WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
I don't really have a dog in the race of whether Aella counts - I was defending the usefulness of "sex worker" as a term, which I think of as a broader category than "prostitute", rather than a euphemism/politically-correct synonym for it. I think camgirls are a more salient example of "clearly a kind of sex worker but importantly different from a common-usage prostitute", while, as you say, the line between prostitutes and escorts/courtesans is always going to be blurry at best (especially as bog-standard prostitutes having business, legal, and self-esteem incentives to make themselves out to be closer to the escort end of the spectrum regardless of the factual truth).
WandererintheWilderness
6hr ago
A prostitute is etymologically someone who is 'put out there', offered up to the public. "Sex worker" is broader, encompassing camgirls and pornstars who don't, in fact, make themselves available to the man on the street. I suppose escorts may or may not go into the narrower "prostitute" box depending on how exclusive they are, and how much personal taste factors into their choice of client (I think this was the key difference historically between a prostitute and a courtesan, at least; a woman who presents herself as a prostitute is advertising that she will fuck anybody if the money's good, while a courtesan must to a degree be wooed if you want to get in with her, she'll just also expect you to pay for the privilege if she says yes).
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
I considered typing "now-considered-to-be-offensive" or some other convolution, but ultimately deemed it unnecessary - I think it sort of goes without saying that "offensive term for [ethnicity]" means "term considered offensive by the sorts of people who care a great deal about what terms are offensive", particularly in the context of pointing out that their UK colleagues seemingly came to a different conclusion about the very same word.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
They were Irish Travellers or Gypsies,
Hang on, I thought these were different - certainly in America, "Gypsy" is a now-offensive term for the Romani. I knew that it was apparently still kosher in the UK, but I assumed that it was used to refer to the same population. Does the British "Gypsy" refer to Irish Travellers rather than Romani? Is it an umbrella title encompassing both?
This is the means by which armies secure their borders given the current state of technology. But if an army had technology that was more effective than lethal force at protecting the nation's borders (eg, for the sake of argument, foolproof mind-control rays), it would use that instead of killing people. The tails eventually come apart. The better definition of the army's purpose is the one which correctly predicts their actions in all hypothetical situations, rather than the one which only works in the current context but breaks down outside of it, even if both definitions correctly predict armies' actions in the real world.
For example, you might think that an airline's purpose is to make money by conveying passengers from A to B as fast as possible, or you might think that an airline's purpose is to make money by burning jet fuel. In the real world, given the current state of aviation technology, conveying passengers from A to B is going to be done by burning jet fuel. But "conveying passengers from A to B" is a better statement of the airline's purpose than "burning jet fuel", not a euphemism for it, because if a technological breakthrough suddenly gave us a better, cheaper way of powering airplanes than traditional jet fuel, we would expect the companies to switch over in pursuit of more effectively conveying passengers, rather than giving up on conveying now-reluctant passengers and finding other reasons to set fire to jet fuel.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
I don't think so. In the event that an army has a choice between securing the nation's borders non-lethally with 100% effectiveness, or killing people, we should expect the army to pick the former strategy over the latter. Therefore "the army exists to secure the nation's borders" has information value as more than a euphemism.
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
Materialists are making the logically consistent assumption that if humans are computers, then AI is guaranteed to surpass our capabilities in every respect. So they predict a future which may not be real if materialism isn't real, and are hallucinating that such a future has arrived out of a cycle of fear and a desire to get ahead of it.
I don't think this makes sense. You don't have to be a materialist to believe that AI is capable of surpassing human capabilities in all strategically relevant respects. It may very well be that only creatures with non-material souls can have qualia, but AI doesn't need qualia to destroy the world, and it certainly doesn't need qualia to wreck the economy in a mundane sense where it doesn't even go rogue.
You'd have to be not only a non-materialist, but someone who believes that the soul is doing a lot of the 'thinking' in a practical sense, for this to be otherwise - and I don't think that's a mainstream opinion even among dualists. But even then - even if you believe that a material machine can never replicate what happens in a human's mind when the human thinks about a problem, this is no guarantee that the AI can't arrive at a functional answer by different, possibly more efficient means.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Old people can be comfortable if they earn it,
What do you mean by "earn it"? If you mean "earn it morally by contributing to society while they were able", sure. If you mean "literally personally earn the money they'll live off of in their elder years", we have a problem. There are plenty of working-class people who can work hard every day of their adult life, but for whom making enough savings to make a decent living on in their golden years is simply not a realistic outcome. Have these people "earned" a few decades of retirement? I say yes. I say society needs to offer them some guarantee of it if it wants young men to go into those lines of work, and they are necessary work. But that's going to look like a pension system.
(No, "get married and have kids" doesn't square this circle. Odds are their children will be living paycheck-to-paycheck too, the last thing Junior needs is another mouth to feed on his minimum wage.)
That's totally fair. I misinterpreted "trying to get people to do anything more than show up" as suggesting you were mad at people not actually doing the signposted activity, rather than people refusing to do their fair share of the admin/etc.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
anything more than show up
But surely that's exactly the point of third spaces. They aren't supposed to be activities you have to put effort into - the whole point of third spaces is to enable what, for lack of a better term, I'll call socially-acceptable indoor loitering. When the bar and the bowling alley are third spaces, you don't go to the bar to drink, and you don't go to the bowling alley to hone your skill at the game. If you want your board game meetup to fulfill that role, you need to stop worrying about whether the people who show up actually play board games. Otherwise you're just running a hobbyist group. Hobbies are socially valuable too, but they're a different thing.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
No. Society does not pay for childhood, parents do.
Your parents, who will be old later, and to whom you will therefore owe a pension. What's your point?
instead of looking forward to their children and grandchildren and personal plans unfolding
To enjoy any those things aged 70, you need to be able to afford a comfortable living without having to work anymore. But more to the point, you seem to be flip-flopping back and forth as rhetorically necessary between "actually, old people don't need pensions to enjoy comfortable idleness in retirement" and "actually, old people's comfort doesn't matter, screw them, as soon as you're out of the labor force you might as well croak". It is the latter I primarily take issue with.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
To be clear, I was attempting to elaborate on how I understood the modding action, not necessarily saying that I personally thought your post was over the line. For myself, I don't really think it's boo-outgroup precisely, and I think the factual purpose is reasonable enough even if I don't find the positions espoused very surprising. At most, I think there was some implicit consensus-building, which is a subtler sin than base boo-outgroup. But I do see where the mods were coming from.
If it's trivial to assume Democratic Party candidates are going to be ACAB, well, sorry. I happen to think that's noteworthy.
Well, I think your opening post would have benefited from an attempt to elaborate on why you think so and why. For my money, ACAB is/was a major social justice meme, and Blue-aligned politicians can be relied upon to endorse all ascendant social justice memes for the cameras. The degree to which they personally believe all the shibboleths, and the extent to which this would affect their policies once in office - now that's a very different question. But when it comes to statements, yeah, I think "Democrat endorsed one of the things which you'd be mildly cancelled for not having in your Twitter bio a few years ago" is fork-found-in-kitchen.
(Of course, the separate point that Platner equivocates on whether he's a full-throated Democrat, and therefore it's significant to show that when push comes to shove he's made statements in support of 99% of the stock progressive platform, remains valid. But that's a completely different argument from whether he's particularly left-wing by the standards of avowedly Blue politicians.)
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Well, there is also credit being issued to the young - the very young, that is. We don't ask 0-to-20-year-olds to work to earn their daily bread, indeed we actively prohibit them from doing so. So the debt does exist - your 30-year-old self owes society his labor in exchange for it guaranteeing you a childhood where you didn't have to work in a Dickensian coal mine, or on a farm.
But to put it another way, the basic model of our social contract is that, out of an ~80-year lifespan, we would like people to contribute about half of that number to working full-time to the benefit of society. In exchange, they can enjoy a life of relative ease for the other half of that time-span. 40/40. It's intuitive, it's fair, it's attractive. Instead of 40 years of leisure followed by 40 years of labor or vice versa, however, we distribute the rewards on the time-honored principle of "half in advance, half when the job's done": 20 years of easy street from birth to graduation, then 40 years of toil, then 20 years of comfortable retirement in your golden years.
Splitting the difference in this way fulfills multiple useful purposes. Firstly, it includes (in your terms) both "credit" and "carrot" mechanics, thus appealing to both kinds of instinctive motivation. You should work hard because you owe society for your happy childhood, and because you still have some more comfort to look forward to later. Secondly, it concentrates the designated labor period in the years when people are fittest and thus when their time is more economically valuable. A 7-year-old gets as much happiness out of leisure time as a 37-year-old, if not moreso - and a 70-year-old doesn't get much less out of it than the 35-year-old, though admittedly he does get somewhat less. In contrast, the labor of a 7 or 70-year-old is worth far, far less than the 35-year-old's.
Above all these common-sense considerations, though, there is the even more basic point that most people like having something forward to in their future. Reducing this incredibly fundamental fact of human psychology to a servile desire for a carrot-and-stick model is bizarre and misanthropic (indeed, I had nowhere mentioned a stick/whip). Obviously I would rather be promised a few decades of comfort at the end of the road, than believe that nothing but pain and destitution awaits me once I'm no longer deemed to be useful. How you can get out of bed in the morning believing the latter baffles me.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
good to have lists of hateable and mockworthy things said by leading candidates for some of the most powerful positions in the country! Those are factual content; they are not "just 'He's on the other team'."
I think the point is that no work was done to show what makes the listed statements "hateable and mockworthy" other than the fact that they're ideological positions from the other team. If this is factual content then it's trivial - "left-wing politician has left-wing opinions" is peak dog-bites-man. And if it's meant to be polemical, then actual work needs to be done to show why OP disagrees with Platner on the validity of ACAB or marxism - otherwise, listing left-wing talking points as if their wrongness was self-evident is textbook consensus-building.
Picture a left-wing poster angrily listing everything a Republican candidate has said that proves he is pro-life, anti-LGBT, pro-border-control, pro-guns, anti-cancel-culture - just collating the quotes without further commentary, but with a distinct sense that OP is inviting everyone else to point and laugh and sneer with them. Wouldn't this clearly warrant mod action? How is it different from what we have here, just with the political valence switched?
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
What do we need old people for
Motivation, that's what. The benefits and respect afforded to the old aren't an insult to the young, they're a promise that they'll be rewarded for working hard in their earlier years once they've done their time. One day, when the tonguing is done, we'll take our leave and go.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I'd think it comes from 1) this hasn't been done before, so the Overton window still sees it as beyond the pale, and 2) it would be done against women, and humans naturally want to protect women from everything.
No - again, I think it comes from a deep-seated intuition that the body is a temple, something private and sacred; that it would be unclean and abominable for anyone to invade or modify your body without your consent. I am struggling to explain this without repeating myself - but a substantial portion of mankind finds it intuitive that having your body interfered with is traumatizing and wrong in a kind of metaphysical way that you can't crush down into utils and compare to other forms of harm. Throughout history, it has been considered self-evident that an honorable woman would rather die than be raped - that a woman who has been raped, even if there is no pregnancy, even if there is no social shame, has suffered a much more grievous and deeper harm than the amount of physical pain endured during the act.
Ergo, it seems intuitively, primally obvious to me that forcing a woman to bear something within her womb, within her most private organs, against her will, is wrong, disgusting, taboo, in a way that's not just quantitatively but qualitatively different from forcing a male or female soldier to risk his/her life in battle. I would feel the same disgust if a mad scientist tried to implant a fetus inside a non-consenting man.
(…) pretending to care about fairness, possibly even to their own conscious mind, so that they can honestly, genuinely believe that they care about some sort of higher order principles beyond naked self interest.
But that's passing the buck. Why do they need to lie to themselves in their own minds unless they actually have a real conscience somewhere in there that recognizes fairness is better than pure selfishness, and makes them feel bad if they recognize themselves to be falling short of that ideal?
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Because of social contagion, a peaceful and relaxed woman relaxes her husband and her kids, which means that working husbands perform better at work if their wife is relaxed at home.
The problem is that in the 21st century, a housewife and mother of three is not going to be relaxed; she's going to be perpetually stressed and exhausted. Servants are the missing variable in these arguments. The old system presupposed that anyone middle-class or above would have at least part-time servants to do the cleaning and look after the very young (and even for the poor, to a certain extent it presumed big family clans where retired members could be put to "work" for household and childrearing stuff, though it also largely presumed that it was okay if poor women's mental health was a horror show).
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
Childbirth is extremely invasive for women of course, but it's also very invasive to be enslaved by the military and potentially shot to death
I think you're underselling the "invasive" point. The idea of forcing someone to go through pregnancy triggers a particular kind of disgust and sympathy in me - it might not be more harmful or evil than forcing someone to fight in a war in an 'objective' sense, but it feels debased and inhumane, belonging to the same category as rape or Mengele-style medical experimentation. Certainly, a legal mandate of pregnancy, at least one that's not enforced through direct sexual violence, would be on the milder end of that spectrum - but the violation of bodily autonomy is still a very particular kind of harm, and one can have a moral intuition that the entire category should be strictly taboo in a civilized society, regardless of what other kinds of harm the government is sometimes empowered to inflict for the greater good.
(Intuitions may differ about whether forced pregnancy falls into that category, but I do think the vast majority of humans would agree that there are particularly 'unclean' kinds of harm that the government should never implement, even in pursuit of its self-preservation; that there are actions so vile that if it's a choice between death and performing them, death is the nobler choice. If a maniac demanded that you rape your preteen daughter or else he'd kill your family, what would you choose? The view that the government cannot compel women to bear children is, IMO, a perfectly straightforward example of that: "if it comes to that, better to be a demographically dwindling nation than a nation of institutional rapists".)
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Just one example of this racket - in half of US states 0,5% or more of all building budget has to be spend on art.
This does not strike me as inherently a racket. It's perfectly anodyne in western civilization for the government to spend money on public art, not just brutalist utilitarian concrete. Has been since the Romans. No doubt there is corruption in what artists get the commission, particularly if it's always avant-garde artists whose aesthetics are light-years away from the kinds of statues and decorations people actually want in their neighborhoods - but a small fraction of the budget being reserved for art is not in principle outrageous or even surprising.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
How do we think this works out?
Could always go for the Ancient Greek route: recreational bisexuality as the norm for young men until it's time for them to settle down and produce heirs?
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
It wasn't an explicit part of the scripts, but they did pointedly only have humans as Imperial officers, never any aliens. I don't know if that was a worldbuilding decision, so much as wanting the dour totalitarians to all look alike while the plucky ragtag goodies come in all shapes and sizes because it's useful visual shorthand; but it was by no means a retcon.
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
That depends on what we mean by "believe"; I don't think Judas is suggested to have become an atheist. When the Israelites turn away from God, they turn to foreign cults and superstitions - they become opportunistic henotheists instead of monotheists - but they do not disbelieve in the supernatural itself. Indeed, I don't think they stop believing in Yahweh's existence, just in whether the clearly-real supernatural entity they'd pledged themselves to really is the omnipotent creator of everything. Biblical characters inhabit a very different epistemic landscape from us.
I'm an atheist, but I think the Abrahamic faiths all have a reasonably cogent answer as these things go: "we know our religion is the correct one because, fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, God sent us prophets and/or a Messiah, who performed all sorts of miracles as tangible proof of the divine; and people wrote credible accounts of those events down for posterity".
e.g., I think there is genuinely something to the case that the Christian Gospels are probably more historical than not. I don't believe for a moment that they were directly written by the people they're attributed to, of course - but we have historical evidence that they were written shortly enough after the fact that, yeah, it's kind of bizarre to imagine people making too much of this stuff up out of whole cloth and trying to pass it off as fact. Mark's Gospel was probably written something like 40 years after Jesus's purported crucifixion - it could and would have been read by people who had personally met Jesus.
Indeed, it seems to be written in a way that assumes the audience has some prior knowledge about Jesus and the rumors that surrounded him, so that the Gospel's purpose is to theologically nail down (or, as they case may be, nail up) who and what Jesus was. Mark is very concerned with telling his audience "no, Jesus wasn't John the Baptist resurrected, or the prophet Isaiah returning to Earth - and he was definitely an emanation of the Jewish God, not a different Gnostic God", not so much with persuading an audience who might think that Jesus was just some guy and all the supernatural claims about him are nonsense. This tells us that, at least within certain circles, "there was a guy called Jesus whose life story went roughly like this, and there was something supernatural going on with him" was a relatively uncontroversial starting point within a few decades of Jesus's death. How would we react if someone wrote a book which took it for granted that everyone knows that, IDK, Jimmy Swaggart routinely performed honest-to-goodness public miracles in the 80s - a book which seemed merely interested in telling us precisely what it was that empowered him to do so?
As a materialist, I don't ultimately find this persuasive as evidence for divinity itself. The credibility of the Gospels as historical document is significant, but not significant enough to match up to the basic improbability of "the supernatural exists" as a root claim. But that's not the question you asked; you asked what makes Christians so sure that, even assuming there's a God, it's specifically the Christian God. And I think that once you take for granted that the supernatural exists, Christianity does start to look pretty well-supported.
I think the argument isn't really "this 20-year-old is so young he couldn't understand the severity of what he was doing". It's more about how we shouldn't punish his future 30-year-old self over what he did at 20, in the way that we would feel comfortable hampering a 40-year-old's freedom over crimes he committed at 30, because a 30-year-old is much less likely to repeat his 20-year-old self's mistakes than a 40-year-old is likely to repeat a 30-year-old's.
(I'm not impressed by the argument as it pertains to 20-year-olds, but I think that's the basis on which we don't try, say, 9-year-olds like adults. 9-year-olds are not inherently "lacking in the sense and good judgment department" in the sense of not being responsible for their own actions; they know that killing is wrong and they shouldn't do it. But you aren't in any realistic sense keeping people safe by keeping a 9-year-old murderer off the streets for forty years, the likelihood of someone committing murder aged 9 is basically apples and oranges to their likelihood of committing murder aged 40 unless genuine mental illness is involved.)
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