domain:mgautreau.substack.com
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
15hr ago
I refuse to believe that the human suffering cost of being fat-shamed, over and above just being unnecessarily ugly and physically weak, is worse than millions and millions of deaths.
ChickenOverlord
16hr ago
A way around this is to institute more competency tests, and make them rigorous. This will naturally raise the spectre of jim crow era literacy tests, but fuck it, if you cant recall basic facts like rules of the road, rules of gun safety, or what congress/the president actually do, you shoudlnt be able to shoot, drive, or vote.
Jim Crow needn't be brought up at all. The countless hoops that New York State has instituted just to be able to carry a pistol (despite being a "shall issue" state now thanks to the Supreme Court) makes it clear that such processes absolutely will be abused (and already are). If we could actually trust our elected officials not to be fuckwad tyrants I'd support measures like the ones you suggest, but until that day (i.e. likely never) I'll stick with near universal gun rights.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
16hr ago
Hah, yes many are saying…
Not sure what to say other than I tried to write this a million times and finally decided to just post it. I hope to do the follow up soon.
gattsuru
16hr ago
[Note that by "childish and gay", that's "this is how attraction works when your age is only measured in single digits" and "not confident/socially capable enough to trust you can dominate a more feminine woman", respectively. It's also preferring more "universal" traits than specifically masculine ones, if you prefer that framing.]
I won't deny the 'gay' bit (though I like my men with a bit more meat on them), but as much fun as homersoc_ style 'tomboy breaking' can be, a sizable part of the interest for me at least is finding someone who's interested in domming me. I can dom and trust myself to do so; it's just not really my favorite. That's not universally connected to masculine traits -- lipstick doms do exist -- but I'll point to scottieman's Anthology of Rat Bullying as an example of what would otherwise be 'normally' traditionally feminine top (uh, barring the last image, cw: m/f and one m/m/f) framework that becomes tomboyish as much by having the character act as a dom as by any overlapping or shared interest with the subs.
kky
16hr ago
That’s a story for another time.
This sounds like the most important part of the story.
kky
16hr ago
Of course! That’s what’s screwy about the whole manosphere take. And not to be crude, but it hurts if she’s even just insufficiently oiled. Not interested in experiencing a total lack of it. It’s hard to view even as an I-win-you-lose deal. It starts to sound like nothing but malice.
The most I’ll say is: having shared expectations for the fact that the man is probably going to want sex more than the woman and that he does in fact deserve a little above and beyond what she’d have of her own accord, as part of a mutually loving relationship where he takes care of her disproportionate emotional needs too, makes it much easier to have the nuts and bolts conversations about what each partner wants. Treating sex as something that arises out of desire or not at all is going to miss out on the fact that there is an obligation. Marriage books often have advice in this vein in them, and it is useful advice for all the mere mortals who care in principle but for whom the logical correlates are not so vividly obvious.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
16hr ago
We do not construct human minds from mechanical components, and we cannot identify mechanical components within them
We can identify neurons, which are not quite as predictable as transistors but pretty good. I think we can also grow and arrange them controlledly to some extent, though not at the scale of a human brain. We can in fact gears-model simple organisms on an individual neuron basis. So it seems to me that if we are uncertain whether brains are "mechanical but intractably complex", we should be similarly uncertain about LLMs.
I indeed dont understand the difference you make between axioms and inference. Even if we could build brains, couldnt you equally claim that "its axiomatic" whether the non-manufactured ones are also mechanical? If I could predictable control people in a gears-model way, are they still mechanical while Im not looking? Is it actually an illusion and I can actually only "control" them into doing things they would do anyway, even though I feel like I could have chosen anything? Whos to say that I have a 1/6 chance of dying when I spin the revolver and put it to my head, just because everyone else does?
gattsuru
16hr ago
A lot of the axis that popularized AGP have been trying to paint furries as autozoophilies. It's objectionable to me in part because a lot of people would round off the 'auto' bit, so it is less palatable than 'tf kinkster'.
((Although there's a few places that -philia that does show up in kink-heavy spheres: vore fans call themselves voreaphiles or endosomaphiles pretty often depending on flavor, and people who buy 'i consent' sleep masks call it somnophilia even if it doesn't fit under the technical definition.))
But it's also objectionable because it seems pretty obviously wrong as a broad model. Yes, there are people who fit the central version of the case: Bailey brings up plushophiles that have a plush tf kink, which is pretty common, but I could link to a guy talking about how he wants to TF into a werewolf, get rawwed by a werewolf, or both at the same time. But there's an absolute ton of people that don't, ranging from human-on-anthro fans, to those who fantasize about being a different species than what they find attractive, to those who only find transformation or becoming an anthro interesting in a nonsexual sense even if they have sexual interests in other parts of the furry fandom, to those with intense sexual interests in a transformation concept so long as it's happening to someone else.
To be fair, Bailey et all don't claim that autoanthrozoophilia is absolutely universal among furries. But they do everything up to that point in the articles themselves, and in contexts outside of academic papers just imply it really heavily, and indeed go further and suggest that these correlations explain how people became interested or more interested in the fandom, rather than any other possible arrow of causation.
That's a pretty big central part of the disagreement for Blanchard/Bailey's AGP theory, and there it is much more explicitly aggressive: they claim that trans people either fall strictly into one of homosexual transsexual or AGPs, categorically. To the point where any testimony that crosses the margins -- a solely-androphilic transwoman without traditionally-male interests and who masturbates to dressing as a woman, or a solely-gynophillic or bisexual transwoman with traditionally feminine interests who doesn't -- is evidence that the trans person isn't willing to be truthful. This was maybe defensible in the 1980s and 1990s, where various motivating factors lead trans women to present study leads highly sanitized versions of themselves.
But these days we have wide arrays of sources that can't be built around people trying to lie to psychiatrists. There's tons of counterexamples, and even a handful would raise serious questions about whether this behavior was the motivating factor.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
16hr ago
There may be room between those positions but there's no stable position between them. The center cannot hold, and has not, and we have reached the stable equilibrium of "she may withhold sex for any reason at any time and his only permissible recourse is a divorce in which he loses most of his assets and future income".
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
The thinking easily becomes I want x while completely ignoring what incentive structures they are creating.
I think that this generalizes to many progressive causes. For example, minimum wages are great until you solve for equilibrium. Or take affirmative action: in a world of strict meritocracy, I would be indifferent between going to a Black or Non-Black physician. In a world where it is public knowledge that the standard for enrolling in medicine depends on your race, I suddenly have to update on the race of the doctor.
For a non-progressive example, consider Israel-Hamas hostage swaps. They create terrible incentives, but why should you care about the hundreds of citizens which might get killed in the future due to your actions when you can score a political victory by bringing home a soldier right now?
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
16hr ago
Agreed, but I'd also say, unless you are having some other severe marital dysfunction going on, if your wife is saying no all the time, wouldn't you want to... have a conversation about this? Figure out what's going on? As opposed to just "asserting your rights."
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
16hr ago
Just leave your car out in the rain, rather than letting it get dusty in the garage.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
16hr ago
The "ordinarily detectable woo" is classified under "shared environment" and has already been examined. Postulating spooky undetectable woo that is heritable doesn't weaken anything.
kky
16hr ago
If I were to put it from the point of view of someone who does not hate women, it would be: a woman who says no, rather than not right now, is a woman who has no right to her marriage.
It sounds like the rape enthusiasts have something else going on, but I think the above description is a pretty reasonable standard for marriage, leaving out the man’s parallel duties.
ulyssessword
16hr ago
Yes, routinely separating people from their from family and other support structures is slightly insane.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
16hr ago
I made the mistake of getting my car detailed once and I had no idea it could ever look so clean again so now I feel like a piece of shit if my cars don't always look sparkling factory new.
Been going down a rabbit hole of building a kit to do it myself which is fairly inexpensive and I'm getting decent results but I'm wondering if I'm becoming puritan housewife crazy and I should instead get a mobile detailer on a subscription basis or something.
Ecgtheow
16hr ago
Doctor's don't really do that much unless things are going wrong with adults. They do blood tests to see if hormone levels are within acceptable ranges every few months and check on liver and kidney functions to see if there's any indication of decline. Interpreting hormone levels and adjusting doses doesn't require much medical expertise.
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
16hr ago
This is not at all unbelievable to me, though it mounts, frames, and hangs the idea that the modern era is as corrupt and depraved as any that has come before it, just in different ways. I wonder how common it is.
Anecdotally I know at least one extremely (to me at least) physically attractive girl (a dancer) who has had similar offers (though not from Arabs, or not to my knowledge) but has refused them (so far.) Once her currency as a burlesque "star" begins to go down as her age goes up, I wonder how it will all play out. She's a lovely person, actually, in her way. At one point in my life I would have been quite taken with her. I suspect large swaths of girls in Japan at least would be reluctant to be flown to wherever simply because of the language barrier. Very wealthy men in Japan aren't as desperate for sex as someone in a more sexually repressed culture such as those in the mid-East, but I suppose they could be training their kept-women up to Tokyo.
Tangentially related, but have you or anyone else heard the term "misyar marriage"? I hit the trending button and possibly because I am in Asia I was bombarded by a lot of tweets in Arabic. Because why not I had them translated by my phone, and they were mostly masked women advertising themselves for these arrangements.
ulyssessword
16hr ago
Can you be more specific?
How would social status vary more among fraternal twins than identical twins? Are there family dynamics that push fraternal twins apart (on whatever stats you use) while pulling identical twins together? Do fraternal and identical twins live in different climates?
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
Personally, I think at this point, it is easier to just wait until the patents of the GLP-1 drugs run out.
Generally, shame is a double-edged sword, because it can enforce norms which are pro-social just as well as norms which are net-negative.
I mean, sure, Japan has very low obesity rates, because most kids would rather kill themselves than being the fat kid in the class, and their shame culture might prevent casual sex, but it is not much use with the TFR, for example.
Rhiow
17hr ago
Emotional labour for someone that appreciates it can definitely be one of the appeals of the job. Emotional labor for someone that's screaming obscenities at you is crap and probably the worst part of the job.
Activists complain about the latter and don't talk about the former because they're activists. If they thought "yeah, everything's okay actually" they wouldn't be activists. People tend to complain when their jobs are bad and not say anything when it's good anyways, so I'm not surprised you don't see much talk about good emotional labor.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
17hr ago
A female football player (perhaps not literally in a pro league), a female programmer, and a female scrawny person, of course. I don't see the problem.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
17hr ago
I'd subscribe.
rincer_of_wind
17hr ago
I really like your explanation as to why individual components of IQ correlate so much. It makes a lot of intuitive sense that its partially a selection effect. Surprised ive never IQ seen truthers mention it.
Mind reading is weakly possible. Elon Musk is doing it right now, amongst others. It's just that it's very difficult to extract useful information against someone's will.
Not to mention that some human actions can be predicted before they're made by reading the brain: https://qz.com/1569158/neuroscientists-read-unconscious-brain-activity-to-predict-decisions
The chip die for the human mind is encased in a woman's uterus. The BIOS is encased in the human genome. It's just that the production process is insanely complicated.
The resurrection of Christ is a totally different kind of matter.
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