domain:natesilver.net
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
5m ago
This reads, to me, like youre taking situations where non-conception is forseeable but not intended (pregnant, post-menopause), and arguing that its therefore ok with intent also.
Can you argue that it is not ok to intentionally avoid conception?
The question is, what tells us that the sexual intercourse thats the point is exactly "ejaculation of a penis in a vagina" and not some related different concept with different boundaries? I think that would be very difficult to explain without tying it to the purpose of sexual intercourse. Im expecting something like "the evolutionary purpose of sexual intercourse is making babies, penis ejaculating in vagina is neccesary for that, therefore its nessecary to proper sexual intercourse".
I figure that's the argument that you're used to expecting, so it's throwing you off that I'm not making it. There are lots of people who will use the Aristotelian-Thomistic Perverted Faculty argument, and you can go talk to those people if you like. Other Catholics like Pope St. John Paul II argue from "the personalistic norm" and semiotics. There isn't an official argumentation that Catholics have to use to defend sexual morality.
If you don't think sexual intercourse is the ejaculation of a penis in a vagina, what do you think sexual intercourse is? I think the definition of sexual intercourse is apparent by looking at the genitals and what they do together, just as you can look at a gun, a bullet, and someone firing a bullet and saying, "yeah, this is how they go together." You don't necessarily need someone to shoot and kill another person with the bullet to figure out that guns are for shooting. You don't necessarily need to have sexual intercourse and have a baby to figure out genitals are for sexual intercourse. The knowledge that these things can be consequences of the action might inform your understanding of the action, but the actions can be analyzed separate from their consequences.
Target practice generally still requires firing small ballistics. Pair bonding and pleasure dont require penis ejaculating in vagina.
True, there are cuddles and other things that can make pair bonding happen. In this part of the analogy, I'm just listing things that are known possible consequences of the action in question. Some possible consequences/results of shooting a gun is that it will hit or miss a target and that will create a feedback loop to help the shooter improve their aim. Some possible consequences/results of sexual intercourse is that it will make a baby or improve pair bonding. This is not an exhausted list of possible consequences of shooting a gun or having sexual intercourse.
The examples are Unidirectional and I'm not making the opposite argument that target practice necessitates the shooting of a gun or something like that. I'm not arguing that the consequences of the actions necessitates how the actions happen or anything like that.
I think thats not how people use words, generally. "Penis ejaculating in vagina", as an ordinary english description, does not actually exclude using a condom.
Where does the ejaculate go? A vagina or a condom? If you poke holes in the condom so that ejaculate leaves the condom, then wearing a condom is fine in Catholic ethics.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
8m ago
HBD, by which we probably mean IQ is what like 30-60% genetic and average IQ scores for whole racial groups vary, is only really worth discussing because so much of academia and society goes berserk if you bring it up. It's a truth that upsets the blank slatists so much that they pervert scientific discourse to bury it.
But it's not actually all that useful a model for the world? Society doesn't change that much if it informs your view: AA doesn't structurally fix anything, maybe try not to force kids to do school programs they can't possibly succeed in, maybe "learn to code!" is cruel. Ok cool. Now that that's out of the way we still have crushing social problems to deal with.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
12m ago
I find this true with a lot of moralizing movements. They never really think about how many barriers to entry the6 put in front of people who want to do these things. And really the thing that would change farming (just for an example) is millions of plant-based eaters who might include fish and eggs and cheese rather than 5000 hard core vegans studiously reading labels for obscure food ingredients that might have come from an animal of some sort. 5000 people is a rounding error, a million is a movement. And for most Altruistic movements, they have such high barriers that nobody can take on unless they have high enough income and enough time to actually do that. Normies have lives and don’t have extra money to search for and purchase the “pure” foods that would make them “pure” vegans. If you throw in organic on top, you’re restricting the movement to the comfortable middle class to upper middle class who have the money to purchase food that costs 33% or more over the normie food they’re eating now. It would be much more effective to have those people choose to limit meat consumption to a side dish or veggie heavy casserole or a veggie burger with cheese than to play purity games.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
13m ago
I'll do math for ml once I finish discrete math, I want to do both linear algebra and stats as they have the most relevance for computers, especially if I do fast.ai soon and wish to dog deeper.
My mentor is making me do some books on the side that will help me get a second, deeper look at the topics I've already learnt via math academy. I'm unsure of what to do post math for ml tho. Calc 3, linear algebra, stats?
How rigorous/helpful do you think the ml and discrete math adjacent courses like MoP are? Are they enough to help you jump right into applied side of programming? I do trust Jeremy Howard when he says that you don't need a vast amount of math if you're starting machine learning.
They will also publish a ML1 course before their CS1 course so I may jump into that once I knock out MoP, discrete math and m4ml.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
13m ago
· Edited 10m ago
you'll start questioning the concept of childhood vaccinations or jet fuel melting steel beams.
TBF, the conspiracists are right that jet fuel doesn't burn hot enough to melt steel. Their mistake is in assuming that you need to melt structural supports in order to make them fail; in actual fact, steel loses most of its strength well before it actually melts.
Reminds me of a bad habit among amateur analysts trying to calculate explosive yields: not knowing the difference between pulverisation (shattering something into dust) and vaporisation. Lots of people see "the building isn't there anymore" and then blithely plug in the specific heat and heat of vaporisation for the entire mass of the building, which is a drastic overestimate because it takes a lot less energy to pulverise than to vaporise something.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
18m ago
ThenElection
19m ago
Got me to wondering: has there ever been a video game or movie where the villain (hero?) becomes convinced that the only way to end all suffering in the universe is to extinguish all consciousness and life? I feel like I've seen this trope a thousand times, but I can't put my finger on one that matches it perfectly. Maybe one of the FF games? Probably some anime somewhere.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
22m ago
THIS order doesn't apply. That doesn't mean that three months from now there might not be another order that does.
Five years ago birthright citizenship wasn't on the table.
coffee_enjoyer
☕️
25m ago
The suffering of bees may be important to mitigate (I think that’s true — wouldn’t you care if someone were purposely buying bees only to kill them?) but the author must convince us —
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the suffering of bees is of such high importance that it is worth writing on it to convince people to place a burden on themselves. (Unlikely. There is worse suffering taking place even if we consider only bees, like the effects of pesticides. It’s not worth discourse hours).
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that writing something so unintuitive that people ignore what else you write is morally worth the future drawbacks of loss of influence.
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that the suffering of bees is so important that we should forego the very term of pleasure. This is problematic to his utilitarian ambitions, because our motivation to live well and expand our wellbeing is tied to whether we are able to experience wholesome pleasures in life. If people feel better from a spoonful of honey, not only does their own suffering decrease, but (1) they have energy to reduce the suffering of others and (2) the reason to love bees over wasps is brought to mind.
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bees are not designed to be destroyed by mammals, given that bears and raccoons destroy them in the wild, and given that fish are designed to be eaten by other fish. If the author does not believe that nature’s design should be respected, then his interest should be ensuring that killer whales aren’t able to kill dolphins in the ocean. But wouldn’t only a senseless person have a problem with the killer whale enjoying his design and eating dolphins, who significantly more intelligent than bees? So the suffering of bees is within our design — we should only guarantee that the suffering isn’t excessive, like with some easy regulations about whether all the young bees are killed off after the honey is made.
There’s possibly an element of Jewish thought in this reasoning + Singer’s. Because there’s an eagerness to heap up behavioral proscriptions, however numerous; there’s the love of rules and the eagerness to find extrapolations to the rules which defy normal intuition; there’s the arbitrary basis to begin morality; and there’s the obsession with trivia and edge cases over more substantive issues. That’s immaterial, but just interesting to note — it’s possible some of Matthew’s moral intuitions come from a different traditional framework.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
38m ago
And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
38m ago
Well I hope you voted to acquit or you have some terrible karma.
Sunshine
40m ago
Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian "back"slide at the time.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary? And yes, contrary to what you said below Germany also counts, of course. I'm almost impressed how you put your finger on the single country in the region that did not revert to authoritarianism, and are acting flabbergasted how I could possibly think they're not representative.
The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.
The Asian Tiger route was a str ictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
Whether or not it would work is another question (and the explanation of why it worked for Asia is a liberal just-so story that they had to scramble for after the fact, as they do with many things), all I'm saying is that it was an idea floated by public intellectuals at the time, although ultimately not attempted.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
First of all it's worth reiterating that the "it" is "people voting the wrong way", something that clearly shows the "democratic traditions" are a cruel joke.
As to the causes, I mean, maybe? I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me. The psyops ran by the Americans on their western counterparts are legendary, to the point that anyone coming from a country with any amount of healthy patriotism comes away shaken after seeing the end result of what they were put through.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
46m ago
That seems to be the face-value meaning of the term, but I have a feeling that there's a meme on the Motte that goes by the "Elite Human Capital" name.
Crowstep
52m ago
Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him
Elon Musk married to a socially competent woman who he actually listens to would be a powerful thing.
Instead he has a weird harem and spends too much time on twitter.
Crowstep
54m ago
Long term I think more expensive food/meat is unlikely. We reached peak farmland in the late 90s. Since then we've been growing more food on less land. Future technologies aren't going to make food more expensive to produce, obviously, but AI and greater use of GMOs can definitely make it less expensive. And the world's population is likely to peak in the 2050s, with declines in the developed world way before then.
Of course, the birth rate and population collapse could also crash the global economy, making us much poorer overall. But I still suspect that food is something that will stay cheap or get cheaper.
Corvos
56m ago
Given that the 30% wages essentially work due to relative purchasing power and / or arbitrage between a Third World childhood and a First World adulthood, isn’t this global laissez faire approach basically poison for long-term economic growth?
If it becomes widely accepted that economic growth means an increased quality of life here and now, but that the window of opportunity only lasts maybe 1.5 generations before your (grand)children are priced out of the global market, that seems to make growth and laissez faire economics a much tougher sell.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
57m ago
Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Imperial Germany was absolutely an Obrigkeitsstaat (elite-state?) ruled by a small number of people with very token democratic institutions that were meant to channel republicanism into wearing itself out and discrediting itself via fruitless procedures conducted within a powerless framework. That "democracy" never amounted to anything, wasn't taken very seriously by non-activists, and got absolutely bulldozed over by the actual rulers whenever they didn't jump according to orders. The Prussians in general and Bismarck specifically had a habit of allowing seemingly republican instutions to take the wind out of activists' sails, only to pull the rug out from under them and have riot police beat the shit out of them a few years later. The counterrevolution was still very much going on in Imperial Germany.
So the "legacy of democratic" norms was really the legacy that democracy was a farce. Does that square with your perception of inter-war Germany?
Yep. It's the same conclusion that I've come to. Lots of vegans will shoot back with "you wouldn't buy something made with slave labor" or "it's not okay to beat your wife just a little bit". The former is funny because all of do in fact buy things made with slave (or quasi-slave labor). The second is true, but if I was the wife in question I'd much rather a little light spanking than being beat by a crowbar. It's this same false equivalence and purity culture (you eat oysters so you're equivalent to a guy who eats steak twice a day) in veganism which is so contrary to the actual goals of the movement (get people to eat less meat so less animals suffer and die on factory farms).
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