domain:aporiamagazine.com
Macaquin
12hr ago
You can't really enjoy South Park and take exception to your own sacred cows landing in the crosshairs; the real offense is that they hit our Resplendent Golden Poet-Emperor with predictable Simpsons-tier recycling rather than something worthy of the show.
Old, tired, washed up.
jkf
12hr ago
I'll refer to my earlier reply to the (limited) meat of s_m_h's OP, trimmed to remove the commentary on the quality of his writing:
from the perspective of an actual Canadian who knows a couple of elderly & sickish people who did choose assisted suicide I can say this:
While I'm in favour of people being "allowed" to do more or less anything they want (direct and deliberate harm to others aside), in practice the whole thing feels... not good, in the pit of my stomach -- mostly I don't like the "assisted" part all that much, nor the moral preening that seems to go along with it. Could be that people just don't know how to do this thing correctly yet, but I'm not sure that's all there is too it.
The motte is a cancer riddled 96 year-old in constant pain, marking the minutes and waiting for the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death -- the IRL bailey (IME) often seems to be rather different from that.
You are partying in the motte at the moment; the bailey (which based on the Canadian experience is not a long drive from there) seems rather different, and much more concerning.
I will say though that the cases I've been personally near to feel roughly as uncomfortable as those around the people I've known who offed themselves -- which is pretty uncomfortable, and made worse by the institutional sanction that seems to border on celebration surrounding it.
It's a very Boomer thing somehow, to duck out once the waters get a rough. I won't say that anyone's wrong to do it, but I don't think it should be sanctioned. Both of the people mentioned above could have easily put a bullet in their own head if they wanted it that bad.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
It was, however, permanently shamed, and to a degree that if Darwin ever tried to reuse the GuessWho account, they'd be constantly challenged to pick up the topic they flopped out on. It'd be like if Tracing came back and wanted to pretend that their flounce and denunciation of the Motte never happened- they'd regularly be hounded for it.
The definition of "homicide" is a person killing somebody else -- it's not normally controversial that this is worse than "suicide", although both are typically considered kinda bad.
Dean
Flairless
12hr ago
I don't recall his sense of humor ever being to refer to himself as a "Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker" either, but that's what the TequuilaMockingbird profile says.
I mean, if anything that's more my joke.
jkf
12hr ago
Legal implications aside, I don’t think I have it in me to do it.
This is part of my discomfort with it TBH -- if you don't have it in you, do we really want a government health service that does? Like, shoot your own dog, man.
jkf
12hr ago
Seems like evidence against TBH -- Hlynka is/was a man of many mansions, but weird German puns (?) didn't ever strike me as part of his oeuvre?
It's viewed as a form of juking the stats by some people, since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts, etc. If there are differences in policy on grade promotion, that makes it harder to do a fair comparison.
Just as a really simplified example, let's say low-performing students in state A learn approximately 0.7 of a grade level each year, while in B they learn 0.6. State A has social promotion, while state B holds students back a year if they are doing poorly. So in grade 4 standardized testing, the low-performers in A would be working at a grade level of 2.8 (4x0.7) while in B they would be working at a grade level of 3.0 (5x0.6). Someone just looking at the aggregate stats would assume B has more effective teachers, when the opposite is true.
This probably has a pretty minimal impact since the number of students held back is in the low single digits, but it is a confounding variable.
The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%. These inter-state comparisons are really just measuring which states are better at handholding the remedial students enough to just barely feign competence.
CanofWorms
13hr ago
Nice.
anti_dan
14hr ago
To minimize the harm they did to others through voting. Or the harm to blacks was less than the harm to others caused by blacks voting are two perfectly reasonable answers.
rae
14hr ago
I recall you had a post a while ago where you said you’d dated both men and women. Did you develop a preference for men, or how did women fit into this?
I’ve always been attracted to masculinity, which obviously made it a bit harder. Plus it’s really hard to avoid gendered expectations when you’re male and dating a woman.
Well, I guess all I can say is, join the club. We don’t have fun prizes but there are occasional butterflies in the chest. And you get a stamp on your card when someone says, “you’re sweet but I don’t see this going anywhere.”
That’s a very relatable post. I think there’s many more men out there like you than it seems, but sex-forward, superficially attracted men feel like they’re the majority due to social pressure. How much of locker room talk is posturing to impress other men, as opposed to actual genuine feelings?
Interesting. I’d never considered that being played could actually be preferable to sex-forward behavior, but I can see it. I guess gay men just didn’t even make an effort? Just, “oh, no dick pic, seeya?”
There’s a number of other body parts that can keep them on the hook, but yeah it’s 100% visual.
I’m not saying that that being played is actually good of course, obviously I’d rather they make themselves known, but the fact that there is no real gay male equivalent of a straight man seducing and manipulating women into sex is telling.
Some of the gay guys I knew hadn’t even cuddled anyone once despite having high enough body counts to get multiple STDs. They called their hook-ups “fuck and go”: no kissing, no foreplay, just send pics, go to a guy’s place, leave 10 min later. To me that’s just soulless and depressing.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
14hr ago
As I recall, Kulak had a flame out post where he basically said "if you guys are gonna be that way [I forget what his grievance was], then just ban me". I can't remember if he did get banned but he did get modded to some extent or other, and I haven't seen him back since.
rae
14hr ago
I might very well be the only heterosexual person here, on a Saturday night.
Hey you got pretty lucky! From what I hear the average gay bar is mostly filled with straight cis women nowadays, and I’ve even seen middle aged women and their (perfectly straight looking) husbands at drag nights.
JarJarJedi
14hr ago
Pretty sure he is overpaying, but in general, the distance between a toy model and a production-quality system is gigantic, and crossing that distance is about 95% of what software developer (and managers, and project/product managers) does. The devil is always in details, and "pretty much" is not "exactly". So generally having an extremely well paid people to spend a lot of time on improving the product based on a widely known and relatively simple ideas is something that a lot of software companies do, and make a lot of money on it, and it's not stupid at all. Zuck maybe going a bit overboard with exactly how much well paid, but otherwise it's not weird at all.
Hieronymus
14hr ago
There is a Dewey-esque impulse among many education reformers to use the schools to shape the next generation into something their parents would not approve of. Nineteenth-century opponents of Roman Catholic education were in that vein, as was Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I think that's what he was getting at.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
15hr ago
My dad used to tell me that when he worked as a roofer, he was told "If you fall, you're fired before you hit the ground."
When I worked with him, it wasn't roofing, but we occasionally had to go up on high places, and the things he would do absolutely horrified my acrophobic ass. I'm talking ladder propped up on top of a ladder on top of a slanted second story roof. Zero safety precautions.
durdenhobbes
15hr ago
Trump now had the dubious honor of becoming (iirc) the second person to be represented by photographs of himself, after Saddam Hussein.
Numerous celebrities have been depicted this way, although I think it's been a while.
Gaashk
15hr ago
That would probably be useful.
I felt irritated about the assertion above, but didn't bother spending energy responding to it, because it's basically just boo outgroup. People being motivated by making money is a fully general complaint, and it was two of the three complaints. As for the third claim -- I provide childcare, you are an overeducated babysitter, she is separating children from their parents.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
15hr ago
That would be weird, since his last alt was never banned.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
I'd tend to think that any pleasure endlessly reiterated would become contemptible. There is something disconcerting or even pathetic about obsessive repetition. That's part of why we find the Skinner box so repulsive.
I would agree that it would be bad for a person to be incompetently trying to interfere with work done by a superior, though for me I don't find the superintelligence hypothetical particularly illuminating. The world is already full of examples of competent and incompetent people. It would be absurd for me to try to insert myself into, say, the cockpit of an aeroplane - I know nothing about piloting and the attempt would only embarrass me.
What would constitute a good life in a world where there is genuinely nothing that needs to be accomplished? I'm not particularly sure. I do not expect such a world to ever occur in this life - sorry, I'm pessimistic about artificial superintelligences - so for me that question seems most relevant as a question about heaven, and there I'm happy to admit to ignorance. Right now I'm not so much pushing for any particular answer as just saying that endless self-pleasure seems insufficient, as an answer, to me.
durdenhobbes
15hr ago
Concur with Nybbler in that it shouldn't be called "permaban", then. Call it indefinite ban and leave the door open.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
15hr ago
The base 10 "new math" in that song isn't THAT new (that is, it wasn't introduced with the post-Sputnik "New Math") -- that sort of subtraction (which I believe remained standard up to common core) dates back to 1821 in the US. The "old math" (for people under 35 who went to public school) in that song is indeed considerably older, and incidentally works better on a computer because the borrow only propagates one way. I don't know about the under-35 or private school variant.
Huh? Both names (along with a bunch of other cognates, like Ludwig and Luigi) come from the same Germanic source, which roughly means “famous [in] battle”.
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