Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2yr ago
In the context of the present culture war, and in particular as regards young people who don't conform to gender norms, I see an expansion of the term, in particular eliminating the context of a close relationship and intent to form a sexual relationship with a particular minor. Then, grooming just becomes introducing sexually related content or concepts to minors, especially when those relate to non-conventional concepts.
As part of the reputationally and financially ruinous lawsuits against the Boy Scouts, many examples of flagged behavior from their private archives were made public. One example in my area was a scout leader in the mid-80s who was banned from the organization after giving a half dozen teenaged boys access to beer and porn on a camping trip. There is no indication that he singled one out to try to rape. If we want to be charitable, it sounds like something The Onion's VP Joe Biden would do, "Hey boys, here's some Bud and a Playboy, then I'll show you how to do donuts in the 'Vette!" That guy was still banned from the organization, decades before anyone got serious about youth protection, because that behavior is such an obvious red flag that you don't need to wait around for a kid to get raped.
Actively trying to prevent and shut down that sort of behavior is so thoroughly not enough that the organization responsible was dealt reputational and financial ruin by the courts. So, by that standard, how should we think of, e.g. librarians who fight tooth and nail to ensure child pornography is kept in elementary schools? "Oh, it's not grooming, it's just being wildly sketchier and more cavalier with children than the organization that just had the shit kicked out of it for insufficient zealousness in protecting kids." It should not be a tall ask to have the "what I wish I'd had growing up" to be restricted to normal standards for age appropriateness.
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2yr ago
The accurate parallel would be if someone condemned "These Nazis marching in Skokie", and every Republican threw a fit about "this bigoted attack on all white people". At that point, it is more than fair to say "My dude, you are the one conflating Nazis and white people."
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2yr ago
Is it possible you're not accounting for the fact that men might be less likely to act creepy when there are other men around?
This is possible, but that would have to be a powerful deterrent effect that would be worth pulling out and studying on it's own. It would also necessitate some serious revamping of feminist talking points.
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2yr ago
Also how do you imagine this? They groom the kids specifically for themselves in the future or just "altruistically" to the whote gay community?
To the extent that this is a real phenomenon, I think It's more about missionary work. Teaching kids grammar is boring. Inspiring a heart-felt coming out story is dramatic. From what I see of conservatives, they are much more concerned with "totally not straight" white women with danger hair than any actual gay men.
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2yr ago
The gay claims about Mateen seem thoroughly disproven. Further, Pulse wasn't even his preferred target, and he seems to have not even known it was a gay nightclub.
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2yr ago
68% of women say immigration is a good thing, which is both a lot, and probably not enough to meet the idea of a biological imperative. Which compares to...71% of men who think immigration is a good thing. There is no gender split on this issue.
Eh, that's just asking about "immigration on the whole". I don't think OP is asking about H1Bs, but instead obviously about the illegal crossings at the southern border. Anecdotally, the news coverage of that is very much in the style of heart-string tugging that is traditionally aimed at women. If such a gender gap exists in this narrower area, I would bet that's a major cause.
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2yr ago
Forgive student loans so we can give them more loans to gamble on college sports teams so they need a new loan. With sufficiently altruistic accounting, we can feedback loop GDP to infinity, pay ourselves a few trillion (pocket change compared to infinity!) while lecturing the plebes that they only think food and gas cost unpayable abstract numbers because they're bigots.
I want to say this is how Economics 2.0 worked in Accelerando, but I don't think Stross was cynical enough to flesh out the details.
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2yr ago
I don't think SC is actually having fun. I think the "massive, seething inferiority complex" element makes having fun a very tall order.
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2yr ago
A couple minor anecdotes about schooling, and some related thoughts.
Earlier this year I blew off Back to School Night, because it is just a litany of teachers slowly reading notes that really ought to be just a syllabus handout. One downstream consequence of that is that I commit to attending Parent-Teacher conferences so as not to seem negligent. My children are excelling (by the standards of high-tier blue state public schools), so the conferences were also a series of boring conversations in which I strove to appear Interested while teachers recited figures and handed me print-outs of details I already knew from the online system that tracks grades. No, there are no social or behavioral issues. Perhaps a lingering artefact of my own issues with diligence, the one thing I pointedly ask every teacher to confirm is the apparent total lack of homework.
When I attended this particular middle school in the 90s, the school day consisted of many 40 minute classes, with 3-5 minutes of shifting between them, and then an average of 2-4 homework assignments per night. These assignments weren't difficult but keeping track and on top of all of them was something I struggled with, especially bigger projects with distant due dates. There were token efforts to help with this, like every student being given a record-keeping journal, and teachers insisting that we make note of each assignment, but we were mostly left to our own devices as far as getting it all done and handed in. My parents made some effort to help, but they are blue collar types, and this sort of thing wasn't quite their wheelhouse either. I spent those years blowing out the competition on the standardized tests, and then getting Bs and Cs because I just couldn't manage to remember that tasks had been assigned, or worse, I'd do them and then forget to hand them in.
In retrospect, it seems probable that the only reason I got into college at all was because a certain PMC-princess developed a crush on me in high school, and drug me into social circles where people socially kept on top of assignments. This is a massive, often unnoticed privilege; if you had it, take a moment to appreciate it. This carried me though the first half of college, and there is a painfully obvious demarcation where my ability to wrangle the administrative parts of college vanished when that social circle did.
My kids, OTOH, in the new, post-pandemic set-up, have 75 minute periods for their main classes (math, science, English, history), and then repeat one of them at the end of the day in a mildly structured study hall, where they are encouraged to finish assignments. As a first note, longer classes and less time wasted swapping to different classrooms seem like obvious optimizations for the school day. But that extra period of guided study hall at the end of the day seems really useful for instilling the kind of mindset that recalls, organizes, and accomplishes tasks. Most days they don't have any actual homework, which is an improvement since it's mostly busywork. But even when they have an assignment that does spill over into homework, between those extra skillsets and the integrated technology for assignment tracking they are so much more on top of things than I ever was. As an HBD-disclaimer, maybe that's their mother's Jewishness shining through, but there seems to be a qualitative improvement compared to pre-pandemic.
I'd picked up a lot of scorn and skepticism for academic pedagogy over the last decade, to the point where I think the entire field is borderline hokum. It feels important to acknowledge sensible organizational changes that have yielded noticeable improvements, instead of just maximizing administrative cowardice. Maybe it shouldn't have taken decades and a pandemic to figure it out, but progress isn't obvious, and it's certainly an improvement.
And on the topic of administrative cowardice, the other anecdote. My son is one of a few dozen boys who stay after school most days to play pickup games of basketball and football using the schoolyard facilities and fields. There is a nearby playground that usually has small children with parents, but these boys (ages range from 9-13) are mostly unsupervised... until now.
There is a boy in that cohort who is diagnosed as autistic, the sort where he probably wouldn't have been diagnosed with anything 20 years ago. At one of those recent pickup games, he was beaten up to some unknown degree, and his mother happened to see the whole thing from her car while stuck in traffic. The mother approached the administration, and was essentially told "This is unsanctioned, after-hours play, we have nothing to do with it and will do nothing for you." So, she went and filed a police report. That kickstarted some action, specifically a ban on kids playing in the yard after school without parental supervision.
Now obviously, I feel for the boy. I wish he hadn't gotten assaulted; I am sure that was a horrible experience. But I also wish that a few dozen other boys hadn't gotten effectively banned from convenient exercise, independence, and peer socializing. And I can't even really fault the administration; they're probably justifiably worried about lawsuits. Or... at least that's how other parents are interpreting it. Reading the email that was sent out about it, all that's really said is a reminder that students are "expected" to leave the premises if they don't have a sanctioned activity or parental supervision. It's not phrased as a hard requirement. It actually seems like a fine needle-threading that absolves the school of responsibility, without actually accepting responsibility for enforcing the ban, the exact sort of "take responsibility for your own choices" that I would have insisted they should do instead of some cowardly, heavy-handed ban.
So, for a second time, I feel that this organization I have heavily criticized deserves some praise for responsible decision-making. Credit where it is due. I'd send the principal a congratulatory email... but that seems like the sort of autistic idiocy that might force his hand.
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2yr ago
I believe the perspective FC is coming from is one in which it is understood that the basest level of human interaction is, as nature, red in tooth and claw. "Might makes right" isn't a moral precept, it's a factual description of the most primitive level of homo sapiens social organization. Government began the first time the strongest, quickest guy in the social unit said "Do what I say or I'll fucking kill you."
There's a fantastic scene in Wildbow's current serial Pale, in which a red-tribe-y combat sorcerer finds himself trapped in a realm in which, as a fundamental Law, violence is not permitted.
Anthem drew a knife.
“Anthem, I don’t advise this,” Miss called out.
“Of course you don’t.”
“It’s Law.”
“It’s your Law. I draw my power from older Law, closer to the Seal. It stands as a basic principle, of competition, violence, and duels. Dig deep enough in most bodies of law and Law, there is always a right to trial by combat. It supercedes.”
Violence is always an option. And as an option, it often sucks, even when you win. Much of hierarchy, and tradition and civilization is just scaffolding to reduce how often we actually resort to direct violence to resolve disputes. "Peace, kindness and love" are nice ideals, but they don't actually offer a useful alternative method of dispute resolution. This issue is made stark when we talk about ideologies like Marxism, whose action plan is essentially:
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Tear down all existing social order, traditions, civilization and mores.
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???? (Something magic happens).
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Utopia.
When we tear down all that scaffolding, we don't unleash the World Spirit/Planet Ghost/Friendship is Magic. We actually just revert to the oldest, default paradigm, violence. Will to power. Trial by combat. And so Marxists always end up with Stalins and Pol Pots and Raz Simones (notice how it took him less than 24 hours to reinvent the first human civic tech, Monopoly on Violence?)
To the extent that it's a revolutionary ideology, Woke will have the same problems. To the extent that it's not a revolutionary ideology, but just window dressing on liberalism, progressivism can dodge that same problem.
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2yr ago
IME, propensity to be conned is correlated with exposure to cons, and has no relation to education, time preference, or intelligence. It's just about having the mental habit of double checking "Could this person be conning me?" and a willingness to accept when the indicators are yes.
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2yr ago
He appointed an unprecedented three SCOTUS judges in a single term and others. I would not call that a failure. Did other stuff too. Did he make the left worse? Possible, but correlation not causation. Of course, this was not contingent on Trump per say.
I remember being quite concerned that after 8 years of the administrative state Turbulent Priest-ing Obama's enemies, that another 4 years of Hillary actively cultivating that behavior might spell the end of the republic. Of course, any Republican would probably have been enough to ward off that.
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2yr ago
in the true sense of the word, in that its not a string of letters with a meaning, but something that is not only felt in one bones, but desired
The word for this is "grok".
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2yr ago
Redbreast 12
Well, that was delightful. Thanks for the suggestion, and the permanent doubling of my whiskey budget. Anything else you'd care to recommend or suggest avoiding?
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2yr ago
I wonder if Mrs. Fried applies that logic to badthinkers, or just murderers and rapists.
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2yr ago
Around me, it's more like $25 vs $30 for a fifth. A bigger gap could swing that.
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2yr ago
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
Goodheart's law. You would optomize for the cheapest way to appear to have what women want, which may have little to no overlap with what they want/need, but would confuse their ability to detect the real deal.
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2yr ago
Honestly, just a reasonable awareness of bad actors is sufficient, when paired with a willingness to make that call if something is unusual. Speaking as a recovered quokka, it doesn't take much cynicism to protect yourself from threats above the level of, say, being on the hook for an extra appetizer. You just have to actually apply that whole reductionism thing and remember that defection and parasitism are proven strategies.
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2yr ago
Eliezer goes the furthest to emphasize that, no, really, you won't get away with it, but he still leaves that out there. He has to.
Eliezer points out in MoR that perfect crimes probably happen all the time, and they just get ruled a suicide, or an electrical accident.
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2yr ago
It's more like "Yes, we all condemn witchcraft, it's the worst. But in the wake of this witchcraft scandal of my good friend, we should focus on general condemnations, and totally not worry about any particular people who might also be witches. Also, we probably don't need any particular new anti-witch policies beyond general frowning and finger-wagging."
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2yr ago
FWIW, I don't think I saw a single mention of the topic in the Fetterman/Oz ad festival, or in any of Shapiros ads (I don't think Mastriano ever ran any at all).
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2yr ago
Kings normally acknowledge their own reign. This is more like some bizarre farcical custom where it's exile-worthy rudeness to openly acknowledge the position of the Grand Vizier.
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2yr ago
I've argued before that ethics should be viewed as a stack, from virtue ethics to deontology to utilitarianism to consequentialism, where the core difference is the trade-off between ideal outcomes vs ease of implementation. My point is that the post you linked is, at best, arguing for accepting a trade-off down-stack in the case of business ethics. They want to implement a "No Fraud" rule because the risk of tricking yourself into harmful bullshit when doing business ethical reasoning on utilitarian grounds is too high, so you should just round off to "all clever plans to increase utility that violate standard business ethics should be assumed false on sight". And the way you credibly signal that commitment, is to switch to a deontological framework for those cases, instead of continuing in a utilitarian framework (which implies a whispered "unless it seems like a really good idea!" caveat).
Kids also aren't supposed to be fucking in the school bathroom in the first place. An example of a boy lying about being trans to gain sexual access to women-only areas is not exactly a glowing endorsement.
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