WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
4hr ago
1865 was the Thirteenth Amendment. So long as slavery was legal, it was legal to rape slaves.
He's not deceiving himself, he doesn't have the IQ for that.
This seems like a strange claim. Three-year-olds lie to themselves when they've been naughty. I agree with @urquan that it's an extremely basic, natural human reaction to a feeling of guilt, not some sophisticated cognitive contortion that only superior minds can master. If anything, I'd say that idiots lie to themselves more thoroughly and more successfully than midwits and geniuses - less cognitive bandwidth means less lingering self-doubt about one's own bullshit, once swallowed.
These aren't the words of a man who is trying to defend his own ego, his self-image of being a good person!
Why not? It all depends on where he's built the mental wall. One form of denial is "I never raped a woman at knifepoint, of course not, it's not true, you're lying", but another form, which is just as psychologically soothing, just not legally helpful, is "it's an animal instinct, I couldn't control myself, it's not that I'm a mean person who wants the girl to suffer, I just literally couldn't think about that until I got my nut out". Many serial killers, never mind rapists, rationalized their behavior to themselves in this way - not by lying to themselves about what they were doing, but lying to themselves about how much agency they had in choosing to do it.
WandererintheWilderness
16hr ago
I agree; but the idea that British bureaucrats would carefully overthink the conjugation of the modal verbs in a piece of official paperwork, on the other hand, isn't so implausible.
WandererintheWilderness
17hr ago
Guardianship exists, in theory, in the interest of the child/disabled person. Enslavement definitionally exists to benefit the slaveholder. This isn't to say that some system of slavery can't be worked out that also gives guardianship-like benefits to the slave - or that guardians don't often take advantage of their charges in some way - but let's just say that as much as guadianship isn't perfect, the historical record viz. slaveholders prioritizing their slaves' welfare and flourishing over their profit margins really isn't great.
That's also true. You can probably play infinite recursion with this, and plausibly you're right that it would be better to leave it at "You will" than start playing the triple-bluff game. I just sort of got the impression that you were accusing the authors of the booklet of wanting to soften the threat - that you interpreted them as saying "well, if you're naughty, we might have to expel you, although don't worry, we might choose to be lenient" - and I wanted to make the point that this was not necessarily the intention behind the "could"s.
WandererintheWilderness
20hr ago
And no one in Europe aside from Ukrainians and Russians is real asylum seeker.
That's rather my point (I mean, I'd say there are a few others e.g. Uyghurs, but same difference). As someone who does believe in the moral duty to aid genuine asylum seekers, I dislike the fact that the "asylum seeker" category has been turned into "immigrant 2.0" and massively overstrained. I would like it to get its old meaning back. Therefore, I approve of official documents which acknowledge that coexisting with asylum seekers is not necessarily comfortable; that when and if we choose to grant that status, we do it out of ethical duty, not because we are mistaking the asylum seekers for swell, prosocial immigrants whom we'd love to see put down roots once the crisis is over. Asking if asylum-seekers are a good fit for Western values is a category error, and pretending that they must be before we can let them in is precisely the overreach that lets asylum-seekers trade on public goodwill to turn into permanent residents.
WandererintheWilderness
20hr ago
Are any of these so-called "asylum seekers" fleeing literal genocide?
My point is that they should be - that this is what the legal category "asylum seeker" is supposed to be for - and the booklet makes sense in that context. To the extent that the category has been artificially expanded in a way that makes the booklet look weird, it's the expansion that is to blame, not the booklet.
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
In principle, I don't see a problem here. If the concept of "asylum" is coherent at all, then we shouldn't be looking to vet asylum seekers for whether they're good additions to the country, the way would ordinary immigrants - any more than hospitals ask for patients to send in resumes in triplicate. Of course some of the refugees you're temporarily taking in out of humanitarian concerns will be ill-suited to coexisting with the locals; by all rights your standards for Jews you are willing to hide in your basement when the Gestapo are on the prowl should be lower than your standards for peacetime houseguests. A booklet like this only looks off if you take it for granted that "asylum seeker" is nothing but a fancy word for "immigrant". Which is understandable in the current status quo, but it's not the booklet that's at fault.
WandererintheWilderness
21hr ago
My only complaint is that the "could"s in the list should be replaced with "will"s.
Charitably, this could be an attempt to acknowledge the reality of imperfect enforcement from the word go so as not to come across as all bark and no bite later. i.e. a way to head off reasoning of the form "Hur hur, the fancy booklet said that if anyone has sex with a sleeping woman he will go to jail, but my cousin Ahmed did that last month and totally got away with it, can't fool me with empty threats" by saying upfront that it's a risk you incur, not an infallible process.
WandererintheWilderness
22hr ago
I for one was astounded that no one had dared to pull one of the many threads dangling from Arday's vast spider-on-amphetamine-ish web of lies
I mean, I have to think a great many people realized his autobiographical tall tales were bullshit, but treated them as just that - the tall tales of an eccentric egotist, which academia isn't short on. Without evidence of his track record of actual plagiarism, I don't know that lying about being a world-class marathon runner should be a fireable offense for a humanities professor - and I don't find it implausible that most people honestly never made the jump from "this eccentric scholar is obviously bullshitting about his athletic abilities (etc.)" to "wait, could it be he's lying about his actual scholarly work as well?". Not a great reflection on the rationality of the average human being, either, but not implausible. There's a group mentality at work, if everybody treats this guy as a respected authority in his field, then what's more plausible: he's a slightly crazy genius whose quirk is telling absurd tall tales, or he's a laughably obvious fraud and you're the only one who's noticed? Past a certain threshold the problem becomes self-sustaining. Of course, I don't doubt that people being afraid to seem racist by calling him out was a factor, especially at the start to get past the threshold in question. But I don't think it was necessarily the only force at play, nor the most potent by the late stage at which the bubble was finally popped.
"Not working" how? The alternative viewpoint is that shooting at the Strait is literally the thing we care about, the one thing we want them to stop doing, and so long as they get to keep doing it then we're losing.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Doesn't every website / forum do that? If not they'd be flooded with spam.
Yes, but most old-school Forums - and, of course, subreddits - are modded by volunteer users, not by the domain holder. This would be the equivalent of specific Facebook groups policing themselves, as distinct from Facebook itself stepping in. (I suppose all it would take for even the Motte itself to comply with such a paradigm would be for Zorba to agree not to take any conventional mod actions, and I don't think he makes a habit of it anyway.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
but repealing Section 230 altogether would be a bad idea because it may affect smaller forums like this
I don't think FtttG was saying it ought to be repealed, merely that it ought not to apply to any platforms that censor content on particular topics.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Ah. I understand what you meant, now - you're analogizing the "good" in "good genes" with the "good" in "good investment". I don't think people who use of "good genes" colloquially would define "good" in this context as "contingently socioeconomically valuable genes", which is a jarringly cynical way of seeing the world. I don't think that a woman faux-modestly boasting "Guess I just have good genes" when complimented on her beauty is saying "My genes make me a valuable market object in the society I live in". I think what she has in mind is some vague underlying belief in objective beauty standards. I think she would say that her genes would still be "good genes", and her looks "good looks", on a desert island. That's the assumption I've been arguing under. Perhaps you think the average American in 2026 is both more clued-in to the fundamental subjectivity of all aesthetic judgements and more ruthlessly mercantile in how they relate to the world around them, but if so, that's the crux of our disagreement/misunderstanding. I think that when people who joke about "good genes" they are flirting with an unexamined belief in an objective value system, and that belief in such a value system is potentially morally hazardous. If you think that they aren't doing that in the first place, fine.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Their arguments were legible and worked for thousands of years. (…) I'm not sure we've established that secular liberal individualism is so right that failing to meet its standards means you don't have an actual point.
I mean, we can get into the whole "God does not, as a matter of fact, exist" argument, but I don't know that this is a good use of anybody's time. Inevitably an argument that relies on the existence of the Christian God is going to be null and void when levied against people who are pretty sure that there's no such varmint, never mind the circularity of "X is wrong because God says so".
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
Sydney Sweeney was born with genes which produce traits which are considered highly desirable by a huge proportion of the population – traits that a huge proportion of the population would either like to have for themselves, or would like their romantic partner to have. A reasonable compression of the previous sentence is "Sydney Sweeney has good genes".
I don't think this works with other forms of subjective taste. Most people like M&Ms better than they like aged Shropshire Blue - would pick the M&Ms over the cheese if given a choice of a free snack - but I don't think "M&Ms are better than Shropshire Blue" is a reasonable compression of that statistical fact, let alone "M&Ms are good snacks (and Shropshire Blue isn't)". This is what I mean when I say that I value diversity.
I feel very keenly that the world would be a worse, duller place if everybody conformed to bog-standard majority tastes - if nobody liked blue cheese. There's nothing wrong with sophisticated gastronomy being a niche taste, there's nothing wrong with most people finding Sydney Sweeney to be the pinnacle of attractiveness, but the moment you try to turn a subjective trend into a normative statement, you necessarily imply that in some sense, people who aren't attracted to Sydney Sweenney are in some objective sense "wrong", that it would make more sense if everybody was into Sydney Sweeney and M&Ms. That way does not necessarily lie Auschwitz, but accepting such a precept does lead in a very direct sense to envisioning a utopia as a conformist, monotonous Brave New World-type society that massively curtails the wonderful variety of possible human experience.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
I will reiterate: the factual claim "many desirable human traits are heavily, if not solely, determined by one's genetic makeup" does not in any way imply the normative claim "therefore, governments should proactively intervene in the lives of their citizenry to improve their average genetic fitness"
And I will reiterate: your 'factual' claim is no such thing because you are smuggling in a subjective value judgement as if it were a fact. There are no such thing as objectively "desirable" traits, or objectively "good" genes. It is a factual claim that the color of one's eyes is determined by one's genetic makeup; it is not a factual claim that blue eyes are nicer than brown eyes. It's just a fairly common aesthetic preference some people have. Once you have taken for granted that some human phenotypes are "good" and others "bad", and that this means there are "good" genes and "bad" genes, you are already some considerable ways down the slippery slope that makes Brave New World-type eugenics look like a remotely acceptable idea.
I do not claim that anybody at American Eagle was using "good genes" as a dogwhistle in the hiding-one's-power-level sense where they would actually support eugenicist policies, and are trying to work people up to the idea. But the "good genes" meme hints at a broader worldview which is antithetical to pro-diversity progressivism, and whose most extreme form leads to eugenicist policies. Pro-diversity progressivism opposes that worldview altogether, not just its direst consequence, and trying to give that worldview extra cultural capital can thus, IMO, fairly be regarded as an attack on the rival progressive memeplex. (Of course, I will add that in my view this is all a tempest in a teapot, because it is a fact that many normies still uncritically accept the implied value system in the "good genes" phrase, it is what it is, hopefully they'll come around once we get the Singularity, I'm not convinced they will any time before, and one goofy ad certainly isn't going to move the needle either way.)
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Whenever someone says "woke", do you interpret that to mean "cancel culture"? Most conversations around here would be practically incoherent under that definition.
As far as I can see, both meanings are in use, and indeed, are often subject to a motte-and-bailey that the current convo seems to illustrate. It's used both to mean "the abnormally illiberal political-correctness movement that began somewhere in the 90s", and "the grab-bag of left-wing opinions that the people in the illiberal movement subscribe to", which is to say, "any and all meaningfully left-wing opinions".
It seems to me that a discussion about whether or not wokeness has been "defeated" only really makes sense in the context of the latter - of the recent and unprecedented threat which fundamentally cannot coexist with American democracy as it had been practiced for the preceding 250 years. If we try to parse the statement using "wokeness" to mean "leftism", it honestly sounds deranged. Leftism-is-general is, again, not going to be "defeated" overnight - hundreds of millions of Blues are not going to suddenly change their minds about their most fundamentally-held social and moral beliefs. The Culture War is just not the kind of conflict where one Tribe can "defeat" the other on the scale of a few decades, unless it were to turn into some sort of actual boots-on-the-ground armed conflict, which has, at the very least, clearly not happened yet.
Wokes were not rending their hair and claiming "Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are promoting a belief which is a prerequisite to endorsing eugenics!": they were saying "Sydney Sweeney and American Eagle are promoting eugenics!"
But compare HBD. I'm always banging the drum that "blacks are, on average, biologically lower-IQ and more aggressive than whites", if taken as a true scientific fact, still doesn't inherently justify moral claims like "blacks should be second-class citizens" or "it's okay for whites to make fun of blacks with minstrel shows" - in short, still doesn't justify white supremacy as an ideology. But in practice, if you see someone trying to signal-boost HBD, it's unlikely that they're just spreading awareness of interesting scientific trivia which they regard as having no political ramifications whatsoever. A progressive who accuses a HBD-promoter of trying to put white supremacy back into the Overton window is, on average, not being irrationally paranoid, even if there may be a few false positives.
The leftist position on the American Eagle ad is that this is very similar. Making value-judgements on genes has been declared taboo to keep the evils of eugenicism at bay, and although it's conceivable for someone to try to put them back into the Overton window for benign reasons, there is going to be a heavy suspicion that they don't think the full package is that bad either. (Heck, the HBD hypothetical would be a stronger case, because "racial IQ differences exist" really is, at a base level, a neutral factual claim about the world. In the "good genes" case, the problematic element isn't a factual claim, but a taboo value judgement.)
wokes being able to say absurd extreme things without repercussion is not what a defeated movement looks like (…) an entire city being festooned with the flags of a particular ideology at the city council's behest is not what a defeated ideology looks like
But then we're back to equating between "woke" as in "the anti-free-speech cancellation machine" (which needed to be defeated) and "woke" as in "people holding left-wing opinions at all, however respectfully" (which there is no particular justification to expect to be 'defeated' overnight, any more than any mainstream belief system held by hundreds of millions of people).
They might claim to be uncomfortable with the concept, but their revealed preferences would tell a very different story.
Even if we grant this point for the sake of argument, that still leaves "phrases like good genes are taboo" as a bona fide leftist shibboleth that the American Eagle ad campaign would have been stepping on the toes of. The question then is whether they did so out of ignorance, or if they considered that left-wingers would be offended and decided that being seen to mildly upset SJWs suited their PR purposes just fine. I have no fixed belief, but the latter is plausible, and it would mean the woke brouhaha about the ad was by no means "crazy" in ascribing hostile intent to the ad, even if it was still something of an overreaction.
Well, that wasn't the point I was making at all.
Then why just list "debatably-crazy things lefties are still allowed to say" rather than "debatably-crazy things righties still aren't allowed to say" as the watermark? That's really what gave me that impression. It's difficult to take your aside about Pride Month as anything else than "Pride Month celebrations should end", as distinct from "Conservatives should be allowed to have equally-extravagant celebrations".
If it meant the latter, there would be literally no one on the planet who didn't qualify as a eugenicist
Not so. Radical progressives would be very uncomfortable with the sheer phrase "good genes" - the belief that some genes are in any objective sense better than others is viewed as a dangerous slippery slope to proactive eugenicism. Certainly no one would deny that there are, biologically, genes for particular eye colors or cranial structures, but the far-left view is that attractiveness is subjective, and Sydney Sweeney genes are in no objective sense "better" than Danny DeVito genes, it just happens to be the case that more people are into Sweeney-like body-types/it's more socially acceptable to express attraction to Sweeney-like body-types.
Talking about "good" and "bad" genes, with the possible exception of medical conditions, is, precisely as I said, a "slightly naughty" reference to a widely-held opinion that's benignly, but significantly at odds with the maximally progressive view. It doesn't mean you're secretly advertising to Hitler, but I think it's fair to take it as a signal that you are less than maximally concerned with the opinions of the radical left; as a signal that you are addressing normal people, not Tumblr keyboard warriors. It's not especially sinister, but the keyboard warriors weren't entirely wrong to think that the ad was winkingly espousing a worldview antithetical to their own.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
That may be, but the problem is that conservatives are not allowed to state their beliefs; not that progressives are allowed to do so. And your post sounded a lot more like you thought it was a problem that progressives were allowed to voice their beliefs at all.
(I also wouldn't describe the American Eagle thing as "obviously insane". The pun is pretty obvious, and "good genes" is, you know, literally the etymological meaning of the word "eugenics", so it's hard to argue that the ad wasn't playing with garden-variety eugenics-adjacent ideas, the question is just how deliberate, how consciously politically-motivated the reference was. I don't believe it was intended as some sort of pointed dogwhistle or propaganda, rather than a slightly naughty reference to low-grade wrongthink which they correctly reckoned to be widely held by their target audience; and I don't particularly think that whiteness was on the makers' minds, just ordinary non-race-specific, non-systematized folk eugenics. But it's a question of degree rather than of kind.)
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Sure, I don't have to pretend to agree that American Eagle is covertly promoting white supremacy, and I won't get into trouble for denying that it is – but woke people can still explicitly state that and face no career repercussions of any kind (…)
Heaven forbid anyone be allowed to hold and express political or ethical opinions that clash with yours! Where would American democracy be then?
The salient characteristic of "wokeness" that right-wingers had a legitimate case against - the thing that needed, needs, to be wiped out - is cancel culture. It was the unprecedented defection from American norms around freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and peaceful coexistence with people from the other side of the aisle. If there are still wokes out there cancelling people, that's one thing. But the fact that people still hold beliefs of the kind that wokeness sought to enforce by illegitimate means, that is not relevant. It's normal. It's the equivalent of non-murderous German nationalists, who do not deserve to automatically be tarred with the Nazi brush just because they pursue similar aims to those that the Nazis committed horrific crimes in pursuit of.
It's like trying to make sure all kids are above average
That's putting it too strongly. Making all kids above average is a logical impossibility even if you had a literal magic wand. There would, on the other hand, be nothing logically or scientifically impossible about ordering society so that every (family of) citizen(s) is guaranteed a house, though barring space colonization it may require population caps once all available land has been tiled with houses.
Regardless, if we agree houses are superior to apartments, I maintain that demolishing houses to make room for apartments should be regarded as a product of dire straits, an extremely regrettable thing to do, to be undertaken only when the humanitarian concerns are overwhelming. To do otherwise is sheer Repugnant Conclusion stuff - depriving people of an actually good life for the sake of making some other people's sucky lives fractionally less sucky. 1,000,000 happy house-owners and 500,000 disgruntled apartment-owners is preferable to 1,500,000 slightly-less-disgruntled, but still fundamentally unfulfilled and frustrated apartment owners.
(And all this is without going into my objection to demolishing living spaces at all; I think it's deeply regrettable that we live in a society where living in the same house from birth to death, over multiple generations, has become abnormal; I suspect that we're like fish not seeing water with regards to widespread psychological issues caused by a majority of the population being cut off from their childhood homes in adulthood. Humans did not use to live like this. We're not built for it.)
Apartments are a necessarily evil but are considerably worse for human flourishing than even small houses, and if there are ways to address the failure of the housing market without building more of them, we should take them even at a significant premium, for the sake of our species' dignity. Backyards should be the default for any family with children, not a luxury. I'm a very literal NIMBY in this sense. Humans need greenery in their lives, little humans need space to run and play and goof around.
(No, public parks don't make up for this. Even if you live very close by, a trip to the park is a whole thing, you need to get the kid dressed, drive or walk them, and then watch them the whole time. Going more than once a week is a tall order. The mental health benefits for the kid, and peace-of-mind benefits for the parents, don't remotely compare to the availability of a private garden that they can run out into at ~any hour of the day or night if they're going a bit stir-crazy in their bedroom.)
I'll note that I'm not the OP, and also that I didn't mean that slavery being legal entailed that rape of slaves must have been legal, I was merely making explicit Opt-out's apparent factual claim that this was so with American slavery pre-1865.
Quickly looking into it, the situation does seem to have been more complex, and unsurprisingly varied from state to state. When it comes to white masters raping their black slaves, no state seems to have been so crass to explicitly allow it in law, even if it was a widespread practice. That being said, I did find this 1850s Mississippi Supreme Court case which explicitly ruled that "the crime of rape does not exist in this state between African slaves" as "their sexual intercourse is left to be regulated by their owners". This seems to decriminalize master-on-slave rape only by implication, but it does at the very least explicitly legalize slave-on-slave rape, so it was sometimes legal to rape slaves.
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