FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
You seem positively hell-bent on misunderstanding what I'm saying.
Let's compare with financial capital. Alice has $1,000 in her bank account, and Bob has $100,000 in his. No one would dispute that, all things being equal, Bob has more financial capital than Alice. There are certain disadvantages associated with having more rather than less financial capital (as they say, freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose), but all things being equal, most people would rather be in Bob's shoes than Alice's. There might well be people who would refuse to do business with Bob on principle, but no one really disputes that Bob's financial capital affords him a greater range of opportunities than are available to Alice. This is not a normative statement: I'm not saying "it is an inexorable law of the universe that having $100k is morally superior to having $1k". It is simply a factual statement that, ceteris paribus, people with $100k in their bank account can do more things than people with only $1k, and hence that most people would rather have $100k than $1k if they could help it. This statement remains true even if you, personally, would rather not have $100k in your bank account, for one reason or another.
Now consider Sydney Sweeney. Her appearance affords her a great deal of social capital. Men will buy her expensive things in hopes of going to bed with her. People likely assume she possesses positive traits unrelated to her beauty which she may not actually possess. She has the privilege of working in, frankly, physically and mentally unchallenging jobs, in which she's paid extravagant sums of money largely just to show up and look pretty. (For the "jeans/genes" ad, she probably got paid more eight hours' work than both of us will collectively see in our lifetimes.) If she wanted to, she could surely marry a wealthy man who would provide for her and fulfil her every whim, all for the low, low price of keeping herself trim and fetching (which she was doing anyway) and missionary sex with the lights off every other week. Of course not everyone is attracted to her, but that doesn't matter: enough people are that it's a fact about the world she can take advantage of. These facts don't in any way imply that her beauty is the only "correct" kind of beauty, or that the only beautiful women are women who look like her: there are doubtless women who look nothing like her, but whose appearances afford them a comparable level of social capital (e.g. female K-pop singers, Bollywood starlets etc.). Doubtless there are certain disadvantages associated with being unusually attractive (even before she was famous, she probably faced a disproportionate amount of street harassment, and probably struggles to be taken seriously) – but all things being equal, most women rather be in Sydney Sweeney's shoes than the shoes of a less attractive woman.
So when I say "Sydney Sweeney has great genes", all that means is "Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce physical traits considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population, a fact which affords her a great deal of social capital". This is not a value judgement, nor a normative statement: it is simply a statement of fact. It doesn't imply that there's anything wrong with you if you don't want to fuck her or would rather not look like her. You might personally find another woman (whom the average man might consider a 6 on a good day) more attractive than Sweeney. That's a perfectly legitimate preference to have – but it doesn't change the fact that Sweeney has more social capital than the 6 in question. And you might say that a big chunk of the social capital Sweeney enjoys is not because she's hot but because she's famous – but that's bullshit. Even in the counterfactual world where Sydney Sweeney wasn't famous, if she found herself in the same nightclub as Rebel Wilson, I know who'd be paying for her own drinks.
Compare with your M&Ms example. The statement "M&Ms are delicious" doesn't in any way imply that Shropshire Blue isn't delicious. But more people consider M&Ms delicious than consider Shropshire Blue delicious, a fact which is reflected in the respective net worths of Mars Inc. and the Colston Bassett Dairy. If I asked a hundred people "would you rather control the assets of Mars Inc. or the Colston Bassett Dairy?" almost everyone would say the former, including people who personally prefer Shropshire Blue to M&Ms. Likewise here: if given a choice between becoming Sydney Sweeney or becoming a random unattractive woman, the overwhelming majority of women would pick the former, including women who don't personally find Sydney Sweeney physically attractive. And that includes women who claim to believe that men only find Sydney Sweeney hot because they've been "brainwashed by Eurocentric beauty standards" or whatever. I don't think the responses would be especially different if you clarified that, post-transformation, you don't get to keep any of Sweeney's monetary or tangible assets (I mean, obviously the... err, other assets are part of the deal): women understand that Sweeney's appearance alone affords her an enviable amount of social capital.
Oh sure, sure: some woke women would answer my hypothetical with "I'd rather live in a world in which a woman's social capital was not primarily determined by her appearance" or "I'd rather live in a world in which everyone enjoyed exactly the same amount of social capital". But gun to their head, even these women would pick being Sydney Sweeney over being a random unattractive woman.
FtttG
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4hr ago
If you have hard data showing that the overwhelming majority of MAiD recipients are older people who've been diagnosed with terminal and/or degenerative conditions, I would love to see it.
FtttG
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4hr ago
I take "sexting" to mean sexually explicit text messages, not photos. In many jurisdictions sharing intimate photos without consent ("revenge porn") is a crime, and I presume that if the victim was a minor that would be considered an aggravating factor.
FtttG
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5hr ago
If one in twenty deaths in a country were caused by suicide or deaths of despair, that would be headline news. Somehow it's ho-hum when it's medically assisted suicide.
FtttG
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5hr ago
Fair enough, mea culpa. I don't think teens sexting should be legally classified as CSAM. By "CSAM" I was referring to the narrow case of photos and videos depicting minor children being sexually exploited.
FtttG
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5hr ago
Fair enough, mea culpa. I don't think teens sexting should be legally classified as CSAM. By "CSAM" I was referring to the narrow case of photos and videos depicting minor children being sexually exploited.
And I will reiterate: your 'factual' claim is no such thing because you are smuggling in a subjective value judgement as if it were a fact.
No, I'm not. "I think Sydney Sweeney is hot" is a subjective value judgement. "Sydney Sweeney is considered exceptionally attractive by millions of people" is a statement of fact, as is "millions of men would give away all their worldly possessions for one night with Sydney Sweeney". If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", it logically follows that a person considered beautiful by 1 million independent beholders is 100x more beautiful than a person who is only considered beautiful by 10,000 independent beholders. Given that, to the best of our knowledge, Sydney Sweeney's appearance is ultimately the product of her genes, it follows that Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce traits which are considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population – traits that a huge proportion of the population would either like to have for themselves, or would like their romantic partner to have. A reasonable compression of the previous sentence is "Sydney Sweeney has good genes".
Once you have taken for granted that some human phenotypes are "good" and others "bad", and that this means there are "good" genes and "bad" genes
Schizophrenia is estimated to be between 70-80% heritable. If presented with the option, would anyone choose to be schizophrenic?
There is no "differently abled": some traits are just intrinsically less desirable than others, and nobody actually believes that we're all created equal, much as they might pretend to (or cope by so doing). You can play this "no one is 'disabled', society has simply chosen to accommodate certain traits and not others" game as long as you please, but it's nonsense and everyone knows it.
The belief that "some people are more attractive than others" does not lead inevitably to Auschwitz.
FtttG
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7hr ago
Initially I thought this was going to be about medical mistakes. It would be fascinating to see a breakdown of the stated reasons that euthanisees sought MAiD. I would like to think that people with incurable terminal illnesses would be in the majority, if only a slim one.
There was a thread a few weeks ago talking about the concept of a "trans genocide", and I noted that the Wikipedia article on the topic devotes a lot of column inches to the notion that conservative lawmakers might make life so unbearable for trans people that they take their own lives en masse. This would make it the world's first self-administered genocide.
Unless Canada beats them to it. Certainly not what I expected the Day of the Rake to look like.
FtttG
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20hr ago
This just seems like yet another tiresome instance of "dog-whistle politics". "You can't talk about this true fact because some people could use it to justify bad behaviour" is a fully general counter-argument which applies to literally any factual statement.
I find dog-whistle politics particularly frustrating because they always, ultimately, seem to boil down to "you didn't actually say anything bad, but I don't like you, so I'm going to interpret everything you said in the most uncharitable possible light and infer things you didn't mean from perfectly innocuous statements, then treat you as if you explicitly said the most uncharitable misreading of your statement possible". I've read multiple people who independently argued that wokeness/social justice politics/whatever seems to attract a lot of people with cluster B personality disorders, and the shoe certainly fits here: "dog-whistle politics" is practically identical to how women with borderline personality disorder win arguments. (That is, without threatening to kill themselves.)
I will reiterate: the factual claim "many desirable human traits are heavily, if not solely, determined by one's genetic makeup" does not in any way imply the normative claim "therefore, governments should proactively intervene in the lives of their citizenry to improve their average genetic fitness". The belief that American Eagle were trying to promote the latter belief (via a fucking jeans and) is silly and absurd, one step removed from the surprisingly widespread belief that the CEO of Procter and Gamble is an avowed Satanist who openly admitted his faith on national television. The people advancing this belief deserve to be ridiculed. The belief that American Eagle are advancing the "many desirable human traits are heavily, if not solely, determined by one's genetic makeup" idea as a "dog-whistle" for literal eugenics is only marginally less silly, and deserve to be ridiculed. If you believe this about American Eagle, then you deserve to be ridiculed.
As an aside, "HBD is true, but the only people who want to talk about are white supremacists, so you should be automatically suspicious of anyone who brings it up", in addition to being one step removed from Bulverism, is just factually wrong. Most HBD enjoyers are acutely aware that Ashkenazim and people from the Far East are above average in intelligence. LKY built Singapore on HBD principles: he was aware from the outset that Malay professional outcomes would never equal Chinese, and took intentional, practical steps to mitigate the resentment that would inevitably ensue. In your opinion, is LKY a white supremacist?
And even if people want to talk about HBD for reasons of political policy, there are plenty of HBD-influenced policies which no reasonable person would characterise as white supremacist in nature. If indeed there is a significant IQ gap between blacks and whites, it follows that we can never expect black representation in STEM to equalise with white in our lifetimes, and so all public monies advancing that goal might as well be flushed down the toilet for all the good they'll do. It is hardly a coincidence that many HBD enjoyers are advocates for universal basic income.
FtttG
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1d ago
My point was that this is the first I've heard of teens sexting being categorised as CSAM, and would genuinely love to know in which jurisdictions it's categorised as such.
I consider "cancel culture", broadly defined, to be a politically neutral set of tactics. It was invented or popularised by progressives, but conservatives quickly cottoned on, and there have been successful right-wing cancellation campaigns.
When the OP said "wokeness is defeated", I took that not to mean "cancel culture is defeated" but "the most recent strain of radical progressive identity politics is in retreat". My example of the city festooned with progress pride flags was intended to illustrate that it's premature to claim that said movement is defeated.
Whenever someone says "woke", do you interpret that to mean "cancel culture"? Most conversations around here would be practically incoherent under that definition. I understand that cancel culture is a political tactic closely associated with wokeness, but it's not the ideology itself, any more than the ideology of the Provisional IRA is "Armalites and gelignite".
Even if we grant this point for the sake of argument, that still leaves "phrases like good genes are taboo" as a bona fide leftist shibboleth that the American Eagle ad campaign would have been stepping on the toes of. The question then is whether they did so out of ignorance, or if they considered that left-wingers would be offended and decided that being seen to mildly upset SJWs suited their PR purposes just fine.
Again: I never disputed that American Eagle was being provocative and intentionally stepping on the toes of wokescolds. That's quite far removed from the claim that American Eagle were explicitly touting the virtues of governments proactively improving the genetic fitness of the populations they govern. Wokes were not rending their hair and claiming "Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are promoting a belief which is a prerequisite to endorsing eugenics!": they were saying "Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are promoting eugenics!" The belief that some people are hotter (smarter, taller, faster etc.) than others for reasons of genetics does not in any way imply the belief that governments should e.g. sterilise those deficient in said traits against their will. This really does strike me as transparent sanewashing.
FtttG
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1d ago
CSAM includes material produced by sexting teens.
I think this is an extremely noncentral example of what people talk about when they talk about CSAM.
Then why just list "debatably-crazy things lefties are still allowed to say" rather than "debatably-crazy things righties still aren't allowed to say" as the watermark?
Because the OP was claiming that woke is defeated, and wokes being able to say absurd extreme things without repercussion is not what a defeated movement looks like. I presumed it went without saying that conservatives and moderates still cannot express comparably crazy (and in some cases, ordinary commonsense) opinions without repercussion. I mean, it obviously does go without saying: even you aren't disputing it.
It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end" - "
Difficult for you to take, perhaps. I thought the point was abundantly clear: an entire city being festooned with the flags of a particular ideology at the city council's behest is not what a defeated ideology looks like.
Radical progressives would be very uncomfortable with the sheer phrase "good genes"
They might claim to be uncomfortable with the concept, but their revealed preferences (in terms of their choice of romantic partner, their aspirations for their children, the people they sexually fantasise about, which sports teams and athletes they bet on, their attitudes towards inbreeding etc.) would tell a very different story.
FtttG
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1d ago
You'd be amazed at the number of self-identified leftists whose response to your rhetorical question would be yeschad.jpeg. One of Dublin's most recent mayors, for one.
FtttG
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1d ago
CP?
One can be a free speech absolutist and still think CSAM should be illegal. The thing that makes it evil is the manner of its production, not its distribution.
FtttG
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1d ago
I need to dig it out. This definitely isn't the article I was thinking of, but it includes the following quote from King:
... whenever the issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man is entered at the starting line in a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some impossible feat in order to catch up with his fellow runner.
From the passage above I infer that King believed some kind of preferential hiring (i.e. affirmative action) was necessary until achievement gaps had been closed.
FtttG
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1d ago
Sorry to hear about your engagement. Hope you're doing okay.
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Years ago I read an article arguing that the "content of their character" thing, while a memorable turn of phrase, was not really representative of MLK's true beliefs and he did believe that, in the absence of racial discrimination, the ethnic composition of an organisation would be reflective of its host country. Therefore, we ultimately have MLK to thank for affirmative action and DEI. In that sense he was certainly proto-woke, far more so than Lincoln.
Wikipedia claims the term was first used in 1974, although I can't remember hearing it before the early 2010s.
Weirdly enough I actually think the term is a perfectly legitimate one: it's uncontroversially true that certain cultures promote rape, downplay the severity of it, or protect those guilty of it rather than protect their victims. It's just that every example of a culture meeting this description is a culture that modern feminists would object to being so characterised. "Gangs of adult men sexually exploit adolescent girls in their thousands, and the police turn a blind eye to it for decades for fear of 'inflaming community tensions' (the perpetrators are disproportionately Pakistani men) and because of the girls' socioeconomic background" is such an on-the-nose description of a rape culture it hurts – but intersectional feminists would likely get mad if I said that the UK was a rape culture provided that the rapists are Pakistani. Likewise, pretty much any Muslim-majority country in MENA could reasonably be characterised as a rape culture.
I don't disagree with feminists that rape cultures exist – I disagree with which cultures ought to be characterised as such.
FtttG
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1d ago
And your post sounded a lot more like you thought it was a problem that progressives were allowed to voice their beliefs at all.
Well, that wasn't the point I was making at all. Perhaps I didn't express myself clearly enough. My point was that woke people can get away with publicly expressing rather out-there opinions without taking any kind of reputational hit, while conservatives or moderates cannot even get away with expressing comparably (or even much less) crazy opinions. This doesn't look like wokeness has been defeated.
"good genes" is, you know, literally the etymological meaning of the word "eugenics"
This seems like a rather extreme motte-and-bailey/sanewashing to me. Eugenics is the belief that governments should take proactive interventionist measures to improve the genetic fitness of the populations they govern. It is not the belief that some people are congenitally more attractive than others. If it meant the latter, there would be literally no one on the planet who didn't qualify as a eugenicist, and if everyone's a eugenicist, no one is.
The "is" belief "some people are congenitally hotter than others" in no way implies the "ought" belief "the government should intervene to improve the genetic fitness of the population it governs".
One of the most famous lines from Nick Hornby's High Fidelity is (I'm paraphrasing) "Which came first: the music or the misery? Do I listen to pop music because I'm miserable, or am I miserable because I listen to pop music?"
For many years I was an avid listener of music, and would constantly have my headphones on during my morning commute. I owned dozens of CDs and went out of my way to convert them to FLAC format, under the delusion that I could tell the difference from MP3s with my budget Sennheisers. When I read the above question in High Fidelity, I dismissed it as an obviously rhetorical one: of course I listen to music because I'm miserable!
Somewhere along the way I got out of the habit of actively listening to music in my own time, and rarely sit down to listen to an album from start to finish: most music I listen to is just something to put on in the background while I'm doing something else. And you know what? My subjective feeling of ease and well-being is dramatically improved compared to the earlier periods of my life in which I was an active and compulsive listener of music. There are many possible explanations for this improvement (I'm more physically active; I'm in a stable relationship; I've outgrown my depression; the period in my life in which I listened to music most compulsively was my adolescence, never an easy time for anyone), but I no longer think the question from High Fidelity is a rhetorical one with an obvious answer. Maybe listening to music did make me unhappier than I would have been otherwise.
All that preamble aside, I'm trying to get back into the habit of actively listening to music – not for the sake of enjoyment, but for research. I've been trying to write my next album and the riffs aren't coming as easily as I'd like. Surely part of that is because I'm not listening to music: the periods in my life in which I wrote the most riffs were also the periods in which I was listening to the most riffs. To that end, I drew up a list of albums which I've either been meaning to listen to for years, or which have a sound I'd like to emulate on the next album. I've been listening to them when I can get around to it. In no particular order, here are the ones I've listened to so far, and my thoughts.
were used in the film "Sinister". It only really
works in context, not as a standalone piece.
black metal albums just like this one.
Unlike the Ulver one, this one can stand on its own.
Particularly liked the fourth track.
but I have no intention of listening to this one again.
genre tag, never mind "depressive/suicidal black metal".
The vocalist supposedly said that he wants people
to be so affected by his band's music
that they kill themselves after listening to it
– I certainly would if I had to listen to
boring corny dreck like this for the rest of my life.
The cover art is the most interesting thing about it
or Just Breathing", even if I prefer Jesse Leach as a vocalist.
which was both a forum and published reviews of albums and EPs.
One of their critics reviewed this album
and said something along the lines of
"I know as critics we're meant to be 'objective'.
But it's hard in this case, because
this album is pretty close to the Platonic ideal
of what a black metal album is supposed to sound like".
I finally got around to listening to it
(twelve years after release) and wasn't disappointed.
Jaw-droppingly brilliant.
but even as someone who normally disdains noise rock
and spoken-word vocals I can say it didn't disappoint.
when a recording engineer compared my band to them.
They collaborated with Dragged into Sunlight (immediately below)
on an EP which included samples of actual serial killers talking about their crimes.
It creeped me out, but I wasn't sure of how much of that
was because of the music and how much was the enormously tasteless sampling.
This album employs no such gimmicks, and I can say that Gnaw Their Tongues can produce some genuinely horrific soundscapes.
describes their music as "post-[anything]", that means it's boring.
While this isn't true of every band, it's true more often than not, and certainly true of Isis.
but with production improved just enough that you can follow what's going on.
and decided to check it out. Loved it.
Profound Lore Records is now considered a hallmark of quality,
but this was back when they were still finding their feet as a label and couldn't afford to be so choosy.
that your brain can't really process it all in one go.
had more stylistic range.
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