Primary might be better than sole, but I'd still add bonding and pleasure into the top 3 of the telos of sex. And I think there is ample historical and anthropological evidence to support that being the case throughout history and cultures.
Sure, though different cultures would certainly dispute the circumstances under which that bonding and pleasure are intended to apply.
With respect, you seem to be flattening a perfectly sensible argument, viz. "sex fairly regularly makes babies, if you are terrified of having babies then don't do the thing that regularly makes babies" into "Ha! Don't you see you're identifying biology with morality?! And if you don't accept this arbitrary list of repugnant conclusions that I have drawn up, then you must be a hypocrite."
Sex fairly regularly produces foetuses ->
Foetuses regularly develop into babies absent molestation ->
At some point in this process - opinions vary on which point - everyone agrees they acquire rights that must be taken into consideration alongside yours ->
Therefore if you are really determined to protect your freedoms, you would be best advised not to begin this chain.
One doesn't have to be a hypocrite or to swallow a dozen repugnant conclusions to see this, only able to accept the basic nature of cause and effect. From where I am standing, the only real reason I can see to deny some level of personal responsibility is a firm conviction that complete sexual freedom is such an important and wonderful thing that nothing must ever cloud or impinge it in the slightest.
If you're interested in discussing how we trade off the rights of the unborn at various ages, the pleasure and freedoms of people having sex, etc. etc. I've given some thoughts elsewhere but we certainly can.
It's being forced to participate in a blatant, obvious lie that literally every human being in history except 5 weird tribes in the middle of nowhere would recognise as a lie.
If it were publicly sayable and reified that trans people are insane and think they're the wrong gender, the existence of trans people in the vicinity would be broadly okay. One would feel sorry for them, but not necessarily feel compelled to say so to their face. The fact that there has been a vast activist-indoctrination effort to punish people who don't play along is what people find uncomfortable.
I've discussed before elsewhere but it's incredibly unpleasant to interact closely with a trans person in a Blue workplace, consciously choosing every day to lie because you're a coward who's afraid to be thrown out of the program you've invested years of work into, dreading the day when you slip up and absent-mindedly call the squeaky-voiced 5ft person who was a girl six months ago 'her'.
That may be true for many other fetishes but I've literally never heard any guy express a desire for that kind of play. Every time you hear about it, it's always the girl pushing for it. I think society finds this awkward so it gets blamed on the men.
Corvos
1d ago
More than some, less than others, I don’t know. Personally I think that foetuses are pretty human by the end of the second trimester and consider it broadly more appropriate for abortion to stop somewhere around the end of the first trimester.
You asked the more specific question of whether pregnancy can be considered the primary telos of sex from any viewpoint other than a Christian one and I’m just saying that as a biologist it seems very obvious to me and did long before abortion flared up as a public flashpoint (which it mostly still hasn’t in the UK).
Corvos
1d ago
Any biologist? Yes, sex in humans doesn't result in pregnancy literally every time, but it's the regular natural outcome and the prime evolutionary purpose of its existence. It takes considerable contrivance in terms of decades of biochemistry and materials science to prevent regular sex resulting in pregnancy, and sometimes even then sometimes that contrivance fails.
It's like exploring flooded caves or BASE jumping off buildings - it's not meant to go wrong, but everyone knows it sometimes does, and the only reason you're at risk is because you enjoy the activity enough to put aside the possibility of failure. Most people don't want such high risk and consequently don't do those activities.
No, she’s saying, “how far did we fall, that the right to kill your own baby in the womb on demand is considered to be the most important right a woman needs, the main thing that distinguishes women from chattel?”.
You may disagree with the framing, of course. Personally, I am more sympathetic to the pro-abortion side than Here and think the Euros (but not the UK or Anglo countries) have it broadly correct. First 8 weeks or so it’s not really human in any meaningful biological way IMO. After that period is ended the right to abort should, aha, terminate.
In anglo countries we seem to have got into this weird maximalist position where if you can’t kill a baby a month before birth then you are a slave, the baby has no rights until literally the moment it’s squeezed out of the vagina, and the whole thing is celebrated and glorified in a way that is very weird from the outside - a miscarriage is a tragedy but a late stage abortion is a beautiful assertion of the right to one’s body. I get the reasoning but it’s a bit much.
Corvos
3d ago
What I mean is that as a semi-advanced Japanese learner, it sounds like the best way to play is in Japanese where translation quality is not an issue and you have to go by real cultural nuance / in-depth understanding to figure out the answers. It's very rare to find something that is a) not targeted at (beginner) learners, b) not novels and novels worth of text as in an RPG, c) requires specific attention to the language at a level deeper than 'can I work out vaguely what is going on', and d) provides feedback about whether you got it right.
In theory it sounds great for an intermediate to advanced learner. Do you actually get any feedback, or do you have to do all 3000 and pray?
Corvos
3d ago
Now THAT's a Japanese learning game!
Is 'masochism game' a generally used term? It made me think of Viscera Cleanup Detail.
Corvos
3d ago
Nothing, I guess, if they really do have that ability. I would dispute equating "conducting a sneak-assassination of the entire leadership plus an extended bombing campaign, aimed at some combination of overturning the country's government + preventing them from developing weapons that might actually hurt their attackers" with "getting into a scrap". But yes, if India did that and Pakistan succeeded in closing the Strait of Hormuz, I would naturally blame India.
is this the first known instance of Nobel Disease developing in someone who didn't win a Nobel prize?
No, I think this is a different phenomenon. Humans anthropomorphise, and for various reasons LLMs have been made very easy to anthropomorphise. The Turing Test basically gets at what a normal person's definition of 'human' is, and LLMs basically pass it, so as a response people have started splitting into one of a few groups:
- People who interact closely with LLMs on a technical level and see the increasingly small gaps in the models themselves, or see the gaps in the simpler versions of the models and extrapolate up.
- People who interact closely with them on a less-technical level and bond with them.
- People who see something that has many of the qualities who traditionally consider human and ascribe all of the qualities we consider human.
- People who pattern-match to sci-fi narratives about 'robots becoming human', either in a positive way or a negative way.
- 'AI will not replace us, nerds are thieves who make inferior copies of us' people who will never assign intelligence to an AI no matter what.
All of this will only get more complex as discussion about AI continues to feed back into the training data for AI. It was a pretty notion but I'd like to slap the guy who thought SOUL.md was a good place to begin making AI workers.
TL;DR: Dawkins is saying this because he's gone normie, not because he's gone weird.
Corvos
3d ago
The point is that forcing somebody to do something and then blaming them for doing it is petty and sadistic.
If somebody controls an important pass, and you slaughter their family and make it clear that you will continue to slaughter until you get unconditional obedience, then closing off the pass is the obvious and natural response.
Some Americans seem to have got so fed up with being criticised unreasonably that they have lost the capacity to see when they are being criticised reasonably. Others seem to believe that Red Americans (as opposed to the hated Blues) can do no wrong and should be acclaimed throughout the world as the righteous God-Kings they obviously are - or else.
Corvos
3d ago
She also broadly abandoned him once she got rich and powerful, if memory serves.
Corvos
4d ago
People like Nerd Fitness regularly try. The problem with gameification is that games themselves have to be at least a little bit fun, especially if you want people to play them long-term. This is much harder to do for things that are (broadly) inherently dull and painful such as tax returns* or learning theoretical physics than for things like shooting monsters or looting dungeons. See for instance the game made by the guy who just tried to kill Trump - to the extent that it accurately represents and tries to teach particle physics, it's much less fun than another game would be using similar mechanics without the baggage.
There are other issues - gamified approaches have to put aside lots of extra time for the 'game' part so they aren't very efficient. If you have to play a periodic table board game for a week's worth of evenings where you could get the most important bits of info from a slide, a 30 minute lecture and a test, that's not necessarily an improvement.
*yes, I know about the XKCD.
Corvos
4d ago
I mentioned your description of the KV-2 to my Dad the WW2 enthusiast and he suggested you look up the French Char B1 bis at the Battle of Stonne, which took 140 hits defending a chokepoint and destroyed 13 Panzers and 2 anti-tank guns.
Corvos
5d ago
Your Two Minutes Hate quote from Nabokov is great. I've noticed myself that I often prefer the clunkier fan translations of Japanese visual novels to the elegant modern localisations, especially that of Fate Stay Night where the writing is fairly execrable at least in English. Lots of repetition, fragments, and clunky sentences - "People die when they are killed." - but there's an interest to it that gets lost in the polished remake.
Corvos
6d ago
Democrats who could convincingly project moderate positions on these social issues -- that are not assumed to be covers for more extreme positions -- would be popular. This would give Democrats lots of room to push their economic agenda, which is broadly popular. Democrats could have healthcare, tariffs, and infrastructure. This is basically what someone like Josh Shapiro did. A national platform along these lines would probably be very successful. In fact, I think if Democrats had adopted something like this all along they would never have lost to Trump in the first place.
This is basically the Tony Blair approach to government, and indeed it worked gangbusters for 15 years.
AI suggests Familial natural short sleep. It seems to be genuinely pareto-optimal for humans, with basically no known downsides and several performance enhancements, although confounded by small numbers of experimental participants. It's not clear if it's a condition per se or just winning the genetic lottery by falling on the absolute edge of various genetic traits for efficient sleep simultaneously.
AI also suggests that it's entirely separate from MCAD deficiency, which usually produces a low tolerance for exercise and slow physical recovery.
I hope you don't mind my looking it up, but it's a fascinating collection of traits.
Corvos
7d ago
As an outsider, there seems to be this longstanding tension in American thought between, “the president is the tribune of the people and must be kept from harm” and, “the only way to keep the president the tribune of the people is to make sure they can kill him if they want to”.
Corvos
7d ago
Used to happen in British Palestine (Israel) I believe. The Stern Gang loved that sort of thing.
Corvos
7d ago
Traditional Asian architecture is just not a scalable solution when you're quickly trying to urbanise 1/5ths of the world's population.
A great discussion, and keep in mind that this is true in the West as well! Big tower blocks are no more native to my British culture than they are to yours, where beautiful stucco Georgian houses completely fail to scale, as do thatched cottages or the stone of Oxford.
One can draw a lineage from the Swiss to brutalism and from the Americans to skyscrapers, and thus call these things ‘Western’, but I think it would be more accurate to say that Globalism and the pressures of urbanisation swallowed Western cultures first and then Eastern countries very soon after.
I think usually, “if it still hurts in a couple of days, or if you can’t move it properly (not because it’s stiff)”.
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