Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
No bio...
User ID: 1558
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
If I asked people "All else equal, would it be better for everyone to do their absolute best to be timely?" or the same for objectivity, I suspect I would nearly universally get affirmation.
What? No! Absolutely not!
This sentiment belies a total failure to understand why people sometimes aren't timely: because it's more important for them to spend time with their loved ones / doing the things they love, than to arrive on time for your sterile business meeting at a possibly Bullshit Job that didn't need doing anyway.
The tyrrany of the schedule is profoundly inhumane, never mind anti-white.
Your points are convincing, alas, it doesn't matter if they are. Rowling is a TERF, and as per intersectionality worldview, she has to be every other reprehensible thing you can think of
There's a similar sentiment in the OP:
I realise that the proponents of this don't care if it's true or not, because any stick will do to beat the dog.
But both of these I think have the diagnosis backwards. It's not any characteristic or opinion of Rowling that causes the HP fanbase to hunt for phobia-epicycles. It's rather the zeitgeist and the neurotic characteristics of the HP fanbase that sends them down this route, and they'd be doing it even if Rowling was a (even more) scrupulous adherent of woke signalling on social media.
There's social credit to be made in purity spiralling regardless of whether Rowling has heterodox opinions or not. Do you really think Internet People wouldn't be trying to nitpick problematic parts of Harry Potter absent the TERF stuff? I don't.
They're not beating the dog with any stick they can find because the dog's been bad. They're beating the dog with any stick they can find because a track record of having a good Beating arm is how you get credibility amongst your fellow animal control enthusiasts.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Personally, if I found out that someone had made fake porn of me or anyone I care about (or distributed actual pictures of them naked/etc), I would immediately go kick their teeth in. I would do this because I would be incandescently furious that someone would do something so flagrantly insulting and disrespectful and then be dumb enough to let me find out about it.
OK, but this reaction is isomorphic to Wahabis going "If another man talked to my wife unchaperoned..."
Just because you were brought up fundamentalist doesn't mean it's objectively acceptable to do violence to people for victimless crimes.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
If you read the tweets about the atrioc incident you can clearly see women are very upset
I do not think you'll get very far by believing that any of the emotional states presented for mass public attention by YouTubers on social media are authentic. Least of all on topics directly relevant to their personal branding.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Basically, I feel like the shame comes from having taken the picture, not from the fact that other people are seeing it.
Yeah, this is my intuition too. People aren't harmed by being seen naked and/or mid-coitus: people are harmed by having their friends, family, and coworkers know that they're stupid and/or slutty enough to be taped, then leaked. In the deepfake case, you weren't stupid and/or slutty enough to be taped, then leaked, so the sting is all but gone.
Would I want friends or family to watch a deepfake sex tape of me? No, but only to the same extent that I wouldn't want them to imagine a sex tape of me, either. And the problem is I have with the imagining is that they're incestuous perverts, not that I've been exposed as a slut who doesn't do their due diligence checking the hedgerow for peeping toms with cameras.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I think the point is that "dehumanising != bigot" is ITSELF irrelevant because while you are right that it is theoretically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them, if you use a 1950s dictionary and several slide rules, it is not practically possible to portray someone a bigot without dehumanising them in The Current Year, because the incentives of the zeitgeist converge modern media writers on that conflation too incentivisingly.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Society would be much better off if incels had those needs met in terms of productivity via enfranchisement, less culture warring and societal friction and that's before you get to basic human kindness and decency in helping and accepting the unloved.
I think this is far from a sure thing.
To meet the needs of an incel, a woman must throw herself on the sword and date a man who she doesn't want to (because if she did want to date him, he wouldn't be an incel). You can't meet the needs of incels without making women unhappy, and vice-versa. Western society currently prefers to side with making women happy on that dilemma; compelled arranged marriage in rural India society prefers to side with making incels happy on that dilemma. If we could do a ceteris paribus controlling for wealth, would Indian compelled marriage really lead to "society being better off" than Western female profligacy?
I think yes, because I suspect that men produce more net social benefit when happy than women do, but I recognise that there is a trade-off being made here and it's not a slam-dunk in favour of men.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I would also argue that its kind of a trope that incels only want sex from attractive women, are therefore voluntarily choosing celibacy, and thus deserve to be maligned.
My usual rejoinder to the "just lower your standards bro, then you'll have loads of partners to pick from" argument is that is is isomorphic with "just become gay bro, then you'll have loads of partners to pick from".
A man can't just choose to be physically attracted to a 200 pound heifer femcel and thereby mutually annihilate the incel-femcel pair, any more than he can choose to suddenly like male on male sodomy.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Rowling, and women, have power. If they are choosing to not lend it to trans women they are doing harm to them.
I can't tell whether you're saying this as an articulation of what anti-JK-ists believe, or saying it unironically yourself, but either way, it's inaccurate in the same way that "You have money, by not giving it to me you are impoverishing me" is. Not helping != harming.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
how much social criticism does a masculine man who lifts, is heterosexual, has masculine hobbies like fishing and woodworking, has a few kids, a stay-at-home-wife, is the breadwinner etc but who kowtows to the dominant ideology in public (like many ‘masculine’ men throughout history) actually face?
With a grand total of 7 stipulations put on his behaviour, how is that not exactly the "controlled and neutered male energy" that was being described?
"Just make sure all your hobbies are prosocial and you support all these hangers-on and you vote the right way and never think anything wrong and don't have any oddities..."
I don't think anyone is fooled enough to believe this is WotC's real motivation. They don't care about progressive issues, or (their other scape goat) NFT's.
Idk. I nope'd out of WOTC products when they started stuffing homosexual characters into the Magic cards hand-over-fist in the Theros set ten years ago. Can't remember whether that was before or after they memory-holed cards like Crusade and Invoke Prejudice; it was certainly before they started firing their own artists for making anodyne pro-Trump statements on their own social media.
There's a pattern of behaviour. Maybe WOTC is un-woke itself but desperately seeking validation from its woke customers; or maybe it's putting on the political commissar jacket with full gusto. But I feel at this point it's a distinction without a difference as to how pleased I should be that the revolution is eating its own.
To date, has GoF produced any real utility?
Providing cushy high-status jobs for overproduced elites staves off nuclear civil war, is that good enough?
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
It's easy to prove that covid caused millions of deaths
IS it? There are many causes of so-called Covid deaths; very few people die of Covid alone. You need pulmonary co-morbidities like smoking; like decreased immune function; like the social pathology of Western medical praxis at keeping Grandma around, medicated up to the gills, long past her sell-by date already. Africa hardly had any Covid deaths, because they don't do the last one.
Saying "Covid is responsible for millions of deaths" is like packing someone's port authority warehouse with ammonium nitrate for years and then putting all responsibility for the inevitable explosion on "The unseasonable heat that day was responsible for 7000 deaths".
The spark doesn't cause the inferno; the kindling does. A novel bat virus is only a spark.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I feel like I'm being gish-gallopped here, because now you're moving the goalposts into the conscript/professionalism of the army and home ground advantage and whatever. The only point I'm making is that receiving a jillion dollars' worth of NATO aid didn't help the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan much, so there's hardly a guarantee it'll help Ukraine. Indeed, iirc pre-war Ukraine was about as corrupt as Afghanistan, so we might expect most of the materiél is getting pawned rather than used on the front, which is why the NATO dollars weren't much use in Afghanistan.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
The domino theory was not that A empowers the actor to attempt B. It is it emboldens the actor to attempt B.
This is a textbook motte and bailey.
Perhaps YOU, @Gdanning, are scrupulously consistent in every discussion you've ever had that Domino Theory describes emboldening only, but many/most proponents of the theory are not.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
Well that's all well and good, but you could say exactly the same things about Ghani's Afghanistan vs. the Taliban. Indeed, the Taliban had zero state resources compared to Russia's nonzero. But despite receiving infinity NATO materiél, Ghani's Afghanistan fell the instant there weren't Coalition troops on the ground. Ukraine doesn't have Coalition troops on the ground, therefore...
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
The biggest handicap to Ukrainian victory at this moment is the strange reticence of some western politicians to cheaply win a decisive victory over a long term adversary.
The strange thing to me is this Bizarro-world some some people are living in, where Russia is the West'l long-term adversary.
Other than CNN telling you that it's so, is there actually any post-1991 evidence that Russia is, in fact, our "long-term adversary", or is it just something that certain people keep repeating to try and meme it into truth?
Pointing a gun at someone is not done as a regular part of making movies
Well, yes it is... stochastically. For every time a man is close to a gun, some proportion of the time he will point it at another person, just as a probabilistic fact. You can decrease the amount of times this happens by detering said behaviour through punishment. But you may rapidly see that the side-effects of the deterrents become more pathological than the things they were meant to deter: namely, fewer movies will get made because movie sets need more safety commissars, which are both expensive and obstructive.
How many N movies are you willing to sacrifice to decrease "actor really does point gun at someone else" by M%?
For me the number is negative, because I prefer "watching movies" to "infinitesimal increases in teamster safety".
That society is a safetyist mess does not mean that safety should be completely disregarded.
Less strawmanning, please. I'm not saying COMPLETELY disregard, merely disregard much much more. And if you think society is a safetyist mess, you apparently agree with me, making it doubly odd that you would strawman me.
Prediction before reading: The result will be an artefact of the recommendation statistics. The overwhelming sentiment of NYT readers (say 80%) will be "Oh no not my poor little African Americinos, don't you dare end AA!", but there will be so many comments to this effect that the upboats are diluted across all of them, yielding a mediocre average score for a pro-AA comment. Conversely, so few anti-AA people are willing to stick their head over the parapet for a probable public drubbling / witch hunt / costing them their job for doing a racism, that the handful of anti-AA comments absorb all the upboats from the 20% of anti-AA people, yielding an evaporative cooling effect that makes the anti-AA comments, ironically, the most upboated.
After reading: It's different flavours of "didn't build this institution but want to benefit its patrimony" ethnic groups squabbling over their slice of the spoils system. Well, that's not incompatible with my prediction, but I accept defeat in that it is at best noncentral with my prediction.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
If lion-keeping had a small chance of gestating a cure for cancer, would this change your calculus?
Your lion is high risk for your neighbours, but also high reward.
Alec Baldwin wasn't hanging around with loaded guns for shits and giggles: he was trying to make ART. Fairly prolefeed-tier art, true, but do you want to live in a safetyist world where no-one dares pick up a paintbrush for fear the chemicals in their paint might flick into someone's mouth and cause freak allergy anaphylactic shock?
The usual objection to "jail people who fuckup" (I most usually see it applied to politicians who fail to avert war) is that if you did that, no-one would take the job at all. No competent scientist who had a chance of getting another job would go anywhere near the field of infectious disease research (not even gain of function stuff, but ANY infectious disease research).
Do you think scientists would still work on virulent chimera viruses if they had to stake endless torture on the possibility that it is leaked? If they wouldn’t, doesn’t this simply prove that research this risky should never be done?
You say this like it's a good thing that no-one would work on it, but it's not. Mad scientist research into crazy-dangerous viruses has a very positive net effect on the world. Without it, kiss goodbye to ever having a cure for ebola. Or influenza. Or the common cold. The only people that might work on such things under threat of torture are the incompetent bottom-of-the-class scientists with no chance of getting a different job, and when you have them working in your Biohazard Lv 4 facility, even with harsh deterrents for failure, they're MORE dangerous than competent scientists with no deterrent would have been, i.e. what we have now.
Sorry OP, but we already live in the best of all possible worlds in this regard. The occasional lab leak Megadeath is an inevitability even under optimal conditions. It turns out all right in the end, though; the expectation value of the research is still positive even when you factor in the megadeaths, because once you work out how to cure influenza, the billions of lives saved on the long time horizon exceed the millions of lives lost to lab accidents.
Same with Alec Baldwin movies. The lives of a few behind the scenes gophers are a small price to pay for cinematic entertainment enjoyed by millions. Hutches is the stochastic version of the child sacrifice of Omelas, and the price of her life is a bargain for the hedons generated.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I wrote an advocatus diabolus back in The Old Place about how "hard science academia is mostly taxpayer funded adult daycare for Israelis and Chinese stealing bread from the mouths of black bodies on whom that money could have been better spent". Fusion power especially: the meme of "we'll have it in 5 years" for the last 50 years is not just funny, it also represents a tremendous quantity of spending without results - aka grift.
So the fact that journos don't leverage rhetoric against it is a failure of their imagination, not because there's no political hay to rake.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
1yr ago
I inferred that OP was claiming that many food restrictions are not allergies. Veganism, vegetarianism, kosher, and halal are certainly psychosomatic.
And also, virtue signalling on behalf of people with actual food allergies is of course psychosomatic.
Discourse on dietary restrictions is I suspect something like 95% holier-than-thou-ism, 5% "if I eat shellfish I get itchy".
He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation.
This is very Gell-Mann Amnesia of him, and you can tell because the parts he cites as good:
if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation
...are the parts that you can't see with your own lyin' eyes in order to discover that the leftist media is ALSO bad on those topics. How can Hanania tell me that the Atlantic's reporting on Myanmar is accurate, if he hasn't been there to see it himself? Did he visit CERN to check the fusion power stories?
We know that Blue Tribe reporting on race and sexuality is trash because we see those things when we go outside, and thereby realise that what happens IRL is not the story portrayed on the broadsheet page. It is then credulous to the point of stupidity to assume that the Myanmar reporting is good, in the absence of our own eyeballs' testimony on Myanmar to back the reporting up. Why would you assume good reporting as the baseline on these topics, when every topic you CAN check has bad reporting?
I mean, he tries to cover his ass a little against this line of objection with a one-sentence
When I look at writing about academic fields I’m familiar with, the MSM generally does a good job of reporting what research says
...but I feel like this is a fig-leaf of a defence in that it only covers the sort of technical, sedulous, grist-for-the-mill topics where they're copy-pasting the press release (so it's not really journalists writing), and ideologues don't have a dog in the fight. But you never know whether a dog will appear - maybe the Myanmar article writer is a seething Rohingya partisan, which would surely lead to distortion. And the dogginess of the fight can change on a dime: as Hanania says, COVID reporting is shit, but I bet vaccine research reporting was a whole lot less shit before 2020, when it became The Current Thing and therefore political.
"The liberal news can be accurate when reporting unimportant things no-one really cares about" is a statement I might be more willing to agree with, but it's not really NEWS at that point, is it?
This is a more difficult problem than the original one he's grappling with, though.
More options
Context Copy link