it is a more important part of living and past culture. Of more normal and respectable people too. So there is a point there. However these are advantages but of a much different nature than books, or getting faster to your destination than 25 miles per hour. But alcohol is bad enough. It carries a significant cost. And certainly restrictions and trying to curtail alcohol abuse is good.
We should put a line to it and prohibit harmful drugs who don't have that history. Alcohol is bad enough but its byproducts are too culturally significant. The rest of harmful drugs are not. The damage that alcohol abuse inflicts in society is bad enough and we should not allow more to be added to it.
sun_the_second
8mo ago
How do you know when it's universally banned? Asking that question in a poll is like asking "are you a bad human who deserves to rot in jail?"
I notice a complete lack of any social judgment towards those who'd like human cloning to be legal, or anything adjacent to that. For contrast, look at the social judgment towards those who want to look at naked pictures (including obviously drawn pictures) of young women (including the obviously fictional ones) who are 17 years and 11 months old.
If you looked at society without knowing the laws, you'd probably assume that human cloning is legal, it's just that there is no use for it and that's why no one does it.
aardvark2
8mo ago
Human cloning: not enough people want it badly enough.
How do you know when it's universally banned? Asking that question in a poll is like asking "are you a bad human who deserves to rot in jail?"
Deepfakes are currently too easy and still readily available even when technically illegal.
Wouldn't deepfakes solve previous CP problems? Deepfakes of any kind might be not so accessible anymore since we're still in yearly stages on banning it. E.g. in China it's OK with just "deepfake" watermark (or what it is) and South Korea only banned it 6 days ago.
faceh
8mo ago
Why ban on commercial surrogacy or human cloning or CP or deepfakes doesn't result in breaking kneecaps, burning down, etc.
Well as I said:
correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
Drugs and alcohol are an ur-example because the people that want them REALLLLLY want them. Similar with prostitution. Gambling too. I imagine legalized sports gambling has made it far harder for criminals to make a buck on it now.
It helps when the thing is legal overseas or is more readily produced overseas and can be transmitted electronically so there's no need for interpersonal violence at the consumer level.
Like, we had a brief change in the drug trade when crypto was still new and allowed Silk Road to exist, and money could be exchanged for drugs without the need for violent enforcement. But the state cracked down and so we slid over to the standard equilibrium.
They are not police states. There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.
I've said it before, I am completely prepared to admit that Japanese people are less likely to be violent regardless of the policies they operate under.
See my point:
correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
Japan doesn't have the huge drug-addled underbelly that the U.S. does, to my knowledge.
But they DO have Yakuza, who keep things orderly but, I emphasize, STILL rely on violence to enforce their business practices.
And allegedly the decline of the Yakuza is opening up space for more violent operations who are harder to police because they're less legible. Although as mentioned elsewhere, Japan is pretty close to being a police state.
So... my EXACT, PRECISE point still applies to Japan, even if less obviously so.
jeroboam
8mo ago
And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.
This is just taking the US experience of Prohibition and expanding it to cover all bans in all countries.
Taiwan and Japan ban drugs just fine. They are not police states. There are no gangs or violence associated with drugs.
Some things are hard to ban, some easier. And there is a large amount of cultural difference too. But most bans do actually reduce consumption of the banned thing without too many negative consequences.
faceh
8mo ago
Yup.
The Prohibition impact isn't really the problem. The first order effect of prohibition is to decrease availability of [banned thing]. The long term effect is to decrease legal availability of [banned thing].
The second order effect is to push the markets for [banned thing] underground, correlating more or less with how badly people still want [banned thing].
And the third order effect, or one of them: when merchants of [banned thing] can't use normal conflict resolution/contract enforcement methods, they have to invoke base violence in order to operate. Wars over turf, breaking kneecaps to collect on debts, burning down establishments that don't pay protection, killing snitches, those all become necessary to the business. And then it eventually becomes organized and systemic.
They can't use the court systems and the state-sanctioned violence, so unless you have a full-on police state, this stuff will spill over into civilian life.
So yeah, flipping a switch on and off between "banned" and "legal" will show some effect, but leave the switch on "banned" long enough and you'll ultimately see a system evolve which perpetuates violence. THEN maybe you can assess whether the additional violence is worth the actual harm reduction achieved by the ban.
It seems unfortunate that for many things there isn't a stable equilibrium of "Legally permitted but socially verboten" where a given activity or product is not banned, but the social judgment that comes from engaging in it is so severe that it necessarily remains hidden on the fringes of society, so there's 'friction' involved in accessing it, and most 'right-thinking' people avoid it because they don't want to risk the social consequences, even if they're curious.
From time to time, people discuss prohibitions here. The general zeitgeist is often that one particular interpretation of the the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s is conclusive for all prohibitions of any type everywhere and always. Nevermind that there are alternative interpretations of the US's experience with alcohol prohibition in the 1920s. Nevermind that different prohibitions are different. We now have one data set from South Africa.
In 2020, the South African government banned alcohol sales as part of their COVID measures. Then they lifted the ban, and then brought it back unexpectedly, and then did that again
Every ban saw murders decline, and every reprieve saw them return. Stunningly, prohibition worked:
Perhaps they just didn't keep the prohibition long enough over any time period for the data to show that murders would have really gone up massively over time. Perhaps murders aren't the right measure. (EDIT: Perhaps there were other restrictions that happened concurrent to the alcohol prohibition; one might be interested to see if there are any differences in start/end dates for other restrictions and see if there is something like a DiD.) Lots of interpretations, but only one limited data set. I'm not a huge fan of alcohol prohibition, personally, but I wonder if that is, to some extent, a luxury belief of mine.
Massive amount of ads is enshittifying, therefore I am using workarounds banned by their terms of use, therefore they can block or ban me.
In general nearly all enshittifying is perfectly legal and can be done by companies doing this.
P-Necromancer
8mo ago
Really? No one's made the standard case against unions?
(I've been too lazy to actually make an account here for three years, though I participated occasionally in the old place. This, finally, has pushed me over the edge.)
Say you're an autoworker in a nation that doesn't participate in trade (or that the labor lobby has persuaded to engage in sufficient protectionism the rest of the world can't possibly compete). Would you rather the auto industry be unionized? In principle, yes. (In practice, unions are so dysfunctional the answer might well be no, but let's put that aside and assume for the moment the union will genuinely work towards your interests.)
It'll make the industry objectively less efficient:
- The union will torpedo labor-saving innovations
- Collective bargaining makes it much harder for employers to remove poor performers or reward high performers. At best they'll be permitted to act on irrelevant or gameable metrics, like seniority or overtime hours
- As a result, there's very little incentive for any employee to do more than the minimum
- Strikes obviously reduce productivity, and negotiations waste everyone's time and attention
- Someone's gotta pay the union organizers their six or seven figure salaries. Stapling a whole second bureaucracy onto a company isn't exactly cheap
These factors aren't transfers from the greedy capitalists to the deserving workers, they're just lighting money on fire to bully the capitalists into making those transfers. But so what? It's not coming out of your pocket. You'll make higher wages with much better job security. You can just slack off and collect a better wage than when you were working your ass off! Sure, cars are a lot more expensive, but you're only going to spend a small portion of your salary on cars, so you still come out ahead.
So far so good, right? In fact, it's so good that the factory workers want in on the action, and they unionize. Then the farmhands, and the janitors, and the retail workers, and the accountants, and... Soon enough every industry in your nation has unionized. And the funny thing about workers and consumers is they're actually the same people, depending on the good or service in question. It's easy to see that you're in fact worse off now than you were when there were no unions: all that money you lit on fire has to come from somewhere, and the only people putting money into this whole arrangement are the customers.
But at least the capitalists are mad too?
Unions are government-backed cartels. That's not, like, an insult, it's just factually what they are. (It's also an insult.) I'm baffled how people who are eager to point out the problems corporate monopolies pose (most often with a very generous definition of monopoly) don't see that unions are bad in exactly the same ways and much worse in others. (Monopolies actually don't have to burn that much money to maximize their profits.)
Uncharitably, it's tempting to say they just care more about hurting the capitalists than helping the workers, or that they're happy to defect in full knowledge they're taking advantage of our insane laws on the subject to rent seek. Charitably... I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable explanation than ignorance, which isn't very charitable. I suppose Democrats cynically supporting them as a source of partisan advantage might be more charitable, provided you allow they think their partisan advantage will be good for the country?
(As far as 'fairness' is concerned: things are worth what you can sell them for. This isn't some special standard invented to screw over workers, it's how literally everything else is valued. And note: that's the marginal value, not the average value of the whole class of the product. You can see this easily by observing that food is pretty cheap despite the value of food as a class being effectively infinite for everyone. Collective bargaining is no more 'fair' than Nestle buying up all the water rights and charging you every cent you have for privilege of not dying of dehydration.)
Now, I'm not saying unions should be banned. There are... vaguely union-shaped things that actually work pretty well in some circumstances, like worker co-ops or law firm partnerships. (After all, these are examples of workers organizing and bargaining as a collective, right?) Trying to draw up definitions that capture the necessary subtleties wouldn't be easy, and I have no faith in the legislature's ability to do so. They're currently protecting them, so I think that's plenty fair.
Fortunately, I don't think that's necessary. Just strip their ridiculous legal protections and businesses will make their own judgments, hiring law firms that provide genuine value while firing rent seekers. In this particular case more work might be necessary, but organized crime is a solved problem.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
8mo ago
Back in the very recent past when the Comstock Act was enforced and the president did not fail his oath to uphold the laws of the country so blatantly, abortion happened all over the place. It does not prevent abortions from happening in states where abortion is legal. It would prevent organizations from using the mail to ship abortion drugs directly to the home of someone in a state where it is illegal.
The most recent Comstock Act conviction was a child-porn conviction in 2021. The Comstock Act remains in force today, unless repealed by Congress.
Project 2025 is only calling for a very narrow enforcement of the Comstock act, despite there being a stronger interpretation that would make medication abortions more difficult (though surgical abortions cannot be stopped through Comstock. Comstock does not restrict shipping gloves and forceps/). Project 2025 is only asking that the federal government enforce the federal law that would prevent mail-order abortion so that the states that have banned abortion can enforce their laws.
Wait for monday I guess.
Oh, that must have been yesterday! I wasn't paying much attention to the news this week, and am now catching up. Here's an update, which is... better than a full-throated endorsement of what happened, I suppose, but not really an honest response, IMO.
Honestly, you're still technically correct, but this kind of stuff just takes the joy out of it for me.
I know how you feel, this sort of stuff used to bum me out too. At this point I just wish I had the time / discipline to make some edgelord game and cover it with "Built with Godot" splash screens.
mdurak
8mo ago
Maps of Meaning looks very promising. I will give that a read, thank you for the recommendation.
The problem here is that the sort of insight that I'm calling for here represents precisely the sort of knowledge that spiritual traditions such as religions and esoteric orders exist to preserve.
See, I’m skeptical that delving into the specific rituals of different arcane traditions, which often contain conflicting rules anyways, will give me much wisdom. What I want are the insights, not the surface level admonishments you mention. I can learn that Jews have their holy day on Saturday, Christians on Sunday, and Muslims on Friday without ever realizing that the point of all this is that
The invocation of the divine and the standardization that goes with it allows all of society to gather around a stable game theoretic equilibrium where not engaging in rest can be punished without discouraging dilligence in general
But how do I learn the actual wisdom latent in such traditions when no esoteric ancient text will explicitly come out and say something like, “We taboo this behavior in order to maintain its signaling value”? Instead, they always put forth some silly reason for it (“It is immoral to desecrate the body your parents gave you!”) that is easily dissolved by postmodernism due to its arbitrariness.
That’s what I’m interested in learning more about. Not about whether or not this or that culture banned cutting hair, but about why there was such a continual need for signaling through different forms across different ages, and about what exactly it is we’ve lost with the breakdown in meaning. About the need for Schelling points of rest, and what we lose out on when those Schelling points are commercialized or weakened. And about any other traditional phenomena that have much richer reasons behind them than their surface level justifications would imply.
But what even is this subject? I don’t know how to even Google for it.
But this goes back to one of my original points, traditionalism is not a more radical conservatism, it is in fact palingenetic and interested in rebirth.
I have not heard of traditionalism as a separate political concept from conservatism. Is there a coherent narrative for how this rebirth is supposed to happen? I don’t believe I see much of that in the modern American political discourse; MAGA certainly doesn’t appear to me to have much more vision beyond “Tariff China to bring back American manufacturing!” or “Fire Deep State bureaucrats who are standing in the way of change!” (My neoliberal bias may be showing.)
This is almost too vast a topic for me to approach. The general issue of codified dress is already quite vast but gender roles and their implications dwarfs it.
Sorry, I only brought it up as an example of one case where we appeared to have loosened our grip on a form of expression without any seemingly deleterious effects. With so many different taboos, any single one appears rather redundant, no? Why a ban on both women wearing pants, and tattoos, instead of just one?
Crowstep
8mo ago
I'm tempted to say 'never'. Clothing has always been an expression of identity, whether the identifying characteristic is ethnicity, nationality, sex, age, wealth, profession, religion or any others you can think of. A muslim woman who wears a headscarf does so as her everyday dress, but it is also explicitly religious/ethnic dress.
The Scottish highlanders wore kilts for hundreds of years because they were practical, but they were also aware the entire time that the lowlanders didn't wear kilts. The identity around the kilt was no doubt strengthened during the Jacobite rebellion and during its aftermath (when it was banned by the government in order to suppress highland identity). So if you want a a particular date for when the kilt became more symbolic than day-to-day, I'd say then.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
8mo ago
Are you careful to align the painfulness of any proposed execution with the amount of pain that was originally inflicted by the murderer on his victims? Or do we just have open license to abuse convicted murderers however we want, for as long as we want? If it's the latter, is that really justice? Or is your motivation something else?
It's important to note here that Nitrogen gas is now being used, because anti-death penalty ideologues have lobbied chemical and drug companies to stop supplying the materials for the prior method (lethal injection). So for anti-death penalty advocates to point to nitrogen asphyxiation as cruel is to decry the results of one's own side.
Cruel and unusual punishments were banned at the founding to move past the medieval drawing and quartering, but definition creep has reached the point where it is used to ban the death penalty by the back door. We must settle on some standard of pain that is necessary and work from there.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8mo ago
AfD, the new right (or far-right, depending on your viewpoint) is the strongest party and it's not even close.
So, how much longer before the AfD gets banned, then?
Mainly thinking of Deiseich. She comments on US election posts on ACX fine but got banned from here IIRC.
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