domain:parrhesia.co
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2d ago
So?
But this poor family made a terrible decision because they've been lied to about reality their entire lives.
They made a brave decision without realizing why it was brave, i.e. there's a lot of danger involved. That doesn't make it terrible. Had they walked into it with open eyes, it would have been admirable. Insofar as it's not their fault alone that they had a poor understanding of the odds they were facing, sure, they're entitled to some sympathy when things turn out poorly in a way they never anticipated; but not infinite sympathy.
Picture a guy who signed up to be a firefighter because he'd observed that everyone admires and compliments firefighters. One day, things get bad, and as he's being roasted alive in an out-of-control inferno he whines: "man, I thought this job was going to be all about rescuing cats from trees and collecting praise just for existing! I'd never have signed up if I knew it involved actual peril". If the fire dept's recruitment drive genuinely downplayed the hardships and hazards of the job, sure, he gets a degree of sympathy from me for the injuries he sustains. But once he starts saying "no one in their right mind should ever become a firefighter! it's a terrible idea! you could be horribly injured! stop praising firefighters and encouraging people to join up!", no, sorry, gotta stop you there. You have a right to be a coward, everyone does, I'm not a firefighter myself - but you can't start preaching cowardice as an ideal. That's wildly antisocial.
Transfer of learning doesn't exist, so all those quotes about how chess teaches foresight and vigilance are full of shit; learning chess teaches you to play chess, period. And we are not in an age or place where it is a common pastime, so it is not particularly useful as a social skill, either.
I would not be categorical about it, I think there are a lot of lessons that a child would learn from chess. Mostly character lessons, not intellectual lessons, and not because it's chess specifically, but because it's a competitive game. It would teach a child humility; even if the kid is good, she will meet people who can effortlessly curbstomp her at it, so she will have to learn to deal with that. She will also learn that if she studies and practices hard, she can improve at something; a valuable insight that eludes a surprising amount of adults.
There's a few pitfalls too though, it's important that she understands that just because she can beat some people at chess, especially adults, it does not make her better, superior or even really more intelligent than them. And vice-versa. But I can easily imagine a kid losing respect for adult autority because she thinks she's more intelligent than them.
faceh
2d ago
It is interesting to think about what sort of evidence you personally would need to bump your personal probability of "God" existing to like 99%.
There's a bit of a problem in that '1 off' events can be 'explained' as an extremely rare confluence of factors that produced an unlikely (but not impossible!) occurrence. And events that seem impossible but are repeated with some kind of regularity can be studied and eventually 'explained.'
And a lot of things CAN be written off as hallucinations or misperceptions of an otherwise normal event.
For me, I'd count "Reviving someone who was proclaimed dead, on demand" as pretty high up the scale of things that can't be explained (yet) with current science, and thus proof of 'divine' intervention.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
"Invasive species" is strong language, to be fair. Yes, African-Americans were brought over to the US, but this was a few centuries ago and by now they're as native as the rest of the immigrant US population.
Well, the metaphor was about the small scale, about white couples adopting black orphans. The idea is that the singular black child is "invasive" in the gated environment of the white family's hearth-and-home. An ugly sentiment, but not really historically falsifiable either way.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
While unquestionably a horror story and about adoption, I don't think this is the kind of "adoption gone wrong" the thread is about, which focuses on cases where the adopted kid turned out to be 'bad seed' no matter how much nurture was applied, and consequently wrecked the innocent adoptive parents' lives - not the other way around.
KMC
2d ago
They are at least as different as wolves, and coyotes, and dogs are from one another.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2d ago
I mean so was the printing press. I don’t see this as a huge problem, as eventually we will learn to deal with it. And I find that in almost all cases, the dangers of censorship and centralized clearing houses of information is that not only does it make organized lying possible— in fact easy — but it makes countering the official lies nearly impossible.
The danger of too much contrarianism is being exposed to crazy ideas that fail on critical examination. This is at least possible because the truth is also available.
Corvos
2d ago
Yeah, I was getting him confused with Tree, who has mentioned a couple of times that his family comes from that background and didn’t get much joy out of it.
ThenElection
2d ago
It's too early to tell, IMO. You had e.g. Newsom saying that MTF trans kids shouldn't play in sports for a bit, so Democratic politicians definitely were seeing the need for a course correction.
Unfortunately, it is (correctly) perceived that Trump has made a series of unnecessary self-owns, so now the "keep the same playbook and hope the ebb and flow of politics brings us back to power" segment has renewed leverage in the intra-party dispute. Mid-terms will determine which view gets to compete in 2028.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2d ago
Honestly, the amount of "oopsies, we didn't mean it!" bombings the Israeli armed forces have been doing recently,
... in the same breath as bragging about the precision of the bombing of Iran, it might be worth adding...
HereAndGone
2d ago
That's the problem: you get terrible landlords, and you also get terrible tenants. There are people who will take total advantage of being a tenant and just wreck the place and laugh in your face about any consequences. I don't blame people who have a house that they're renting out for spare income but are not 'professional' landlords for deciding the game is not worth the candle, and it's better to just sell the property (or keep it as inheritance for your kids).
CriticalDuty
2d ago
I'm not a progressive and I wouldn't call myself a feminist either, but Sheridan also frequently has some of the worst written female characters around. The women were easily the worst part of "Landman", a show that is only watchable thanks to the Herculean efforts of Billy Bob Thornton.
2rafa
2d ago
I stand by it. Epstein’s victims are victims - like Harvey Weinstein’s , to some extent - of the sexual revolution and the very negative consequences it had on many young women. My mother tells stories about half her friends at 14 years old (in the late 1970s) having 25-30 year old boyfriends who picked them up outside school. That is the way it was.
Few more than me have stood up more here to say this whole thing was a bad idea and a way for largely higher status men to maximize access to pussy (especially from previously respectable kinds of girls) without consideration for their wellbeing or that of society, but this specific case is just an illustration. Much of the most salacious theory (including Trump’s involvement) is implausible for a number of reasons. The rest is just a richer version of a sad, mundane story that occurs in countless places at countless times.
oats_son
2d ago
I suppose a more accurate statement would be that "tribalism is the default state of humanity". I was indeed including cultural divisions in my original statement.
Race is, of course, real. Taking a microscope within very similar populations and pointing out how similar they are doesn't erase the distinctions between more disparate groups.
Do you think dog breeds are a social construct?
HereAndGone
2d ago
Israel is, uh, let's move on
They seem to have now declared war on the terrorist menace that is the Catholic Church by yet another "oopsies! did we bomb that? sorry, just a mistake!"
Honestly, the amount of "oopsies, we didn't mean it!" bombings the Israeli armed forces have been doing recently, they're not really a good advertisement for them being a developed First World secular nation, now are they? Though you have to admire their cursed by luck ability to hit the only Catholic church in Gaza by complete accident, didn't mean it, had no idea it was there. Poor guys, they must just have such terrible equipment, clearly they need billions of military aid to get modern range sights so things like this won't happen again!
(Before the mods slap me around: yes, I am being heavily sarcastic in order not to be heavily enraged and start calling no-no names. That being said, let the beatings commence!).
FoundViaTwitter
2d ago
Hi, Turok! First off, thanks for turning me on to The Motte. I found you in the comments section of a Hanania tweet and then after some rabbit holing I stumbled upon a link to this place.
Second, you're doing a disservice to Andreessen by placing him alongside Musk; Andreessen is a lot more thoughtful and he does admonish the Right occasionally.
oats_son
2d ago
Good post. I am not sure what causes EverythingIsFine to argue this out. It feels like a steelman of the "race isn't real" thing I see on reddit, but there's only so much you can do with something that's totally false on the face of it.
You may have difficulty determining the difference between a bred-for-competition German Shepherd and a bred-for-work German Shepherd, but that doesn't mean there's no difference between a New Guinea Singing Dog and a dingo. They can interbreed, sure, but there are significant differences. Distinguishing Koreans from Japanese or Frenchmen from Englishmen isn't particularly enlightening to me, but the broader you get, the more that distinguishing between races makes sense to me. I would also agree that culture is a significant factor, too.
2rafa
2d ago
Epstein molested a few hundred girls. Rotherham was about 1400 victims, and the total across all known British Pakistani gangs is about 5000.
Pearson’s extrapolation method estimated based on the rates in Rotherham more than 350,000 victims nationwide. Sarah Champion, the Labour MP who blew the whistle on the scandal said there were hundreds of thousands, up to a million victims nationwide (over the 65 year period of mass immigration from Pakistan).
HereAndGone
2d ago
Pence did fuck and all during Trump's first term.
You don't remember the hysteria about he was going to be running the gay torture camps as he set up the theocracy that Trump would oversee? The fact that he did the job quietly was much more of an achievement than you think, including hosting our gay Taoiseach and his boyfriend during St Patrick's Day visits! That, and the mockery over the Pence Rule which was really common-sense for the crazy times we're in.
I think we should be more reassured about the fact that "this guy will kill us all!" messaging of the time then turns out years afterwards to be "that guy? sure he did nothing!"
AvocadoPanic
2d ago
I recognize the moral framework and lecturing
In the 60's Captain Kirk could kiss green space ladies and his black colleague, even if he was being forced by aliens with telekinetic powers.
enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation.
I regret to inform you that you share a planet with people who believe in penis-stealing witches, and many of them don't even have Internet access.
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The original default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time. Recently, in large part thanks to the Internet, some people are occasionally less than 100% wrong. You might even say that the Internet made people less wrong (bah-dum tiss).
People being wrong is not a new problem and the Internet didn't make it worse.
During the life of Marie Antoinette, there was a scandal involving a diamond necklace that severely damaged her reputation. Except she had literally nothing to do with it, and she could prove that she had nothing to do with it. The French press vilified her anyway.
And who could forget about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer who was accused of selling secrets to the Germans? You know, the guy who was proven innocent and then dragged through the mud by the French press because the army was too embarrassed to admit they made it all up? The guy who was vilified because of a bunch of lying journalists and government officials? That guy?
/images/17528682967017636.webp
Hey, I'm starting to notice a pattern here. It seems like journalists and government officials have been spreading disinformation since before the invention of the telegraph. Maybe instead of giving journalists and government officials unlimited power to censor anyone who disagrees with them, we should consider that maybe the call is coming from inside the house.
AvocadoPanic
2d ago
Being that there > 100 episodes, it persisted in syndication for some time after it's initial run completed. I remember it on Nick at Night in the late 90's.
Denzel Washington - 137 episodes
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
2d ago
I didn't take the short path but I'll be alright. Seeing people here has made me feel better about agein as you folks are still alive on the inside. You can stave off the decline by a lot. Modern times are a blessing this way, a man can be himself nowadays If he does things alright.
I think this is broadly true, but I think there’s another serious problem which is that starting with Gen X, there’s been a steady decline in literacy in the sense of having read and absorbed enough written fiction to understand how to use things like symbolism and metaphor and subtext to tell good stories. It’s actually weird, but for artists, they are not subtle at all. One conversation on Reddit sort of crystallizes this. There’s a very famous episode of old series Star Trek in which Kirk lands on a planet full of literal Nazis. As in full on swastika wearing, goose stepping Nazis. Turns out that this Nazi planet was turned Nazi, deliberately by a rogue Starfleet officer. Now, lots of people on Reddit, college educated, supposedly literate had a huge problem with the episode. They could not grasp that you could have the bad guy defend a bad idea unless you secretly hold the views that the villain is espousing. And of course if you can’t imagine other people telling stories without having to explain that X is bad so that you understand that they don’t agree with it, telling a story where you don’t hit people over the head with your own views lest you be accused of heresy becomes impossible. First because you don’t want to be mistaken as a heretic, as you kinda need to be able to work in mainstream media, but second because you have no idea how to use subtext or metaphor or symbolism to get a point across. It’s a skill issue.
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