MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
Offended and insulted, rather than necessarily turned off.
Turned off by their men showing sexual interest in other women in a low-status way, definitely. And slow-mo replay of the shower scene in an anime is as low-status as it gets.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3hr ago
The optimal physique for impressing other men (gay or straight - mutual admiration among male bodybuilders who get that far is pretty homoerotic) is more muscled than the optimal physique for attracting women, which is more muscled than the physique you get if you optimise for balanced athleticism*. Men in actually elite military units are a lot fitter than you or I, but they aren't obviously jacked, and they would be if it made them more combat-effective.
* Obviously there are some areas of strength-focussed sport, notoriously including baseball hitting, where being jacked and roided is optimal for performance if there is no drug testing regime in place.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
4hr ago
Timeline 3: (doesn't quite work fast enough to get to 99.6% by 2100, but the overall mechanism is plausible and can be delivered by voting harder)
- A right-populist government ends illegal and low-quality legal immigration, restricts legal high-quality immigration in ways which make the UK an unattractive destination for high-quality immigrants with options, and ends the bullshit which makes it advantageous to self-identify as non-white.
- Non-Irish immigration drops to negligible levels
- There is already no taboo on interracial dating in the UK, everyone is doing it except Pakistanis, and Pakistani parents are breaking the law in order to stop their children dating interracially. Laws against child abuse and forced marriage would probably be enforced by a right-populist government.
- After a century or so everyone is mixed-race, and most people are mostly white given the starting demographics.
- All the mixed-race people tick the "white" box on the census because there is no gain from identifying as anything else.
A large part of the decrease in the "Christian" share of the British population mostly comes from culturally Christian non-believers changing which box they tick on the census. It is not the case that 94% of British people believed in Jesus Christ in 1951 - in fact I would be mildly surprised if 94% of Anglican priests did. (It is also not the case that 54% of British people believe in Jesus Christ now - I don't, and I tick the CoE box on the census because it helps causes I like for the number to be higher.)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
Yes - it is certainly possible to write banking and aviation laws that an intelligent layman can understand and put the technical detail into agency regulations. (The UK does this). There is an open question about when the technical detail should go into primary legislation (which means that at least the legislators on the relevant committee will need to understand it) - for instance the EU puts most of the technical content of its bank capital adequacy rules into primary regulation in a way the UK and US don't. The Anglosphere tradition is that the only time you have to put the detail into primary legislation is tax law, and even there the US has delegated significant tariff-setting powers to the President (with the Trump tariff litigation being about whether this delegation should be interpreted broadly or narrowly).
I do not get this argument. The ECHR prevents you from directly deporting someone who makes a claim of asylum.
The ECHR doesn't even say that. ECHR caselaw says that you can't deport someone to a country where they will be mistreated in certain ways. It is completely legal (and most ECHR countries have done so) to state, correctly, that a certain country does not mistreat people in the relevant ways and that you will not entertain asylum claims from its citizens and legal residents, and start summarily deporting people who fit that description. Spain does it with Moroccans, for example. The Refugee Convention works the same way, but in practice the list of relevant ways you can be mistreated is strictly broader under the ECHR than under the Convention, so the Convention is de facto irrelevant to European refugee law.
Neither the ECHR nor the Refugee Convention prescribes the process for asylum claims - both were written at a time when people thought it was obvious who was and was not a refugee - also when people weren't as afraid of genuine refugees illegally crossing from one safe country to another, which is what drives most toxic immigration politics nowadays.
The problem is that the ECHR does not require courts to believe blatant lies by the executive, so this trick doesn't work with evil countries like Taliban-ruled Afghanistan or countries with ongoing civil wars. The most common nationalities among small boat migrants to the UK are Eritrea, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iran and Somalia. Almost everyone from those countries has a colourable asylum claim, and apart from the Iraqis most of them are genuine refugees under the Refugee Convention. (You don't cease to be a Convention refugee until you become a citizen or permanent resident of a safe country.) The problem is that the UK wants them to stay in France and seek protection from the French authorities, and the French want them to leave France and become someone else's problem. (France is not required by international law to take back people who illegally transitted through France en route to the UK, and doesn't.)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5hr ago
The cryptocurrency is protected by a random number - it is a property of the crypto algorithm (not the wallet) that anyone who knows this number can steal it.
You can store the number en clair on a hardware wallet, so anyone with the wallet can spend the crypto (and someone who steals the wallet has stolen the crypto), or you can store the random number encrypted on the wallet (so you need the wallet and the key to spend the crypto). The passphrase is the key used to (symmetrically) encrypt the random number.
But if the underlying random number that goes into the crypto algorithm is not random and someone manages to guess it, then no amount of secrecy protecting your copy of the number will stop the guesser stealing your crypto.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6hr ago
There are areas of law which are technical and complex for good reasons - the examples I normally give are aviation safety and bank capital adequacy. "We shouldn't have bank capital adequacy regulation" is a position which is only taken seriously by the kind of nutcase who thinks we shouldn't have fractional-reserve banks. "We shouldn't have aviation safety regulation" is taken seriously by a libertarian fringe, though as far as I can see not by most pilots. (It is the general aviation orgs who lead the lobbying effort against privatising ATC in the US).
Spending bills are, of course, technical and complex because the government they fund is. (And would still be even if the government stuck to core functions - the military budget is the most complex and technical of the lot.)
No private sector CEO could recite from memory his organisation's full internal rulebook in a complex, technical, safety-critical area. Any CEO who tried would be considered dangerously irresponsible. Above a certain size of organisation, the CEO wouldn't be able to recite the budget down the the line item.
That said, laws can and should be written clearly such that a 110 IQ non-lawyer with a passing familiarity with any relevant technical content can understand them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I dropped Latin before they started reading Catullus, but among his more notable works (all of which were pored over by my classicist friends) were:
- A Latin translation of Sappho's Greek "lyric poetry" (this is what classicists call it in learned academic journals, but there is a reason why the old-fashioned term for lesbianism is "Sapphic love")
- His own erotic poetry about his sexual desire for teenagers of both sexes
- Invective against his political opponents including sexual innuendos. (The modern equivalent of calling your political opponent a pigfucker, but with more poetic description of the physical qualities of the pig).
Suetonius is the primary source for most of the modern stories about sexual perversion in Ancient Rome. The description of Tiberius' BDSM exploits (he was a sexual sadist to the point where I find him sick, and I'm not exactly innocent here) is the most explicit part - the discussion of Caligula and Nero is mostly a list of who he did and where.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
I would say El Salvador has done a lot more for the US right than Argentina has. But the "US right" shouldn't have any foreign allies at all (and in general nor should any other faction within a democratic country). Your allies are the enemies of your enemies, and the enemy of the US right is the US left. A foreign government who is supporting the US right against the US left is meddling in US domestic politics, which is something foreign governments shouldn't be doing, and something that all US factions who even pretend to be patriotic should be discouraging them from doing.
I think Israel is an ally of the US right, in the sense that Israel does meddle in US domestic politics in a way which is intended to help Republicans and DINOs, but turning support for Israel into a partisan issue doesn't seem to be moving either US public opinion or US policy in a pro-Israeli direction. I also don't think that Netanyahu's explicit, public, partisan-coded opposition to Obama over the JCPOA actually helped Republicans.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
True though the Rowling case seems indicative that TERFs are more likely to die on that hill/be proactively purged even if generally aligned
In the US, the TERFs lost and you can no longer be a feminist in good standing unless your feminism includes men pretending to be women. In the UK the battle between trans-inclusive and womyn-born-womyn feminisms is ongoing, with the "TERFs" (they are by no means all radical feminists) having the better of it. Rowling's money may be part of it, but I think it is mostly driven by the different class composition of 2nd wave feminism in the two countries - the most prominent trans-exclusive feminists in the UK are all older women from working-class backgrounds.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
In the British version of the joke, the dog is the 0.4 of a child.
[The history is that "the average family consists of mum, dad and 2.4 children" became a comedy meme back when TFR was 2.4 for the country as a whole, but roughly 2 for the chattering classes]
It is notoriously the main way the more trad British public schools motivate the boys to learn Latin. Something like Suetonius' account of Nero's vices can be read in a scholarly translation, but if you want to someone to let you read Catullus as a schoolboy you are probably reading in in the original Latin. Rated "C" for classical.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
In the case of Mediterranean boat people, nobody cares about the (relatively small number of) drownings except as a legal weapon. Under normal circumstances, it is a crime to put people who do not have permission to come to Italy on a boat and take them to Italy. But if the reason why you put them on the boat is that you were rescuing someone who was in peril at sea, then it isn't.
My understanding is that a lot of work goes into calibrating the number of Mediterranean migrant drownings to the bare minimum needed to keep the people running the migrant-trafficking NGOs out of prison.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
The Democrats actually, in fact, did a bunch of bad shit to win the 2020 election, and suffered zero consequences for doing so. As a starter, they used Federal security and legal agencies to harm the trump campaign and protect the Biden campaign.
I've said it before and I'll probably say it again, but "Who was the real Chief Executive in 2020?" (in this comment, referred to as they) is the most divisive issue in contemporary American politics. Both sides agree that the government was criminally awful, they just disagree whether the then-President of the United States can be blamed for the performance of the government.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
5d ago
Nazi book-burning
The taboo against book burning is a lot older than that. In the West, it goes back to blame-placing after the burning of the Library of Alexandria. In the East, the Han were accusing their Qin predecessors of book-burning while the Library was still standing.
The taboo on book-burning is lindier than the taboos on male homosexuality and sister-shagging.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
Non-intervention in the ME was not a possible political position pre-2010 unless you were also willing to accept a lower quality of life in the US. Back then we needed to keep the oil flowing.
US support for Israel is not and never was driven by oil. The oil is controlled by the Gulf Arabs, and the Gulf Arabs hated Israel as much as everyone else in the region until the 2010s when the Middle East became a giant proxy war between Iranian and Saudi-backed jihadi groups. The first oil shock in 1973 was engineered deliberately by the Gulf Arabs to punish America (and other western countries) for supporting Israel. The "realist" policy in the post Cold War era (as practiced, for example, by both Bushes) was to unofficially tie American pressure on Israel to negotiate with the Palestinians to commitments from the Fremen to keep the Spice flowing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
I'm not sure what to say about #4 except that I haven't seen any of the Ferengi episodes, and I kind of doubt that very many of the people who come up with this stuff have either.
I would say 100% of the people involved in the Geek Feminism lamewar were aware of the Ferengi connection. I don't know how much of the wide conversation about calling women "females" has passed through that filter, although I first came across it in the Geek Feminism context.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
No? ‘Girl’ implies unmarried, but referring to a woman as a ‘girl’ would be uncontroversial and normal outside of liberal bubbles
I think calling an adult woman a "girl" is now restricted to dating and sex-related contexts (including sex work-adjacent jobs like Hooters "girls")
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
6d ago
"Woman doctor" and "woman engineer" don't exactly roll off the tongue
In old fashioned British English, "lady doctor" was idiomatic. It fell out of use alongside all non-fossilised uses of "lady" (we still have ladies' toilets and begin formal speeches with "Ladies and Gentlemen") around the time it became acceptable to speak in Estuary English on BBC news bulletins. My experience is that if you talk about a "woman doctor" you will be accused of sexism regardless of the words you use - she's just a doctor after all. (There is the obvious exception if you are doing feminist activism. They use people-first language and talk about "women in medicine".)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
"What is a woman?" is a question about the meaning of words, not about the world. And "We should, where possible, use words in a way which avoids hurting people" is a good (though in my view insufficient given that it makes it impossible to talk about sex-specific medical issues in non-technical language) rational argument for using the word "woman" in a trans-inclusive way - see any of the multiple Yud essays on this point, or Scott's "The Categories were made for Man"
There are a lot of insane transactivists who think that "What is a woman?" has an objective scientifically correct answer which includes transwomen, but you don't have to agree with them to avoid cancellation.
Given Hobson's choice on the issue, I would rather defend pro-Palestine in front of a hostile audience than TWAW*, but I would rather defend TWAW than a blatant lie like the MAGA position on the 2020 election.
* My actual position on this issue is that Israel is almost certainly the lesser evil, but I don't take sides in evil-vs-evil conflicts where I don't have a stake.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Not to mention less accurate. The average Democratic office-holder lives in a woke bubble where "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is a correct description of the local usage of the word "woman". I do not think the GOP has a widespread alternative meaning of "stole" and "thieves" which would make @anti_dan's proposed response a true statement when parsed as conservatalk.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
Wouldn't that cause a problem in the lab by making the "alcohol" immiscible with water?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
7d ago
"Ethanol" in a school chemistry lab is probably meths - the duty on drinkable pure alcohol is pretty high, even if not marketed for drinking. Adding 5-10% methanol makes the alcohol too toxic to drink and therefore unattractive to drinkers. We were all warned about this in no uncertain terms before doing an experiment with the stuff.
In the UK, they don't add anything additional to meths to make it unpalatable, so ocasionally tramps and suchlike posion themselves by drinking it. Meths sold to the general public as a fuel/cleaning product is died purple to discourage accidental drinking. But a school science lab is going to be using "industrial methylated spirits" - i.e. an ethanol/methanol mix with nothing else added to it that could affect the chemistry. (Of all the chemicals in my school lab, this was oddly the only one they needed a licence to buy).
I'm not sure about the situation in the US.
My technical expertise is limited for BTC, and non-existent for other cryptos - but wouldn't you need a separate passphrase for every key in the wallet to do that?
Best practice for BTC is to use each address and associated keys once only, which would make that impractical for a working wallet and pretty annoying for a cold storage wallet - you would need to memorise a new passphrase after each deposit or withdrawal.
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