pigeonburger
20hr ago
Yeah, I'd agree it's plausible but far from trivially true. Which I why I wonder about it. How many boats would they have needed to sink? And you can look to Palestine to see how long some people can insist on taking basically suicidal actions even against a grimly determined superior force.
I probably end up thinking more like you on this, but to try and steelman BahRamYou's point, you have to take into account what was the likely mindset the story was written with. It's from the #MeToo era, written by a lesbian writer, in The New Yorker, and it depicts a man as a villain, in a way that even seems to go against most of the story itself. What are the chances that Roupenian thought: "that's what men are truly like, they're children who become nasty and wound you when you don't want to have (more) sex with them"? I think it's quite possible. It's also possible she didn't think so and just wrote the story that wanted to write itself using random details of a relationship she heard before, and despite harbouring no ill will towards men in general decided right at the end to turn the guy into a total asshole. Maybe she thought it would help the story get picked up, or maybe she just made a bad writing decision, or maybe I'm wrong and in decades we'll be looking back at this story and decide she made the best literary choice by doing this heel-turn. We'll likely never know because it's not quite as fashionable to admit having this kind of prejudice against men now as it was when the story was written. But it's almost impossible for me to think that it's not the reason The New Yorker picked it up. If prejudice against men was intended, it does make the revelation that it's based on a story where the man wasn't at all like that seem intellectually dishonest. Prejudice can be understood and forgiven if it's driven by experience or ignorance, but it's much harder to explain and forgive if the person did actually know better.
pigeonburger
1d ago
Their explanation is always plausible, but my basic issue is that if the stock market is generally just on a random walk, and you always grasp for the nearest plausible explanation, you're going to be completely wrong about why the market was up or down in a given day a lot of the time.
To begin with, explaining market reaction is a less credible version of divination. Even things that should have a straightforward effect up or down are polluted by second, third, fourth, nth-order reasoning of frontrunning the reaction and frontrunning the frontrunners and turning positive news into a negative if it's not AS positive as the frontrunners assumed (or vice-versa), and etc...
pigeonburger
1d ago
When I hear of "migrants dying on rickety boats trying to cross to Europe" I keep wondering if the tally would be positive or negative and by how much if Europeans countries had been sinking the unidentified vessels with unlawful intentions approaching their coasts right from the start. Sometimes, real mercy is harshly disincentivizing bad and dangerous behavior.
pigeonburger
3d ago
The justification for the hatred she gets fits within the restrictive moral framework of the people Jonathan Haidt identified in The Righteous Mind as WEIRD (Western Educated Industrial Rich and Democratic): she's evil because she's harming trans people. WEIRD pretty much only see the care/harm and fairness/unfairness as far as morality go.
Personally I am/was raised WEIRD, and while I cannot express why specifically, some examples Haidt used to test moral foundations outside of harm and fairness still trigger primitive negative emotion in me even if I cannot find a way within myself to condemn it intellectually. The real, original moral instinct as to why JK Rowlings is so hated might still be because she's undermining the consensus (not going along with the group is an affront to the loyalty moral foundation), or from expressing ideas considered sacrilegeous, but having a negative reaction to someone because of that is not allowed by our universalist mindset, so it has to be laundered as her being harmful.
pigeonburger
3d ago
Without that issue, I can sort of conceive of a war as banding together with your bros for an adventure and your odds of survival turning much more on your individual skills AND your ability to plan and effectively coordinate rather than luck of the draw.
I'm not going to get into the longbow countering the knight thing as others have already, but it's hard to overstate how much of an advantage noble knights had in battle. You were not going to be given a role in battle that would amount to cannon-fodder/bait, you had presumably access to the best training, a horse, the best armor. It was pretty unlikely you'd be killed or seriously wounded on your feet and most importantly, no one was really incentivized in finishing you off if you found yourself surrounded or knocked down/out, as ransoming you was much more lucrative.
I'm not so certain I agree with his framing of the trend as a coherent entity.
I would frame it as nothing more than the result of imposed religious tolerance. In order to stop the religious persecutions that were commonplace in the second half of the last millenium, Europeans and their descendents, and particularly city-dwellers, had to blunt some of their innate moral instincts: those that would chafe at the presence of heretics and apostates. For a few centuries this gave them a big boost, but long term it turns out some of those moral instincts might have been load bearing to civilisation, as we find ourselves atomizing into individualism under a universalist philosophy that forbids us from creating an exclusive shared identity.
pigeonburger
4d ago
The reason I say this is overrated is because, for all his insight, there's nothing universal about anything he says.
This is not surprising, goaltenders have the reputation of being weirdo loners as far as pro athletes go.
That said, I've already wanted to read that book for a while and none of your caveats seem like deal-breakers to me. I'll probably pick it up soon.
pigeonburger
5d ago
The problem of course is that while he's right, this does not give a signal as to whether the funding of the police is adequate or excessive. Which means a police department that adequately reduces crime with little visible action is going to be regularly targeted for budget cuts.
pigeonburger
6d ago
Both these movies are scary because they understand the true nature of horror, what really scares us: powerlessness. Not monsters, danger, pain, violence, death. These are all present in definitely not scary action movies. The extent to which these are scary in horror movies, is the extent to which the characters the viewers identify as are powerless against them. The Exorcist, like Rosemary's Baby, goes straight for the root, not incidentally. The former forces us to confront the horror of a parent being unable to help their child with an ailment. Rosemary's Baby forces us to confront a woman losing all of her social power and agency as she's railroaded into a parental role.
pigeonburger
7d ago
Chotiner is the New Yorker’s resident assassin. Merely being asked to sit down with him is a sign that someone wants to see you politically gutted.
Which honestly was predictable. Right now, for Democrats associated with the Biden administration, the smart move is laying low, not launching books. The party is still looking for excuses for its 2024 performance and its moribundity going into the 2026 midterm season. Peeking your head out, like Harris and now Jean-Pierre did, is just asking to be thrown under the bus.
pigeonburger
8d ago
Even given the collapse in journalism, wouldn't you expect someone pushing that thesis to collect the most persuasive cases, not the most ambiguous?
I guess that speaks to either the weakness of the case or the incompetence of the journalist that these are the best cases he could come up with.
Then we get to the Reno shootout. Woman decides to intervene in some quarrel between a man and a woman. Man starts yelling at woman. Husband of woman intervenes. Man goes back to truck, gets gun, shoots husband. No, this wasn't what was deemed justified -- things continue. Woman pulls out her gun, shoots man. Man shoots woman (and some bystander) too. Then another bystander fatally shoots the man, thinking he's going to kill the woman. The dead man turned out to boozed up, coked up, and high on pot too. If the WSJ writer had his way, presumably the bystander who killed him would be imprisoned for it. Or not shot him and maybe the woman dies instead. How would that improve things?
Its presence in the article is clearly because the journalists needed more meat to try and push his point that stand-your-ground laws are bad, but he knows the facts aren't aligning with that so he just says it's an example of how guns and alcool don't mix.
But then, the story has this important tidbit:
Instead, Wilson retrieved a handgun from his truck
So it's not like the guy who turned this incident deadly had a snap lapse in judgement and the presence of the gun is what turned a likely fistfight into a shootout. The gun was not present, he had to go get it, which means we're dealing with an asshole whose brain was so fried he had murderous intent for several seconds to minutes.
Also
Instead, Wilson retrieved a handgun from his truck and shot Reichert’s husband at arm’s-length.
So why are we focusing on the gun here? He could have just as well stabbed him with a knife, with a broken bottle, concussed him with a baseball bat or tire iron, etc... Would it have been less deadly then? I'm not sure at all; what if the fact he wasn't using a gun made Reichert and the bystander less willing to pull out a gun in self-defense out of fear they'll be convicted of homicide? Would they have been able to stop Wilson before he murdered Reichert and her husband? We don't know and can't know.
pigeonburger
9d ago
Here, online gambling gets away with advertising on TV (which they are not allowed to do) using the stupidest loophole: they advertise a different website (onlinecasino.net) where you can only play with pretend money for free. But if you go to the obvious website (onlinecasino.com) then of course you get into real gambling.
pigeonburger
9d ago
Prime example of the worst argument in the world (non-central fallacy).
When someone says:
It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it.
They imply murder, not very justified self-defence.
The article is absolutely rife with that kind of manipulative but technically accurate language. Just under the title
legally sanctioned homicides
Technically true, but has the connotation that it's some "The Purge" shit that's going on.
so-called stand-your-ground laws
They are indeed so called, but the phrasing implies that it's pretense.
The laws are written to protect those who tell authorities they feared for their life.
This one is not even technically accurate: the laws are written to protect innocents who defend themselves. That they incentivize less than innocent people to claim they feared for their life is not the reason they were written. Unless the writer can prove otherwise.
pigeonburger
9d ago
One of the nice things of the technology is that if things get too crowded or expensive on the base chain, you can settle multiple transactions on another smaller and less expensive blockchain and only use the base chain to settle the start and end state of those transactions. From what I understand that's how the Lightning Network works for Bitcoin (I'm more familiar with the Ethereum ecosystem).
Independently of whether women hypergamy should be celebrated or socially repressed and shamed, a lot of the obsession you see in the crowd that say they want nothing but a virgin tradwife has very clear parallels with other sexual fixations. If it was really just about worrying about how it affects their chance at a good relationship, they could just, you know, get to know a woman' personality before committing, for sure a better indicator of compatibility and relationship potential than any reading the tea leaves in her sexual past. But the point is that a lot of the "trad or bust" crowd really have a purity fetish, with exactly all the same implications that the word 'fetish' has in porn.
On one hand, it seems trivially fine that private spaces where only a subset of people are allowed should exist, and while I'm sympathetic to the privacy argument, it could have been resolved with a (somewhat purposedly) cumbersome and opaque process that would be able to split between genuine interest in maintaining privacy and mere curiosity.
But the west as a whole has decided that men-only clubs are not ok, so I don't see a principled argument that would make
The first ever girls-only space
okay.
The difference is that after getting his opinions from (relevant) people on the left, someone went and did shoot all (relevant) Charlie Kirks. And the reaction was mostly (with notable and appreciated exceptions) not a sobering realization of the impact of their words. To compare, no one (relevant) installed, attempted to install or even proposed installing a modern version of Hitler.
That should inform as to which was only banter and which was not.
/* (using relevant here to exclude non-central, lizardman constant people on both sides)
pigeonburger
23d ago
It's funny because Politico would have a stronger article if they did not fixate on this obvious joke mentioning Hitler, some of the edgelord racist stuff would have the potential to shock prudish normies or at least create enough of a problem for the right that it would have to address as if the public and the private are not different spheres of communication, but the Hitler quote Politico (and magicalkittycat) highlight as if it was the worst of it is so obviously said in jest that it's easier to dismiss the rest.
pigeonburger
23d ago
"I love Hitler" seems about as literal Nazi as possible. If that is not "proof of Bad Nazi" to you, what is?
Did you read the context?
AD: He did say “My delegates I bring will vote for the most right wing person”
PG: Great. I love Hitler
Do you think that last line, if this was written with acting cues as in script, would be:
PG *with stars in his eyes at the thought of a Fourth Reich* : Great. I love Hitler!
or
PG *deadpan* : Great. I love Hitler.
or
PG *sarcastically* : Great. I love Hitler
is neonazism, support of slavery, and unabashed bigotry such as this actually common among young conservatives as Hanania and the group chat themselves seem to believe?
See, this is the problem with the question. Someone asked recently about what the building consensus rule here meant, and I think this is a stellar example: it presumes that what you're referring to is clearly "neonazism, support of slavery and unabashed bigotry", where someone not highly motivated to see it as more will just see joking and edgelording. Tasteless, yes, and ill-advised in a context that had the possibility of being leaked, but looking at the quotes in the articles I see nothing that reads to me like neonazism or support of slavery, just laconic jokes. As for the bigotry, there's a better case there (though nowhere near a slam dunk) but at this point the right has run out of shits to give about following the left's rules for what they're allowed to notice and think about groups of people. Or at least joke about.
pigeonburger
24d ago
He probably wouldn't like it because his era was obsessed with industrialization, yeah, but that doesn't mean that the people doing it are not transplanting his ideas from the factory to the movie studio.
pigeonburger
25d ago
People can point to a consensus that already exists, and no one is going to object, but building a consensus is smuggling your controversial opinions in the shared, uncontroversial context of a post hoping they will evade scrutiny. Well executed it's a great propaganda tool, but in a forum where people are expected to lay out their opinions clearly for debate, it's dishonest and counterproductive, as if someone spots the smuggled opinion and cares to debate it honestly, they will need to have you unwind that argument back to that assumption, which wastes everyone's time. It also, as Primaprimaprima mentions, feels very hostile and unwelcoming when you have it done to you.
Recently I had a friend lament that there was no counterbalance to corporate lobbyists and I had to remind him that nonprofits existed, that their goals are not axiomatically good and uncontroversial.
My gut feeling is that there is still likely a majority of people immediately translating in their head "nonprofit" as "charity", and who generally think of them as non-partisan, non-political, altruistic, net-positive.
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