Throwback to when I posted pictures of my lawn here last year and got yelled at because apparently everyone on the planet lives in California
The whole “lawns are bad; they waste so much water” thing is fucking bizarre. It’s like, dude, have you ever considered living in a place that’s actually capable of supporting human life?
I think people fail to distinguish between “lawn” and “yard”. A lawn is deliberately manicured; a yard is just wild.
I’m no landscaping expert or horticulturist but I’m pretty sure you don’t have to water lawns.
You do if you’re planting a lawn from scratch but once it’s there the rain takes care of it.
People in California plant grass that isn't suitable for their climate and dries out in the sun, so they have to water it.
Another option is living in a water basin that has lots of fresh water available… like not-California the Great Lakes region. Since it all ends up back in the lakes again anyway, it isn’t drawing down the water table like in Texas. But people don’t like living on the Great Lakes.
That’s not reality. 9/11 was ridiculously and falsely linked to Iraq by the lying liars then in the WH. But they wanted to do it anyway. Just because Bush claimed to be isolationist in his 2000 campaign, doesn’t mean he was telling the truth.
Really. You think they could summon up the political will to do it when Bush was just *barely* elected President in the first place? 9/11 is what gave them the power to engage in that level of mid-east meddling.
It’s correct that Iraq was not really involved in 9/11. The problem is it’s in the same general area of the world, among other things, enabling the Bush Administration to falsely tie them in the public’s perception.
But Saddam wasn’t really pursuing WMDs, all that was left was stuff leftover from a long time ago that was missed in an earlier sweep. So how do you gin up support for an expensive war against some random middle eastern dictator that isn’t even really arranging terrorism against you?
External image
Step one - get your shoddy approval rating spiked into the stratosphere by a massive middle eastern terrorist attack, massively boosting your low political capital, allowing you to even attempt to make this threat narrative without looking like a paranoid lunatic in the first place.
in my experience enthusiastic male programmers outnumber enthusiastic female programmers by approximately 100 to 1 by the age of 15, but maybe this has shifted slightly over the past few decades.
(numbers not completely pulled out of my butt, based on observation of room containing roughly 300 juvenile coders, three of which were presenting as girls).
perhaps we need earlier interventions, possibly starting in the womb.
The alternative method is infecting more programmers with the cat-girl virus.
Ugggggh
I’m not made of highly unethical experimental preference-modifying subconscious neuromemetic virus precomputed vector model patches.
in my experience enthusiastic male programmers outnumber enthusiastic female programmers by approximately 100 to 1 by the age of 15, but maybe this has shifted slightly over the past few decades.
(numbers not completely pulled out of my butt, based on observation of room containing roughly 300 juvenile coders, three of which were presenting as girls).
perhaps we need earlier interventions, possibly starting in the womb.
Mass hormonal doping to alter the neurotypes and sexualities of the population, but unironically.
You ever get the feeling in certain sexually liberated subcultures - kink, poly, body positivity - that you’re expected to find everyone attractive by default?
Like you’re supposed to choose your partners pretty much at random - your preferences can be superficial but never integral to your sexuality, and they must always be toothless. Believing that the person you love is in any way more beautiful or more special than anyone else is somehow dehumanizing to said “anyone else”, because somewhere along the way we’ve started to conflate attraction and respect. We’ve looped right back around to calling sex and romance the highest forms of human interaction: to deny them to anyone, the logic goes, is a slight to their very humanity.
I’ve been noticing that a lot in poly communities lately, but this article really crystallized the concept for me. To wit:
When you call a fat body “cute,” it’s patronizing and de-sexualizing. …
[W]hen someone calls me “cute” in a setting where I am showing my body or
expressing my sexuality, it plucks me right out of the narrative I am
trying to create.
…
Try “beautiful,” or go out on a limb and say “sexy.” And don’t panic
when you find that “beautiful” and “sexy” start to change in meaning for
you. They should. These are words that belong to everyone who wants
them.
You are entitled to express your sexuality in any context you want (in this case, a Facebook group for nude photos), but I am equally entitled not to participate in it. The idea that someone posting nudes in a group I happen to be part of obligates me to express sexual admiration for them - well, as we say in The Industry, it creeps me the fuck out. Would the author of that article apply the same standard to a dude showing off his erection?
By all means create your own sexual narrative, by all means claim any word you feel you deserve, but the minute you obligate me to take part in it is the minute I get the fuck away from you. Desexualizing a person is not the same as dehumanizing them.
Very yes.
“Believing that the person you love is in any way more beautiful or more special than anyone else is somehow dehumanizing to said “anyone else”, because somewhere along the way we’ve started to conflate attraction and respect.“
As an obligate monoamorous person (why. is. that. not. a. word?!) this is how 99% of Bad Polycourse feels to me, too.
And it’s so weirdly regressive, too - I thought we had agreed that romance doesn’t have to be The Ultimate in relationships! Suddenly we’ve gone right back to “if you really loved your friends you’d be dating them” and I’m just like…when did we decide that friendship was lesser?
Status competition in sex runs deeper than ideology, I’d wager. Much deeper.
Github eliminated gender bias in selecting conference speakers for ElectronConf by using randomized blind review, 100% of selected speakers turned out to be men, so they are cancelling the conference
amazing
Cowardly, dishonest, misandrist trash.
(no clue what this conference is about/looking for in speakers, other than it’s in a coding field and they want a mixed panel)
If you assume misogyny exists, which obviously this conference is, then surely this is a predictable result of that? Women would face attrition before even entering the field, falling off during study and falling behind after becoming professional. Coding is not an innate natural skill; at least, it’s not a pure natural skill, where it all comes from within, and opportunities don’t matter. So those who get promoted would be men, thus men would get better more often; those who stick around more would be men, have more resources to pursue and direct projects would be men.
This isn’t like playing music, where you can do most of it in your own time. You can play and practice those fancy difficult pieces on your own. (You would see a class bias still, since free time and instruments are expensive.) You can’t really do that with big projects in coding, can you? You can’t work on AI without getting promotions, you can’t work on team projects without being above entry-level. You can’t get design experience and other stuff without big resources and connections. All of which come with moving up the ladder and being liked, which if we’re assuming misogyny, doesn’t happen as much for women.
I would only expect maybe pre-college level blind reviews to turn out an equal gender slate (other minority sections not addressed). I’m pretty sure I’ve seen data that says even then, it’s already skewed male. If you’re assuming misogyny, then its cascading effects will result in a lot of the “top people” being male in a “male field”. Hence, the speakers would be male by any unbiased selection process. You can’t use this kind of review to pick speakers if you’re aiming to promote people you believe are marginalized. That’s like saying, “well let’s use the size of people’s fortunes to choose speakers, surely that’s a good measure of success”, but obviously you’re going to get a biased panel there too, not a population-representative one.
You can’t fix bias like this by starting at the top. You have to explicitly say, okay this happens, so to counter it let’s hear from some of those minority people and give them the opportunities they haven’t been getting, **so that they can then be on the par they would have had they not faced bias*. That’s what affirmative action IS, recognition that people are being held back at all levels, and then fixing that at all levels. You can’t both expect to get equal representation in things like these reviews *and* claim you need affirmative action. Blind reviews do not remove the long-term effects that cause people to not be in the top of the field to begin with. It would stop biased promotions, but it wouldn’t go back in time and fix everything that caused people not to rise who should have, which is what they seemed to expect. It only goes down one level, not the many layers of you’d need to reach through
The only place where this effect isn’t true would maybe be in the hacker world? Far as I understand that’s pretty much all self-taught and totally blind. Everything else relies on above-the-table, ie someone else offered to you, opportunities. All of which would be biased by prejudices.
The problem, of course, is that they often haven’t found the systemic misogynistic biases they’ve been looking for. I can’t remember the exact details, but there have been studies where they have tried altering voices to sound more feminine, observed acceptance rates for commits on FOSS projects by gender, and so on, and they most often come up empty-handed on it.
But of course, to say there is an imbalance in the frequency of neurotypes in populations based on hormone levels during development is forbidden darkspeech, even though it is uniquely women who, it is commonly thought by the same people who object to any biological influence on cognition even at the statistical population level, must be carefully herded into various professions. (And of course, the constant messaging that “soft dev is misogynist!” by those same people cannot help but be discouraging.)
I rather strongly suspect that one might find autistic traits (or similar) overrepresented among computer programmers relative to the norm, or other correlations. After all, my ex who helped me get into programming is neurodivergent and bi, and I’m not quite such a pure normie myself…
Am I missing something? Notch responds to the term “mansplaining” with explaining “mansplaining”. This is funny. When others double down on not getting the joke, he doubles down as well, making it all the more obvious. Why does everybody act like they are not getting the joke? Is there a meta-joke? Am I the only one who is not in on the non-joke?
Sufficiently fundamentalist rhetoric is indistinguishable from satire. The real joke is that we’re in the middle of the anthropocene extinction event and a writer is writing about writings that two writers wrote to one another.
In this case we here are even worse, writing about even more meta Bullshit, self-aware enough to know it, but not strong enough to change.
The story of my life. The last three posts on this chain, i mean.
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
I’m saying the opposite. Since we won’t consider maximum ages, why are we considering minimum ones? Just let children vote. “Biologically incapable of making good choices” is exactly the same argument for taking away the vote from old people with dementia or the mentally ill.
So what you’re saying here is just a roundabout way of suggesting we should disenfranchise the literally demented and the mentally ill.
And of course, taking your other reply into account, I, too, value the power of soft authoritarian technocratic dictatorship.
Unless, of course, you are suggesting that because some limits are not present due to the dangers in imposing them, other limits which already exist and aren’t particularly dangerous to enforce should not exist?
Might I suggest that the lack of wide support for this policy by a group which consists entirely of people who were once teenagers might not be quite the same thing as the other two examples?
Wonder Woman strikes a blow against the patriarchy by having the male lead be only 4 years older than the female lead instead of 40 years older.
MRAs might see it as a victory against “female hypergamy” when the woman is actually older and slightly wealthier. Not sure how to be woke in that case.
Oh, this one is obvious. By the laws of vague internet liberal feminism, any activity can be transmuted into female empowerment if it’s done by a woman. Easy! Next question, please.
I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:
I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.
Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?
In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.
So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans.
That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)
So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.
“Paki” bad. “Bikey” good.
Let’s just refer to every nationality as they refer to themselves in their own countries, for cultural respect. Sure, it will feel weird saying “nihonjin” without saying “wa”, and everyone else will look at you like you’re Steve Naruto Midnight Raven the Ultraweeb, final boss of the figurine and dakimakura dungeon,
Wait, where was I going with this?
Oh, right, to avoid further confusion, by decree of the International Society for Metrification, residents of the United States of America shall now be known as either United Statesians or Unionese,
I mean if we’re even going to entertain the idea of minimum ages for shit like voting and serving office we should have to consider maximum ages too.
Disagree. Children can’t vote because 1) biologically incapable of making good decisions yet 2) parents are legally allowed to punish them for voting incorrectly.
Voting because of old age can only be a problem because of stuff like dementia, and then you’d have to disenfranchise all people who are not mentally capable of voting.
what’s currently being done if is a person is mentally incapable of voting, a handler votes for them, which is okay because handlers will probably trend towards voting for candidates that help people who are mentally incapable
we need to encourage more people to vote not disenfranchise them
If children vote the same as their parents that doesn’t exactly seem unfair, given that their parents are trusted rightly or wrongly with other aspects of their well-being. And if it’s a secret ballot, they can rebel as much as they like when they feel the inclination to do so.
Plus is it really that difficult to find a 14 year old that is more politically savvy than the average 30 year old?
I was 14 once and I certainly wouldn’t give my 14 year old self the vote. 14yo Miti did not understand much about war. 18yo Miti had far sounder judgment on such matters.
I was trying to ask Google why Japanese prefectures are called prefectures and I accidentally a racism:
I think the hilarity comes partly from the fact that when I stop the question at “Why are ___nese…” before I get to a noun, there is still a broken English nounification of the adjective that can happen if your standards are lax enough. And anywhere that you can ask “Why are Chinese smart?” without getting corrected on your grammar is probably also a place where you won’t get corrected on your racism. You have to be extra smart and well educated and enlightened to realize that everyone is definitely exactly the same everywhere.
Well, like, is it technically incorrect grammar?
In English, we put the plural status as part of the noun, but the Japanese language uses things like counters and the noun 日本人 does not actually specify whether you are referring to one or more Japanese people, as “neko” does not specify the number of cats, and so on. Japanese also doesn’t have an a/an/the attached to the noun.
So, if we adopt either a descriptivist mindset or some sort of cultural prescriptivist mindset, it could be argued that Japanese/Japanese is valid just as ninja/ninja and German/Germans.
That also brings up that there is no simple plural form such as “Germans”, and I don’t think anyone anywhere will approve of “Japaneses”. (Wow, “Japaneses” sounds really racist.)
So I guess it’s down to whether the listeners/readers socially approve of it, much like “Brits” is okay, but “Japs” and “Nps” were both part of pretty damned racist WW2 propaganda and are thus permanently prohibited, even though all three are just shortenings of national names.
it’s when you’re discussing how much you hate all members of group A and a person from group A is like “hold up, what?”
Okay, I laughed at that one.
To answer OP, the term is one of those SJ terms that is so easily prone to abuse that it’s poor epistemic or political hygeine or something to use it, because it can basically be used to dismiss the outgroup defending themselves.
if you were a villain, what kind of villain would you be?
I’m definitely “I’m taking over the world because under my control it would be perfect”
I’m the “mostly in it for the fashion and the Depraved Bisexuality” kind.
I’m absolutely the “been pushed too far by you assholes” kind
I’m the “taking logic to a horrifyingly inhuman extent” kind
Joke’s on you. I’m already a villain and I’ve tricked you all into following my blog.
As soon as North America is under my control, I’ll rebuild the NAU and show the Chinese and the Russians the true meaning of the words “continent-spanning superstate”.
You don’t need to be female to enjoy Wonder Woman any more than you need to be male to enjoy Captain America or a robot to enjoy WALL-E, but it’s amusing to consider identity based advertising anyway.
“fellas, finally a superhero movie you can watch without your wife nagging you!”
“tired of buff male superhero homoeroticism? how about hot lady island!”
“a woman can be just as good as a man… at dealing out violence and mayhem!”
I’ll ‘ave you know I only watch movies where the main character is my exact permutation of race, sex, internal gender identity and struggles thereof, neurotype, personal hobbies, height within 2cm and weight within +/- 2 grams.
I’m not sure what your point is there. You’re comparing different islands in a far off locations in a different state with different internal politics to tell me what exactly?
the idea that “a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it” would have some sort of mortality advantage doesn’t have any basis in fact, collapsedsquid, and I’m not sure where you got it from
Malta and Cyprus certainly didn’t get any sort of mortality boost just because they were small islands with few people on them
You can make a lot of systems work if they’re small enough that might not scale otherwise. (Singapore is small. Mauritius is small. Hong Kong is small. Norway is small.)
Though in this case it isn’t really the causative factor, IMO.
He might otherwise be arguing about restoration of political unity in China or something along those lines.
Github eliminated gender bias in selecting conference speakers for ElectronConf by using randomized blind review, 100% of selected speakers turned out to be men, so they are cancelling the conference
amazing
now reveal the demographic breakdown of the reviewers
For diversity purposes in tech companies, Asians count as white. So obviously majority white, ofc.
I mean, you think I’m shitposting, but most of my shitposts are not completely groundless - there was a criticism of diversity levels at some Silicon Valley tech company a while back, and they conveniently left out that like 30% of the staff were Asian.
(And from what I’ve read, it’s Asians that take the actual brunt of Affirmative Action policies in schools… overall I’m not sure how long the political alignment will hold out. The true racists are split on this matter from what I’ve seen.)
I was bored so I wanted to do a ballpark estimate for the excess deaths resulting from the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, assuming that a counterfactual Nationalist China would have the crude death rates of Taiwan rather than the crude death rates of China between 1953 and 1979.
It’s about 158 to 161 million.
Now, that isn’t appropriate or fair. It’s not appropriate because CDRs aren’t comparable across populations with different age structures – once you get to the 1980s It’s unfair because Taiwan had lower CDRs than Mainland China when the comparison started.
We can also ask the question of how rapidly the Nationalists and Communists reduced its mortality from the same starting point. Because the Nationalists had 18 deaths per 1,000 in 1947, we might as well start there; the Communists had the same death rate a decade later, in 1957. So what happens if we start the clock running in 1957? How does that look?
Not great for the Communists. The Communists still have about 80 million excess deaths between 1957 and 1979, of which about 39 million are from period between 1958 and 1961.
Well, I guess you can’t win ‘em all.
hey you can’t make an omelette without killing fifty million people
Like
others, Ryan reasonably selects as Exhibit A of the criminal indictment the
Chinese famines of 1958-61, with a death toll of 25-40 million, he reports, a
sizeable chunk of the 100 million corpses the “recording angels”
attribute to “Communism” (whatever that is, but let us use the
conventional term). The terrible atrocity fully merits the harsh condemnation it
has received for many years, renewed here. It is, furthermore, proper to
attribute the famine to Communism. That conclusion was established most
authoritatively in the work of economist Amartya Sen, whose comparison of the
Chinese famine to the record of democratic India received particular attention
when he won the Nobel Prize a few years ago.
Writing
in the early 1980s, Sen observed that India had suffered no such famine. He
attributed the India-China difference to India’s “political system of
adversarial journalism and opposition,” while in contrast, China’s
totalitarian regime suffered from “misinformation” that undercut a
serious response, and there was “little political pressure” from
opposition groups and an informed public (Jean Dreze and Amartya Sen, Hunger
and Public Action, 1989; they estimate deaths at 16.5 to 29.5 million).
The
example stands as a dramatic “criminal indictment” of totalitarian
Communism, exactly as Ryan writes. But before closing the book on the indictment
we might want to turn to the other half of Sen’s India-China comparison, which
somehow never seems to surface despite the emphasis Sen placed on it. He
observes that India and China had “similarities that were quite
striking” when development planning began 50 years ago, including death
rates. “But there is little doubt that as far as morbidity, mortality and
longevity are concerned, China has a large and decisive lead over India”
(in education and other social indicators as well). He estimates the excess of
mortality in India over China to be close to 4 million a year: “India seems
to manage to fill its cupboard with more skeletons every eight years than China
put there in its years of shame,” 1958-1961 (Dreze and Sen).
In
both cases, the outcomes have to do with the “ideological
predispositions” of the political systems: for China, relatively equitable
distribution of medical resources, including rural health services, and public
distribution of food, all lacking in India. This was before 1979, when “the
downward trend in mortality [in China] has been at least halted, and possibly
reversed,” thanks to the market reforms instituted that year.
Overcoming
amnesia, suppose we now apply the methodology of the Black Book and its
reviewers to the full story, not just the doctrinally acceptable half. We
therefore conclude that in India the democratic capitalist
“experiment” since 1947 has caused more deaths than in the entire
history of the “colossal, wholly failed…experiment” of Communism
everywhere since 1917: over 100 million deaths by 1979, tens of millions more
since, in India alone.
xhxhxhx: right, but Taiwan seems to have managed it without the surplus corpses
Do you think that’s because it’s a smaller island with a lot fewer people on it maybe?
Or, just gonna put this out here,
The cultural starting conditions between China and India are not the same.
We’re supposed to consider that irrelevant because all cultures are equal and human beings are just economybots, but… have you observed the records for overseas Chinese as compared to other populations?
Index funds are on a roll. Funds that
passively track indexes are popular because they’re cheaper than the
alternatives run by active money managers, and the robotic, rules-driven
funds often outperform their human rivals, too.
In fact, passive funds will swallow up the US stock market before too long, according to Pictet Asset Management (paywall). Index
trackers currently hold more than 40% of US stocks, according to
Pictet’s analysis, and if the present rate of growth continues they
could eventually own everything by 2030, or perhaps a bit before. Passive funds now control more than 30% of all US assets:
stumpyjoepete: i guess one thing to worry about is that the HFT folks have an easier time skimming off the top of those by doing cross-market frontrunning, iiuc
Some older articles I posted were about this means the stock market could totally fail to allocate capital. It also calls into the question the whole idea of the stock market and if it’s either useless in general or will stop allocating capital, the question becomes like “Why not nationalize it?“
“If these trends continue-”
It won’t happen. There is nothing to suggest that they have some sort of exotic characteristic that will become the new dominant paradigm that is the gunpowder of finance and which will push all other funds out of the market.
Probably capital allocation is currently overvalued because it controls the capital and thus decides how much it gets paid. Passive funds will continue to expand for a while and then slow down as the market is corrected.
Or something. I’m a supervillain, not an economist.
how do you (general you) deal with the thing where you become poly so now there is no excuse to say no to sex with anyone who asks? i miss being monogamous because i didn't have to have painful, frightening sex with acquaintances, but i am dating 2 people and don't want to break up with either. but random guys i'm not attracted to ask me politely for sex, i feel like saying no is bullying, i dissociate my way through sex and want to die. i wish they were rude so i didn't feel bad saying no
Hey. So: first I’m going to say some things you already know: sex is not something you need reason to refuse. You should not be having sex you don’t want. Those guys, if they are decent people, when they ask about sex, are hoping you are into them and want to have sex with them; they are not hoping that you’ll be unable to say no and then disassociate through it. You said you were okay with refusing sex with people who were rude. Well, okay. One of two things is true: either these guys are terrible people, in which case feel free to say no to them, or they don’t want to have sex that is frightening and painful for you either. The current situation is really bad for you and really bad for everyone else.
It sounds like you don’t know how to say no. It’s not just that you feel bad saying no, you can’t do it. Declining sex with perfectly nice people who you don’t want to have sex with is not a skill you have. No one starts out with skills by magic; we have to pick them up. You need this one.
Here are some things you can say:
“Sorry, but I don’t enjoy casual sex and I’m not looking for a new relationship right now.”
“Thanks, but I am not looking for new partners.”
And here are some things you can do:
You can tell your friend group “I don’t like being asked for sex in person, because I’m bad at saying ‘no’.” Lots of people will ask someone’s friends how to ask them out, and if your friends know how to look out for you they’ll be likelier to say ‘don’t ask them out face-to-face, they find that really stressful’.
You can find a friend, or ask one of your existing partners. Have them pretend to be a perfectly nice guy who you don’t want to have sex with. Have them nicely ask you for sex. And turn them down. It’ll probably feel awkward and silly and contrived, but you literally need practice at saying these words. And your brain needs reassurance that when you say those words the other person might be disappointed but they will probably not snarl ‘you monster! how dare you exist while not wanting sex with me?’
And if they do, then they’re not good people and you can reject them with a clear conscience.
(To be clear, you should have a clear conscience about rejecting people anyway; there are lots of lovely people in the world and I want to have sex with practically none of them and that is entirely okay. Eventually I hope you won’t need an excuse. But in the meantime please please pick one and practice using it.)
I think “Reality Winner“ might be an even better name than “Shadow Moon.“ That is a mythological name that truly captures the meaning of the current era.
My name used to be Raven Moon Night Wolf but I had it changed to Magato Rana to fit the current fashion.
Wait, that’s a real name? In this era? How unexpected. I suppose I need to revise my estimates around contemporary names in the US.
I think “Reality Winner“ might be an even better name than “Shadow Moon.“ That is a mythological name that truly captures the meaning of the current era.
My name used to be Raven Moon Night Wolf but I had it changed to Magato Rana to fit the current fashion.
do you ever have that dream where the sj and anti-sj trains crash into each other and all of them die in a giant fireball because I have that dream every night
This has already happened on tungler dot hell years ago, and we, mad and in deep denial, scavenge for questionably dressed anime girls on this desolated wasteland
I appreciate all the effort you’re going through to bring me random images of naked women, but… Look, I know some people will say this is racist, but I won’t anyone who can’t complete a captcha, okay? So you really don’t need to go through the effort, because you really don’t have a chance.
And I know you’re trying to endear yourselves to me with that unlawfully leaked image of Sheila from Accounting, but it’s just… it’s in very poor taste, okay? It’s less disturbing when you bring me incorrectly-tagged bouquets of cars that are not actually Japanese.
What do you think the odds are of least one congressman in the next few years coming out and saying they think the Earth is flat and that NASA’s been lying to us? Realistically, 10, 12%?
Like, the head of an MRA reddit got outed as an elected rep, you’re acting like these people don’t already control NASA funding
Redpill, not MRA
Remember when an article was published saying that “MRAs” were in a frothing rage over Mad Max: Fury Road, but actually it was RoK, a site that explicitly thinks MRAs are all losers?
At this point, I’m very close to thinking the misinformation is deliberate.
Our descendants will find our songs about butts and preference for thick ones ridiculously quaint, much like the Victorians going apeshit over visible ankles.
#god knows what they will be into #livers maybe
Nah man,
This trend ain’t sustainable. Eventually you get into stuff that’s taboo because it’s actually grievously harmful, and then there will be more rebellion against decadence than there already is. People talk like that about mono people doing BDSM in their bedrooms while looking nornal on the outside, but that doesn’t even begin to touch the barest outer surface of harmfulness of some possible tracks.
So I think it will split, and we’ll be looking at weird transhuman augmentations and monstergirls/boys, catgirls, and so on while another group goes to restore tradition and yet another group becomes truly debauched degenerates.
Also in the future, I think they’ll look at porn somewhat like we look at alcohol.
the gay marriage will lead to polygamy slippery slope argument makes it sound like homophobes are more worried about a dude marrying two women than another dude.
It isn’t obvious, Argumate, dear old boy? It’s trying to trade against the greater remaining taboo value of the second to stop the first. The ideological tools to pass the first will be used to try to allow the second, even though gay marriage is most likely pro-civic while polygamy is very likely anti-civic. (The civicness is not the argument being used, after all!)
I’m trying to understand the point of this NRx post from 2015, so maybe some defenders of this perspective can explain.
It seems to say as trust in a cynical Cathedral collapses, then people have no source of knowledge but tribal ingroup beliefs. This leads to cynical nihilism and blind allegiance to your social division.
Which, true, but how is this different than before? As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities. You’ve traded one authority for another, but how did things get worse and why would you want to go back?
“As it acknowledges, the trust in Science! before was just trust in your social authorities.” The piece definitely does not acknowledge this, not in the way you’re framing it, which is kind of the critical point.
As the theory goes –
* Objective truth is an accessible and relevant thing. (In your language: science, and similar methodologies, provide some level of access to the Real.) There is an important difference between listening to your doctor and listening to your priest, which is that your doctor actually knows complicated facts about the actual goddamn universe that will allow him to solve your medical problems, whereas the priest is mostly just an expositor of local ideology.
* “Rational ignorance” is the practice of deferring to the expertise of those who know Science! that you don’t, because you can’t know all the Science! yourself.
* Scientific experts can “sell out to the Cathedral” by lacing their allegedly-scientific recommendations with ideology, or even by outright dropping the science wholesale and purveying uncut ideology. This can pay dividends for them in terms of social power, cognitive assonance, etc. However…
* …it’s a self-destructive strategy in the long term, because you can’t fool all the people all the time. Eventually, your patients are going to notice that your “medical advice” is no longer doing any better than priestcraft in terms of getting them results.
* At which point they abandon you and start listening to whichever set of priests they like best anyway. Faith in Science! as an objective, neutral, supra-ideological methodology has been destroyed.
You can feel about that however you want, but I’m pretty sure it fairly describes the content of the post.
Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?
There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.
Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.
There was literally a Battle Royal at a local public high school a couple years back. A 14 year old was arrested a couple days ago with a loaded gun. All gang related, of course.
When physical safety can’t be assured in the school, if you call it racism and classism that people want to pull their kids out, aren'tyou just assuming that certain races and classes are inherently violent and criminal?
I’m saying that parents view certain races as inherently violent and criminal. They are the ones who will be choosing where their kids go.
The article in question doesn’t seem like a very convincing counterargument, honestly. It’s not so much that people want to take their kids out of “ethnic” schools because they’re racist, it’s that people want their kids in good, safe schools, and those are heavily linked to class and economic factors, and those are heavily stratified by race due to legal and historical factors. But you’d see the same general pattern even in a society with no racism, it’d just be aligned on whatever axes of social inequality were most relevant in that society.
Personally, I have mixed feelings on the subject. The current system fucks up property values in ways that have negative side-effects, it’s still gameable, and it’s essentially crab-bucketing – the idea is to make it hard for even upper-class people to escape terrible hell schools, so that they’ll be motivated to make them less bad, but that doesn’t seem to have really manifested.
On the other hand, social stratification is certainly going to be worse under vouchers, and it will mark a movement to a more high-pressure cram-school type lifestyle for students. It will diminish the proportion of the population that’s trapped in the dead-end hell schools while still keeping it enormous, which increases the likelihood that they’re there for good. So it’s really a question of what percentile we want to optimize for here. Obviously, people mostly want to optimize for theirs, but it’s not at all clear to me that there’s a right answer.
The upper class people aren’t *allowed* to make the schools less bad. When some kid comes in with the intention of starting a knife fight, knife in hand, he needs to be either punished hard, or kicked out of the school. Ideally bad behavior should be punished proportionately long before then. It doesn’t take much to disrupt a classroom if no one has the ability to remove a child or punish them for being disruptive and the kid knows it.
Many on the Left think it’s just about being discriminatory, but do people really think my parents would give a damn about the number of black kids if they were all college-bound? No, this is almost entirely about selecting the kids whose parents will punish them for causing trouble (which is what actually gives detention any teeth) and kids who actually have something to lose.
It’s been deemed unethical to allow the schools to punish the children, so that just leaves exclusion.
To prevent stratification, just don’t make the vouchers additive - you either pay only the voucher or you pay the whole thing yourself. That will allow routing around the political damage.
All this complaining about racism and classism, but who is really being hurt most by the status quo? It certainly isn’t upper middle class suburbia.
I feel the left (as represented here on Tumblr) is too busy looking backwards and larping the Spanish Civil War, and it’s sort of sad.
If you look back at socialist activism 100 years ago it was dynamic and offered a vision of the future that was challenging, while today it’s all about justifying failed states and bickering over whether Stalin was really that bad.
maybe there are exciting things happening in leftist enclaves somewhere, but they don’t seem to have any impact or be able to capitalise on things like the GFC or public dissatisfaction with neoliberalism.
Anyone talking about workers’ councils is stuck in the 20th century. The future is digital and uses far more exotic organizational systems.
Hey quick question, why is the music app on the iPhone so fucking worthless? Cant repeat songs anymore, cant listen to all a bands albums back to back. Wtf, it’s unusable.
No competition.
Don’t be so harsh Ranma-san. They’re just trying to ~simplify~ the listening experience. Listening to one song over and over repeatedly, hah, who would do such a thing? Sounds like a total dork!
* hides in the bushes with an Android phone, listening to one song over and over again, as Apple iCopters buzz overhead, searching for the last users to escape the Walled Garden of Babylon, *
Sometimes I forget that you’re older and thus a more powerful vampire more experienced than me.
Forgive me if I ever seem too provincial.
I leave out all the boring and embarrassing details. FWIW I might have been the dumbest least well-adjusted guy in my class.
Scattered thoughts on education:
If a technocratic dictator instituted a centrally managed, stratified education system (tracking), then party officials/bureaucrats would use it to extort parents by holding children hostage.
If school vouchers/tutor vouchers are in any way transferrable or fungible, alcoholic parents will sell them to temporarily embarrassed, frugal intelligentsia and thus widen the educational gap.
Efforts to make education more integrated are sold as left-wing or fostering solidarity and social cohesion, but are actually cost-cutting measures that make education net worse for everybody (Will-Rogers-Effect).
There is a lot of confounding going on between socioeconomic class and school/teaching style. Waldorf education is notoriously bad at actually imparting knowledge on children, but it tends to attract hippie parents with strong convictions and disposable income (I knew a couple of Waldorf-educated math students. They hated it. I don’t know if they would have hated regular high schools less, but still).
Montessori Schools are actually based on constructivist developmental psychology and not eastern mysticism woo, but the selection effect is even bigger there.
Moscow-educated mathematicians or rather math teachers trained by Moscow-educated mathematicians were great at actually teaching math. I learned more English from Cartoon Network than from my teachers though. Eastern bloc English teachers were not very good. Same goes for Latin, but there was no Reticulum Tabulae.
I liked several books that were later required reading, before they were required reading.
Finnish comprehensive primary school until grade 10 with a good teacher/student ratio has the best outcomes in the EU. It’s not at all clear what causes that.
Back to vouchers:
I personally believe that there are lots of high school teachers out there either who do not understand the subject they are teaching or suck at the didactics of their subject. Good teachers can have a positive effect on students, but are limited by the material they work with.
Bad students can drag the rest of the class down. Smaller classrooms have numerous benefits: Not only does the teacher have more timer per student, but students who are slow to grok a particular concept keep the whole class back. It makes a difference if you have one stupid question per hour or three. The time adds up. It’s not always the same student lagging in every subject.
If you can use vouchers to pay for remedial classes or individual tutors in specific subjects, you could have slightly bigger classes moving on a much more consistent pace. It might be smarter to reduce the student/teacher ratio as needed for specific students and subjects.
I am much more skeptical of vouchers for whole schools (Which seems to be the proposed policy in the US?).
Actually, I already laid out a plan for a total revamp, something I’d instantiate a few prototypes of were I actually the technocratic dicta- er, I mean Central Director. Perhaps you could comment on it.
Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding.
But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system.
(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)
“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.
Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.
So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.
Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.
I went to a high school that was created before the fall of the Iron Curtain to turn gifted children of trusted citizens into scientists and engineers. The schizophrenic stance of progressive governments to create more comprehensive schools while simultaneously claiming education is the future must be grating. Nobody really believes that we need any bakers, butchers, farmers, plumbers, carpenters, or locksmiths. I guess that’s why people IRL dismiss any and all of my thoughts on education policy.
Who wants to be any of those things when they don’t pay enough money (or else are tough to get into) and housing prices are rising out of control due to bad policy backed by bad politics?
Who wants to go to a comprehensive school that pays lip service to the idea that intelligentsia and working class go there together, but actually there are no working class jobs and you’re fucked if you don’t get a university degree? Why even bother with all this inclusion? Why have comprehensive schools at all in this environment?
Does America have comprehensive schools in that sense? From what I’ve seen, talking about how the school includes blue collar elements is the lip service, and those programs are being cut.
But then, I come from a background where my formative high school years were in a school district that educated professionals moved to to raise their kids in a good school district.
Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding.
But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system.
(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)
“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.
Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.
So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.
Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.
I went to a high school that was created before the fall of the Iron Curtain to turn gifted children of trusted citizens into scientists and engineers. The schizophrenic stance of progressive governments to create more comprehensive schools while simultaneously claiming education is the future must be grating. Nobody really believes that we need any bakers, butchers, farmers, plumbers, carpenters, or locksmiths. I guess that’s why people IRL dismiss any and all of my thoughts on education policy.
Who wants to be any of those things when they don’t pay enough money (or else are tough to get into) and housing prices are rising out of control due to bad policy backed by bad politics?
Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?
There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.
Yup, those parents gotta take their kids away from the blacks and the poors. Fortunately there’ll be no blowback there.
Ah yes, there are no actual problems, just bigotry…
Well, you realize the marginal political will for vouchers is being driven by public schools’ inability to either punish or exclude problem students, right?
There’s some demand for homeschooling or religious schooling, but it isn’t what’s driving it at the margins.
Like, if the voucher system has bad results, then its bad (at least in the present context). If charter schools don’t turn out well, then they don’t and they shouldn’t get funding.
But I’m still pretty disturbed by the way that many left-wing people seem to treat any attempt to provide alternatives to conventional public schools as some kind of aggression against the continued existence of an education system.
(There’s meanwhile an attitude among some generally red-tribe right wingers that ~~(neo)Liberal Elites~~ send their children to expensive elite-gifted private schools where they don’t have to deal with how horrible the public schools are – and “horrible” often means “ill-managed”, not just “ill-funded”. Meanwhile, there is no fundamental reason why mass private schooling could not be a thing.)
“Left wing” aka Dems for purposes of this discussion, are, I’m pretty sure, thoroughly purchased by the teachers unions, which warps the market significantly.
Yes, that is totally it, and not all the fiasco that’s happened with for-profit higher education or the fact that turning any government program into a grant is the first step of starving it to death, or any one of a dozen of other reasons.
So what you’re saying is, if I were technocratic dictator and enacted a voucher policy, it would be fine, since it would not actually be the first step towards killing public education.
Just kidding, I’d radically restructure the whole system in such a way that the bulk of marginal political will for vouchers would coincidentally evaporate.
