domain:infonomena.substack.com
phosphorus2
2hr ago
In the context of the original comment, I am going to point out that a baby is not a potential person. A baby is a person. A gorilla will never be a person, and it will never be a potential person. But otherwise nice thanks, a pretty good way to take it into account.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
2hr ago
I don't think they are especially angry, but older liberal women especially seem to have an unfortunate tendency to speak publicly as though they are talking to children and struggling to make themselves understood, rather than struggling to persuade. Maybe this is a factor of mistake theory vs. conflict theory, but I think it really annoys people, like trying to make yourself understood to a foreigner by speaking English, louder and slower.
sun_the_second
2hr ago
My point being, the state of welfare for women is utterly irrelevant to what happens if men "just refuse to pay taxes", as per faceh, because governments extract taxes with certainty that doesn't care what they then spend them on. If all women were principled self-sufficient libertarians there would still be taxes.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
I've memorized a lot more songs than poems, but I've memorized a few poems, and a lot more sections of poems. The ones I've memorized, I definitely found worthwhile, which is why I memorized them. Usually this is because they encapsulate some truth or insight in a way that seems most valuable to me.
Memorization usually was accomplished by repititive reading and writing.
TitaniumButterfly
2hr ago
Those, or even undesirables in general.
bolido_sentimental
2hr ago
Have any of you ever memorized poems? I understand this is something that used to happen in school at least at one time, but I wonder if it died out entirely.
If so - did you find it worth doing? Or, indeed, the memorization of anything else? (Not referring in this case, to, e.g., the endless Anki decks of medical school, or all of the TCP/UDP ports for your CCNA, but rather just for fun.)
phosphorus2
2hr ago
Its a beautiful book, isn't it?
https://www.themotte.org/post/1208/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/259175?context=8#context
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
2hr ago
"Israel is bribing American politicians with child rape" is a sufficiently inflammatory claim to require considerable evidence, proactively supplied.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2hr ago
I agree with @gattsuru and @ArjinFerman here. This is not a major victory for the red tribe, or a major loss for the blue. It's probably valuable, politically, for Republican politicians to be able to say to their base both that this is a win for "state's rights" and a win against "the trans agenda." I expect red states to increasingly adopt anti-hormone and anti-puberty-blocker legislation, and blue states to explicitly protect it, and probably we will also start seeing "trans your kids by mail" services not unlike what we have with abortion. So the victory will be mostly symbolic (which may count for something, but may not).
It's worth noting that Kagan, though she agreed on heightened scrutiny, declined to join the Court's low-IQ wing to assert that also the law failed under heightened scrutiny. Once again she shows herself to be, by a wide margin, the most competent jurist on the Court's left wing.
It's also worth noting that this is not quite correct regarding intermediate scrutiny:
laws containing sex-based classifications to intermediate scrutiny
Intermediate scrutiny applies to laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. Merely containing classifications is not sufficient. What's the difference? Well, the minority tries to claim that there's no difference; the law mentions sex, therefore the law is about sex, therefore intermediate scrutiny. But the majority points out that there are many laws obviously dealing with sex, that do not warrant intermediate scrutiny. The most obvious, of course, is any law dealing with pregnancy. Only women (sexually mature human females) can get pregnant. Every law dealing with the classification of "pregnant" contains a sex-based classification. But the discrimination in such laws is grounded in a medical status (pregnancy) rather than in sex. In this case, the discrimination is based on age (the state is denying both minor males and minor females cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers) and medical status.
Incidentally, this is why the late Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell is and has always been such a mess. Laws denying males the right to marry males don't discriminate on the basis of sex because everyone has the right to marry someone of the opposite sex. No one was being denied the right to marry on the basis of sex (any gay person could legally marry someone of the opposite sex...), but on the status of not being part of a consenting heterosexual dyad. What the left wanted out of that case was for intermediate (or even strict!) scrutiny to be applied to sexuality, which is obviously a different status than sex. But Kennedy didn't write the opinion that way (he didn't use "scrutiny" analysis at all, instead using history-and-tradition, which is transparently nonsense). Even post-Bostock, sexuality still hasn't been formally adopted by the Supreme Court as a "suspect class."
Despite the utterly bizarre attempt by Biden and Harris to declare the "Equal Rights Amendment" passed (how was he not called an attempted dictator for that?), the fact is that even "heightened scrutiny" on sex is utterly without grounding in the Constitution of the United States. Which brings us back to Skrmetti: a real win for conservatives here would have been a majority declaration that sex and gender are not suspect classifications at all, that sex and gender relevant regulation all belongs in the "rational basis" bin.
Never going to happen, I know. But that's what an unqualified victory would look like, here. This decision ain't it.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I think it goes way deeper than that. The concept of declaring war and making peace within European (and hence today, global) diplomatic systems goes back to Rome at least. The Romans had huge amounts of superstitions and traditions related to declaring war, and making peace. Numa Pompilius, who first held the title Pontifex Maximus which has gone in unbroken succession to our current Pope Leo, introduced the tradition of the Temple of Janus to the Roman populace in order to tame their warlike urges. The temple's gates were open in times of war, and closed in times of peace. The formal declaration of war and peace was a superstitious, religious matter for the Romans.
When we abandon that kind of simple logic, we chip away at an organized international legal system, and we wind up with a permanent murky state of conflict. If you never have declared war, you can never have peace.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Like church, most people don't attend regularly. They just go to the holiday services (pride).
But as with certain varieties of Buddhism, most people will spend a period in a monastery (university) where they will engage in serious study and pious indoctrination.
Totalitarianit
2hr ago
I see. I'm not talking about "TV clips" as just being ICE raids. I'm talking about "TV clips" as being part the optics, or even the "aesthetic" (like the other commenter mentioned) that goes into what I believe to be an effective anti-illegal immigration strategy.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Well, sure, you can tell me that my right-wing position is wrong by picking contradictory arguments that I haven't made, and then generalize from that to right-wingers in general. You can posit that immigration cannot possibly be bad because of logical reasons and that even right-wingers know this, as made evident through their revealed preferences. You can even argue that the left in general is soundly grounded in reality. Then we need to conclude that right-wingers are illogical and wrong and shouldn't be believed.
And then I'm left with either of the following scenarios:
- The epistemic gulf between us is so vast we can't even communicate our axioms by messenger pigeon.
- I'm an abject idiot and not worth talking to, why haven't you blocked me yet?
- You fail the ideological turing test very hard.
But seriously now. Some points to argue about:
- The post you replied to described behaviors that I absolutely have seen from the left and the right, from numerous people, IRL as well as online. Leftists and rightists do in fact both do this. This is orthogonal to whether you believe that either side has the better arguments.
- Anti-immigration arguments do not hinge exclusively on "muh jobs" and Trump is not the avatar of all right-wing thought. And even if that were the case - there are more than enough similarly bad and contradictory arguments made on the left. There has been more than enough spotlight on those on The Motte.
- The portion of what you call "extreme bubbles" on the left isn't just very large but also disproportionately influential, and was able to shape public discourse with very little resistance in many spaces, including American academia and Europe in general until very recently (assuming "peak woke" has been passed). This is obviously hard to measure and easy to dispute, so deny it if you will, but with how far left the Overton Window has been in the past ten or so years I find it very obvious that the leftist fringe has been relatively close to the mainstream, and was able to exert far greater influence, compared to its right-wing equivalents.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
The problem with protecting the potential of personhood is that it starts even before conception.
If two people (of suitable fertility and biological sexes) have PIV sex, then in the ancestral environment, this has some probability of setting a chain in motion which will result in the creation of a person -- a being with the cognitive capabilities typical of a human. If instead they use some form of birth control, this will drastically lower that probability, so from the point of preventing a person to come into existence, it will be fractionally as bad as abortion or infanticide. (Being anti-birth control is still a position some people hold, but it is mostly more about being anti-sex.)
But we do not even have to stop there, because people having PIV sex does not just happen randomly. If birth control is bad because it prevents the creation of persons, then so is not asking out people on a date. (This is now very contrary to the RCC, which views abstinence as praiseworthy.)
The person too busy with Warhammer to date, the person who uses birth control, the person having abortions whenever she gets pregnant and the person who just murders her babies are all preventing new persons from coming into existence despite there being a potential if they made different choices.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
I don't think we really have two different approaches. Your snatch goal is your goal, and you have to work through or around injuries to get to that. Right now, fitness wise, BJJ is my goal; everything else is an assistance exercise. I gut through soreness/injury for BJJ, but not for everything else where it might impact rolling every day I can.
The accountability mechanism right now for BJJ is very effective, I have several close friends who are about as good as I am at my gym and I can't let them get better than me and leave me behind, because right now our technique progress is huge month to month. Compared to that everything else is less important.
But at the same time, I'm conscious of the fact that I'm six or seven months into jiu jitsu as my main focus now, and it's important to keep up lifting and cardio, if only to avoid getting weaker. So I'm trying to figure it out.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
2hr ago
'Right now, Metro Homicide is targeting a certain type of "undesirable", namely, alleged murderers, and appears to have carte blanche to apprehend anyone who disrupts that process.'
Before you invoke "just following orders", you need to establish that some atrocity was actually being committed. If your objection is that immigration agents are targeting alleged illegal immigrants for apprehension and that they arrest people who interfere with that, you haven't.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2hr ago
Jon Stewart/John Oliver/the other guy with glasses/the View/&etc.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
Been a while since I've dealt with an LDR, but some simple mechanical advice:
As a man, you probably only contact people when you have something to say to them, and typically only when you need something from them. You aren't contacting her just to chat and show general affection, you're contacting her to solve a problem (often one that rhymes with "she wants me to call her") or when you're horny or to organize something.
Your goal in an LDR is to tie her into your life, show her you are thinking about her, so that she doesn't feel so far away.
Send her pics of your day. Not necessarily selfies of you, but just of funny advertisements, pretty wildflowers, or traffic jams, or your workout equipment, or the sky, or a screenshot of your phone when a song is playing that "reminds you of her." She's the person you want to share these things with, and when you see them she's the person you think of, and you wish she was there.
Send her articles you read that you think she might be interested in, then discuss them. Ideally, she's interested in the same articles you would be reading anyway, but we can't all be so lucky, so be prepared to invest a little time finding articles she will like. "Hey, I saw this, what's your take?" Then throw in some lovey dovey before/after along the lines of "I'm so happy I have you, there's no one else I trust/believe/is smart enough/gets it/shares my values who I can talk about this with." Makes her feel valued, and brings you closer.
Utilize the work of others. You have trouble doing expressions of affection, but luckily there's a huge industrial complex online of people producing sappy content. There's an effectively infinite quantity of content on twitter (and probably other places) that's a picture of two cute animals, or an historical painting, or hell of two literal spoons, with the caption "us if we were..." She will like that.
Good luck my friend.
faceh
2hr ago
Now I am wondering what the equivalent to the church service is for these folks.
Protest marches, for one, but surely they don't have weekly sermons in the equivalent of a chapel.
rae
2hr ago
If society isn't offering any net benefits in exchange for the money paid into it, then it is quite morally defensible to stop paying in.
You’re American I believe, so fair enough your social services are inefficient and terrible (although you pay less taxes and earn a lot more than us Europeans), but that’s completely unrelated to gender.
Why would any man want to continue to support a productive society that treats him like an expendable worker bee and doesn't even guarantee that he'll at least have the CHANCE to pass on his genes?
This is clearly a personal grievance. All I can say is, you’re sitting inside watching content designed to make you angry, with the goal of hooking you on a corporation’s algorithmic content feed and selling your attention to the highest bidder. It’s not real.
It’s absolutely true that being plugged into the globalised online rat race is hopeless and depressing, so switch it off. Focus on your local community, your niche interests, and you’ll find people that value you for who you are. Join a commune or go pick fruits if you have to.
The Supreme Court found that the Second Amendment appeared to exist.
Federal Circuit Courts informed them that they were mistaken, and that the Second Amendment very definately did not exist.
The Supreme Court accepted this correction, and allowed the Circuit Court decisions to stand rather than vindicate the Consitutional Rights of United States Citizens as required by its own prior decisions.
People like me abandoned all hope in the Supreme Court as a viable institution, removing the Jury Box from the "four boxes" model of liberty, and precommitted to discount all future adversarial arguments made on the basis of Constitutional Rights.
ABigGuy4U
2hr ago
This is my main complaint about libertarians generally. They don’t understand the nature of power, and they don’t understand the connection between money and power. Once a corporation gets big enough it is going to start exercising power by whatever means available to it, including access to state power. If it gets really big it’s going to start trying to exercise state power of its own, with all the restrictions on other people’s liberty that that implies.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
There are non-angry female politicians in the US- they’re just republicans.
This entire line of argument relies heavily on some very specific definition of 'personhood' that I can't tease out from context. Would you mind?
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