domain:science.org
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5hr ago
However at the behest of users such as @ArjinFerman
Oh sweet! Thanks for putting the time and effort into writing this.
I can't participate in the technical conversation, but your impression of the Rat community matches mine. On AI I'm like 90% sure that the AI doom they predict won't materialize, and the AI doom that will materialize, they won't predict.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
5hr ago
If there was a politician here who turned out to have acted in hardcore porn, it would probably affect their career negatively, but more due to this being perceived as unserious/frivolous than immoral as such. Whether it would be enough to tank the career would probably depend on the party.
roystgnr
5hr ago
I think appearing in a magazine which is famously providing jerk-off material is not very pure even if you don't have your tits out.
Playboy tried really hard to make itself seem much more classy than that. I recall one author (Isaac Asimov?) explaining submitting a story there as simply "they paid twice as much", but to a great extent it worked. Fahrenheit 451 was serialized in Playboy the year after it was first published. Arthur C. Clarke, Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Ian Fleming, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Joyce Carol Oates, Norman Mailer ... and big-name non-authors did long interviews to be published there: Schweitzer, MLK, Malcolm X, Sartre, Welles, Kubrick, Toynbee, Carter...
Jimmy Carter might be the best example to consider: he didn't think of himself as pure, because (as he tried to explain to Playboy, which hurt his candidacy) he was the sort of serious strait-laced Christian to take "I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery" as a straightforward explanation of a sin he had needed forgiveness for, but he was basically as pure as it gets for the 1970s, and although he never got his tits or anything else out for the camera, he literally had his photo published in Playboy.
TowardsPanna
6hr ago
Assuming that police brutality and other forms of abuse of power happens because of racism misses the more important point:
Abusers want to hit without getting hit back, and to get away with the violence (in whatever form) without being punished by the law.
So they seek out people who are weak/vulnerable in some way, and preferably isolated and stigmatized.
FoundViaTwitter
6hr ago
My impression is that porn is not nearly as frowned upon in Europe as it is in the US. For example, Denmark:
On a legislative level, too, an overall air of sexual frisind (Danish for “free-mindedness”) is detected. Sex education in schools has been mandatory since 1970 (see Section 5A, Interpersonal Heterosexual Behaviors, Adolescents), abortion was decriminalized in 1973 (see Section 9B/C, Contraception, Abortion, and Population Planning, Abortion and Teenage Pregnancies), and in 1989, same-sex partners obtained (almost) the same legal status as heterosexual couples (see Section 6, Homoerotic, Homosexual, and Bisexual Behaviors). Moreover, Denmark was the first country in the world to legitimize written pornography in 1967 (followed by pictorial pornography in 1969) (Kutchinsky 1989). Prostitution is no longer a criminal offense in Denmark, and it is estimated that a total of 5,000 transactions with female prostitutes take place every day. Further, 13% of Danish males claim to have been with a prostitute at least once. Among 40- to 44-year-olds, this fraction rose to 17% (Melbye 1992). Equivalent numbers were seen by Jaeger (2000). Male prostitutes are believed to constitute a total of only a few hundred persons. The number of migrant sex workers is apparently low, but internationally, Denmark is sometimes mentioned as a transit country for women who end up in prostitution in neighboring countries such as Germany and Holland. Though not in itself prohibited, prostitution is considered illegal vagrancy if the prostitute has no other means of income. Prostitution of minors is rarely seen.
Generally speaking, sexual and reproductive rights are both acknowledged and appreciated in Denmark, and sexual autonomy is taken for granted by younger Danes. Sexual curiosity of juveniles is widely accepted (many kindergartens have “cushion rooms” for children to fight and cuddle in privacy), although heated debates on the alleged “pedophile threat” have swept over Denmark (as it has in the rest of Europe and the US) during recent years. As previously mentioned, sex education in schools has been obligatory since 1970. The current sexual knowledge of adolescents is supposedly good, even though up-to-date didactic methods are called for. Thus, a quarter of youngsters still don’t use any contraception at their first intercourse (Rasmussen 1999), and rates of chlamydia and venereal warts among adolescents are a matter of medical concern (see Sections 5A, Interpersonal Heterosexual Behaviors, Adolescents, and 10A/B, Sexually Transmitted Diseases and HIV/AIDS, Basic Figures).
hydroacetylene
6hr ago
Melania Trump has also appeared in nude photo shoots.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
6hr ago
The Untergang jokes (no umlaut!) all just use that one scene though, which notably depicts Hitler in a state of complete dissolution. It's basically impossible to take that scene as a signal that Hitler is deserving of respect - even if you put a valid complaint in his mouth, it is understood that an actual Hitler apologist could and would have picked any other depiction over that one.
And well, if ambiguously positive or unambiguously nuanced discussions are not enough to amount to "getting a pass" by your standards, consider the case of Lenin. In my assessment, he was actually by far creepier and more evil than his successor, more on the Pol Pot end of the scale of communist leaders, a sadistic enjoyer of violence for its own sake, while Stalin's paranoia and ruthlessness was more of an adaptation to the environment he was a creature of (that Lenin created to begin with). Yet, there is no shortage of mainstream depictions of him that could read as being a flawed but fundamentally good anti-hero (no doubt in part because of systematic ignorance of things he actually said and did).
HereAndGone
6hr ago
I wonder. The way it's reported sounds less "Cousin Miguel knows somebody whose sister-in-law is a clerk in a government office, maybe she can look this up" and more "somebody high up enough to get access to the information straight away". But it's all so nebulous it's not even sure that the alleged family exist, or the guy, or that this story is more than someone trying to use outrage bait to get a juicy payoff from selling interviews to the media (or I suppose using the media to publicise their GoFundMe to 'bring Grandpa home').
roystgnr
6hr ago
My perception upon talking to many Marxists in my time around these people is that there isn't that clear of an idea regarding how one would handle the incentive problems, coordination problems, etc that the envisioned society would face.
Well, sure. There's been a century of selection bias. The natural thing to do for a communist who thinks their idea of communism would solve its problems is naturally to join a commune. The USA had like a hundred of them in the 19th century. Some lasted a decade or more before failing. The trouble with joining a commune is that that's the point at which you have to have ideas to solve its problems, and if you don't then you're not just being told that communism doesn't work by some capitalist jerk you can ignore, you're just not getting told that It-Wasn't-Real-Communism-Anyway doesn't work by a history book, you're getting told your specific style of communism doesn't work by reality itself.
When you're working on things as complex and fragile as entire societies, you just can't operate like this.
Part of why the few remaining communists fantasize about seizing entire nations before they get started is that that's a necessary prerequisite for certain "solutions" to the brain drain problem, but I think part of it is this selection bias: the remaining communists must have some excuse not to be communists right now, or after a decade or so of direct experience they'd stop being communists. From China to the kibbutzim, the least unsuccessful communist societies in history managed to hang on in part by becoming steadily less communist.
TowardsPanna
6hr ago
For several years I've been suspecting and feeling that the majority of people in the West are ignoring the presence of quite a lot of female chauvinism, and the indoctrination into this position in many schools (often dominated by feminist teachers). Feminism itself and the creation of subtly or not so subtly misandrist attitudes that are passed down from mothers, aunts, grandmothers, are pretty much ignored as problems or excused somehow, because of "the patriarchy" or whatever else. Now it's Her Turn, etc.
I think it should be obviously true that the teaching of "women were oppressed by men throughout most history until recently and society remains male dominated", regardless of whether it's true or not, is going to result in the feelings that women as a group are the victim and deserve vindication, and that men as a group are guilty and should be sanctioned and put in their place in various ways. If you keep hearing that person A abuses person B and got away with it, you're going to be sympathetic to A and antipathic to B, right? And liberals would be very quick to complain if the media didn't obfuscate the race many violent criminals, precisely because they fear the effects on attitude that unfiltered news would have. They're much less worried about whether any sexism against men pops up, or about current dominations by the female gender of places and aspects of Western societies.
Am I onto something or am I talking gobbledygook...
Extending the right of civil marriage as a contract to the gays was something that I would have been tepid about and not really minded (until the idiots running the pro-same sex marriage campaign in my country couldn't successfully hide their contempt for normal mores and enraged me to red-hot "I'm voting no in the referendum, I know we're gonna lose but to hell with it, I am not going along with this crap"), but it was ridiculous to say that changing the definition of marriage would not have any effects whatsoever. If we changed the age of consent to be six, I don't think anyone would get away with "now it's legal to fuck six year olds but this will have no effect on wider society whatsoever".
Same way that the number of abortions has gone up in my country once it was legalised. Gosh, you don't say? Making something legal means more of it happens? Who could possibly have foreseen that? Oh, and this is despite the rollout of free contraception and nope, it's not all "pregnant by incestuous rape and I will die unless I get an abortion because I'm only ten" cases:
The number of women having abortions in Ireland rose significantly last year to 10,852, the highest on record since the law changed.
This compares to 8,156 terminations of pregnancy carried out here in 2022 under the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018.
The majority, 10,711, were early medical abortions, where a woman takes two types of tablet prescribed by a GP up to 12 weeks of pregnancy.
Another 108 terminations were due to a diagnosed fatal foetal abnormality where there was a condition likely to lead to death of the foetus.
A further 24 pregnancies were terminated due to risk to the life or health of the mother, while another nine involved an emergency intervention.
...Asked to comment on the overall number of terminations for last year, Dr Shirley McQuade, medical director of the Well Woman Centre, said she was surprised at the high number.
She said while the population has increased and would account for some of the rise, there are likely to be other factors also behind the increase.
She pointed out that free contraception is now available to women aged 17 to 35 years of age, which should make it easier to control fertility.
“The options are out there for women to use. Obviously there is a failure rate in contraception, but it is quite low,” she said.
“There may be women who are on a form of contraception that is not suiting them or they are forgetting to take it. There are women who avoid taking any form of contraception, but are not joining the dots.
“If they are sexually active and not using contraception, the likelihood is they are going to get pregnant.”
So if we add up all the "thousands of women will die unless we get legal abortion!" cases by these figures, that's a whole 108 +24 +9 = 141. Out of 10,852 that comes to... 1.3%. Well I'm so glad compassion and trusting the medical experts won the abortion battle now.
At this stage I'm singing the same old song, but here goes: clears throat But I was told and assured by the government bringing this in that abortion would be limited and would only be for very severe cases of medical necessity! There would be no abortions because "whoops, I got laid and now there's a bun in the oven and I'm not ready for that"! (No, I did not believe any of that so the latest results don't surprise me).
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
6hr ago
So if they do it for free, is that ok then? Thereby de-commodifying it.
Granted, commodities can be given away freely too, I suppose. But if I were to say, write a poem and put it on my own public blog for free, I don’t think anyone would call the poem a commodity. I’m just creating something and choosing to give it freely. So it seems like I should be able to create and give away my own porn and have that be not-a-commodity too.
2rafa
6hr ago
No right populist parties are really trad. The GOP have trashy serial cheaters like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Meloni is an unmarried single mother etc.
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
6hr ago
It's not like there's no history of Hitler being used in a jocular manner as well, considering the hundreds of Der Üntergang rant parody videos, including ones where Hitler's supposed complaint is a valid one.
What's the self refuting part, exactly?
Post-structuralism is a Discourse.
What "worst urges" do you have in mind here?
The same ones we always have, power, sex, greed, take your pick.
Derrida's work in particular is relatively light on ethics and politics
What you're missing is the implications of those "abstract" and "classical" philosophical problems. Though these should be self evident now that this has been turned into political practice.
Lacan
Psychoanalysis is a different can of worms altogether, that one France has always been in love with. It begets similar dismissal in broad society, but is treated more seriously than the amusement people had at the spats of Foucault, Derrida and their ilk.
Also, one must remind oneself that this is all within the normal level of consideration for intellectuals that France has, which has always been higher than average.
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
7hr ago
I figure the assessment is different in countries that fought directly against him. I've seen people in Stalin t-shirts, Stalinface parodies of the Andy Warhol campbell soup photo, and academics having a printed image macro with "you're just mad / cuz I'm Stalin on you" taped to their door, in Germany and various parts of the anglophone sphere.
Botond173
7hr ago
As far as I can tell, 4 different things are/were going on.
Post-2014, many Atlanticists and Nationalists (Banderists etc.) in Ukraine believed that trying to reach a compromise with the Russians on the status of the Donbass is pointless, because they thought ongoing military assistance from NATO would eventually ensure that, when the political opportunity arises, the swift and victorious conquest of the Donbass and the Crimea by a beefed-up Ukrainian army would become a reality, just like how the Croats united their country during Operations ‘Flash’ and ‘Storm’ in 1995.
Pre-2022, the same group of people and their sympathizers believed that NATO countries would send troops and weapons to aid Ukraine should it be attacked, which in turn would deter the Russians from attacking, as in reality they’re a paper bear.
None of this turned out to be true.
After the Russian blunders in the opening months of the war 2022, plus the successful Ukrainian counterattacks in the Kherson and Kharkov regions, this same group of people were convinced that final victory can be achieved in the summer of 2023 because the demoralized orc hordes will cut and run at the sight of the first German tank, and if not, then it’ll be still possible to recapture the entire post-1954 territory of the Ukraine because the Americans and their NATO allies will provide sufficient supplies and weapons for the job whereas the orcs will run out of missiles/tanks/food/washing machines.
Again, none of this happened either, and at this point seems increasingly out of reach, although this is the only turn of events that would realistically constitute something that can be called a Ukrainian final victory.
With respect to your argument that the Ukrainians would keep fighting even without US/NATO weapons (and supplies plus money), I’d say the lessons of history prove the opposite. Look at Afghanistan, South Vietnam or Georgia for that matter (in 2008). US-aligned regimes don’t keep fighting after military aid is cut or is not forthcoming in the first place – this has been the case so far for sure. But even if you’re right after all, the main question is whether the average soldier is then willing to fight even offensively or only defensively. Because if the latter is the case, victory cannot be achieved. My argument is that to the extent Ukrainian troops keep fighting defensively, they are doing so in the belief that NATO will at least supply enough assistance to prevent the Ukrainian army from collapsing. (Whether the Russians actually want to annex the entire state is also far from clear, on a different note.)
zeke5123a
7hr ago
Yeah but that’s the whole point of the insult — the one act of cocksucking makes someone a cocksucker (ie a bad thing).
zeke5123a
7hr ago
I don’t think it’s the equivalent but it is still highly distasteful. That is, I would be crushed if my daughter did porn. I would still be extremely upset if she did playboy. Yes one is worse than the other but only on the margins.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7hr ago
but it's also self refuting nonsense that should never have been allowed to have social impact.
What's the self refuting part, exactly?
Reading Derrida is a journey into the most high grade sort of masturbatory thinking about thinking that allows learned men to convince themselves that their worst urges are actually fine just because they're so clever.
What "worst urges" do you have in mind here?
Derrida's work in particular is relatively light on ethics and politics (depending on which period of his work you're talking about). He spends most of his time addressing relatively abstract and "classical" philosophical problems related to language, meaning, and knowledge.
Incidentally, that's exactly how it was received in France at the time
Depends on who you're talking about I suppose? Lacan was a pretty big deal, it was front page news when his yearly seminar series finally concluded after more than two decades. He was a bit like the Jordan Peterson of his day, except culturally lauded instead of culturally shunned.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
7hr ago
I knew "career" was the wrong word to choose and might lead to a misunderstanding, but I didn't take the time to work on it. "Lifestyle" might have been better. Or "Calling". The material rewards are not the main aspect here.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7hr ago
"Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable."
Fair enough! I have no interest in defending any of the specific points listed of course. Just one more reason why I'm not a Marxist.
I will point out that 1) the Manifesto was a relatively early work and Marx's political thinking developed as he progressed into his mature works, and 2) it was a polemic intended for general consumption and may not represent the most "nuanced" version of his views. But I don't have any further relevant textual references to cite.
How? It only would be if Stalin played in a completely different league then Hitler, and the whole argument is that they're going head to head, so they should evoke a reaction that is also on a similar level.
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