Jiro
1mo ago
The view that sane, neutral or good actors can have a conflict worth fighting over for sane reasons is now fringe.
I'm not convinced that it's false, though. You can fudge it by saying things like "he wanted to conquer the enemy because he honestly sincerely thinks the enemy's country belongs to him", and insane and bad actors really like to say that kind of thing. But I'm hard pressed thinking of any conflict in the modern era where sane, neutral, or good actors have a conflict worth fighting over, except maybe for wars of independence, and we don't have too many chances for those any more.
Jiro
1mo ago
People marking their bodies in a way that they know leads people to make assessments about their personal characteristics and then complaining that people make those assessments tells me something about their character.
Being visibly Jewish in a place whose inhabitants hate Jews by your reasoning also says something about one's character. Or kissing one's gay partner in front of a homophobe. Or having a bumper sticker proclaiming your political party in a place where people oppose that political party.
If doing X leads to bad reactions, those bad reactions can't be justified with an appeal to "they know it'll have bad reactions".
Jiro
2mo ago
But it was obvious to most at the time that the distribution would inevitably drift rightward, until you have what you have now.
The distribution drifts rightward because a huge portion of leftists will consider a site to be biased towards the right and full of fascists merely because the right is permitted to speak at all. If the site doesn't give in and censor the right, these intolerant leftists will flee, making the site drift rightwards.
Jiro
2mo ago
I'll note one interesting thing, which is that a common trope among the statistically illiterate is acting like isolated exceptions disprove a general stereotype
Bear in mind that this game is fiction and was created by writers. It's possible that the writer is such a statistically illiterate person and is, in fact, trying to say "the stereotype of evil mind flayers is bad". It's also possible that a reader who isn't one could realize what the writer is trying to do and make that a point of criticism.
This isn't a perfect analogy, because feces is a major constituent of sewage, and indeed is a large part of what makes sewage noxious.
That's another version of the same nitpick. If you like, make it "this food tastes like feces" and "this food tastes like rotten skunk vomit".
I don't know how one would taste the difference between sewage and feces, whereas is an obvious meaningful difference between cats and dogs
There is not a meaningful difference between cats and dogs in this context, even if there is a meaningful difference when you're reporting a missing one to the police.
You take a sentence I posted out of context (I go on to point out that bullshit is a better framework for this type of statement than lies), and respond with a bunch of barely-parseable word salad that looks like (and is, when finally parsed) an allegation of dishonesty, and you accuse me of lying like a lawyer?
I'll step in here and say it a little more clearly: Nobody beyond the lizardman constant thinks there's any meaningful difference between immigrants eating cats and immigrants eating dogs. Saying that "it's really cats, not dogs, so Trump is a liar" is itself lying like a lawyer because you are nitpicking a detail that nobody cares about in order to attack Trump. It doesn't matter that "dogs" is literally false if the truth makes no substantive difference.
It's like going into a restaurant and complaining "this food tastes like sewage", then getting told that you're a liar because the food doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like feces, so tasting like sewage is a literally false belief.
Jiro
2mo ago
And then, who even gets to define what is right-wing?
This is like the guy on datasecretslox who claimed not to know what race is. People know what right-wing is to enough of a degree to be able to talk about it, even if you can "well, aksually" the edge cases.
Jiro
2mo ago
Gang members who are attacked by police don't get to attack back on the grounds that the police are enemy combatants. The gang members aren't a state.
Jiro
2mo ago
There is a separate point to be made that no insurgency has actually overthrown a state per see.
Haiti? (Though you can quibble on what "a state" means since France still existed).
Jiro
2mo ago
The probability of your vote mattering is tiny, but if it does matter it matters for hundreds of millions of people, which makes up for the small probability of it mattering.
There's also the question of how you count whether a vote "matters" *which amounts to the same thing phrased differently). If someone wins by 1000 votes, nobody's vote mattered in the sense that their vote alone would have changed the result. But 1000 people's votes mattered in the sense that as a group it would have changed the result, and each of the 1000 people should get credit for 1/1000 of a result mattering. And it's arbitrary in what order you count the votes--you could just as well say that the first 1000 votes mattered as you could say that the last one did.
Jiro
2mo ago
You are in a rich person's bubble if you think $100 is unimportant enough that someone would give it up in order to vote.
Jiro
2mo ago
There's a difference between a lack of reaction from someone who doesn't react to other things, and a lack of reaction from someone who does. You are in the former category. The leftists who are being criticized here are in the latter. When people obsess over a lot of anti-Trump political causes, it's not an answer to say "what can they do about the assassination, obsess over it?"
(Of course the school shooting is a false equivalence. The school shooting is not done for political reasons, and failure to support gun bans isn't to failure to react.)
Jiro
2mo ago
I wonder if they will ever have a "Physician, heal thyself moment."
Biden was metooed in 2020. It made no difference.
Jiro
2mo ago
Getting the government to force someone to give you money counts as knowing how money works.
Jiro
2mo ago
Covid is an example of how a publicly funded healthcare system cannot be trusted to tell you what counts as triage. They have no skin in the game, no incentive to make decisions that actually maximize health. If your father dies, they don't even get upset.
Jiro
2mo ago
The idea is that overburdening the health care system risks other people's lives, so you're actually still comparing your life to lives, not your life to an amorphous system.
Of course, even this version can be criticized in the way that socialism in general can be criticized.
Jiro
2mo ago
Would you accept a rollback on trans issues, gun control, immigration, and other right-wing issues in order to get allies against climate change? Because that's the problem. Climate change is urgent when it comes to "you have to give up something" but is suddenly not so urgent when it comes to "we have to give up something".
Jiro
2mo ago
Let’s imagine some white CEO stammering to the minority police officer,
If the arresting officer has a thick Latino accent, he is a working class minority police officer.
There's also the question of whether someone has relatives back in China who can be threatened--that isn't going to disappear if they lose Chinese citizenship.
I don't see why citizenship even matters here. Nobody cares that someone in the US can vote in China; they care that they may be an agent for China's government. Getting US citizenship doesn't prevent that. If anything, getting US citizenship makes it worse because the agent can't be deported.
Jiro
2mo ago
If everybody loved it, it wouldn't have to be mandatory, and it's not pointless in principle, just the way it's set up nowadays is
While most people hated school, they did so for different reasons. Rationalists hated school for reasons that are strong enough that becoming adults won't change their mind--bullies, incompetent teaching, they already know what's being taught, etc. Normies hated school for reasons such as "I can't play video games if I have to study for an exam". Adults don't agree with those reasons.
For the vast majority, who hated school for normie reasons, school is not a downside, even if it was at the moment they were actually attending school. The view that even from an adult perspective school is bad is weird.
Jiro
2mo ago
Unfortunately the same mechanisms that are used to suppress these things for good reasons are used to suppress them for bad reasons, and it's impossible to tell them apart.
Germany, on the other hand, was one of the most advanced countries in Europe
The Soviets were treated in the media as one of the most advanced countries in the world.
I'll suggest the conflict theory explanation instead: The average person doesn't think Communism is very bad because decades of leftist media propaganda has tried to minimize any bad things that Communists did from at least the 1960s until Communism died out. And even afterwards, they never tried to stir up hysteria about Communists being around every corner like they did with fascists.
Normies do not exist
You just said that right after a section which said "most people are affected by emotional impact, not logical arguments like you guys are". That's pretty much "normies exist".
Acting like a rationalist is weird. Being convinced like a rationalist would be convinced is doubly so.
Jiro
2mo ago
You could probably get the same by using classical spy work
At some point, which they've long passed, making spying easier in effect grants the spies new capabilities, even though they "already could do that". (This applies to domestic spying too. The NSA could send out an agent to surveil any target that is caught up in Echelon, but surveilling everyone makes things so much easier that there's no comparison.)
I think we're at the point where the "subversion" of having the monster not be evil is so common that having the enemy be irredeemably evil has become the subversion, even though everyone who makes good orcs or demons or wicked witches thinks they're being clever and original about it.
More options
Context Copy link