07mk
5d ago
The rather spotty - at best - track record of social engineering efforts is a good point. However, despite my generally tech-optimistic stance, I think population-engineering efforts through gene therapy has an even worse track record, i.e. none. That doesn't mean that it's worse or less likely to work, but I do think, until we actually see real-world examples that gene therapy - and specifically population-wide gene therapy of this sort - can be implemented, we are correct in believing that environmental factors are easier to manipulate than genetic ones.
07mk
5d ago
I'm guessing it's a combination of the 1st 2, since Scott seems likely to believe that 3 wouldn't work; the people who tend to accuse him of racism would do so regardless of whatever hedging he might choose to do except on the margins, and those margins probably aren't that big. Like most people who dive into this topic, at least from my perception, he probably hopes that the environmental factors, which can be more easily controlled than genetic ones, are very important. Thus he ends up genuinely believing it.
It could also be a combination of 2 and 3 - also like most people who dive into this topic, he probably wishes that the types of people who would accuse him of racism for exploring this topic in good faith would be willing to modulate such accusations based on hedging. And so through wishful thinking, he genuinely believes that such hedging would help him.
07mk
12d ago
I never claimed or implied that the original claim was charitable or good basis for debate.
I still don't understand what this has to do with me asking others to be charitable with me or me breaking the rules.
07mk
12d ago
But if I were to say, “It’s fine to vote for Trump while still strongly disagreeing with what he did around 1/6, I’d just like to hear you say that in public,” the response would be that everyone knows it’s best to avoid Trump’s bad side.
I've been only very loosely following the whole Trump 2 transition and know even less about the drama around wrongthink about 1/6, so I honestly have little idea, but I wonder how accurate this characterization would be. Again, I'm someone who hasn't spent much time looking into 1/6, but what little of it I've learned has led me to a weak conclusion similar to Sunshine below, that it's a case of the demand for threat to democracy outstripping the supply, resulting in the demanders constructing their own supply. And so I could believe that these billionaires in question just came to a realization that their previous disavowal of Trump wrt 1/6 was based on faulty premises and thus changed their mind to just not disagree with what he did around 1/6.
But maybe these billionaires in question (which ones? I couldn't read the Vanity Fair article that was linked) actually did make statements similar to what Yglesias made up in his hypothetical above, and so he's completely on the right track about billionaires apparently being cowed by Trump in that soft, hard-to-detect, easy-to-deny sort of way.
07mk
12d ago
Charitable with me how? As a leftist, I chose to be charitable to the commenter who made this claim as not making some insane claim about literally every leftist including myself not caring about child rape, but rather in context about the predictable outcomes of policies leftists like myself support. Are you claiming that I'm asking others to be too charitable to me by allowing me to show that level of charity to someone making such a bad-sounding statement about my group? I'm not sure how that works.
07mk
12d ago
Okay, well I think you're wrong in thinking that the charity rule means posting baileys (leftists don't care about child rape) instead of mottes (policies that leftists champion lead to child rape) is acceptable. This site is...literally called the Motte. "It's obvious this is what I'm saying" is literally the shady thinking we are trying to avoid. It's the exact same poor debating as what antifa is doing.
I've written before that I don't think such writing is good. I honestly think it's borderline in terms of rulebreaking, since it's clearly meant to create more heat than light. Does it cross some imaginary threshold from "acceptable" to "unacceptable?" You think it does, I think it doesn't. C'est la vie.
I mean, this debate started because you said "I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here because the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as "No." because when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration." therefore the comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there, whereas the comments left by right-wingers are not."
I responded with, "I don't think you can answer "do leftists care about child rape" with your own anecdotal evidence, because anecdotal evidence is bad on its own. Do you agree that anecdotal evidence is bad on its own, and do you have other evidence that "leftists don't care about child rape" other than anecdotal?"
This is such an obvious strawman - the strawman is directly beneath the statement it's strawmanning! - that I wonder why you do this in a comment that's specifically complaining about the quality of debate here. Note the parts I bolded. The first part is a fairly accurate mostly-quoted but partially edited synopsis of my comment. The second is your response to my comment where you seemed to claim that I was using my anecdote to answer the question "Do leftists care about child rape," when the above paragraph, particularly the bolded part, does nothing of the sort. What the anecdote does is answer the question, "Is it reasonable to ask the question, 'Do leftists care about child rape,' and it is it reasonable to answer it with 'No?'" These are 2 fundamentally different questions, and it's either careless or dishonest to elide between the 2.
You responded with "I'm not saying every leftist doesn't care about child rape, I'm saying leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect. And, additionally, my anecdotal evidence stands because I was no means being an unusual leftist as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it."
In this one, I just bolded the words you added to your synopsis of my comment that fundamentally change the meaning of my comment. I never once claimed that my anecdote was evidence of anything. It was merely context for why I believed that the question and answer we're discussing now are reasonable things to say in that discussion. At best, you can say that it's evidence that this question is a reasonable one to ask, though I wouldn't even characterize it as such (indeed, I've never once used the word "evidence" to describe my anecdote, nor have I used it to support any other notion in a "because" or "therefore" fashion).
I responded with, "Okay, but why are you not saying what you think then? There is a world of difference between "leftists don't care about child rape" and "leftists are unwilling to look at the true ramifications of their policies and therefore don't actually care about the results". Additionally, you haven't responded to my claim anecdotal evidence on its own isn't valid, much less my question if you have any other evidence than that, you just repeated your anecdote, which I assume means you think that type of data is valid and you don't have that evidence, but then can you say that out loud so we can move on?"
Where did you ask this question? Please point it out to me, because I couldn't find it. I am saying what I think. Where am I not saying what I think?
And my contention is that there is no world of difference between "leftists don't care about child rape" and "leftists are unwilling to look at the true ramifications of their policies and therefore don't actually care about the results." In fact, I think there's basically no substantive difference, it's a matter of tone. And the tone in the former is bad, something we should have less of here. I don't think it's some egregiously bad thing, though.
I didn't respond to your claim about anecdotal evidence not being valid because your claim had nothing to do with my own claim. You are the one who decided to derail this conversation by putting words into my mouth and then demanding that I defend those words I didn't say.
If you want to complain about debate fallacies driving away leftists from here, don't be a leftist who introduces debate fallacies while debating the case, because it demonstrates that, at least for one leftist, debate fallacies are no objection to contributing to this place.
07mk
12d ago
Case in point: I think @07mk responded to what you said. You think he didn't. I am not saying his response was good or persuasive (I agree that anecdotal evidence about one's own personal experiences does not qualify one to speak for all leftists), but when you say:
You are both mischaracterizing my comments, which is something I find ironic given the topic of discussion. I didn't ever claim or even imply that I spoke for all leftists, nor did I make any sort of argument that my anecdotal evidence was some sort of proof that the question should be answered with "No." Perhaps I'm guilty of breaking the rules against writing clearly, though I'm not sure where in what I wrote contained the argument "[my anecdotal evidence] ergo [leftists don't care about child rape]." My anecdote wasn't even meant as evidence, just context for why, as a leftist, I personally find that question entirely reasonable and also believe that answering the question with "No" is entirely reasonable.
07mk
12d ago
This is, again, illustrating the problem with the Motte. It is not that you’re a right winger insulting me a left-winger; you’re being a bad debater. Part of the rules of this site are “speak clearly”, so yes, you DO have to clarify that when you say “leftists don’t care about child rape”, you SHOULD say “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on” or that “leftists believe in stopping child rape but don’t take action”.
No. One of the rules of this place is to be charitable, and I believe that an obvious charitable reading of “leftists don’t care about child rape” is something akin to “policies that leftists champion lead to child rape and so on.” I would agree that wording it this way is not nice, and certainly something that I would prefer to see less of in this space, but it's a world away from the type of crap that the likes of antifa posted.
Okay, but we’re trying to debate and your response was “I think that leftists don’t care about child rape because of my anecdotal experience of being a leftist” and I responded with “anecdotal evidence isn’t enough, do you have evidence outside of that”, and not only have you not responded to my claim about anecdotal evidence you have not responded about providing said evidence. I’m not saying you need to agree to those points or some type of action or whatever, but you have to acknowledge those points so we can move on to the next point of debate or we are literally talking over eachother.
If we're having a debate here, it's certainly not about whether or not leftists care about child rape. Commentary on the truth-value of that was something I put in a parenthetical to point out that the answer of "No" is one that I agree with. You don't have to agree with it, and I don't care if you do.
My actual point, the point surrounding whatever debate we're having, is that this is a perfectly reasonable question to ask and to answer with a "No" given the topic at hand. It's not a particularly productive question, nor is it a nice question (though personally, I'd say it's a productive question for a leftist - or really anyone - to ask himself, based on my own personal experience as a leftist who did, but not productive for someone to ask about others). But given the topic and underlying reality at hand, it's a question that makes sense both to wonder about and to answer with "No."
07mk
12d ago
Sure, that's what many/most people on the left side of the spectrum would find more plausible. Whether or not right-wingers care about child rape has little to do with whether or not left-wingers do, though. Maybe they both don't. Maybe left-wingers don't care to a lesser extent than right-wingers, and that's a W that we should put on our mantle.
In any case, what left-wingers find to be plausible about what right-wingers care about doesn't seem likely to have much truth value except by coincidence, similarly to what right-wingers find to be plausible about what left-wingers care about. It's because I'm a leftist who, from within leftist spheres both experienced and observed directly the explicitly non-caring about child-rape with respect to immigration (and more recently male access to female locker rooms in schools) through a lack of curiosity about negative consequences of one's preferred policies that I'm willing to carry water for this claim made by a right-winger about left-winger beliefs.
07mk
12d ago
No one who says "[x] do/don't care about [y]" mean that "literally every individual within the group [x] do/don't care about [y]." This is common sense and shouldn't need to be explicitly stated in a discussion like this. In this situation, the question is relating to how "policies that leftists prioritize/champion have predictable outcomes on child rape such that their level of caring about it is necessarily below others and below some meaningful threshold in order to prioritize such policies." And, again, as a leftist who used to champion such policies, I was by no means unusual as someone who openly said that, if allowing in poor people that Republicans dislike into our country also means that some of those poor people will do things like rape more children in the USA, then so be it. But more common were people who would outright deny that such policies would lead to bad outcomes without doing the very very hard work of actually checking with multiple adversarial sources that disagree heavily with oneself, which is the ultimate form of not caring about those bad outcomes, i.e. child rape in this case. I am perfectly comfortable saying that those leftists would absolutely, 100%, honestly, in good faith believe they care about it, but their lack of curiosity in actually checking if their beliefs about reality are correct shows that their belief about what they care about is incorrect.
07mk
13d ago
I don't find either of your examples to be anywhere near the level of dunking or the vitriol that's displayed by antifa here. Wording meaningful claims about truth in a way that's meant to sound controversial isn't good, but it's a whole other world away from content-less naked loosely connected declarations that amount to booing the outgroup. Like, the question of whether or not leftists care about child rape isn't pleasant, nor is it nice, but it's a real question that can be honestly, in good faith, answered as No given the political issue being discussed (as a leftist myself, I'm perfectly okay with saying that when I was a younger, more naive leftist, I genuinely didn't care about child rape or other potential negative consequences of unmitigated immigration, such as lower wages or suicide bombings; such things were the cost I would gladly have me and my fellow citizens pay for giving more poor people the opportunity to thrive in a first world nation like the USA. My opinion on that has changed since; I think I've gained greater empathy than I used to have for certain groups of people). And characterizing a drug as for aiding gay men in going to orgies isn't nice, but IIRC that was just one off-hand line in a comment that otherwise had some meaningful thing to say about different ways different drugs are covered by insurance. There's actually meat to the bones, along with all that shit.
The comment here by antifa, and IME the occasional leftists who come in "hot" here, are basically pure shit with perhaps some bones and ligaments there. That difference matters to people who care about the meat on the bones, i.e. the actual content of the arguments, but that difference matters little to people who care primarily about getting their views lauded and their outgroup's views booed. This is one reason why, even as a leftist, I find the quality of conversation and discussion here, where it's predominantly populated by people well to the right of the most right-leaning person I might meet IRL. Who cares if they'll drop in little - or big - digs at me and my ingroup here and there or all the time? Their actual substantive criticisms are actually interesting and valuable and the wording and the digs don't affect the level of charity or quality of arguments.
07mk
13d ago
I know very little about social work or its culture, but certainly I was educated in ways similar to you, where "sex work is work" was the unchallengeable dogma, in the sense that any parent who would react to their daughter saying "I got a job as a hooker at the local brothel" any differently to her saying "I got a job as a server at the local restaurant" is necessarily a misogynist, and I think it's just another instance of the humanities in academia going off and declaring things as true based on what sounds convenient rather than based on what is actually true in reality. How much time, do you wager, the professors who taught this sort of this stuff, actually spent around real prostitutes working the streets or the internets or whatever, actually learning and documenting what the median or modal woman who goes into this industry would experience? I'd wager that what little time they spent with IRL prostitutes wasn't spent in actual meaningful documentation and knowledge generation, but rather on confirmation bias. It's convenient to just believe a simple slogan and then fit all observations into that slogan instead of trying to modulate one's worldview based on observations. Doubly so when you spend your entire professional and most of social life surrounded by people who all agree with you on this, many of whom have very high status and are willing to heap more status onto you for agreeing with them more loudly. Both logically and logistically, you run into major holes in your belief if you actually start thinking about and observing the way customers interact with sex workers and how sex workers get into the industry and how the employment structures work, but why think about logic and logistics, when there's valuable status to be gained?
I really don't think there's anything deeper than that. It's not an ogre onion, it's a balloon.
07mk
1mo ago
I don't know that I'd characterize it as "reflexive genuflection," but the way I interpreted the statement was that it's sad that the specific pattern that's observed is sad (rather than that it's sad that there is a pattern at all, which is what the text actually says, which I took to be carelessness), because the prevailing ideology makes it difficult to solve the problem due to making the act of publicly noticing this specific pattern severely punishable. Now, I'm personally not sure that ignoring such patterns is meaningfully harmful to our ability to address the problem of the kinds of antisocial behavior that's being discussed, but certainly many people in this forum seem to believe otherwise.
07mk
1mo ago
I spent around seven years living in Seattle. There are a few gangs in Seattle, generally based in the southern area. As it turns out, most of the participants of the gangs happen to be black. This led to the black gang members being arrested and prosecuted for crimes in a disproportionate way compared to the overall population of the city. Seattle's solution to this was to disband the gang unit.
This looks like it'd be a good basis for a reboot or spiritual successor of The Wire. Like how the then-contemporary issue of the drug war was used as good fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing in the original series, the now-contemporary issue of DEI/socjus/idpol/CRT/etc. seems like it could provide plenty of fodder for showcasing dysfunction in policing today, as well as other related institutions like schools and local government. I just wonder if there's a David Simon today who's been covering local police work in some city for the past 15 years who has the depth and breadth of experience to now put together a show.
Or perhaps rather than something like The Wire, something more akin to Dr. Strangelove would be more appropriate.
07mk
1mo ago
It is, when taken in context with the rest of the statement.
No, it's still false while taking the context of your statement and the entire comment thread here.
The claim is that creative expression cannot exist since the player interacts with the programming to create the "work." Therefore, the programmer cannot say what the creative expression "is" any more than the coder of tax preparation software can say his program has "artistic meaning" without the user inputing values, or any more than the designer of a car's ignition system can say his diagram is "artistic expression."
But this claim is, again, simply wrong. So what if the player interacts with the programming to create the "work?" The creative expression of the creator of the software is the boundaries that are set on how the player can interact with the programming. As long as the player isn't hacking the game, no matter what choices the player makes while playing the game, the player's choices are within the boundaries that are the creative expression of the game devs.
07mk
1mo ago
Art is defined by being an act whose principal purpose is creative expression of the creator (this is why video games fail to be art; once they're put in the hands of the player, the creator has no control over the creative expression. A "Let's Play" of a video game might be considered "art," depending upon the intent of the uploader; the game itself never can be).
(Emphasis added)
The bolded part just isn't true, though. The creator of a video game has complete control over the creative expression when the game is being played, because the creative expression of the game creator isn't in the playing of the game, it's in the structure and rules of the game. In Mario, the creative expression of Nintendo isn't something like "Mario moving from left to right to hit the flag" or whatever, it's "when A is pressed on the button, the pixels and audio coming out of the TV adjust such that the player character appears to hop in the air, when the right button is pressed, they adjust such that the player character appears to walk to the right, accelerating to a run if the button is held down," and every other rule that makes up the game, along with the images, animations, sound effects that accompany those. Those are all within the control of the game creator and outside the control of the player if modding isn't considered (modding would be a whole other case, akin to someone cutting out pages of a published novel and taping in new pages that they wrote themselves).
The fact that each individual player would - and usually should - interact with the rules of game in their own individual unique way based on their own personal quirks and idiosyncratic preferences doesn't change the fact that the rules they're interacting with is under full control of - in fact, it's the only creative expression of - the creators of the game.
I think one can argue that almost every video game doesn't have creative expression of the creators as its principal purpose or even a particular purpose and, as such, they don't count as "art," for whatever it's worth. But I don't see how game creators have any less control over their creative expression than a movie director or painter, just because they're working in an interactive medium. The players interacting with the game all have to interact with the same set of rules and audiovisual representations of those rules, which were set by the creators of the game.
07mk
1mo ago
All of the negative reviews I've seen are bitching about the performance, which hasn't been an issue for me or my circle of gaming friends, the only bitching about the gameplay or story I've seen has been generic 'oh its corpo shlock with cut content and sweet baby were involved' and that's a knee jerk reaction these days.
I plan on playing the game eventually, but my expectations and hopes have been tempered by the reviews I've been seeing, which all seem to criticize the same things. The performance is one of them, though that's been a mostly minor point; more serious issues are the stealth gameplay and the puzzles, both of which have been described as insultingly easy by almost every review I've watched. Particularly the stealth enemy AI has been said to make this year's Star Wars: Outlaws's enemy AI look smart in comparison. Bad stealth gameplay in an Indiana Jones game is perfectly forgivable, but then the puzzles are also said to be extremely easy, which would leave basically just the combat to carry the gameplay, which the reviews say are pretty bare-bones.
The tone and story have received basically universal praise, which is what draws me towards the game as a lifelong fan of the original film trilogy, but I was also hoping that it would have some decent puzzle-solving or exploration gameplay, like it was a modern incarnation of Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the LucasArts point-and-click adventure game from the 90s.
07mk
1mo ago
Thus, members of the group have collectively decided that they'll allow no words at all to describe their movement, so you have tons of individual definitions like were used to describe the left (progressive, woke, wokist, SJW, social justice leftist, etc etc).
A major difference specifically with the phrase "woke right" that makes this new term extra confusing is that "woke" was never a term used by any rightists to describe their rightist ideological positions. This is in contrast to terms like "progressive," "woke," "social justice warrior," and even "identity politics," which were terms brought into the mainstream by their strongest proponents who were proudly labeling themselves and their ideology as such.
07mk
1mo ago
Trans topics haven't been mainstream for a long time, but they've certainly been a part of the progressive movement for a long time, at least decades. It's merely another instantiation of the concept of equal rights being expanded to cover minorities, following the success of the gay rights/gay marriage movements of a couple decades ago. Heck, the mere existence of trans topics as a mainstream political/ideological topic over the past decade or so is an example of swimming leftward.
07mk
1mo ago
Well, if by “visceral response” you mean “heuristic.”
I don't. By "visceral response," I mean a sort of automatic, subconscious, emotional response. A heuristic is something else, which you outline below:
Hearing someone choose the word “females” usually says a lot about their worldview.
But... it doesn't. Referring to women as "females" is just accurate, mainstream, correct use of that word. Claiming that only people with a certain type of worldview tend to use this word that way, and as such, forms a meaningful heuristic with respect to how to react to such usage, is, again, something that appears as motivated reasoning. I've yet to encounter a shred of evidence that usage of the word that way has any correlation with the speaker's worldview, or evidence that anyone has even attempted to collect such evidence.
This is in contrast to terms like "male fantasy" or "male privilege," which are well-known terms from a certain specific well-known ideology or cluster of ideologies. It's certainly possible for people to use those phrases in a way that doesn't invoke those ideologies, but the very concept of characterizing individuals as having "privilege" based on their group identity with respect to sex is something that relates to those ideologies.
07mk
1mo ago
Billionaires et. al. can afford private security, but there's been a recent movement attacking small business owners as the "petit bourgeois," who are less likely to be able to afford that kind of stuff. Those grievances are likely more local, though, and less likely to make the news. Local level "activism" doesn't generate attention, so maybe it's less of a concern. Idk.
I know nothing about this recent movement, but it reminds me of dekulakization in the USSR roughly a century ago, which led to some pretty bad results for almost everyone involved, so, at first blush, I hope this movement dies a quick death.
07mk
1mo ago
First, this isn't how people often use the phrase on this site or others. When they speak of Cthulhu, they're often referring to things happening on the scale of decades or years, and sometimes even less.
This doesn't match my experience. This phrase is so niche that I don't often run into it, but my memory of it is that decades is roughly the minimum timescale involved, i.e. they're talking about decades or perhaps even centuries, not decades or years, and certainly not even less than years. Timescales of under a decade - or even a handful of decades - are so short that extreme, unsustainable things can win out - and often do, akin to a last-place team beating the first-place team in one of their dozen match-ups during an MLB season - such that people seem to believe that they shouldn't talk about them in such grand, sweeping outside-view terms, but rather with the actual inside-view specific factors.
07mk
1mo ago
If you say "these people are all liars", then I'm going to call you out. "Lying" is saying things you believe to be false with the intention that others will believe them to be true. It is highly useful to have a word for that, and I think that's worth protecting against hyperbole like yours.
I don't think that's the singular definition of lying. Phrases like "lying to oneself" and "lying by omission" are quite common, and I don't think they're being ironic or hyperbolic. Often, lying to oneself is considered a lesser evil than knowingly saying false things with the conscious intent to make others believe them to be true, but I'd also argue that, often, the truth is so obvious and the false thing that someone believes when they "lie to themselves" is so blatantly self-serving that it's at least as much an evil.
07mk
1mo ago
This appears as you typical minding to me. Honestly, the more I think about the deal, the more it appears to be, logically, the best deal in the history of deals, and someone who can make deals that are better than that one is someone who must be in an almost unimaginably privileged position.
It's just a throwaway line said by the pilot while playing with dinosaur figures. He was making up dialogue between, IIRC, a stegosaurus and a tyrannosaurus while having them pretend-fighting. I think the full line was "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
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