Spookykou
10mo ago
Isn't Japan famous for people consistently turning in wallets with all the money inside, and similar stories? The, people in small towns not locking their doors things also seems related. I imagine that high-trust societies exist, and modern western urban centers just happen to be lower-trust, currently. Especially in 'public' spaces. I would bet there are at least some high-trust enclaves within most major cities where the norms shift closer to Japan.
Spookykou
10mo ago
It is possible to care more about the people being taken from and still support redistributive programs if you believe the things being taken have marginal value such that the people receiving get a lot more utility than the people being taken from lose. I would not put much stock in happiness research either way, but I think the latest is that more money really does continue to make people more happy, though, so maybe the 'marginal value of the dollar' has been overstated.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I have always felt that Paul Graham captured the modern concept of identity quite well. I can understand calling it incoherent, meaning confusing, in how people argue about it, often holding incompatible or contradictory views. That people try to game social status around the concept of identity does not really speak to the usefulness of identity as a concept when reasoning about the world for any given individual.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I feel like the core of 'liberalism' is holding principled positions, specifically with regard to crushing people who disagree with you, the Liberal Wisdom is, there are in fact bad tactics.
The progressive liberal conflict, is that progressives think appealing to principles is just a tool of the oppressor, no bad tactics, only bad targets.
The leftist liberal conflict, is socialism/communism vs redistributive capitalism.
This is how I understand these terms in the context of American, and to a lesser extent, Western politics in general.
Spookykou
10mo ago
Super late reply but I remember really loving a depiction of Watson getting ready in the morning in some Sherlock story I was listening to in audiobook form while working years ago. It has oddly stuck in my mind which is why I mentioned it here.
Spookykou
10mo ago
You seem to present an argument that Ukrainians do not have a good reason to fight, because at the end of the day the culture/governance of Russia is not meaningfully different from their current existence. Ignoring for the moment the accuracy of that, you compare this to Canadians resisting Americans, this seems to imply you think such a Canadian resistance is similarly wanting for a reason, because at the end of the day the culture/governance of America would not be meaningfully different. Of course, if this is true, then in theory if the role was reversed, and Canada was to attack America, since the same conditions must necessarily be reciprocal with regards to culture/governance, it would seem America would also lack a good reason to fight.
That is, your argument, as best as I can tell, seems fully reversable for any two nations to which it was applicable. Russians would be similarly foolish for fighting against Ukrainian rule, etc.
Spookykou
10mo ago
*Which is not entirely her fault, I think. It's just that to the viewer's ape brain, her combativeness works less well because she is a woman than it would if she were a man.
I remember when some people ran with this idea, trained actors to perform a gender swapped Hillary Trump debate, and it did not turn out the way they had assumed it would.
Spookykou
10mo ago
point deer, make horse
Total tangent, but I looked this up and it is very confusing. The story seems straight forward and simple enough, and everyone here seems to be using it in the same way, which is directly referential to the origin story. Blatant lies as loyalty test, might be my definition for the idiom. However, the first couple results when I googled it, all explained the idiom as some variation of, "to lie to manipulate people because you are evil", what is going on here? For some reason I am very upset by this. Are the google translations correct, and the idiom is really that watered down/pointless, or is this just several different people all using the same shitty translation that lacks the nuanced understanding of a native speaker?
Spookykou
10mo ago
Maybe I am crazy, but I don't think Kinsey's red tie was a random wardrobing decision, and his particular style of bible thumping, like arguing that God would 'physically' intervene to prevent an alien attack, seemed very republican coded to me, but you are right I don't think they ever actually say what party he belongs to.
O'Neill is absolutely less of a peacenik than Daniel, but he stands in stark contrast against all the other military personal, save perhaps Hammond From Texas. He would be the most level headed security officer to ever serve on the enterprise if you slid him into TNG. Makepeace, the only other colonel in the program and one of the few military personal with a name, is an NID traitor. Jack is very superficially a gruff military man, but in practice he only really overrides Daniel when Daniel is asking him to gamble all their lives based on the style of pots the aliens use and a half translated prayer.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought. DS9 is photon torpedoes full spread at traditional religious beliefs(which is especially clumsy because the Bajoran gods are real), Jack O'Neill is a peacenik xenophile who sneers with open contempt at Christian Republican Senator.
I don't think they were as bad as modern shows are today, but it is still consistently surprising to me how often and sometimes heavy handed political messaging was in these shows that I was totally oblivious to when I mostly agreed with the politics/hadn't been primed to notice.
Spookykou
10mo ago
Raised Catholic in America, it feels kind of like an apples to oranges comparison. I remember way more church stuff going on around Easter for sure, but I feel like there was more 'energy' around Christmas. Obviously a child's perspective might be skewed what with the gifts but Christmas was the bigger deal for me.
Spookykou
10mo ago
This is such a commonly expressed idea that is so alien to me I would love to get more details on it.
I don't even particularly love Christmas, I have spent more than a couple of them alone, but the only part of Christmas Creep that I find even slightly objectionable is the music. I enjoy Christmas decorations, I think they are cozy and festive, and often well done. It takes a lot of time and effort to put up good Christmas decorations, and it seems crazy to me to go through all that trouble and only put them up a hand full of days in advance and take them down immediately. Enjoy the atmosphere. Light a fire in the fire place. Drink more hot coco and mulled wine.
Thinking about my own preference here, it reminds me of Diamond Age, and the phyles/claves which I absolutely loved. I guess to try and name this nebulous concept I am feeling, it might be something like Aesthetic Intentionality. Anything that pushes against the dead aesthetics of 'universal culture' is at least interesting if not strictly preferable to me.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I assume they intended this to mean a reciprocal situation to the US, so, in the hypothetical the Christians are demanding that nobody talk about Passover in anything that could be considered general/public communications specifically and just refer to the time around Passover as "Holiday Time" because Saint Mark's Day falls around the same time.
Also the paid leave system in Israel is fundamentally different and more religiously based than the US model. From reading your link, it is just that all people get 9 paid holidays for holy days, and which days you are expected to take is broken down by religion (four religions listed, not sure what they do with atheists). In the US, Christmas day, just the one day, is the mandatory federal holiday. The vast majority of holiday time is private policy specific to an organization. I think this reflects a fundamental difference between how these counties view religious holidays that is almost totally orthogonal to the social engineering point the OP is trying to grapple with.
Spookykou
10mo ago
Live by the sword die by the sword. The left has aggressively pushed that everything and anything is a dog-whistle for racism, islamophobia, homophobia, etc. The too cute by half, about face to it being idiotic to suggest that antizionism is antisemitism rings hollow.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I assumed the "your" there was an individual. The normal way I see the 'progressive stack' being brought up is to discuss the fall out from a specific event with specific people trying to compare their 'status'. If a gay person loses the court of public opinion in some sort of conflict with a Hispanic person, people on here will ask questions like 'Does this mean gay people are lower on the progressive stack now?'. I tend to agree with netstack here that this is not a very useful model. The 'progressive stack' is at best a useful heuristic that might improve your ability to predict the fall out from such events slightly, but is very far from a consistent of systematized reality.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I think Ana de Armas has a special cultural place after playing Joi in Bladerunner, that I would associate with right wing doomerism/depression/incels.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I should have known better than to comment on this topic here, I am not very rigorous or deep in my metaphysical beliefs.
Let me try and clarify my internal view, and if you have the time, you can explain what I am doing wrong.
So, I view my own morality and the morality of my society through a largely consequentialist lens, understanding that my ability to fully understand consequences decays rapidly with time, and is never perfect. I view morality as a changing thing that adapts and morphs with new technology, both social and physical. I find the 'concept' of 'utilitarianism' a useful jumping off point for thinking about morality. Obviously this interacts with my own biases, I am not really sure what it would even mean for a person to think about something and not have that problem honestly. I do not view 'utilitarianism' as a solved, or solvable problem, rather as a never ending corrective process.
For example, I am not currently vegan or vegetarian, but I also do not like animal suffering, and I think a lot about this disconnect. Ideally I would like a world that allows me to enjoy all the perks of animal husbandry while reducing as much animal suffering as possible. I think the effort of trying to reduce the amount of suffering in factory farming, reflects a 'utilitarian' effort, but that does not mean I would agree with any particular reality those intuitions suggest. If for example, reducing animal suffering, made it impossible for a lot of people to afford meat or eggs, then that also seems bad, and is another part of the problem to keep working on or striving for solutions to.
My biases manifest in a number of ways, for example, I lean towards observational data in terms of what a better or worse world would look like, so for example, if a particular religion espoused the idea that animals enjoy animal husbandry and or they can only go to heaven if eaten by humans, I would not factor that into my considerations. I also tend to think suffering is bad and happiness and a fulfilment/satisfaction are good, etc.
I guess I view 'morality' as a system or framework that I use to try and evaluate my own actions and the actions of others. I am reliant on the persuasiveness of my arguments in favor of my preferred outcomes to drive other people (and sometimes myself) to respect or adopt a 'morality' similar to my ideals.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I will admit I consider my self a 'skeptical utilitarian'(I made this term up, or, if I didn't, I am unfamiliar with the other usage) in that I have utilitarian leanings in terms of how to reason about morality but reject unpalatable extreme extrapolations thereof, on 'eulering' and 'epistemic learned helplessness' grounds. Still I have always found casual swipes at utilitarianism of the form, 'see, it actually leads to bad things' to be weak. Clearly the goal is to lead to good things, broadly, and if it seems to lead to a bad thing then that probably means you should try again and fully considerer the externalities, etc. I don't see a good reason why 'utility' can't be a proxy measure for human flourishing, and I would personally prefer a form of utilitarianism organized in just such a way.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I think it is probably true that doxxing poses more of a physical risk to women than men.
I think this can be read a few ways, I think your reading is something like, therefore the number of women physically assaulted after being doxxed would be higher than the number of men, and you don't think the stats would back that up.
A different reading, would be that a (specific) woman being physically assaulted after being doxxed is in more danger, because they are physically weaker than men.
It is possible this is also not borne out by the stats, but they would be different stats, like, how often do women survive a physically violent attack compared to men.
All of these stats are complicated though, because I doubt the whole of the difference would be because men are just 'randomly' more likely to be victims.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I don't see how the goal posts ever moved. The original claim was that woman are easier to victimize (because they are physically weaker than men), men being more likely to be victims in general does not seem to preclude that.
Spookykou
10mo ago
As a victim of MGM I have always found complaints about condoms to be wild, I can hardly tell the difference, so maybe you are onto something.
The sensitivity thing is also interesting as, to my mind, increased sensitivity would be strictly a bad thing as a man. If I could magically wish for more of it, I wouldn't. The physical pleasure from sex is pretty far from the top of the list of things I enjoy about sex. It seems to me that sensitivity would trade off directly with endurance. I really viscerally enjoy the sense of masculine prowess I get from absolutely destroying a woman for a prolonged session, but I am only really able to achieve that with mental and physical tricks to actively reduce my sensitivity.
Spookykou
10mo ago
I think traditionally doxxing happened/happens to small people in small online communities. I would agree that major celebrity doxxing probably has gender parity in terms of badness, however I can see the smaller scale version being worse for women (or bad in a way specific to women). I think it is reasonable to assume that doxxing of random private individuals would result in more stalking/sexual harassment adjacent behaviors, when directed at women, and might intentionally be directed at women to drive that kind of behavior in others, in a way that would generally not be true for men.
I have been to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, multiple times and lived and worked in Beijing China for over a year.
Chinese workers do not live or act as if they are under some sort of totalitarian state. They call in from work at the drop of a hat, or take two hour lunches to get in a few rounds of tennis (this was not just because they were rich or well connect, one of the regulars at the court was literally a beat cop). I would also say that the average Chinese is not very principled, less so than the average westerner in my experience. They are obsessed with 'face' and looking good but will lie and cheat at every opportunity. I would just assume their self reported fraud data is fraudulent.
Taiwan and Hong Kong seem mostly the same, honestly, maybe a bit more 'liberated' but the base Chinese cultural programing seems to go hard.
Japan feels VERY different culturally, and really seems like a high trust society. It is true that interacting with Japanese police can be onerous, especially for foreigners. Still, given the massive gulf in behavior between the Japanese and the Chinese it is hard for me to accept that it is down stream of how draconian their respective governments are. The simplest and most obvious form of this is queueing. Everyone, everywhere in Japan will queue properly into lines and wait their turn, and nobody, anywhere in China will do the same, but I could be unaware of the death penalty anti-cutting laws in Japan.
Honestly though I am not sure how much I disagree with you.
Seems, almost trivially true and correct to me.
The example of the money on the ground stood out to me, because I honestly think a significant number of Japanese people would actually take money they found to the police lost and found. While I don't think this behavior is driven by the strictness of their State, I am not confident in saying it is because the Japanese are more principled, in the abstract. I would rather say, that principles are easier to hold when everyone around you holds them. This would also be my explanation for the small town effect.
I imagine that after a critical mass of defection only a handful of people would continue to hold to principals while everyone around them constantly defected. There is a sense in which only those people ever really had principles at all. Still, I value fair-weather principles. I think Liberalism, is a sort of coordinated attempt to get everyone to agree to some core principles and follow them and this is valuable and good, and should be encouraged.
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