aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
3mo ago
Not exactly what you're asking but we have a blood on the motte tower discord server that occasionally has some discussion on the other games chat. DM me if you want an invite. It's been thoroughly colonized by dramanaughts but of the more manageable sort.
aqouta
3mo ago
A lot of the current mess dems are in could be traced to them trying to stop Bernie twice.
this reasoning is just straight forwardly poor. Bernie only looked like he had a chance because the centrist lane was crowded. When it became uncrowded he had no chance. This isn't "trying to stop Bernie". This is a group of 20 friends, 2 of which want to eat at the same slop house and the remaining 18 of them each preferring a different steak house deciding on a particular steak house that was only one guy's first choice rather than take a vote at the restaurant level and end up at a coordinated minority's preference.
A tremendous amount of people came out of that primary thinking that they should have been allowed to win because other candidates were obligated to keep splitting the ticket 8 ways in order to give him an opening. It's ridiculous.
aqouta
3mo ago
He is for sure not innocent. You can certainly argue that it was a politically motivated prosecution of the 10 felonies a day type but Trump really did commit a crime.
aqouta
4mo ago
I get we're in a frenzy right now, but this is one of my least favorite styles of post. If you want to dunk on people for making poor predictions please do the leg work and link the predictions.
aqouta
4mo ago
So this was definitely a failed assassination, whoever did it.
I mean of course, this isn't the kind of thing you survive after doing. Listening to the audio I suspect the culprit is already dead.
I think Trump is now sure to win. From the audio I'm now also pretty sure there's a dead body somewhere and I'm intensely interested in who that corpse was before it made a very bad decision. What's the protocol for the media here? Avoid publicizing it to prevent copy cats? This is a very bad thing for our democracy.
aqouta
4mo ago
We're a razors edge away from arguing about definitions but at the risk of that. My air conditioner is responsible for keeping my house cool in the summer, a responsibility it failed at recently, and yet as far as I know it possesses no free will. The person who rear ended me has a responsibility to not rear end me and has failed much like my air conditioner. It's not as if the person chose with anything like free will to rear end me, very few people would ever choose to do such a thing.
aqouta
4mo ago
Do you treat yourself and other people as being responsible for their actions? Say someone rear ends you at a stoplight because they were looking at their cellphone while driving. Do you think they are to blame? Do you get angry at them? Do you pursue an insurance claim against them?
Yes, responsibility isn't a function of free will. In a cosmic sense they were always going to rear end me and we've built up systems around responsibility to handle this that provide incentives that influence behavior ect. ect. I'm entitled to insurance whether or not it could have actually ever been different. You can built up all of society without the need for free will and I don't really see why anyone would act differently depending on whether they believe in it.
aqouta
4mo ago
The only out here is some form of argument against free will, but people who argue the choice to eat the whole pie isn't actually a choice never live the rest of their lives like they don't have free will. It's pure cope.
I'd personally bite that bullet and say that libertarian free will does not exist. I'm not sure what you think I should do differently, or in my framing must do differently, given that belief.
aqouta
4mo ago
when he was the beneficiary of an elite attack on Sanders and RFK and Dean Phillips
Do the elites now include random middle class people in the mid west who don't like the anti-vaxx guy who had a worm starve to death on his brain or an avowed socialist? If the elite defended him against some of these people it's because of how incredibly embarrassing they are.
aqouta
4mo ago
I think the consensus view here is that people should be treated specially for the sole reason of being white instead of any personal qualifications.
This is just consensus building in reverse. No, these positions are not the consensus, no I'm not going to prove a negative that there is some other consensus. We don't have a consensus, we are a collection of individuals with wildly different beliefs.
aqouta
4mo ago
Over thinking patterns without any actual way to determine truth is at the center of my trouble with the whole trans thing. I think it's well known that at least one strand of the trans person is stereotypically a very good programmer, perhaps you hadn't encountered that meme. But it's so well known that I pretty much guessed where this story was going at this point
Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore
It's precisely the keen analytical mind that notices they feel a disconnection(A better word eludes me) and searches for a reason. Maybe they find god, maybe they find community in some niche, maybe they discover the concept of gender identity and ascribe their not fitting in to being the wrong gender. All these answers have a kind of new equilibrium to them and I can't confidently say they're wrong. But I do know the appeal. Landing on belief in one's trans identity to explain your dislocation has this feature that even after transition you have any number of handy explanations for why you don't quite feel right. The important thing isn't alleviating the disconnection, it's finding an explanation for it, not having an explanation it what was really eating them up. They can handle anything so long as they can put a label on it and gain that little bit of control.
aqouta
4mo ago
It's often no taken into account that with the American fixed rate mortgages people almost always use what a mortgage today would cost rather than a mortgage entered a decade ago. You lock in a flat payment that doesn't increased with inflation like rent does.
aqouta
4mo ago
No reason to burn this bridge. I enjoy the new freer X as well, but the ground has not even settled yet. That is a land ruled by a mad an capricious man that any day may change his stance and wipe us from existence. That and, while I understand why the current obsessives might sour your experience, there is still magic here. I think before this election is done we'll need to rely on it again.
This is silliness. Maybe you'd have a point if @TracingWoodgrains used his credibility to push the story but he didn't. LOTT ate bait posted by an anonymous source with zero attempt at verification. He did not pimp out his name. There is no reason to believe anything he writes is a hoax. The only lesson one can reasonably draw from the whole thing is that you shouldn't take the word of random anonymous people or those who do.
aqouta
4mo ago
Love the audio version, a good break from the monotone tts player nearly everything else goes through for me.
aqouta
4mo ago
Does anyone actually think Biden can beat Trump
Definitely, there's a lot of game left. Trying to call it before October seems a fool's errand. Anything greater than ~80% confidence seems like pure hubris to me. We have two people born in the 40s running very volatile campaigns.
aqouta
4mo ago
This is my experience too, but there's been a lot of discussion lately about typical mind fallacy. Trans people supposedly feel their gender directly, and I have no such experience. I'm not being flippant here, there is some possibility that it's just the case that we're missing out on some kind of widespread experience that many other men have. Like that theory from a while back that bronze aged stories about conversing with gods wasn't metaphor but the actual felt experience of the people involved.
aqouta
4mo ago
Normal people don't watch debates, they get their info from people who do. People who watch debates can take all sorts of things from them some of which are the actual policies hit on. It's a very dynamic thing.
aqouta
4mo ago
Your whole premise is flawed. It might make sense if we had some rule that everyone has to watch the debate but we don't. Normies wouldn't be caught dead spending over an hour watching two old people spittle on each other. CNN seems to have claimed somewhere between 50 to 80 million people tuned in, many of which could be internationals. What does influence normies is what their politics brained friends and collogues tell them happened and that is downstream of the words and the performance.
aqouta
4mo ago
I just think I'm skeptical that this is realistically going to work on any topic that is at all ideological. Even with everyone basically agreeing that over prescribing opiates is very bad we get these pain clinics you mention. On subjects even a little bit controversial? Forget about it. It just becomes a matter of who is doing the auditing and an endless series of proxy wars around that and the judges and the people who decide what should trigger an audit on and on and on.
Just the thought of the amount of wasted human effort waging those wars makes me feel exhausted. Societies can't be run like this, we must actually come to some consensus on what reality is or split into small enough exclusive groups who can agree.
aqouta
4mo ago
I don't have an answer to the actual question you're asking besides you can't and probably shouldn't. People should be allowed to make decisions about their bodies and before they're old enough to consent to those decisions we can't do much better than relying on the parent's responsibility to act in their children's interests. Will some parents do irreparable harm in a failure of this responsibility? Absolutely. Does it mean that gating any treatment behind a doctor's evaluation is basically pointless for anything that could plausibly be granted? Also yes. But the alternatives seem worse. If we think a treatment is categorically wrong or wrong given objective criteria like age of recipient then we should write laws that do that. The fight is properly had on the ideological level and the motivation for such a procedure if it can't be won there then it ought not be won on these obscure proxy grounds.
aqouta
4mo ago
This all just feels like moving deck chairs on the titanic. If being trans is real and we can indeed reliably detect it then all of this is pointless. If it's not then deciding what age to do the surgeries is the least of our issues. I don't see how there can be some middle road where we are confident it's real and detectable and yet should move cautiously.
Scott's criticism, that toughness alone can't solve the problem without an actual actionable plan, is both true and uninteresting because it doesn't engage with the critiques of the current establishment and just says a truism. It's an important truism because many people do actually just have no real alternative to the status quo, especially true when discussing critiques of capitalism that amount to basically "capitalism hasn't brought about utopia yet".
However being more tough becomes a more interesting critique when you believe that the problem we have with handling the homeless that I'd call hyper-empathy. if hypo-empathy is not being able to take another's perspective, usually implied because of lack of care or interest, and empathy is having a good understanding of another's perspective and needs hyper-empathy is the mirror of hypo-empathy where you are charitable and caring beyond reason. Hyper-empathy might be characterized by letting a bad actor brutalize you and your family because it would be mean to interfere and maybe they have a good reason to do so, maybe you've contributed to a general environment and they're the product of blah blah blah.
If you think the problem with our treatment of the homeless population[1] is hyper-empathy by the NGOs that basically run all homeless programs then being tougher makes sense. We need to either axe this hyper-empathetic orgs or staff them with people who are willing to be tough. Scott says the reason we can't solve the homeless problem is a lack of state capacity. Well what actually is state capacity and why don't we have it? What's actually stopping us from doing the things he scoffs at like building asylums and throwing people into them? I think part of the equation is a general lack of will or "toughness" among the people making decisions on this topic. The money is there, a desire for a solution is there. I'm an outside observer, I can't go into a step by step explanation for how to build asylums and set up laws so that we can populate them, that's an incredible burden, but I do know that the people that we entrusted billions of dollars and many years to have utterly failed to deliver improvements and they all seem to be manically hyper-empathetic so toughness might be just what is needed.
1 - by homeless population I mean the people in tents long term that make no effort to reintegrate back into society rather than people who live in their car for a little while or even temporarily rough it while trying to reintegrate for whom we do have good services and tools that I advocate for even being quite generous with.
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