domain:streamable.com
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
18hr ago
Wasn't there a (state? California?) legislator who was found to have had an OnlyFans? I'm not going to search for it at the moment, but I remember this happening within the last few years.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
18hr ago
Boring practical reasons are high minded spiritual ones. There is no difference except maintenance through time. It's a mistake to think that virtues are the concerns of some untouched far away realm and not the common lives of common men of the common time.
What similar problems do drugs have?
They make reasonable men do unreasonable things.
Other vectors of addiction can do the same, but nowhere near at the same rates. Few men have killed because of a video game. Legions have for sex and drugs.
When and how did you arrive at the idea that sex is a relationship
Arguably it started when I read Plato as a teenager, but that's not what convinced me of it. I think it's about when I had friends of mine get back together for the third time after swearing each other off. That's about when I knew my mother was right both to say that sex makes people retarded and that it connects people on a special level other things do not.
But time has done nothing but confirm this for me. I've hung out with many a people of little virtue (I've probably had more candid conversations with sex workers of more genders than anyone on this website), and their existential angst seemed to be proportional to the amount of casual sex they had.
A decent amount of them openly whined to me about feeling desensitized and frustrated at how unable to feel anything for anyone they were.
Now I refuse to conclude something too specific from my life experience, because it's not really generally applicable, but I will certainly stand by the ancient idea that sex is special and that carnal knowledge is not like other acts in its implications on the psyche of the participants. That alone seems undeniable to me.
did you already believe that porn was a bad thing beforehand and this was just one more piece of supporting evidence?
I do not actually believe pornography to be evil. At least not inherently. I've stood by its artistic merits and associated freedoms here before on numerous occasions.
I used to have far more liberal views on this particular matter, but these days I think it probably needs some effective regulation or at least social framework, like we do for tobacco or alcohol.
The complete free for all of hyperreal stimuli seems a bit unwise, seeing as though I've had multiple friends make stupid life ruining decisions on account of it.
faceh
18hr ago
If we're going that route, then we have to also have to come to the conclusion that it is utterly fine for men to ogle up the pages of the high-class magazine with the naked women, AND to be a full-on gooner who consumes hours of porn portraying the aforementioned stuffing of holes and similar levels of degeneracy.
If either of those factors came out about a male politician, then those factors would both be equally unworthy of further attention, for presumably similar reasons as the womens' conduct wasn't worthy of attention.
I'm sure we could hash out some set of circumstances where it was not fine. Lets say there's a Married mother of children who does porn without the knowledge of her husband, and not only does this trigger emotional distress for the husband, it can also nuke his reputation and lead to a divorce fight over the kids.
Since I assume you will ask I'll go ahead and state that it should be possible for a woman who does pose for a magazine in her reckless youth to seek political office and not be hounded by her past (assuming its all in her past). But the electorate is still going to consider it, and compare it to their other options.
I will also state that I don't think there'll be any harm done by a blanket soft ban on anyone who stars in a professional pornographic film from holding a political position.
I am absolutely 100% fine with keeping people like this out of public office.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
18hr ago
Not the person you asked, but I was taught that sex was a relationship when I was taught about sex. I was also taught that porn "was a bad thing"; it was obviously lustful, but why specifically that was a problem was left quite vague. The vast majority of my conceptual model of why porn is bad I learned through direct experience.
What's your moral/ethical model for binging/purging as a method for enjoying food? It seems to me to be another example of the moral structure you're curious about here; "people see this as wrong, but why?"
PutAHelmetOn
Recovering Quokka
18hr ago
What similar problems do drugs have? If videogames cause similar brain signals, aren't those basically drugs? Maybe it's my wrong-headed reductionism speaking, but the reasons why societies treat drugs differently seem like boring practical reasons, not high-minded spiritual ones.
I call this "Men, amirite?" It certainly turns up among the leftists and liberal women I have the unfortunance to interact with.
The attitudes don't get passed down by mothers and grandmothers, though, they get picked up from blogs and influencers and ticktocks and reddit and wherever else it is that women get their programming from.
thejdizzler
18hr ago
Biggest tip I have for running is to slow down unless you're deliberately trying to do a workout session. This will allow you to burn more fat from cardio, enjoy the run more, and is easier on your bones and joints.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
18hr ago
When and how did you arrive at the idea that sex is a relationship (this particular kind of distinguished relationship, as you conceive of it)? Did you only decide that porn was a bad thing afterwards, on the basis of this conception, or did you already believe that porn was a bad thing beforehand and this was just one more piece of supporting evidence?
This isn't a gotcha, I have no agenda here. I'm just genuinely and sincerely interested to learn more about how you think about these issues.
Supah_Schmendrick
18hr ago
...No? That's literally the opposite of what I said. "Use value" assumes some objective, rational value of "use"; exchange value includes all the irrational feelings and opinions people can have about goods and services like risk aversion, FOMO, status, or just idiosyncratic preference. People also make secondary bets on what other people will find useful/interesting/worth buying, introducing further fuzziness into the system.
That's not commodity fetishism; it's the opposite. Recognizing that when people are buying things, they're not just buying things - they're communicating with other people as well.
John_Doe_Fletcher
anarcho-heretic, Quokkit guy
19hr ago
Sorry this is low-effort, but the fact that woke has become a catch-all is a bit of a symptom of the style of discourse it describes. See Freddie de Boer on this effect. You're asking a fair question though.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
19hr ago
who the heck actually believes that posing for a photoshoot in a completely mainstreamed, slick, high-class magazine which eventually shifted to a women's fashion and lifestyle brand is the cultural/moral/social equivalent of anonymously getting your holes stuffed and swallowing cum/urine on camera for a handful of cash?
I guess this framing is weird to me. It seems to me one need not believe that two things are "cultural/moral/social equivalent[s]" in order to believe (1) those things should have similar impacts on one's political career AND (2) one's political opponents are behaving hypocritically by condemning one thing but not the other.
gakles
19hr ago
Summer fitness has been interesting. I was pretty excited to return home to my local gym after my second semester in college but was sorely disappointed. They changed the machines, it's way smaller than my college's gym, and the extra 15 minutes it takes to drive there really became an inconvenience. I went a few times with friends but haven't touched a barbell in a month and half now. Luckily, the scuffed pullup bar in our barn is still functional, so I've been doing 50-75 reps a day. I'll do 15 with strict form, then two sets of ten more relaxed ones, one with a wide grip and one without locking out my arms at the bottom. Doing this 2-3x a day only takes a total of around 30 minutes and its been great for my mental health. I'm probably resting too long between sets and certainly not pushing myself to failure but I've seen an increase in strength and my form is getting much better.
My calisthenics goal this summer is to do a front lever, which I'm finding incredibly difficult. Like I can do 15 pullups without breaking a sweat, but I can barely get my legs parallel to the ground. Once I got serious about the pullup routine I've been adding torso/leg raises to the start and while I'm seeing some improvement it's really tough. I watched a youtube video where a calisthenics guy recommended tucking your legs and focusing on your torso before working your legs out, and thats the routine I've roughly been following. I think the main think holding me back right now is core and back strength, each day it's 50/50 which gives out first.
Aesthetically, it took about a month to burn off the fat that finals seasons had added. My abs are pretty good and the wide grip pullups have finally built my deltoids in a way I never had before. These changes are probably also a result of my facial structure/body shifting away from teen and towards adult more generally. I'm pretty lean right now with no sign of stopping, the first month of the summer was pretty bad with lots of boba/fatty mexican food but the start of a summer fling made me lock in and I've pretty much cut out sweets. By the end of next month (when school restarts) if I stay on track I'll be in the best aesthetic shape of my life. The aforementioned summer fling also increased my self confidence by a lot, which will probably make me somewhat more outgoing back at school. It's nice to know people actually find you attractive.
One of my friends back at college is one of those people who is genetically inclined to run. I'm not, but I'm hoping when I get back to school I'll pick it up again. I ran every other day last fall semester, and I don't think I'll be able to do that with my workload but something like 2x a week would be nice. The consequences of bad cardio scare me. Going back to the college gym will be interesting. I know my "gym buddy" has been pretty consistent so far this summer, so we'll see how much his bench/squat outstrip mine, and how fast it'll take for me to catch back up.
ABigGuy4U
19hr ago
People forget that internet culture has around since the Republic of Letters in the late 17th century.
ABigGuy4U
19hr ago
It’s not just the chemical structure that makes it bad, it’s the corn lobby. The price of corn syrup is massively driven down by government farmer subsidies. You can put massive amounts of corn syrup in everything at a scale that wouldn’t be affordable with cane sugar.
JarJarJedi
19hr ago
If you're implying the policemen specifically look for people like George Floyd to abuse them, this does not sound plausible. I mean, did you see the man? His standard description in the woke media is "gentle giant". I am not sure about the gentle part, but he's 6'6", played multiple sports, was employed as a security guard, and he doesn't exactly look like something you'd describe as "weak". And, of course, if you wanted to target somebody weak and unable to resist with violence, without the possibility of punishment, would be a public street, in presence of your peers and multiple witnesses possessing recording devices, your preferred venue for that?
What do you mean by "isolated" and "stigmatized"? Floyd certainly weren't "isolated", given how much resources have been spent on defending his cause and lionizing him, including burying him in a golden casket, all DNC leadership kneeling to apologize for whatever happened to him, and erecting a monument to him. And anybody alive in the last 20 years would know how such things work. So if you think the policemen were on the lookout for some helpless victim nobody would care about, it's literally the worst choice in the history of bad choices. And they would know it very well. Neither is he "stigmatized" - if anything, all his past as violent psychopath and drug addict is completely forgotten and any discussion of it is now considered "downplaying the problem of police brutality and similar abuses of power" and definitely means whoever discusses it is a racist.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
19hr ago
Should've framed it more as "chronic, debilitating and high maintenance medical condition" than a single "medical event". Complaints about medical bankruptcy in America aren't because of MRIs for broken arms.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
19hr ago
This is not limited to environmentalist parties. Many leftists are acutely aware that nearly every leftist political action becomes strangled by purity testing. Intersectionalism should've remained in academia, because it's a utilitarian race to the bottomless pit when implemented in public policy. That's probably why we've never had actual leftists in positions of meaningful power, just neoliberal centrist democrats.
pbmonster
19hr ago
For example, Denmark
Bad example for a discussion about Hungary. Denmark is easily among the most progressive Euro countries in that regard, while Hungary is equally as easy among the most, probably the most, conservative.
Never underestimate how culturally heterogeneous the Euros are.
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
19hr ago
Do you have a concise definition for "wokism" that you can share?
To be clear why I'm asking, I know I can read through Marx to understand Marxism, and even more, through criticisms of his works and even political actions based on his ideas. But there is no equivalent for "woke". Without a solid set of works to reference, the invocation of "woke" becomes a catch-all strawman for de jour leftwing politics, similar to "chud", "bootlicking", etc. for de jour rightwing politics. Useful for flaming; completely useless for having dialogues grounded in reason.
YoungAchamian
19hr ago
While the current paradigm is next-token-prediction based models, there is such a thing as diffusion text models, which aren't used in the state of the art stuff, but nonetheless work all right. Some of the lessons we are describing here don't generalize to diffusion models, but we can talk about them when or if they become more mainstream. There are a few perhaps waiting in the stables, for example Google semi-recently demoed one. For those not aware, a diffusion model does something maybe, sort of, kind of like how I wrote this comment: sketched out a few bullet points overall, and then refined piece by piece, adding detail to each part. One summary of their strengths and weaknesses here. It's pretty important to emphasize this fact, because arguably our brains work on both levels: we come up with, and crystallize, concepts, in our minds during the "thinking" process (diffusion-like), even though our output is ultimately linear and ordered (and to some extent people think as they speak in a very real way).
I hate that I feel compelled to nitpick this. But while it's a good layman explanation for how Diffusion models work, the devil is in the details. Diffusion models do not literally, or figuratively diffuse thoughts or progressively clarify ideas. They diffuse noise applied to the input data. They take input data noised according to a fixed schedule and model it as a gaussian distribution which they learn to remove said noise. Since they are an encoder/decoder networks, during inference they take only the decoder (Edit. technically this is incorrect, it's the forward process vs reverse process they aren't explicitly encoder/decoders, its unfortunately how I always remember them), input noise and have it generate output words, text, etc. It is 100% not "thinking" about what it has diffused so far and further diffusing it. It is doing it according to the properties of the noise and the relationship to the schedule it learned during training. It is entirely following a Markovian property; it has no memory of any steps past the immediately previous one, no long-term refinement of ideas. During training it is literally comparing random steps of denoised data with the predicted level of denoising. You can do some interesting things where you add information to the noise via FFT during training and inference to influence the generated output, but as far as I know that's still ongoing research. I guess you could call that noise "Brain thoughts" or something but it is imprecise and very speculative.
Source: 3 years spend doing research on DDIM/DDPMs at work for image generation. I admittedly haven't read the new battery of nlp-aligned diffusion papers (They are sitting in my tabs) but I did read the robotic control paper via diffusion, and it was similar, just abstractions on how the noise is applied to different domains. I'm guessing the NLP ones are similar though probably uses some sort of discrete noise.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
19hr ago
I’m just creating something and choosing to give it freely.
See that's the problem. Unlike your poem, sex is not a good, service or other such thing. It's a relationship you have with others. The implications of which do not cleanly stop and start at the will of contracts.
This fuzziness alongside its other peculiar characteristics (irrational draw, propensity to create children, etc) is why it is not treated the same as other things morally by most societies. And why attempts to use reductionism to map it onto benign activities are wrong headed.
Drugs have similar problems that also make them special in this way.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
19hr ago
Fascinating. Are you making a wooden headband to replace a busted old one, or did you grab some free range headphone electronics that need a housing?
voters-eliot-azure
patently unbiased
19hr ago
Guilt by association is one of the first tenets of political mudslinging.
Uh, where did you arrive at the idea that it isn’t? It’s a paired activity, kinda inherently a relationship there.
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