ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
No bio...
User ID: 1012
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Russia has apparently been abducting tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian Children. The prospects of getting these kids BACK even if Ukraine wins are slim-to-none.
I'm no Russia apologist but this seems like maximally uncharitable framing, and I'm extremely skeptical of that wiki article since it seems like blue tribe has thrown in completely with Zelensky. Having never heard of that, I assumed that Russians were literally driving around in vans and snagging kids to send them back to the motherland to process into Soylent Green or something since I can't imagine why they would bother rounding up kids in a war zone. But apparently they're just collecting war orphans, kids who were stuck in government institutions, and kids who were orphans before the war broke out, and trying to place them in Russian homes.
I'm not really sure what the alternative is. Send them across a chaotic active military front? Leave them to scrounge for rats to eat in bombed out apartment blocks? Having read the AP news article cited in the wiki (NYT one is paywalled), the biggest complaints are that the kids aren't being sent to the other side of Ukraine (which makes sense since as far as Russia is concerned eastern Ukraine is part of Russia now) and that the kids are being taught Russian which apparently counts as "genocide." From the kids' perspectives, western Ukraine and Russia are probably both very foreign, and wherever they get sent in Russia will almost certainly be farther away from the warzone then wherever they'd end up in Ukraine.
This is as bad as "kids in cages," and it makes it really hard for me to take seriously any claims of Russian war crimes (of which I'm sure there are many real examples) since western media is so eager to exaggerate to push an image of Russians as sadistic child-stealing orcs.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
That was always strange to me. Who are the real Masters if Slave Morality is strong enough to subdue Master Morality? It reminds me of the JQ paradox, that Jews are simultaneously weak, cowardly, dissolute, and pathetic, and also somehow powerful, full of chutzpah, fanatical, and fearsome. Does Nietzsche ever address why Master Morality is not naturally dominant since it's apparently so awesome and life-affirming?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
My reactions to reading your synopsis:
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This sounds like a social justice fantasy so outrageous that it borders on pornographic
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This sounds like what might actually happen today if the races were swapped (and sure enough @Folamh3 says it was; do you have a link to the case?)
To your prompts:
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"No" to all those questions. Alabama in 1996 is much closer to Alabama in 2023 than to Alabama in 1926.
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Not very differently. Which is to say, both back then and today the jury would have been quite fair and just, unlike the ridiculous civil rights fantasy the movie portrays. Alabama today might actually be slightly less tolerant than Alabamians in 1996, since back then they were on board with "colorblind" race relations as a sort of truce. Now, racial identity politics and tribalism are on the rise, but I still don't think it would be enough to change how the trial would be handled.
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Light sentence for the murders of the two scumbags, and whatever the standard sentence is for unintentionally shooting someone.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
How can so many people be publishing stuff with this quote in it, and none of them paused long enough to check their source?
As an average Joe and non-academic, I just assume that a sizeable chunk of papers and citations are just made up and I look on requests for "source?" and quasi-religious appeals to "peer review" with an increasingly jaundiced eye. I think that a lot of this is probably not malicious, since I too have copied quotations from second or third hand sources without checking the original when writing undergrad papers, but that doesn't make this any less of a problem.
The usual retort is along the lines of "it might not be the perfect system, but it's the best one we've got." I'm not sure I agree. A tabloid magazine article claiming something outrageous is easy for people to evaluate and accept, reject, or suspend judgment. In contrast, a published study filled with impressive sounding words and using complicated statistical methods appears cloaked in a mantle of authority, expertise, and erudition has much more power to simply overawe plebs into accepting its conclusion.
This sloppy, lazy, or ideologically motivated science has the potential to be very harmful to a person's project of building a useful and accurate model of their world because when it's wrong, it's wrong in cleverer , deeper, more subtle ways than, say, the tabloid example above. A great analogy is "The Book" from Anathem:
Since the sole purpose of the Book was to punish its readers, the less said of it the better. To study it, to copy it out, and to memorize it was an extraordinary form of penance.
[...]
There was no point at all to the Book, which is what made it an especially dreaded form of penance. It contained twelve chapters. Like the scale used to measure earthquakes, these got exponentially worse as they went on, so Chapter Six was ten times as bad as Chapter Five, and so on. Chapter One was just a taste, meted out to delinquent children, and usually completed in an hour or two. Two meant at least one overnight stay, though any self-respecting troublemaker could bang it out in a day. Five typically meant a stay of several weeks. Any sentence of Chapter Six or higher could be appealed to the Primate and then to the Inquisition. Chapter Twelve amounted to a sentence of life at hard labor in solitary confinement; only three avout had finished it in 3690 years, and all of them were profoundly insane.
Beyond about Six, the punishment could span years. Many chose to leave the concent rather than endure it. Those who stuck it out were changed when they emerged: subdued, and notably diminished. Which might sound crazy, because there was nothing to it other than copying out the required chapters, memorizing them, and then answering questions about them before a panel of hierarchs. But the contents of the Book had been crafted and refined over many centuries to be nonsensical, maddening, and pointless: flagrantly at first, more subtly as the chapters progressed. It was a maze without an exit, an equation that after weeks of toil reduced to 2 = 3. Chapter One was a page of nursery-rhymes salted with nonsense-words that almost rhymed-but not quite. Chapter Four was five pages of the digits of pi. Beyond that, however, there was no further randomness in the Book, since it was easy to memorize truly random things once you taught yourself a few tricks-and everyone who’d made it through Chapter Four knew the tricks. Much harder to memorize and to answer questions about were writings that almost but did not quite make sense; that had internal logic, but only to a point. Such things cropped up naturally in the mathic world from time to time-after all, not everyone had what it took to be a Saunt. After their authors had been humiliated and Thrown Back, these writings would be gone over by the Inquisition, and, if they were found to be the right kind of awful, made even more so, and folded into later and more wicked editions of the Book. To complete your sentence and be granted permission to walk out of your cell, you had to master them just as thoroughly as, say, a student of quantum mechanics must know group theory. The punishment lay in knowing that you were putting all of that effort into letting a kind of intellectual poison infiltrate your brain to its very roots. It was more humiliating than you might imagine, and after I’d been toiling on Chapter Five for a couple of weeks I had no difficulty in seeing how one who completed a sentence of, say, Chapter 9 would emerge permanently damaged.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Where do you go on the internet to have fun in 2023?
I used to frequent the chans back when there were many small ones, read a lot of SA, Fugly, iMockery, even early Cracked and some Maddox, among dozens of other small sites. Then there was Stumbleupon which was like magic to me when it came out, and I came across all kinds of weird and interesting sites while using it.
I've outgrown a lot of those sites now -- they were a lot funnier when I was 15 -- but I haven't really found any new sites or communities that scratch the same itch. I usually check this place first for interesting bathroom reading, then if there's nothing new I check a few subreddits, and if I'm truly desperate I'll open 4chan, although the noise/bots/spam seem to finally have killed any originality that was still lingering (except for during the rare major Happening).
Help me avoid reading books and going outside by recommending a few fun, funny, and/or interesting sites to read.
Wasn't it applied to fans of "The Man Show?" So it's probably around 20 years old. Maybe it (or a sanitized version of it) started offline?
Edit: Since people seem unfamiliar with the term -- my understanding is "person (usually a guy) who leans left not out of pure devotion to the progressive cause, but because he enjoys fun deviant stuff like booze and porn that the prudish Christian Right would try to restrict or ban."
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Japanese crows. They're huge and really clever. There are crow fanzines and crow pet owner societies in Japan. Sometimes they even have live crow pop-up cafes.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
If you've got the right sort of sand, you can make a Sagrada Familia sandcastle. My daughter enjoyed this when she was about 4 or 5. Otherwise just crack a beer and let 'em run around, they make their own fun at that age.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Definitely take them when they're a bit older. My dad took me to Normandy when I was 8 or 9, and decades later those are still some of my most vivid memories. Extremely cool and interesting.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
The porn and headlock thing sounds like a fantasy more than anyone I met in real life
I think this sort of touches on what I find strange about the meme. It's an imaginary version of a tomboy that is basically a bro. Tomboyish girls (that I have known) aren't like that, they're just girls who are a bit more masculine in a few areas, or even just girls who are confident.
But I wouldn't say any of these means you're pretending to be a man
Yeah, that was too broad a statement. That other poster just got under my skin.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Thanks, done.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
No, I think you may very well be a principled person. But you are probably surrounded by a large majority who are arguing for unprincipled exceptions who will use your principled stance to cynically further their goals.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
You're arguing in favor of a broad definition of tomboy, while I'm talking about something rather narrow. From the linked meme in the OP:
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Thinks makeup is stupid
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Likes porn
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Likes video games
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Rough speech like "I'm gonna kick your ass/suck my dick/fag"
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Gets mistaken for a boy
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Puts you in headlocks
Sounds like a boy or young man to me.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
My wife is pretty tomboyish, and we have a pretty normal relationship minus the occasionally flipped gender roles.
This is actually how my relationship is, but I wouldn't call my wife a tomboy. Maybe we need more shades of meaning than "wheat field tradwife" and "tomboy."
And since we're pathologizing each other's preferences,
I don't think you're the sort of person I'm talking about in the OP, but thanks I guess.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Would you rather have sex with your buddy or your kid?
An adult woman who doesn't pretend to be a man is a kid?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I guess I don't think it is one, but there are a lot of smart people on here who sometimes are able to help me see things from a different angle so I suppose I was hoping for that. If I could tell you what kind of answer I wanted, if I could steelman this in my head, I probably wouldn't ask here.
If I had to imagine a well-adjusted and over 25 who was into tomboys, I suppose I would imagine a guy with traditionally feminine personality traits who enjoyed taking on traditionally female aspects of a male-female relationship. But I don't think that's what I'm seeing on the internet, instead it just seems like emotional immaturity. Are there mature, feminine men who are into tomboys in any significant number? Or are men who like tomboys a totally different breed? Or something else I haven't imagined?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
No, it's not enough, because you and I both know that these cases will never be reopened so it costs you absolutely nothing to take that stance. Very principled and also very convenient.
As someone above posted, the only way to deescalate this sort of partisan spiral is for your side to willingly take an L. If the Dems showed that they had Trump dead to rights but then loudly proclaimed that they refused to stoop to politically motivated prosecution, I would be impressed. Or, if they prosecuted Trump and then also began looking into Hunter Biden, I would be impressed. But until then, if it looks/walks/smells like political partisanship then it probably is, and all the self-righteous throat clearing in the world isn't going to change anyone's mind.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
This is essentially what I believe. As long as he remains active in politics, and quite possibly even if he doesn't, the investigations will continue until they get him or he dies.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
Now I’ve got an urge to map the exact route by which he moved the goalposts, but I’m trying to cool down a bit before posting.
I'd be interested in reading this as I'm often baffled and fascinated at my boomer relatives' logic.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
This is the real problem. I don't know or really care if Trump is guilty of mishandling documents, but I do care about setting a precedent for using the bureaucracy to endlessly hound and destroy a political rival. I thought his "lock her up" rhetoric was stupid and irresponsible in 2016, and I think this much more serious escalation is stupid now.
Trump was over after 2020, the Dems could have just taken the high road, ignored Trump, and watched as the GOP tore itself apart three ways between the Trump fanatics, the Nevertrumpers, and the demoralized group in-between (including me). Instead there's a faction determined to make an example of him in order to... what? Certainly it's not because they love justice or else they would've been prosecuting the legions of other corrupt American politicians who do worse things. Presumably this is ideologically motivated but again -- to what strategic end? Letting Trump beclown himself on social media as he and his partisans slip into irrelevance would have much more effectively destroyed his movement than giving him a bunch of attention and riling up his fans. It seems then to be motivated by short sighted vengeance, or is there a steelman I'm not seeing?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I dunno, man. I'm pretty sure that if Jan 6th was a bit hotter the cops would've started shooting people and would probably have been exonerated for doing so. Look how draconian the legal repercussions have been for Jan 6 participants.
Not so for BLM. I don't blame cops for not shooting BLM rioters, they knew that the full force of the radical left-wing political machines would come down on them and utterly ruin their lives.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
1yr ago
I agree that men who complain about that stuff are ridiculous. "My female feminine wife acts like such a woman! How could this happen to me? Who could have forseen this?" It's silly.
I imagine it's probably pretty different for gay guys, so my OP probably doesn't apply to them
Trigger warning: traditional gender roles
But I enjoy providing, protecting, and listening. That's what men by nature want to do. I think men who don't want to do that have something wrong with them, like women who hate children or want to spend their life in an office cubicle instead of marrying . Those men are either abnormal or immature (I believe "manchildren" is the hip term).
I don't want my girlfriend to be my friend, she's not a dude, she's a romantic partner. She fulfills a different need. I have male friends who fill the other role. A tomboy just seems like subpar gf mixed with a subpar buddy.
Oops, good catch, my wording was completely wrong. I meant that if two black men abused and killed a white child, I wouldn't be surprised for them to get away with a relatively light sentence.
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