“money can’t buy happiness” is such a baby boomer concept like…. I don’t want excessive wealth to buy a golf plated toilet seat Karen, I just wish I wasn’t crying because I can’t afford both spaghetti and rent after working 40 hours a week
Now see, I reaaaally want to use this post to bitch about not building enough housing units keeping the rents high where the jobs are in the first place.
Unironically I sort of want to boycott Nestlé because of all the generally horrible things they’ve done (use child labor, slave labor, said water isn’t a human right, asking for payment for Ethiopia after they provided them with famine relief, etc) but at the same that’s near impossible considering all the industries they have their hands in. As hypocritical as it sorta sounds, I can’t afford to buy 100% fair trade stuff with no Nestlé logo whatsoever even if morally I see it as the optimal thing to do. Am I being overly scrupulous?
Exactly. Even if we’re to forget my moral and ethical concerns, it’s just generally bad for consumers. Companies like Nestlé, Mars, Procter & Gamble, hold onto alot of industries in what’s effectively monopolies. It doesn’t seem pronounced but it leaves us with solely expensive alternatives or else any semblance of competition will just die or be bought out. These effects are even more exasperated in smaller and/or more impoverished communities.
it’s called an oligopoly and while it’s not “technically” a monopoly its almost as bad.
oligopoly, the new board game where you team up with your friends to control the apparently irrelevant dog food market
The trick is to just stop caring because none of this actually affects you in any way shape or form
from there the only thing you have to worry about is being jealous that you can’t get away that that sort of thing yourself
Look brah, I know you have that doesn’t-care-about-others-except-your-boyfriend thing (although that you do care about your boyfriend is quite humanizing - a nice touch), but 1) major shifts in consumption habits really have been occurring, and 2) if not enough people care it’s actually really difficult to maintain civilization and have nice things. (Though I will admit that I suppose if too many people care too much it could also destroy civilization, we’re just dealing with like a ten cent increase in the price of chocolate or something here.)
Boston-based multi-trillion asset manager State Street Global
Advisors, the controversial company behind the now infamous feminist
symbol (and selfie cameo) The Fearless Girl,
is settling federal allegations that it discriminated against 305 women
in senior positions by paying them less than their male counterparts.
The settlement, first reported by Bloomberg, also names fifteen black vice presidents paid less than their white counterparts, genders not specified.
Now remove the statue so that we can have our glorious bull, which was originally placed somewhat subversively but kept due to the adoration of the people, restored to its original context.
this is why they don't want to let birds on Tumblr. wildlife conservation is gonna be pissed after you've grimaced yourself to death on discourse. don't you owe it to Australia's environment to log off and go hunt small rodents?
I just find it amusing that every self-described leftist who accuses me of being a fascist invariably gets torn to pieces by other self-described leftists a week later, who then get torn to pieces in turn, and so on ad infinitum, like a bizarre political karma system.
so in other words, become a chad if you don't want to get falsely accused of rape??
There is no guarantee, and if you look like a sufficiently valuable target, you may be attacked regardless, however…
Being attractive and high-status is a major defense against many forms of social attack. People will like you and make excuses for you, when they won’t for equally-deserving others that are less handsome and less popular.
It can help even in environments that say they are against lookism and unfair benefits from popularity.
The best defense against this particular accusation, of course, is to be born cis female. (Of course, that’s still only a partial defense.)
we’ve circled all the way around to “you’re too unattractive to be falsely accused of rape”, the mind boggles.
Oh come on mysterious blogger Argumate is thinking of, surely the ugly, undesirable, and otherwise low-status are the best targets for a false accusation?
People already don’t like them and find the thought of them as sexual beings to be creepy and repulsive.
One of the things I think about a lot is imagine asking an individual politician what value they provide to society: they can list work they’ve done, initiatives they’ve sponsored, speeches they’ve given, constituent interests they’ve represented, and so on.
Now imagine asking an entire party what value they provide to society: they can do something similar and talk about the good stuff they’ve done and the bad stuff from those other guys they’ve opposed.
Now imagine asking the entire representative body what value they provide to society and suddenly it gets much trickier, because they are inherently working at cross purposes to each other and most of their “work” is simply inhibition.
“As a group we’ve had endless debate, passed a bill, wrangled for a while, repealed the bill, wrangled a little more, then passed a similar but worse bill.”
There really isn’t any way to justify the existence of representative bodies as a group without saying look we’ve had five thousand years of power struggles that involved stabbings and this is a small step up from that, count your blessings.
But to say,
as Sarah Champion did,
that “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and
exploiting white girls” is either saying that Pakistanis are more likely
to rape and more likely to rape white girls, or that the rape of white
girls is more of a problem than the rape of, for example, white boys or
brown girls.
– Chi Onwurah
Worst take on Rotherham yet. Seriously.
Isn’t it… Literally true that British Pakistani immigrant men disproportionately rape white girls? Isn’t that a large part of the Rotherham scandal, that this is widespread and well above the base rate? So yeah, people are saying it is more likely. Because it literally is.
Now, if people are saying “therefore we should treat this subgroup with extra suspicion”, sure, you can object to that. Presumably a bunch of Rotherham-complainers are doing exactly that, and they shouldn’t.
But what makes the Rotherham scandal special is not that one subgroup committed a pile of crimes at a rate disproportionate to the population at large. The usual “treat people as individuals” liberal rhetoric is well-equipped to handle such cases and maintain social harmony while prosecuting offenders.
No, it’s that people didn’t treat them the same way. They literally discriminated, but the other way, letting minority groups get away with much more. It’s really hollow to try to dismiss the Rotherham scandal by saying “You can’t treat people differently based on their ethnicity/country of origin!” when the entire problem is that people did exactly that. If the relevant authorities had treated people the same regardless of ethnicity and national origin, Rotherham wouldn’t be nearly so big a scandal.
When I first heard about Rotherham, I was bracing for it to be yet another instance of conservatives claiming “PC culture means you can’t call out minorities who actually commit crimes!” without much basis. But then they had an actual example of just that, and a really grotesque one, too. Maybe all their other talking points and examples are shit, but this one isn’t. Haven’t seen anyone debunk it. People who support the culture that produced this trainwreck need to explain how this type of failure can be prevented under their frameworks. If parts of the progressive agenda are at fault for this, then we need to cut those parts out. I don’t believe that attacking racism has to involve letting rape gangs slide. If I thought that, I’d be a lot more conservative than I am.
And if I thought preventing these types of things required keeping out immigrants of certain nationalities, again, I would be a lot more conservative than I am. But as @mitigatedchaos says, you need the will to actually enforce your culture at times, if you want a liberal society that functions correctly. If there is a cultural cause of these rape gangs, then it must be stamped out. The left loves to fight the culture war; they should enjoy fighting this battle of it, too. “Respecting culture” has always been a lie; we have always judged and will always judge the merits of various cultural pieces, just as the left constantly attacks (often rightly!) the culture of conservative Christians. Feminists should be lining up to condemn the rape culture at work here. It seems in their wheelhouse.
Once more, if I believed that culture war tools were insufficient to fight this battle, I would be a lot more reactionary than I am. But I believe that we can change cultures, and yeah, you can call it “imposing our will on minorities” if you wanna make it sound ominous, but that’s kind of what society does. We can and should have broad, consensus standards for behavior. It doesn’t work if murder being okay is just a matter of opinion and cultural difference. If the “murder is okay” people are to coexist with me, they should be on the other side of the globe, in some other society where I don’t have to ever meet them.
Regarding the original quote: I wouldn’t put it as “Britain has a problem with British Pakistani men raping and exploiting white girls”. I would say: “Britain has a problem with British authorities too chickenshit to go after rape gangs because they happen to be a minority ethnicity, and they fear being called racist more than they fear child sex trafficking.” Or perhaps it wasn’t fear of being called racist; perhaps they simply didn’t have the resolve to wield the iron hand of the state in communities not culturally similar to them. But that is their responsibility, to intervene fairly and consistently. (A third option is that they dismissed the allegations as racist, and so didn’t act. That also condemns them, albeit in a slightly different way.)
Whatever the answer, something’s wrong.
Much though it pains me to say it, the conservatives have a point, and it has to be addressed.
In the end, I did become more right wing, not because I think it’s mechanically impossible for the modern left of center to use the tools, but rather because I don’t believe they will have the will to do so unless they are forced to.
To unlock that capability, that willpower to acknowledge that there is actually a problem, which is so unwoke (they’ll defend Islam and Muslims even over other “religions of color”), they ultimately must be threatened with cultural displacement and made to compete.
A lot of my thinking on what counts as actually-degenerate now, vs what could count as that in the future, depends significantly on available medical and legal technology.
Keeping birthrates steady is key in a society where lifespan has not been radically extended.
The lack of artificial wombs makes it far more difficult for the state to, if necessary, raise children to make up for population shortfalls.
STDs still exist, some of them are becoming antibiotic-resistant, some of them are permanent.
Most radical body modifications just aren’t feasible right now without dramatically risking the health of the subject.
Difficult-to-impossible for most people to exit their sexuality means that most people are locked in as heteros so gender ratios matter a lot.
Difficult-to-impossible for most people to remain young in appearance, and healthy beyond current healthspans. Long-term irreparable deterioration inevitable.
Cannot adequately repair DNA damage accrued through having children while of too great a genetic similarity.
Heritable diseases largely incurable, cannot be simply edited out.
Can’t repair brain damage beyond some minimum natural level at current tech level, including psychologically-induced trauma.
Can’t repair limbs effectively, replacement prosthetics are of substandard performance.
I’m not against a future of immortal cyborg mermaids polyamorously dating cyborg vampires while engaging in extreme Martian exosports per se, but I am against picking the policies that make sense for that future long before they make sense for our present moment.
My stretch goal is basically to reconcile LessWrongian high rationalism, hyper-individualistic social liberalism, socialism (or at least something that might be called that), degeneracy, and being really, really autistic into a stable totalizing* ideology, and then use it to overthrow the old world order, reeducate the normies, and hold off the dark forces of GNON until we can ascend to heaven.
Everyone needs a little hubris in their life.
*totalizing is not the same thing as totalitarian
It’s really interesting to see a list of all the things I used to idolise and now find eh, unpleasant, or horrifying all in one place like this.
It’s like imagining living in a utopia designed by a younger me and then immediately searching for a rope to hang myself.
I wouldn’t find a utopia designed by a younger me all that terrifying.
On the other hand, I’ve been getting more extreme over time, not less.
And now, since my political prescriptions vary by time, resources, technology level, and so on, the question of “what does my utopia look like?” depends on just which decade or century it’s proposed for, and for which country.
It’s funny, because I’m the opposite of OP on a number of these.
Integration of intuition over purist high rationalism.
Recreation of stabilizing and mutually-supporting communities over hyper-individualism, even if the borders of those communities are porous. Pragmatic social centrism oriented towards social welfare and economic production over radical social liberalism.
Something most people would consider to be a variety of Capitalism, even if the nation-state is considered more important than capital, and even though it includes substantial welfare-type payments.
The anti-incentivization of actually-degenerate behaviors. (”Being gay” doesn’t count. Cousin marriage does.)
Increased respect for the viability of basic normie intuitions such as relationship jealousy as, while not being right 100% of the time, being right for most normies most of the time.
The prevention of the emergence of a world government, and instead the instantiation of a new order of cooperating groups of Nationalists.
I’m becoming more and more suspicious that the christians may be right about porn.
Porn isn’t a mass corrupting influence in the way the opposition portrays it, per se.
It’s alcohol.
Some people can drink responsibly… some people can’t. And if you’re drinking too often, it’s either a sign that something is very broken in your life and you should fix that instead of drinking so much - or that you’re addicted to it.
You know, I got that on [other platform], too. In fact, someone once approached my girlfriend at the time because they were too cripplingly socially anxious to approach me.
…and also my other ex described my dating profile as a bit that way, once…
A-am I not moe enough? * hides pile of guns under strawberry plush pillow *
Why did the early 2000s neocons think we could export liberal democracy to the Middle East? We can’t even export liberal democracy to the United States.
Once you drink too much of certain variants of Liberalism, you start assuming that Liberal Democracy is the natural condition of mankind and once the restraints are removed, it will naturally emerge and take root, along with economic development.
I mean, it‘s probably doable, but step 1 is to enforce a ban on cousin marriage for 1000 years.
Ah, but you see, Neocons are ideologically prohibited from acknowledging this, because hey, what is a foreign culture but food and clothing waiting to be sold in the United States?
You could do it in far fewer generations, but you’d have to install a 20-year military governorship, still ban cousin marriages out to the third degree, enforce village exogamy, and seize total control of the educational system to wipe out non-trivial parts of the culture and replace them with ideology necessary to support Liberal Democracy.
That’s a pretty big ideological price, and it would require a long troop presence to enforce.
It’s hardly impossible. Afghanistan was liberalizing at one point. But if you’re too hooked on the ideology that democracy flowers in all soils, it isn’t possible for you to carry it out.
That actually kinda sounds like “the last few hundred years of Japanese history, but faster”.
I mean, if you believe Clark, it sounds like the last thousand years of Western European history, only faster.
“The Development of Advanced Industrial Civilization, But Faster”
A plan for the Middle East from Award-Winning1, Internationally-Published2 Politics Blogger Mitigated Chaos
1 Winner of first annual Rationalist Adjacent Award for Blog Most Resembling Mitigated Chaos 2 Blog available in all jurisdictions where Tumblr is accessible
I’ve vaguely heard murmurings about a secular decline in testosterone levels, but imagined it was overhyped or at worst just a result of the obesity epidemic. @lambdaphagy and I had a chance to just scratch the surface of the literature, though, and it’s frankly alarming.
The speed of that T drop is just jaw-dropping. Obesity doesn’t help, but doesn’t explain this level of cratering. So: phytoestrogens, xenoestrogens, micropharmaceuticals in the water, behavioral effects? More work is required, but hit me up if you have any good intel.
Cold Take: Crime declined because we removed lead from the gasoline, lowering the amount of lead-induced brain damage.
Lukewarm Take: Crime declined because we allowed abortion, removing some of the worst-off potential people from being born and raised in substandard conditions.
Hot Take: Crime declined because we put drugs in the water supply and we’re all transgender autistics/neurodivergents now, even the women. (Especially the women.)
hmm arguing with a straight face that racism against white people is bad because it’s a slippery slope that can lead to racism against non-white people
…I
OK separately I think racism against white people is bad because it is racism.
But also I actually think that yes, unironically this? If you officially start designating races and you treat them differently (e.g.: Affirmative action), people will follow suit by thinking of them differently.
Isn’t this just what @mitigatedchaos argues all the time, that all racism is empowered and normalized by all other racism? (And the generalized version of this for the left’s hypocrisies.)
More seriously, while being racist towards white people is bad on its own merits, either as a violation of justice - judging someone for the actions of another - or on more Utilitarian grounds, most of the people that are seriously racist against the whities aren’t going to accept those arguments.
Thus the appeal to something they might actually care about.
It’s possible to create political will out of thin air, but a lot of the time it’s in reaction to historical or material factors, and political will with those factors will have deeper roots.
It’s important to realize along with this, that most politics will occur around the margins - whether groups of white supremacists are growing or shrinking, whether swing voters shift from one party to another, and so on. Strong believers do have an effect, but it’s necessary to have raw power mass at your disposal.
As such, the question is not about “but if we be nice to our rivals, they will still be maximally evil,” but about “what’s the marginal rate that people will enter or leave our enemy’s coalition?”
Now that doesn’t mean playing along nicely all the time, but for goodness sake people should be very careful and specific in who they are targetting, and most racism is really bad at doing that.
The discussion we SHOULD be having RE: the vegas attack is if nihlist mindless violence should count as “terrorism” since there’s no real set ideology driving it
I mean, assuming Stephen Paddock’s brother is correct and he didn’t have any sort of radical political or religious affiliations and just was going for the high score, is it still terror? Is murder for murder’s sake an ideology?
hmm arguing with a straight face that racism against white people is bad because it’s a slippery slope that can lead to racism against non-white people
…I
OK separately I think racism against white people is bad because it is racism.
But also I actually think that yes, unironically this? If you officially start designating races and you treat them differently (e.g.: Affirmative action), people will follow suit by thinking of them differently.
Isn’t this just what @mitigatedchaos argues all the time, that all racism is empowered and normalized by all other racism? (And the generalized version of this for the left’s hypocrisies.)
See, though, has anyone done a parody/fanfic of the original story, except instead of being a mysterious and sinister dark-skinned Egyptian man, Nyarly was just straight-up an anime girl? Maybe like some sort of holo-idol with a hologram posse, and the narrator exits to find himself in not a world of apocalypse, but a world of moe.
I think self-defense shortcuts a lot of the debate over shooting conscripts. As my sergeant put it, if someone's pointing a weapon at you, you can rightfully kill them, period. Maybe your rules of engagement should include more room to allow for surrender from conscripts, but when the bullets start flying, who is shooting at you is no longer relevant.
Or to put it another way, if you give voters the same level of responsibility for a war that you give a soldier volunteering to go over and fight it, then you are starting to weight very heavily on partial causal factors - which means that you can weight on the causal factors that contribute to the risk of a war. No snowflake thinks itself responsible for the avalanche.
Attempted murder is just as bad, in a more Deontological sense, as murder, right?
Thus being a Fascist and not starting a war is as bad as being a Fascist and starting a war, under that line of thinking.
However, Fascism is not the only ideology to start wars of imperialism. Communism and other ideologies have done this, too. Therefore, before a war even starts, and even if it’s hopeless that they could hope to start one, Communists are a potential valid target.
So this isn’t really seeming like a good plan to me, here.
In ideal liberal theory, citizens themselves are the source of all
governmental actions in one form or another. This is a unifying
principle of what makes a liberal theory a liberal theory, at least for
the contractarians. The conclusion then that citizens within liberal
societies are not covered under the [Neutrality-innocence justification] follows in a fairly
straight-forward fashion. If a government decides to go to war, that
decision only comes about as a result of the citizens authorizing the
government to do so. The citizenry’s role in the war is as the
originator of the action towards war. This might happen electorally or
it might happen by consenting to a societal structure that allows wars
to be waged. Regardless of which one happens to be the case, the
citizens are necessarily participating in the process of waging war.
Thus, the citizens are not innocent of the decision to pursue war, for
it is they who are authorizing the decision; and, the citizens are not
neutral towards the war effort because it is their actions (consent)
that causes the war to occur. Because the citizens are non-neutral and
non-innocent, the
[Neutrality-innocence justification]
cannot apply.
You’re either a subject of your government with no say and therefore not a legitimate target, or a citizen with say and therefore a legitimate target.
An interesting argument.
A terrorist blowing themselves up in the middle of a crowd of anti-war demonstrators would be perfectly justified according to this theory, which is your first clue that it is not also a good argument.
If killin antiwar protesters is forbidden, what about killing civilian pro-war activists? What about conscripts?
Since when do such movements limit themselves to civilian pro-war activists?
As far as I can tell, “a terrorist movement which only selectively attacks political operatives that are against their national separatism” (or similar) is something that largely just doesn’t happen.
I think it would be a lot smarter and likely to succeed than what tends to actually happen. It provides a very clear Exit path, draws in far fewer in opposition (since those of opposed ideologies are at much less personal risk), spends scarce public resentment resources over targets that disproportionately help the opposition, etc.
From what little I know, that might fit the IRA?
Anyhow, whenever I see this argument, I never see it in a more nuanced form suggesting that the force of violence be directed over the actual movers of political power towards war.
Instead, it’s usually “and therefore 9/11 was justified.” The problem with this is that the same reason meddling over there created the conditions for bringing about 9/11, launching 9/11 creates the conditions for the Iraq War. That’s just how people are - and in many ways it makes sense for them to be that way. From a practical perspective, all this viewpoint does is increase, rather than decrease, war.
Okay, how about this take - the power falloff is fairly significant as you go from politicians, to political operatives, to voters, and war is only one axis of any major political party.
As such, retribution/war justification falloff is also significant. Otherwise, you start losing the argument that says forced-/non-supporters of $FASCIST_REGIME should be killed because they didn’t do enough to resist it.
(Which is of course not the Utilitarian “we don’t want to kill them, killing them is not good in itself, but from a practical perspective we must destroy $FASCIST_REGIME and that takes priority.”)
How much control do soldiers have?
See, that’s part of why I think a more highly Deontological justification for war is unsuitable, generally. You get weird things like desperately trying not to shoot the enemy conscripts or something, instead of dealing with the practical matter that it is likely necessary to do so in order to win the war.
It might be relevant if you have extraordinarily more power than the enemy. The US military fighting Iraq the first time deliberately held back on anti-personnel tactics and let lots of them surrender.
But, let’s suppose you’re a state on the border of the Soviet Union, they’re throwing waves and waves of conscripts at you, and it’s taking everything you have not to become the next megafamine zone.
You just can’t afford that.
There are other issues. As one chips away at civilian protection for the powerful, developed nations, one is chipping away at the civilian protection for less powerful nations. Even the non-voting subjects contribute economically to the despot’s war effort, if unwillingly.
It risks summoning Total War if people actually start to accept this doctrine, rather than this weird, chewing-around-the-edges thing we have now.
But it goes deeper.
If you go after the civilian political factions that cause a war now, it makes sense to start going after ones that might cause a war in the future - like Communists.
And if ideology is a valid target, then so is religion.
In ideal liberal theory, citizens themselves are the source of all
governmental actions in one form or another. This is a unifying
principle of what makes a liberal theory a liberal theory, at least for
the contractarians. The conclusion then that citizens within liberal
societies are not covered under the [Neutrality-innocence justification] follows in a fairly
straight-forward fashion. If a government decides to go to war, that
decision only comes about as a result of the citizens authorizing the
government to do so. The citizenry’s role in the war is as the
originator of the action towards war. This might happen electorally or
it might happen by consenting to a societal structure that allows wars
to be waged. Regardless of which one happens to be the case, the
citizens are necessarily participating in the process of waging war.
Thus, the citizens are not innocent of the decision to pursue war, for
it is they who are authorizing the decision; and, the citizens are not
neutral towards the war effort because it is their actions (consent)
that causes the war to occur. Because the citizens are non-neutral and
non-innocent, the
[Neutrality-innocence justification]
cannot apply.
You’re either a subject of your government with no say and therefore not a legitimate target, or a citizen with say and therefore a legitimate target.
An interesting argument.
A terrorist blowing themselves up in the middle of a crowd of anti-war demonstrators would be perfectly justified according to this theory, which is your first clue that it is not also a good argument.
If killin antiwar protesters is forbidden, what about killing civilian pro-war activists? What about conscripts?
Since when do such movements limit themselves to civilian pro-war activists?
As far as I can tell, “a terrorist movement which only selectively attacks political operatives that are against their national separatism” (or similar) is something that largely just doesn’t happen.
I think it would be a lot smarter and likely to succeed than what tends to actually happen. It provides a very clear Exit path, draws in far fewer in opposition (since those of opposed ideologies are at much less personal risk), spends scarce public resentment resources over targets that disproportionately help the opposition, etc.
From what little I know, that might fit the IRA?
Anyhow, whenever I see this argument, I never see it in a more nuanced form suggesting that the force of violence be directed over the actual movers of political power towards war.
Instead, it’s usually “and therefore 9/11 was justified.” The problem with this is that the same reason meddling over there created the conditions for bringing about 9/11, launching 9/11 creates the conditions for the Iraq War. That’s just how people are - and in many ways it makes sense for them to be that way. From a practical perspective, all this viewpoint does is increase, rather than decrease, war.
Okay, how about this take - the power falloff is fairly significant as you go from politicians, to political operatives, to voters, and war is only one axis of any major political party.
As such, retribution/war justification falloff is also significant. Otherwise, you start losing the argument that says forced-/non-supporters of $FASCIST_REGIME should be killed because they didn’t do enough to resist it.
(Which is of course not the Utilitarian “we don’t want to kill them, killing them is not good in itself, but from a practical perspective we must destroy $FASCIST_REGIME and that takes priority.”)
In ideal liberal theory, citizens themselves are the source of all
governmental actions in one form or another. This is a unifying
principle of what makes a liberal theory a liberal theory, at least for
the contractarians. The conclusion then that citizens within liberal
societies are not covered under the [Neutrality-innocence justification] follows in a fairly
straight-forward fashion. If a government decides to go to war, that
decision only comes about as a result of the citizens authorizing the
government to do so. The citizenry’s role in the war is as the
originator of the action towards war. This might happen electorally or
it might happen by consenting to a societal structure that allows wars
to be waged. Regardless of which one happens to be the case, the
citizens are necessarily participating in the process of waging war.
Thus, the citizens are not innocent of the decision to pursue war, for
it is they who are authorizing the decision; and, the citizens are not
neutral towards the war effort because it is their actions (consent)
that causes the war to occur. Because the citizens are non-neutral and
non-innocent, the
[Neutrality-innocence justification]
cannot apply.
You’re either a subject of your government with no say and therefore not a legitimate target, or a citizen with say and therefore a legitimate target.
An interesting argument.
A terrorist blowing themselves up in the middle of a crowd of anti-war demonstrators would be perfectly justified according to this theory, which is your first clue that it is not also a good argument.
If killin antiwar protesters is forbidden, what about killing civilian pro-war activists? What about conscripts?
Since when do such movements limit themselves to civilian pro-war activists?
As far as I can tell, “a terrorist movement which only selectively attacks political operatives that are against their national separatism” (or similar) is something that largely just doesn’t happen.
I think it would be a lot smarter and likely to succeed than what tends to actually happen. It provides a very clear Exit path, draws in far fewer in opposition (since those of opposed ideologies are at much less personal risk), spends scarce public resentment resources over targets that disproportionately help the opposition, etc.
From what little I know, that might fit the IRA?
Anyhow, whenever I see this argument, I never see it in a more nuanced form suggesting that the force of violence be directed over the actual movers of political power towards war.
Instead, it’s usually “and therefore 9/11 was justified.” The problem with this is that the same reason meddling over there created the conditions for bringing about 9/11, launching 9/11 creates the conditions for the Iraq War. That’s just how people are - and in many ways it makes sense for them to be that way. From a practical perspective, all this viewpoint does is increase, rather than decrease, war.
if u accept the idea that the porn industry is toxic bc of how they treat the actors then hentai is basically veganism for porn
Now see, this makes for a very interesting screening question.
Is someone actually arguing due to the treatment of women in the porn industry, or are they arguing to reduce sexual alternatives to straight women for straight men, relatively increasing straight womens’ sexual power/negotiating leverage? Or, are they arguing for women (or rather their faction) collectively owning the cultural intellectual property of the idea “women”?
Etc.
See, um, there’s one other reason that you guys are kinda missing, I think, and it’s the idea that porn isn’t actually bad in and of itself, but that virtually all porn is bad because it teaches bad, um, morals? And you can, like, say that these morals are, um, inherent to the pornographic medium or just, like, products of our, uh, patriarchal society, but, like, people are definitely anti-porn on the assumption that they’re there.
Obviously, the solution is to mandate multiple age grades for pornography starting with simple nudity and progressing through “sex within the context of a healthy relationship between two consenting adults,” before getting on to the weirder and more extreme stuff, thus setting up sensible expectations for future relationships, like alcohol laws in Europe.
This isn’t a shitpost, by the way. Depending on the country and its legal and political environment, I think this could potentially be a good policy.
(Edit: Also, to a degree this “bad morals” explanation falls under “ownership of [the idea of women] as intellectual property.”)
How do you keep kids from getting into the real bad stuff, though? I mean, porn’s digital. Are you going to have, like, DRM on porn?
It depends on the country and its legal environment.
The country I originally developed this idea for was a hypothetical one which had a more cryptographically-rooted internet, where each citizen was issued multiple pseudonymous identifiers that the government could track back if needed, but which corporations were prohibited from tracking in some of the ways they currently track identity in the United States.
However, the political and technical landscape of the various real countries is much different.
In this case, while we already have mechanisms that somewhat limit the sale of pornography by age, especially in physical stores, people can get around that with the Internet if they know the right keywords.
What I’m wondering about is if a limited lifting of some restrictions in combination with the imposition with new ones would create a new market. The sheer amount of, uh, let’s call it sexual energy present in humanity is what drives the demand that creates oceans of pornography. Like, Rule 34 exists not because of some 4Chan cult but because of the demand plus available infrastructure. Trying to end it all because it ‘teaches bad morals’ is practically impossible short of the introduction of a far more totalitarian state.
So instead of abolishing it, channel some of that energy and adjust the ease of access such that rates of exposure to healthy vs unhealthy versions, especially at key times, shift.
when are continuity complaints justified vs. just nitpicking?
I will explain
by means of Star Trek reference
In Star Trek, you can’t beam through the shields.
This is established. Can’t beam through the shields. It has been a plot device multiple times. Entire episodes have hinged on it. The Enemy in TNG is a good one, one of the big Romulan episodes.
So, whenever an episode (or movie) fucks up and has someone beam through the shields, I think it’s valid to call them out on it cause they used it as a plot device and drew attention to it previously. Expecting a production or author to remember their own plot points is not too much to ask.
If Peter Parker wore a red shirt once in Issue 360, then later they flashback to events and it’s a green shirt, that isn’t something worth complaining about.
Now, if he wore a red shirt, and wearing that specific red shirt distracted some bull-themed super-villain specifically by being red, then yes, by all means be annoyed they forgot that, cause it wasn’t just a detail, it’s a plot device.
if u accept the idea that the porn industry is toxic bc of how they treat the actors then hentai is basically veganism for porn
Now see, this makes for a very interesting screening question.
Is someone actually arguing due to the treatment of women in the porn industry, or are they arguing to reduce sexual alternatives to straight women for straight men, relatively increasing straight womens’ sexual power/negotiating leverage? Or, are they arguing for women (or rather their faction) collectively owning the cultural intellectual property of the idea “women”?
Etc.
See, um, there’s one other reason that you guys are kinda missing, I think, and it’s the idea that porn isn’t actually bad in and of itself, but that virtually all porn is bad because it teaches bad, um, morals? And you can, like, say that these morals are, um, inherent to the pornographic medium or just, like, products of our, uh, patriarchal society, but, like, people are definitely anti-porn on the assumption that they’re there.
Obviously, the solution is to mandate multiple age grades for pornography starting with simple nudity and progressing through “sex within the context of a healthy relationship between two consenting adults,” before getting on to the weirder and more extreme stuff, thus setting up sensible expectations for future relationships, like alcohol laws in Europe.
This isn’t a shitpost, by the way. Depending on the country and its legal and political environment, I think this could potentially be a good policy.
(Edit: Also, to a degree this “bad morals” explanation falls under “ownership of [the idea of women] as intellectual property.”)
if u accept the idea that the porn industry is toxic bc of how they treat the actors then hentai is basically veganism for porn
Now see, this makes for a very interesting screening question.
Is someone actually arguing due to the treatment of women in the porn industry, or are they arguing to reduce sexual alternatives to straight women for straight men, relatively increasing straight womens’ sexual power/negotiating leverage? Or, are they arguing for women (or rather their faction) collectively owning the cultural intellectual property of the idea “women”?
I tried that once. The premium Facebook friends are actually pretty great, they’re just reaaaally really expensive.
In the end I ended up using a bunch of AIs at that time growing up. It wasn’t really, you know, healthy.
Psh, you don’t need Facebook for that. There are plenty of people working freelance who will take your money in exchange for paying you attention and pretending to care what you think.
I didn’t know about YesManFinder at the time, and Facebook has the advantage of being able to advertise to minors (anyone under 30), so…
@collapsedsquid if you want to start a movement you need to make some bold claims that contradict conventional wisdom, setting you apart from the crowd and acting as useful shibboleths to identify your followers.
also helps if you have some sacred texts, but I understand those can take quite some time to write.
aspiring empiricists, or empies,
Someday, man. Someday I’ll have cultists.
well that’s a bold claim that contradicts conventional wisdom, so you’re off to a good start already!
Hey are any of us here, uh, not planning to start a cult?
Or at least an institution of collective living consciously dedicated to promoting and living out doctrines at odds with contemporary norms?
Yud’s like the Velvet Underground or something, not that many apostles but every one goes off to start their own
Uh, does a city-state count as an institution of collective living?
I don't know why people got so upset about my plan to use genetically-engineered kudzu to capture the carbon from the air and synthesize it back into crude oil. It would make the vehicular carbon cycle a natural part of this planet's biosphere, just like killer bees.
