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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
bambamramfan
discoursedrome

@rustingbridges wrote

to be fair, our society at present has a deeply confused idea of what marriage is for, and this can be seen as a symptom of that

(I don’t particularly care what marriage is for. Expression of romantic love, or child-having, or some package of legal rights, whichever is fine. I’m just annoyed we can’t pick. Do one thing and do it well, y'kno)

and now for the hot read as: unnecessarily disagreeable take: in a world where the government (and a large tax base) pays the floor healthcare costs of random persons, it’s totally reasonable for them to be interested in banning things that will increase their costs. If these things have sufficiently few supporters and many detractors, guess which way we’re going to go in a democracy?

There’s definitely a legal argument for banning cousin marriage – @mitigatedchaos also touches on that in their reply here, for instance, and they’re not wrong per se. I’m skeptical that this sort of law does enough good to justify the loss of liberty, given that most people have a natural aversion to the behaviour in question and it’s the sort of thing that mainly becomes a problem when a lot of people do it over time, but certainly the state gets up to worse things for worse reasons.

But that doesn’t make a case that it’s less moral than anything with similarly deleterious effects – even from the most interventionist angle it’s, at best, an argument about picking your battles. My objection is that arguments against incest tend to be built around the idea that it’s a unique moral evil in a way that can’t really be supported by arguments from health or genetics. If people want to make pragmatic cost/benefit arguments that’s worth doing, but they need to get down off their high horse on the topic and onto a smaller horse that’s more within their means.

bambamramfan

You spend how many hours talking with rationalists and public policy theorists about the nature of morality, evidence based interventions, and not shaming people for having politically unpopular beliefs.

Then someone brings up a taboo sexual activity, and it’s all “well if they had kids that might be bad so it seems proportionate to say anything romantic or sexual they do should be shamed. I mean just think of the medical bills for their hypothetical kids they never considered having.”

The challenge isn’t getting uninformed people to have good principles, it’s getting even thoughtful people to apply them instead of knee-jerk rationalizations.

mitigatedchaos

This depends heavily on one’s opinion of the general population and their susceptibility to complex memes that depend on a careful analysis of information.

If one is optimistic, switching to the “it’s okay not to taboo this kind of incest socially, even if we will argue to them not to have kids” seems reasonable.

If one is pessimistic, then tearing away the current taboo won’t result in proportionate response, but rather no response.

An optimal political response isn’t actually available, and the odds that someone will be foreveralone if they can’t be with their cousin are pretty low, just leaving the taboo for now seems prudent, with the time limit of the next generation of genetic repair/enhancement technology.

Also we’ve had experiments with “societies that allow cousin marriage”, and it doesn’t look good.

Source: discoursedrome gender politics
argumate

In a sense Khan and Valls are correct. Terror is indeed something that the residents of London, Paris, Antwerp and many other cities are going to have to learn to live with. In the same way that the residents of Istanbul, Beirut and Islamabad have had to learn to live with the same.

Yet why it might be that London, Paris and Antwerp are having to accustom themselves to the security status of Istanbul, Beirut and Islamabad is a question that nobody in any position of power seems keen to ask.

Douglas Murray, Pray for London, for Antwerp, for Nice: this is Europe’s new normal (via elementarynationalism)

in other news the Blitz and the IRA never happened

(via argumate)

The Blitz was a war between states. The IRA had tactics that involved scaring people out and then blowing up expensive empty buildings. Both of them have potential off-switches long before “our religion takes over the world”.

Source: elementarynationalism
shieldfoss
motherboard.vice.com

Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware
dagwolf

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for “crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software.” The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and “authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”

ranma-official

This is a very strange cyberpunk future

blackblocberniebros

No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas in the cyberpunk future.

ranma-official

No one ever thinks about the farmers and rural areas regardless of the cyberpunk future.

shieldfoss

How can they get away with this? Do they have a monopoly on tractors? Are their tractors just so much better that people will buy them even with this bullshit in place?

mitigatedchaos

Patents ensure that any tractor by a start-up competitor will likely be 20 years out of date, making a small run of new tractors you aren’t sure people will buy is prohibitively expensive, but also Capitalist competition isn’t as powerful as Hard Capitalists say it is or should be.  Partially this is because Hard Capitalists assume that state interference is deeply unnatural and non-Capitalist, when in reality the state is necessary for Capitalism to exist, and the market incentivizes corporations to attempt to establish control of the state.

If there are few enough major tractor manufacturers, and tractors are absolutely vital to farming, then they can all start using restrictive EULAs all at the same time.  As long as they limit their rent-seeking to something less than the cost of a whole extra tractor, they can all benefit from it without engaging in tight collusion.  Farmers looking to violate the situation would have to do something like import tractors from Japan or Russia or something.

Source: dagwolf the invisible fist
saxifraga-x-urbium
saxifraga-x-urbium

Woman collects dolls: creepy!
Man collects “action figures”: cool nerd boy!

🤔

mitigatedchaos

What in the world are you talking about?  Since when would action figures collected by an adult human male be considered “cool”?!

That is low-status behavior for a male!  A girl collecting action figures might be seen as a cool nerd girl, but even then it’s still a bit risky if she wants to expand her dating pool into high-status normies and not come off as a fujoshi.  She’s only protected by the thin veil of women being perceived as harmless, foreign, and low-agency.

grumpy gender politics
bambamramfan
archive.is

Thinx Ex-Employee Accuses Miki Agrawal of Sexual Harassment

The self-styled “She-E.O.” prided herself on breaking taboos. According to some employees, she went too far.
the-grey-tribe

https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/158064777823/cliffs-notes-on-callout-culture-preconditions

https://the-grey-tribe.tumblr.com/post/158319054623/addendum-to-cliffs-notes-on-callout-culture

One other contributing factor is a feeling of groundbreaking, rule-shirking and recreating the rules from ideology and first principles. There is less consensus of what the rules are, and when they are broken.

But this company definitely falls under “activist circles“, and they framed the lack of boundaries as breaking with oppressive convention.

Yada yada social technology

bambamramfan

Okay this article is hilarious. Tremendous sympathy for the employees who were stuck there, but you really should read it yourself. I went in expecting some exaggeration and sensationalization of some dumb behavior in an attempt to show a female CEO what sort of lines a male CEO has to watch. No, this is way more along the lines of “female liberated version of Donald Trump.” Like the climax of the story is when the Board asks for people to volunteer concerns about working with the CEO… and almost every employee comes with stories, going over the time available for the meeting.

Which makes it sound like “activists or startup culture” is a bad fall-guy for this. There is a tyrannical boss with no sense of professional boundaries. They have the power to fire you, and also to set up status-shame where you live in fear of firing, or are denied bonuses which are a large part of your salary. They opposed creating an HR department and threatened to blacklist any quitters. They have their own sense of reality.

What the hell is anyone, even a culture, supposed to do? Life under them is just hellish, and the easiest way is to go along. It does not appear that most other employees actually thought Agrawal’s behavior was acceptable. There just was no other option.

Now, this is not to fault individual idiots like Agrawal. There will always be idiots. The problem is any capitalistic culture that thinks one person having this much power over other humans is acceptable.

the-grey-tribe

I did not intend to blame any one factor. I tried to do the opposite, as this company has ALL the factors at work: Startup culture, using SJ language as a shield, a creepy pushy boss, peer pressure, all came together to reinforce a climate of fear.

There is the detached culture warrior idea that it’s okay when we do it, and you better not say anything because you hurt our side if you go public, combined with blurring of boundaries in activist circles, isolated startup culture, vesting cliffs, all the other power a CEO at a BigCo has.

This situations is the synthesis of the tyranny of the structureless with the SNAFU principle in hierarchical organisations.

It is atypical in its terribleness, but you can see the patterns in their purest form.

bambamramfan

So this isn’t to pick at the theory too much, because your thoughts about how callout culture thrives (which I reblogged earlier) capture a legit phenomenon. But it’s important that we be rigorous in our applications of patterns, or otherwise we become the same as people going “conservative racism is a problem some places, therefore it’s the problem in all places that look similar.”

The dynamic that makes social-justice-liberalism so scary is not just that activists, or some self-serving people, say bad things (like “a woman boss can’t harass” or “there’s nothing a defendant could say that would matter”) but that people cooperate with these suppositions. After all, people also say just as cruel and dumb things from the right, or from even weirder more insular culture, but the difference is those perspectives don’t have power in our circles. It’s the reasonable people who give a pass to poor logic and meanness as long as its phrased appropriately, that make callouts into a culture.

In this case, from that article at least, no one was buying her defenses. To some degree she was groping in a way that would be harder for a man to get away with, but I think that sort of assumed non-sexualization among females was widespread before and outside any activist circles. And it did not take much more at all from Agrawal before her employees thought her behavior was inappropriate and hostile. There doesn’t seem to be any culture justifying this, just her spouting a lot of delusional defensive BS, and people going along with it because they had no job prospects and she was the hyperactive CEO. And other than a Board who could fire her, there wasn’t anything to stop her. The same sort of thing can replicate at any company that’s the private fiefdom of the president, and no one ever does stop it… till he ends up getting elected President.

Callout culture seems much more an issue where everyone is kind of involved in it, and ends up buying into fairly terrible beliefs just to keep going on. Like the disaster over at Amherst. There’s no one “crazy” person at the heart of those problems.

(Though the article claims Agrawal would be on a panel talking about the line between harmless and harassment at some conference. That would indeed be some toxic cultural effects, however I don’t see her anywhere on the website so I would imagine they cut her.)

mitigatedchaos

She seems to have confused her workplace for an erotic roleplay of a workplace. While it’s true that the financial dominance of conditions allowed this, I do think it’s still partially driven by the idea that women have no agency and are harmless. I’m not sure she would have done the same if it were widely recognized that women are not, in fact, harmless.

Source: archive.is sexual content cw

A continent-spanning superstate controlled by a network of computers implementing the thing that comes after the thing that comes after prediction markets over a vast and inscrutable state bureaucracy physically realizing a National Utility Function, attacking enemy nations in ways they don’t even understand, its terrifying efficiency only truly understandable as a creeping horror to the very few.

But unironically.

mitigated future mitigated fiction the invisible fist
discoursedrome

Anonymous asked:

I hate the needless moralism with incest on this site. I don't mean with legit concerns about consent and power dynamics but posts going "COUSIN MARRIAGE IS ICKY!!". I mean, this site is gung ho about animal abuse and killing but suddenly something where absolutely nobody is hurting nothing is considered totally wrong. Sorry, it just irritates me.

sigmaleph answered:

cousin marriage is icky

doesn’t make it wrong, but

slatestarscratchpad

I’ve been reading about leptin receptor deficiency recently, which is mostly (only?) observed in children of cousin marriages. Stephen Guyenet describes affected children as follows:

Usually they are of normal birth weight and then they’re very, very hungry from the first weeks and months of life. By age one, they have obesity. By age two, they weigh 55-65 pounds, and their obesity only accelerates from there. While a normal child may be about 25% fat, and a typical child with obesity may be 40% fat, leptin-deficient children are up to 60% fat. Farooqi explains that the primary reason letpin-deficient children develop obesity is that they have “an incredible drive to eat”…leptin-deficient children are nearly always hungry, and they almost always want to eat, even shortly after meals. Their appetite is so exaggerated that it’s almost impossible to put them on a diet: if their food is restricted, they find some way to eat, including retrieving stale morsels from the trash can and gnawing on fish sticks directly from the freezer. This is the desperation of starvation […]

Unlike normal teenagers, those with leptin deficiency don’t have much interest in films, dating, or other teenage pursuits. They want to talk about food, about recipes. “Everything they do, think about, talk about, has to do with food” says Farooqi. This shows that the [leptin system] does much more than simply regulate appetite - it’s so deeply rooted in the brain that it has the ability to hijack a broad swath of brain functions, including emotions and cognition.

Marrying your cousin is like winning access to a whole new, much more interesting tier of genetic diseases.

ozymandias271

Cousin marriage, according to wikipedia, has about the same risk of congenital disability as giving birth to a child over age 40. If lots of people marry their cousins, the risk gets worse.

I suspect that even if cousin marriage is legalized and destigmatized most people in the US aren’t going to want to do it, because family really isn’t that important in our culture. So banning cousin marriage implies that one should also ban giving birth over the age of 40. While that might be intractable, banning assistive reproductive technology to mothers over forty (or even forbidding it to be covered by insurance) would be more doable.

testblogdontupvote

So, that things about older age being a risk - is it due to changes in uterus or genetic composition of eggs? Because if the latter, then insurance should just cover egg preservation starting right from puberty, and IVF afterwards. Not only would that solve the dilemma of “have children early due to health reasons” vs “have children late for social and personal reasons”, but it would also make voluntary sterilization to avoid unwanted pregnancy a much easier and common choice, since it wouldn’t actually be preventing people form having biologically related children later (and will hopefully put all this “but what if you marry, etc.” gatekeeping to the rest for good).

discoursedrome

Technically, banning cousin marriage on those grounds implies that you should ban marriage to people over 40, as well as marriage to people with a high likelihood of passing on a serious genetic disorder (even if they’ve been medically sterilized, presumably).

This is the issue with arguments against incest on the basis of genetic problems: they’re arguments against having children being used to discourage people from having relationships, which doesn’t really make sense unless you’re also against non-procreative marriages generally or birth control/abortions. Unless you’re willing to say “incest between consenting adults is totally fine so long as they don’t have children with one another,” and unless you’re willing to treat anything with a comparable risk of serious birth defects the way you treat kissing cousins, it’s not really a viable line of argumentation.

It seems pretty obvious that the tendency to view incest between consenting adults as icky is an evolutionary heuristic designed to prevent genetic problems, but evolutionary heuristics are blunt instruments so we probably shouldn’t try too hard to extrapolate moral principles from them.

mitigatedchaos

I want you to think about the political realities here for a moment.

Banning cousin marriage is relatively politically safe, and has been done in multiple countries without creaking up into extra categories, precisely because it is seen as ‘icky’.

Banning having children over 40 or for people with significant risk of passing on severe genetic disorders is almost politically impossible and will draw substantial criticism from disability rights advocates, feminists, and entire already-existing political structures.  Previous states that have attempted this level of interference have typically been highly authoritarian and have terrible reputations.

Seeing as eugenics is now forever associated with the Nazis, even though of course having children with good genes and not condemning someone to die before the age of 40 of some genetically-passed-on heart disease would otherwise be a smart move, this matter cannot be approached directly.

In fact, even a policy of just paying people with high genetic risks not to have children based on the estimated costs to society would probably fail spectacularly on the political stage and get one labeled an Evil Nazi, regardless of one’s opinions on racial matters.

In light of this, the ban on cousin marriage should stay until the early Transhuman era.  So about another 30 years.

Source: sigmaleph gender politics politics
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