DiscourseMagnus
2d ago
This is an extremely underdiscussed point. The cognitive dissonance is bad enough that I've started seeing lots of people convince themselves that it isn’t even normal for fourteen year old boys to be attracted to fourteen year old girls in the first place.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
Censorship is very dangerous and a very bright line needs to be drawn around any exceptions made to the general anti-censorship principle. Documentation of crimes in the real world is a much better place to draw this line than things like obscene subject matter or a prurient tone; there's much less room for slope-slipping and constant renegotiation of norms. (I would actually be in favor of much harsher treatment of the live action porn industry in general, though, for much the same reason - it's just a thin conceptual shell of "speech" over prostitution.)
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
Maybe they think people should be allowed to say what they want because they don't think people should be allowed to want to say offensive things.
DiscourseMagnus
3d ago
there is a floor on how much the power of the word can erode since the central examples of pedophilia are just too abhorrent for the vast majority of people, unlike racism or sexism.
I'd consider Muhammad and Aisha a pretty central example of pedophilia, and they made a religion out of that which, in the present day, has about 2 billion adherents, nearly a quarter of the world's population. Humanity's moral floors are generally much further away than you'd like them to be.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
Oh, I'm sure, but that stat was about the girls. And I was already taking for granted that abusing the girls to that degree is going to indirectly fuck up the boys too; even if we unrealistically assume that you happen to be subjected to no violent crime yourself, what's it going to do to you to grow up as a boy in a community where the majority of your female peers are compelled into sex slavery by foreign invaders?
That's still an average of a small classroom full of new victims every day for fifty years, and I'm guessing it wasn't at a constant rate over those fifty years. (A regular-sized classroom if you're accounting for it just being the girls.)
Rephrasing: this is numerically roughly equivalent to if the UK had established a formal policy in the 1970s that every day, a random class would be selected by lottery and all of its white girls would be sold into sex slavery overseas, and that policy had continued ever since. Maybe it's an alternate timeline where the Ottomans won the World Wars. I don't know.
DiscourseMagnus
10d ago
I think this is one of the most important problems our civilization is facing, but I'd really like to get better backing for the 250k stat if we're going to use it; I think it might be true, but it's such an extraordinary claim that extraordinary evidence is merited to make it unimpeachable rather than merely shocking. That's approaching one percent of the current population of white British women, and easily far larger than a percent if we even begin to control for age cohort and affected region.
DiscourseMagnus
14d ago
Yeah, I personally find it somewhat alarming how many people seem eager to ignore the actual plot of the film in order to slot it into a preferred "bitches be crazy" gender war lens. I'm pretty sure it's going to be my favorite film of the year, and I personally found it extremely convicting; it's a very effective morality play about lust and the way that it poses as but is fundamentally incompatible with love. And the real, human lust in the film is Bear's, which led him to turn to the occult; "Nikki" is the demonic result of that. Sure, it sort of resembles a real type of mentally ill woman, but Bear did in point of fact impose that on her by calling on evil forces; he's a Faust figure.
I'm practically inclined to say that people are appreciating the film but desperately and disingenuously trying to reinterpret it as something less compatible with feminism, and I say that as someone with a pretty low view of feminism myself.
DiscourseMagnus
19d ago
Yeah, it's a rare positive sign for modern sexual morality that many of us have forgotten the distinction between lower class prostitutes and upper class ones and assume the latter doesn’t exist.
DiscourseMagnus
20d ago
I don't think this analysis really checks out; "trads" and "conservatives" are not the same group, and the latter are the ones it's reasonable to pose as "progressives driving the speed limit". Best I can tell, trads are generally opposed to racism, but pretty good at noticing when people are fucking with them with false accusations of racism, except in cases that are especially dimwitted and easy for progressives to peel off by any number of tactics. Some of their number predictably die in overseas mission trips or doing other charity work, so they do have to have some "suicidal empathy". However, it's often said that progressives support policies that let dangerous criminals into the country, but wouldn't personally invite them into their homes; I think trads are basically exactly the converse. They aren't generally Amish-style absolute pacifists, and it's pretty easy to whip them up into a nationalist fervor by posing things as a cultural and religious war.
DiscourseMagnus
20d ago
For example, Jesus says "love your neighbor", this works fine in his time because "your neighbor" is literally your neighbor
I note that as much as this interpretation might have been the result (unclear), this is pretty verifiably not the intention on display in the New Testament, much to the embarrassment of many a heatmap-pushing X user treating it as at least an open question.
DiscourseMagnus
24d ago
"white people are disfavored in two-tier policing"
Some extremely stunning loss of message control going on there where the usual suspects are denying that two-tier policing is real while the UK government itself is desperately pleading with the public that it'll review its explicit two-tier policing policies.
DiscourseMagnus
29d ago
I was going to say "I don't think it's particularly likely that Donald Trump will pull a successful auto-coup and establish his administration as above the law", but then I realized you were instead talking about him dying (or being killed) in office.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
While I agree that it looks like trash, I would question the label "overrated", seeing as practically all commentary I've seen on it firsthand comes to the same conclusion. I guess "overrated" begs the question "overrated by who". "Gaming journalists"? Uh, okay; are there any real people with that opinion?
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
This is simply the Marxist error of the labor theory of value. The difficulty of producing something raises its value indirectly by reducing its supply, but people do not demand things simply because they're in short supply. A great work of art is not great because of all of the effort that went into producing it; all of the effort that went into producing it was commendable because it had the goal of producing a great work of art. If it worked the other way around, then the most beautiful paintings and statues would pale in comparison to efficiently hiring teams to dig and fill ditches pointlessly.
It's entirely likely that AI will contribute to the end of the world and bring about unprecedented evil, but getting angry at it for making it easier to produce art is fundamentally similar in kind to getting angry at old computers, printers, or any other tools for making it easier to produce art. When people first started making AI art, it was novel and incredible and worthy of applause on that basis alone. Now AI art is very common, and it's rapidly raising the floor for how cheap decent-looking art can look, lowering its value. People feel threatened because if they can't make art that looks better than that, no one will value the labor of traditional artists remotely as much anymore. But their getting angry at that dynamic does not substantially change that dynamic.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
Did God not make us to be servants, and did we not rebel? All the works of detailed information on the nature of angels and demons that I know of are either extremely speculative, not considered religiously significant by many serious authorities, or both.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I feel like people overdistinguish between B(/D) and C. Sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic and all. "Demons try to trick humanity into thinking they're aliens to shake our belief in God" is an opinion that's all the rage among fundies these days, and every time I see it, all I can think is, can you really not draw the connection that "angels and demons" and "aliens" could quite sensibly just be two different sets of vocabulary for the same thing? Is "angels and demons might be beings much like humans but from different stars/planets" an inherently heretical view? Did ancient people have any need to be informed of the logistical specifics of how angels and demons came about? If we have faith, why would we presume that aliens don't have their own histories with and views on God, for good or for ill, which would make them, to us, angels or demons? In the event that our elites are secretly in contact with aliens, it seems entirely plausible to me that this is a very evil thing, on both ends of the contact, and that this is functionally occult activity, powerful people with demonic patrons.
DiscourseMagnus
1mo ago
I feel like this line of thought has to be post-facto rationalization that people are doing to justify their choice to themselves. Yes, obviously it's inhuman and cruel to force children, the mentally handicapped, etc to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. It's also obviously inhuman and cruel to summon any significant fraction of the world's population to participate in a "game" with life-or-death stakes. There is no scenario in which this game is being run ethically.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
And he was killed, apparently, by a black inmate who didn’t believe him. So in a meaningful sense Dahmer was killed for being a racist and not for being a serial killer.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
For parallelism, perhaps it should be "the subtlety of a pulp writer with the humility of a literary fiction author".
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
Just off the top of my head, Ford had two, not one. The line between serious and unserious attempts is pretty blurry in any case; Butler, Pennsylvania is clearly in the most serious tier of near-miss (well, maybe second-most serious tier - Reagan was out of commission for weeks), but the other Trump attempts are comparatively mundane. Numerous crazies made some gesture in the direction of killing Obama and Clinton, and while these "attempts" were laughable, I'm not sure that they were objectively moreso than something like this.
I'd also say that there's no coherent standard that gets Trump "three serious assassination attempts". Everyone's apparently forgotten about the one in 2016. If it's more than one, then it's at least four.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
This makes sense seeing as, despite her focusing a lot on body positivity activism, she was, like her entire set, selected for fame on the basis of being attractive to begin with. I always assumed her body positivity activism that presented her as oppressed for being overweight was mostly countersignaling, but I guess she must have been genuinely insecure about it.
This really doesn't work, in any case, as an anti-Ozempic argument. The average person getting Ozempic is not Meghan Trainor, or even close.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I'm not seeing any reports elsewhere of someone dead; someone was saved by a bulletproof vest.
DiscourseMagnus
2mo ago
I would add that I strongly suspect that the ubiquity of "gay" as a generic insult meaning "bad" around the early 2000s likely played a substantial role in the normalization of homosexuality, because a generation of children grew up with a horde of angry antisocial disagreeable people throwing around the explicit accusation of homosexuality as a crude playground insult with no real weight. Such insults existed in earlier generations but were rarer as the subject matter itself was more illicit and taboo.
My perception is definitely that it's mostly cultural. There are severe underlying faultlines between the trans movement and the feminist movement, but most trans people still see themselves as allies to feminism, and they were trained to hate sexy stuff and hate themselves for being interested in it back when they still thought of themselves as men.
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