domain:streamable.com
quiet_NaN
5hr ago
I would argue that the crime (or "crime", if you want) is distribution.
If a horny teenager creates fake nudes of their (realistically, 'his') classmates, that is creepy and sick and kinda pathetic, but should not be a crime any more than substituting the name of his crush for a protagonist in some lewd fan-fiction.
It would also be difficult to enforce laws against these things because nobody would even know that a "crime" had been committed.
However, things are very different if that teenager then goes to spread his deepfakes among common acquaintances (who are the only ones for whom these images would be different than "yet another nude person"). More gravely, he might not mention that they are deepfakes.
I would argue that American prudishness is a major driving force here. In a society where everyone went to the beach and the sauna naked, his classmates would just reply "What is the big deal? I know how Tina's boobs look." For whatever reasons, Americans are big on "purity" and slut shaming. (I guess having an OnlyFans as an 18yo would likely get you kicked from the Cheerleader team for ethical violations.)
Under that -- admittedly silly -- framework, a nude -- even a fake one -- is a direct assault on the character of the victim when shared.
Even in a more enlightened society where people don't judge people based on sluttiness, there are probably other things which would be just as damaging. For example, I would very much prefer if a deepfake video of me in full SS uniform chanting Nazi slogans would not go viral, and I would feel violated if it did.
From the context of the proclivities of French intellectuals, I wouldn't be so sure.
Tomato
6hr ago
It can't be the creation or existence of the images that harms the girls.
I mean sure but in practice this only comes to light when they’re discovered or distributed which does harm the girls. And I think “creation + distribution” is worse than “distribution” alone if for no other reason than it speaks to a more culpable mens rea and greater capacity to reoffend.
I don’t think the boys should go to jail but I do think they should be suspended or probably expelled.
hanikrummihundursvin
6hr ago
And the best schools on Earth, as well as the ones most people choose to attend, are none of those things.
The best schools on earth are in Finland, Japan and Denmark. These schools are very homogenous.
I suppose you can bend the rules to say that children raised in bubbles grow up to be well-liked and sociable in their bubbles. But that presumes life in a bubble is man’s greatest aspiration.
These children raised in these "bubbles" are well liked and sociable everywhere they go in life. Stop lying about people you know nothing about.
Have you interacted with homeschooled children turned adults? Or people who went to private school? They are, generally speaking, socially stunted and awkward.
No they're not. What a hateful, ugly and bigoted thing to say. The vast majority of the research says otherwise. And if you knew anything about homeschooling you'd know that the kids get a lot of social interaction outside of school, such as in various club or sporting activities.
You highly doubt that someone who graduates valedictorian and places in the top 3 of their class at the SAT will continue to be smarter than most of the people around them? Very smart people still have to employ and work with normal people and idiots.
Anyone who graduates HS and goes to a competitive workplace or university will very likely not be the smartest person around. I point this out just as a simple statistical fact.
But that's besides the point, which is that you don't need to interact with brown people to be able to socialize with people who are less intelligent than you. Like, that's just nonsensical. White societies work just fine and there are plenty of not so smart people in them.
Yes, but it certainly helps. Homeschooled children are weird, unsociable misfits who become predisposed to blindly trusting authority figures and struggle to wake up for work on time.
This is completely untrue and you are ridiculing yourself by saying such obviously untrue things. A simple google search can show you how wrong you are, as homeschooled children faire just as well or better than publicly and privately educated children.
Women who never go to school with men become sexually repressed fetishists who chase cock in their 20s and 30s instead of starting families.
To say nothing of the men who grow up to be incels because they never learned heterosocial customs.
Again, this is ridiculous.
Uncharitable generalizations cut both ways.
What? You're not generalizing, you're just saying obviously untrue things.
Become too insulated in a hyper intelligent bubble, and you become the kind of person who genuinely wonders why no one likes your plan to sterilize or segregate vast swathes of the population because a black boy bullied a white boy once.
Again, what even is this?
Tomato
6hr ago
Having a fake nude made of you is way more disturbing than someone saying you’re creepy or have a small penis.
I agree that you shouldn’t go to jail for fake nudes but I do think it’s absolutely legitimate to suspend or expel boys who do this.
quiet_NaN
6hr ago
There are states where ethnicity matters and linearizing different interest groups will (a) not always be possible and (b) result in some ordering which is drastically different from from the general usage of "left" or "right".
I mean, look at the Knesset. I am not an expert in Israeli politics, but Wikipedia describes Ra'am as "an Islamist and conservative political party". They sit on the far left, but apart from ethnic concerns would probably belong right of the center -- where none of the Zionist parties would have them in a coalition.
(Of course, another anomaly would be the dirty trick when labor tried to form a coalition with the ultra-orthodox, but you can argue that the fate of that attempt is mostly proof that cutting out a middle party on the political spectrum does not work.)
In Germany (where I know the politics a bit better and they are simpler -- the Bundestag does not have a zillion different shades of blue and red like the Knesset on Wikipedia), a counterexample would be the Grosse Koalition.
German major parties go left to right (WP Bundestag colors in parenthesis):
- Linke -- far left (violet)
- SPD -- social democrats (red)
- Greens -- eco, anti-nuclear (green)
- FDP -- economic liberals (yellow)
- CDU/CSU -- conservative, slightly Christian (black/darker blue -- they always form one voting block)
- AFD -- far right, anti-immigration, some fascists (lighter blue)
(This is how they are arranged in the Bundestag, there is a case to be made that the Greens are actually left of the SPD.)
Take the 2005 Bundestag. Nobody wants to form federal coalitions with the Linke or the AFP (so far), so the following would get you a majority:
- SPD, Green, FDP: called "Ampel" (traffic light)
- CDU/CSU, Green, FDP, called Jamaica (for the colors of the flag)
- SPD and CDU/CSU, called grosse Koalition
Per your "arranged by compatibility" argument, one of the first two options would be favored, covering as little as the political spectrum as possible. Even if you agree with me that the Greens really ought to be placed on the left of the SPD, an "Ampel" coalition would seem preferable.
The reason that they ended up having a grosse Koalition instead was that while seated next to each other, FDP and Greens had major policy differences. These differences are not well reflected on the traditional left-right-spectrum. The Greens wanted to shut down nuclear power plants, impose a speed limit on the Autobahn and generally have stricter environmental standards. The FDP wanted none of these. In the end, it was easier for SDP and CDU/CSU to compromise than to reconcile FDP and Greens. Three out of the four Merkel cabinets were such coalitions (the other was CDU/CSU+FDP).
To be fair, getting the FDP into the coalition boat would have been possible policy-wise without to many concessions, but other considerations made this unfavorable. (At an election, the previous administration is mostly not seen positive. Having the stink of culpability in the failures of the previous administration on you has to be balanced with being able to point your constituents to specific policy wins your ministers accomplished. This means that you generally go for the minimum viable majorities -- and the grosse Koalition already had a solid majority.)
Poke away! I don't see where you proved that observable reality is actually faith based or where I changed the subject in that long chain of well trod ground; I believe in determinism and cause and effect and physics and materialism. These are all real things. Belief in G(g)od(s) and the thousands of religions of history have produced no actionalable technology or revealed any truth about the universe whatsoever, it is fantastical stories that sometimes teach some ok life lessons and sometimes lead to human sacrifice; no different from Grimm's fairy tales any other fiction, except that some portion of humanity takes them seriously. Materialism and hard science have opened up the universe to us and will continue to do so.
somedude
6hr ago
And remember, the starting point was that Black schools were deliberately designed, funded, and often forcibly maintained as worse quality. The schools themselves, not the people! That's a lot of ground to make up.
"Twenty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Forty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
"Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up!"
And all the while, generation after generation, we're supposed to avoid noticing that no ground is ever actually made up.
Most data seems to suggest that desegregation efforts stalled out in the late 70s and ratios flatlined until about the 90s when (arguably organic) re-segregation started happening (though the timing causes one to wonder if this was a negative side effect of War on Drugs-related stuff that started about the same time!!!)
Efforts stalled out because white people decided they would abandon their cities and move as far away as required in order to get the hell away from what they were experiencing.
Liberal anti-racist orthodoxy holds that whites uprooted their communities and fled for no good reason because they just couldn't deal with seeing people with different colored skin, but I consider this nothing but a laughable cope from a social movement discredited by sixty-odd years of abject failure
And I really can't square what you mean about the scale including "continents and generations" without concluding it's a racial dogwhistle -- could you please expand on what exactly you mean by this?
I'm not dogwhistling, I'm just saying it out loud. The more black a system is, the more of a dysfunctional pile of shit it is. There's always an anti-racist liberal standing around somewhere telling us it doesn't have to be this way. That the cities don't have to be cesspits, that the schools don't have to be disasters, that the countries don't have to be starving shitholes, if only we'll enact whatever policies they're pushing this year.
It doesn't work, it never works, it never gets better at any level, anywhere, ever, and the rest of us are expected pretend we have amnesia about it. We're just supposed to repeat this every few years forever without acknowledging the pattern.
Sixty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. Eighty years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. A hundred years ago things were really unfair, that's a lot of ground to make up. So on and so forth for eternity.
It's a farce. It's our society's version of Lysenkoism or believing in fairies or burying our treasure in pyramids. I can't really do anything about it, but I'll be goddamned if I'll sacrifice my kids to it.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
6hr ago
Most of these issues are resolved as "would an average reasonable person say this has property x?".
Which is hardly bad common law. Not that I like how subjective it is, but it's how it's supposed to work.
Gaashk
6hr ago
The difficulty is pretty variable.
I'm an introvert who loves alone time, and currently 7 months pregnant with two children under 5. I would go on week long silent retreats if I could. My daughter is extremely hyper, showing signs of ADHD. Trying to rest at home with her is awful. Going on adventures with her is pretty fun. I'm reasonably optimistic that her energy levels will pay off in the end, but times were bad when she was a baby in a little apartment. A teacher friend with similarity energetic children is putting them in a bunch of cheap Parks & Rec day camps, and I think I'm going to have to do something like that in the future.
My brother was very challenging for my mom as well. Some parent/child combinations are just really difficult, for personality and energy level reasons.
non_radical_centrist
6hr ago
Maybe Christians have to sadly stay in the far right category then. But would a type of Theist that believes in something nearly identical to Christian theocracy, with the tweak that they think God is just the spiritual union of all humanity's souls and that we are all equal in Heaven(and that everyone goes to Heaven), get to be called far leftist? Again, in the material world, their actual policies are identical to something like Byzantine Rome.
ThenElection
6hr ago
I would question whether it's really the young and attractive in particular; if you think about the Longhouse discourse, it supposed that it's the older matriarchs who wield power.
A model I've been playing with: imagine society as a graph, with individuals as nodes that create information. Information flows through edges in the graph, with more information flowing through those edges with greater weights. The nodes are labeled with either M or F, about half and half. The F nodes are more highly connected and have edges with greater weights (in this hypothetical, at least), while the M nodes are more sparsely connected and dominated by a single strong edge to an F node.
With this structure, although M and F nodes create approximately the same amount of information, the information that actually reaches any particular node will have passed through far more F nodes than M nodes. And, if you made that graph more highly connected, it makes the ratio even more disproportionate.
non_radical_centrist
6hr ago
The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.”
In theory, maybe, but in practice this runs into many, many problems.
First- do you evaluate ideologies on what they claim they want, or how they are in practice? I.e, take Stalinists who say they to totally remove hierarchy once capitalism is totally defeated, but until they have a very strict hierarchy with the Party on top. Are they more or less leftist than social democrats who want to remove most of hierarchy but are still okay with parents controlling children and the hardest workers having some more money than people on welfare, and who actually implement anti-hierarchical policies? It's a rare person who'll call Biden farther left than Stalin, but I consider Stalin far more hierarchical.
Second- Removing hierarchies in practice
It makes sense to remove explicit legal hierarchies, like ones that say you must obey a king, or that the government will not allow you to do drugs and if you do the police will throw you in prison. That is coherent as an anti-hierarchy position. But removing voluntary hierarchies does not. If two people sign a contract, such that Alice is the employer of Bob and Bob must do what Alice says, and in exchange Alice pays Bob a salary, with either party being free to cancel the contract at any time, that is hierarchical according to leftists. So far leftists would want to stop that. But the only way to stop it is to institute another hierarchy- some sort of government and some sort of police force to declare it illegal and to enforce its illegality. Therefore, a "pure leftist" is a contradiction. And I expect in reality, you wouldn't even be able to get close to being a pure leftist before running into significant issues.
FiveHourMarathon
The Gun Would Go Off
7hr ago
I would highly doubt both. The modal convert, especially a Jewish one, married a Catholic and is converting to make their future mother in law happy. They'll be exactly as Catholic, maybe a little less or a little more, than their spouse.
Trad Cath converts are a tiny minority that you'll have to explain to most people you try to talk to about it.
celluloid_dream
7hr ago
This reminds me of Bryan Caplan's framing: "The left hates markets, and the right hates the left", in that a market creates natural hierarchies. The left doesn't like that, and wants to correct it toward equality as much as possible.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7hr ago
The universe is a physical system that can be entirely explained by natural laws that we can discover.
This is a statement of faith, and a pretty remarkable one. We cannot entirely explain the universe through natural laws, and there is no evidence that we will ever be able to. When this is demonstrated to you, you decide to go talk about something else, and then go right back to your determinism of the gaps.
Imagine aliens come to live here from Sigma Tau and are asked if they have heard about their lord and savior Jesus Christ?
This is one of the reasons I'm confident betting that Aliens don't exist, specifically because they would not mesh well with my conception of God and Christianity. Ditto for brain read/write and the harder forms of superintelligent AI. This should be an absurd method of reasoning, opening me up to all sorts of exploits... and yet, Aliens, in fact, do not appear to exist, and neither does brain read/write, and neither does hard superintelligent AI, and much effort continues to be expended trying to explain away these surprising facts. Despite this, you are reasoning as though they do exist, and that their existence is the basis for your conclusions. You seem to reason from fictional or nonexistent evidence quite frequently when it comes to this general subject.
If you taught no religion to a smart kid and when they turn 18 ask them to believe in all kinds of crazy magic and make pretend it is true, they would look at you like you're nuts.
And yet, adult conversions to various religions are a thing that happens. I suppose the next argument would be that the converts aren't smart because they disagree with you?
Most smart religious people are indoctrinated well before any critical thinking sets in, it becomes a part of who they are and they feel "off" without it, even if they leave the the church the brain pathways for religious belief are set and they tend to wander back later in life or find a similar thinking system to fill the hole.
One could just as easily flip this around and say that indoctrination to Materialism sets the brain pathways such that they never really feel comfortable with religion. But in any case, this is an entirely unfalsifiable just-so story. You are not pointing to evidence here. You cannot actually demonstrate the specific "brain pathways" you refer to. You've just made up a story where you're right and anyone who disagrees is just stupid and brainwashed, because doing so is maximally-flattering to your own biases.
I get that you believe Materialism is obvious, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is stupid. I get that you don't like seeing this belief rigorously interrogated, and feel that people should simply agree with your obviously correct views. The problem is that your obviously correct views do not, in fact, appear to be correct, and are quite easy to poke holes in. A modicum of epistemic humility would put you in a much more defensible position, but until you figure out how to manage that, I'm going to continue poking.
MiltonMurrayRobertLucas
Conan still talks to us too
7hr ago
I'm planning someday to write an entire post of my own proposing an alternative to the up/down vote system, but here I will provide a basic sum up of my thoughts on it: I agree that it's a good way to convey accurately the overall opinion of the community on the post/comment, it's just that this leads to biased interpretations of people of whether it's right or wrong.
Take for example the post here about Café Américain's article questioning the mainstream climate change narrative. I thought the article made some good points, most people didn't agree, that's okay. The problem is that the voting itself kinda warps the perception I already had; just seeing it made me feel the article had some problem or was mostly based on faulty reasoning/evidence. If it's downvoted, must be for some good reason, right?
Of course, you may scoff at this and reply "Oh hoho, we're rationality aspirants here, buddy, we're able to understand disapproval of someone's opinion does not mean anything regarding whether that opinion is solid or not!" However, this entire community is made (supposedly) of people who think that way, so that sampling leads to an not so subtle bias whether we like it or not: "since the community is made of people who try to be above bias and interpret opinions in a way that is unaffected by public opinion or peer pressure, any voting sample of those same people of an article must convey whether that article was well argued or not".
If we're going to be a rationality community, we can do better, and we might as well at least try having a review system for posts/comments that conveys how much light it brings. I'm thinking of something like Reddit's awards system along the lines of this SSC article on levels of disagreements: basically, the post/comment gets an award based on whether there was a genuine attempt to disagree in order to find some truth, or whether it was just made to boo some point of view and generate a negative response towards it, with an award that categorizes the post/comment as a meta-debate, an (bad) award for social shaming and gotchas, one for at least avoiding that and making an argument or a series of ones, one for high level disagreements over facts/meaning of words, and one for value disagreement, where there isn't any attempt to claim the other side is factually wrong, but states to have another moral framework.
Prone to improvement? Absolutely, but I consider it a step in the right direction.
Who_Cares
7hr ago
This is a counter point to what? Homeschooling works great, sex segregated schools work great. Highly homogenous schools work great.
And the best schools on Earth, as well as the ones most people choose to attend, are none of those things. So I suppose desegregated schools also work great, and your objection to them is rooted less in reason than you seem to think.
I suppose you can bend the rules to say that children raised in bubbles grow up to be well-liked and sociable in their bubbles. But that presumes life in a bubble is man’s greatest aspiration.
Where are you getting the impression kids from these backgrounds are growing up to be social outcasts?
Have you interacted with homeschooled children turned adults? Or people who went to private school? They are, generally speaking, socially stunted and awkward.
I highly doubt that. Maybe if they're in a very big school, but even then there are a lot of smart cookies in the world.
You highly doubt that someone who graduates valedictorian and places in the top 3 of their class at the SAT will continue to be smarter than most of the people around them? Very smart people still have to employ and work with normal people and idiots.
We’re not talking about historical geniuses here. Just normal working professionals.
What even is this... Like, I don't know where you are coming from but you don't need to go to school with brown people to learn how to interact with people who have lower IQ's than you.
Yes, but it certainly helps. Homeschooled children are weird, unsociable misfits who become predisposed to blindly trusting authority figures and struggle to wake up for work on time. Women who never go to school with men become sexually repressed fetishists who chase cock in their 20s and 30s instead of starting families. To say nothing of the men who grow up to be incels because they never learned heterosocial customs.
Uncharitable generalizations cut both ways.
Become too insulated in a hyper intelligent bubble, and you become the kind of person who genuinely wonders why no one likes your plan to sterilize or segregate vast swathes of the population because a black boy bullied a white boy once.
Felagund
7hr ago
A friend's having a kid, and is skeptical about vaccines. I'm believe she's doing her own research, but have no idea how reliable whatever sources she's looking at are.
Do any of you happen to know of anyone who goes through which childhood vaccines are best, weighing concerns people raise against likelihood and severity of disease? My immediate searches just bring up either government sites or similar, and extreme skeptics, which is not helpful.
I’ll start with Mathew Yglesias’ recent theory of Left vs Right, as it was partial inspiration for this post. I thought his post was great with an accurate summary of relevant history, but fails at making a consistent set of rules with which to define left vs right. He defines the right as being fundamentally pro-hierarchy and the left as fundamentally anti-hierarchy, and walks through a few issues he thinks proves his point, such as religion, racism, and policing. I don’t think he’s totally wrong, I think he’s grasping towards a pattern that does exist, but that pattern doesn’t explain left vs right.
I think the problem boils down to the fact that leftism is well-defined: its fundamental, terminal value is equality, or the absence of hierarchy. Given two hypothetical positions, it is therefore easy to determine which is more leftist. For instance, consider answers to this question: What special duties do you owe to your own family member, or your countryman, or a member of your race, as opposed to a random stranger? The pure leftist answer is “none whatsoever.” Or: To what extent should a person’s merits or hard work or whatever lead to increased social status? The pure leftist answer is “not at all.”
Rightism, on the other hand, is not well-defined. In practice, it just means “something other than leftism.” To the extent that a position deviates from pure leftism, it is more or less rightist. This is why George Washington and Hitler are both considered right-wing, even though their policy positions (and terminal values) are not very consonant.
You can create a political compass with an arbitrary number of axes, but so long as only leftism is well-defined, determining how right-wing a position is only means calculating the geometric distance between that position and pure leftism. There could be an infinite number of value systems that value something other than equality and that have nothing in common with one another other than the fact that they are not leftist. Hitler is considered more right-wing than Washington because his policy positions were, in aggregate, more not-leftist than Washington’s, but he was not “like Washington, just more of it.”
BahRamYou
8hr ago
he's not, like, some obscure writer. he's been a best seller for decades. but yes, he's very quotable on all sorts of hot culture war topics.
BahRamYou
8hr ago
from the context he's pretty clearly talking about young adults, not kids.
hydroacetylene
8hr ago
Telling a knowable lie when you have a professional responsibility to speak truthfully is evil.
"Closer" is probably the wrong word. God will be as close to the glorified in heaven as he can be; if it were otherwise there could be no salvation.
The best description of heaven in the saint-venerating Churches comes from St. Therese of Liseaux, in Story of a Soul:
In other words, all the saints are full of God, but some are capable of being fuller than others. And one among them is so full of grace that she is "more spacious than the heavens" (in any other context, a grievous insult) and so densely filled with God that he took physical form in her womb.
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