GBRK
1d ago
"would you rather" questions are not at all the same as questions that smuggle in unsupported assumptions. The cow question doesn't force you to say you enjoy either dead or living cows, it merely asks you to decide what you prefer-- with the goal of getting you to examine what your moral rules and foundational assumptions about the universe are. Not being able to answer the cow question is a red flag in the same way as not being able answer the trolley question. It's entirely reasonable to distrust people who either refuse to analyze their own system of morality and apply it in self-consistent ways or else refuse to describe and stand by their morals for fear of social sanction.
GBRK
6d ago
Nearly every anime girl is designed to be impossibly hot. With such an abundance of superstimuli, it's easy enough to look over the hot and crazy women for the merely hot ones.
That being said, I think you're operating on bad priors. There are still plenty of fans attracted to aqua, and dedicated kazuma/aqua shippers. The same goes for darkness.
GBRK
6d ago
Okay if we're verbal creature then cops can constantly declare detainment status. None of this Schrodinger's detainment nonsense, where you don't find out whether you are until you try to walk away and get tackled for "resisting arrest." None of this, "if they run, they're VC, if they stand, they're well-disciplined VC" bullshit where the cop can get around your right not not be detained unless under reasonable suspicion merely by putting you into a situation where doing anything other than acting submissive to them gives them exactly the suspicion they want.
GBRK
6d ago
Why are you still ignoring the part where the cop ignores the initial brushoff and moved to directly impede the person walking? It wasn't just a matter of walking toward the guy.
GBRK
6d ago
It may help to know that When I Win the World Ends is specifically a fanfiction of competitive pokemon, inspired by the author's onetime league of legends obsession and smogon/pokemon showdown/vgc. Pokemon-as-sports-movie rather than pokemon-as-adventure-story, with all the megalomiania, pressure for victory, and strategic complexity that entails.
...of course if you already read and dismissed the first few chapters it probably just isn't for uou.
GBRK
6d ago
“Am I being detained” is not a self-incriminating statement.
You're asking someone whether they're forcing you to stay somewhere, with the implication that you will leave unless they threaten force. In the context of a society that says things like, "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear," it very well can be a self-incriminating statement, and citizens shouldn't be required to say it.
How is a cop suppose to know every situation where a citizen might be curious if they are being detained? Should they just say “I am not detaining you every 5 second” in case someone might be confused that they are being detained?
Should citizens have to ask about their detainment status every five seconds? You're telling me this would be too much of a burden on cops, and yet in effect declaring that citizens should have to bear it.
No, I don't think either party should have to use the magic words. But that means that situations where a reasonable citizen might suspect they're being detained have to count as detainment even if the cop doesn't explicitly say "YOU ARE BEING DETAINED." And that very much describes the situation at hand-- where a cop ignores an initial brush off to move ahead of someone and physically block someone's path.
GBRK
7d ago
A reasonable human being is able to make conversation.
A reasonable human should not be obliged to make conversation with a cop. That's what the "no self incrimination" amendment is for. The government should not be able to compel ANY kind of speech.
(Yes, I know subpoenas exist. I'm not happy about them as applied to private individuals.)
And I disagree with the characterization of “am I being detained” or “get out of my way I’m walking home” as some kind of magic versus normal human conversation. It’s not some priestly class words that only a few people from a special caste know how to do.
"I am not detaining you. This is not a search." aren't magic words either. I don't see why we should put the burden on citizens, instead of the cops, to clarify the law.
GBRK
7d ago
Mildly entertaining grimdark Madoka Magica fanfiction: Fargo DX
If you didn't already know this, the same author (Bavitz) wrote "When I Win the World Ends", which is probably my #2 pokemon fanfic.
GBRK
7d ago
My understanding of cloudflare is that they aggregate information about how your browse the internet from the sites that use their service to see if you browse in a humanlike way. Having any sort of adblocking, scriptblocking, cache deletion, history deletion, vpn, cookie blocking, etc might interfere with their ability to verify that you're a human. If they fail-safe and block access... There you go.
That being said, your description of trying different browsers makes me think the above probably isn't your problem. So maybe Cloudflare just thinks your ip is from a region with a lot of bot traffic? Especially if russian, chinese, korean addresses get into america through fiber lines and DNS hops in the bering straight... Maybe try a VPN instead? You can start with one of the free ones online just to test (though fyi those will 100% harvest your data) then get a real service if it works.
GBRK
7d ago
I think a reasonable person can asks “yo am I being detained”
I don't think the standard for due process rights should be knowing which magic words to use. Not unless we're going to make public policy of educating people about which spells they have in their spell slots (c.f. Miranda Rights) and force cops to proactively tell people about their detainment status or lack thereof with every interaction.
GBRK
7d ago
You know, this is the most interesting idea I've heard in weeks. I've never paid much attention to the idea of instating mandatory national service to replicate what mass conscription did for previous generations because I just couldn't think of what we could possibly do with that labor pool that outweighs the deadweight loss of corvee labor. Now. However, I see the vision: a sort of labor that by its very nature instills pro-social behavior. I can imagine even just having college age students take one or two days out of their week to serve as effectively glorified security guards in return for a small stipend/scholarship/government healthcare wouldn't be obscenely expensive while still instilling a respect for public order.
GBRK
11d ago
I occasionally mask when I'm sick but have some sort of unavoidable social event. I also interact with people who clearly mask as a sort of fashion statement and/or to obscure their gender. (Perils of being a furry and occasionally being around YNs.) The N95 wearers are definitely hypochondriacs tho
GBRK
11d ago
I don't know about a "significant" amount but I definitely benefited as a very mixed Latino by getting a full ride to my state college a decade ago. I would have gotten most of it paid for by scholarships anyway given I auto-qualified for scholarships based on GPA, residency, and high ACT/SAT score, but my race was worth something like $5-10k in the end. Probably the biggest effect was that the full ride convinced me to spend 4 years in college instead of 3-- I had an insane amount of AP/college credits going in so it would have been easy to drop a year, especially if I decided to single-major instead of double-major. But I figured since I had a full ride anyway I might as well make use of it.
This scholarship was a little funny though because it was for specifically mixed-race students, and that was defined broadly enough to where one of my best friends in college ended up being a white/ 1/32nd native american dude with the same scholarship. The DEI seminar we all had to take had like one lightskin black kid and a lot of white-passing kids.
Overall I think it was pretty stupid since none of us were the kind of underprivileged youth that needed a scholarship, but obviously I wasn't going to turn it down. Cash money baybay!
(I do need to specify that I'm Latino, NOT hispanic.)
GBRK
12d ago
It's funny that you mention Iowa because I went to school in Des Moines and the system there absolutely DOES segregate based on intelligence. While local high schools do have AP classes, the students who score particularly highly on the statewide standardized tests get put in separate math classes starting in 5th grade and by 8th (or rarely 7th) grade start getting bussed to a magnet high school for part of their days to learn through an accelerated math/reading/science curriculum. Though that still means time spent at the source schools for certain electives and non-accelerated courses (music, foreign language, art) the smart kids are still pretty well insulated from the average kids for all the rigorously academic subjects.
(Though I would be remiss to not mention that Ames Public High School still dominated all the math competitions anyway...)
GBRK
14d ago
A New Jersey legislator has submitted a bill that would ban sex in state, county, and municipal "government facilities
This will make illicit bathroom sex in government building even hotter. Approved.
GBRK
20d ago
It's not about fixing problems, it's about giving the sufferer the a quality of life better than being dead. And I feel like that shouldn't be a super high bar because people regularly persevere through absolutely horrible circumstances instead of choosing death
If the person is truly braindead, then the drugs aren't any WORSE than euthanasia. The point is to avoid deliberately killing someone who would have otherwise preferred life-- even in the meanest sense.
GBRK
20d ago
Well the fentanyl isn't going to make things any worse for them, then. It's a little more expensive for the parents or society that keeps them alive, but not THAT much more expensive. Drugs is cheap yo. Especially as they wouldn't be alive for that much longer in proportion to how much fun they're having.
GBRK
20d ago
I think fentanyl addicts prefer their drugged state to their undrugged state, and prefer it also to being killed. If either of those things fail to hold, then their problem is insufficiently fun drugs. Now, it's hard to say whether the epileptic braindead child would prefer drugs to death, but I feel confident enough guessing that insofar as they have preferences, they would enjoy fentanyl as a little treat. The problem with fentanyl globally is that it prevents people from living full, healthy lives in other ways... But I don't think that's a concern in this incident.
GBRK
20d ago
Euthanasia is a solved problem and the only explanation for its advocates call for it is that they have insufficient care for the lives they're ending. There is no circumstance, NONE, where it is necessary to actively end a nonthreatening person's life. Not when you can just give them the fun drugs in quantities sufficient to render their suffering moot. This kid should have been on fentanyl, not murdered. (If the drug kills the patient as a side effect that's unfortunate, though predictable. At least they had the best available time beforehand.)
GBRK
1mo ago
So I bet a college kid on reddit that I could find an upcoming edm or metal show in their town because they were whining about how nobody throws parties any more. But the joke's on me because their college town is Damascus, Syria. My US-defaultism strikes again...
Given that I stand to lose a substantial amount of izzat if I can't substantiate my boast, do any of the esteemed members of this forum know how I can get hooked into the syrian underground music scene without actually flying there? My AI-and-google-fu has only got me to the facebook pages of bands/DJs that went defunct pre-2025 at the best and pre-covid at the worst.
GBRK
1mo ago
Reviewing your earlier comments, I see a examples of how you think learning doesn't work, e.g.
I don't really think that reading is valuable in itself unless you are reading something worth reading.
I do not believe that you can learn to expand what you like by reading more of what you already like.
I also don't think that the tactic of reading garbage is likely to lead to appreciation of actually good literature
...but I don't see a positive model of how you think reading comprehension is built and how people learn to love reading.
GBRK
1mo ago
I feel you man... Gearing up for my last round of agent submissions too. (I'll also have to send it out to a few smaller presses that take direct submissions, though I'm even less hopeful there...) Good luck to us anyways! And in the likely event that it isn't, we can swap shoutouts on royalroad.
GBRK
1mo ago
So I think you're overapplying your own understanding of why leftists want representation because I was referring less to all the academic concepts of why representation is good/useful and more to what I understood to be the most defensible version of the argument. That being, narrowly, that people re more likely to enjoy and therefore engage with works of media where they can see aspects of themselves represented.
(this is my bad for not being more specific, sorry.)
And to be clear, I'm also not applying this concept of representation normatively. I'm not saying that representation is good or bad, I'm neither claiming nor disclaiming a moral right to reject a book series based on its lack of big-titty schoolgirls. I am making a descriptive assessment that there is a lack of representation for males (1) within newly-released novels and (2) relative to the amount of space allocated for male-targeted books on store shelves. I furthermore diagnose the cause of that lack of representation as being due to the lack of representation of males (3) within the publishing industry. I do make a normative assessment about whether male literacy/novel-reading is a good thing, and to the degree that I believe it is a good thing I propose measures to remedy a lack of it by addressing (1) and (3). But you should understand those recommendations as instrumental measures, not moral imperatives. So with reference to your question:
Arguing from your very high standards for equity and inclusion, how would you operationalize this in fairness across all those identity categories
To the degree that we can benefit as a society by encouraging literacy in specific identity categories, we should recommend interventions to promote literacy... based on the relative cost of the intervention compared against the expected benefit. I think the interventions I propose to start making up the gap between male and female literacy should be fairly cheap and affect a large proportion of the population. I think, on the other hand, forcing every single movie to include mixed-race professional sheep wool stylists would have a cost out of proportion to its benefits.
And with reference to--
if we're going with the identitarian "fiction= mirror" and the main purpose of reading really is to stroke our ego,...etc
This is a clear strawman of my position. I think reading can, does, and should stroke egoes and fantasies... not an an terminal goal, but as an instrumental step towards getting them to read better books that help them grow as people. (And also as a way to displace even more unhealthy, ego-stroking forms of media consumption.) Refer to my original post:
Just like babies have to eat mashed-up food before they can chew through steaks, young men need a regular diet of sophomoric fantasies before they're ready for Asimov or Murakami. Yes, there's a certain risk that the Heinlens and Ayn Rands of the world will feed them masculinist fantasies incompatible with the feminist-egalitarian view of the world you might prefer to instill... but hey, at least that's better than whatever the TikTok algorithm would have done to them.
Also, elsewhere I make the argument that reading anything increases reading comprehension skills, which are linked to educational and professional attainment and therefore something we want to positively promote... even if the means to do so have unsavory light novel titles about horny sisters and taking gigarevenge for small slights.
GBRK
1mo ago
You are basically just restating your premise. Surely you can't expect anyone who disagrees with you to be convinced by this?
I don't expect them to be convinced outright, but I do expect them to at least try to counter them with an alternative mode of how learning might work or arguments that any of these points are inapplicable. If all you have to say is "nuh uh" then I don't have a chance at figuring out what differences there are between our underlying beliefs that cause us to draw different conclusions.
What??? Are you so low-decoupling you consider any discussion about an unpleasant topic a personal attack? I am genuinely baffled by your perspective. Do you sincerely think that people who ask the trolley question want to "gotcha!" you? You can trivially disprove this by just asking the question back. Nobody who would ask the wife-beating question would reply to it, but I can guarantee you that virtually anyone who asks the trolley question (or the cow question) is just dying to talk about the philosophy that underpins their own answers. I'm not speaking in the abstract here-- my friend group plays Aella's Askhole game as an icebreaker at parties and the cow question (well, in the askhole formulation it's "would your rather fuck a dog or your own mother") always starts interesting spirited discussions.
Actually, let me administer a quick test about your ability to deal in hypotheticals... "How would you feel right now if you hadn't had breakfast this morning?"
More options
Context Copy link