nomenym
16hr ago
The problem is that evaluating the trade-offs here is very very hard. There are many moving parts and many possible outcomes, and I simply don't know enough and probably can't under the current circumstances. I am highly ambivalent about these current events and don't have much to say other than the obvious, e.g. the inevitability of collateral civilian deaths justifies neither action nor inaction. At this point I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.
nomenym
20hr ago
Most people don't care nearly so much when bad things happen to their outgroup, and indeed they often enjoy it.
Selective empathy is ordinary human psychology. Unselective empathy is a mental disorder.
nomenym
5d ago
With the march of the ents, "doom" should be interpreted to mean their destiny, not necessarily their destruction.
nomenym
6d ago
Fundamentally, modern capitalism rewards childless women with status--higher incomes, more prestigious jobs, bigger homes, more fame and attention. If you're status-maxxing in the modern world, then family is an impediment to success. This competition favors women who eschew femininity and childcare, and so women predisposed as such increasingly set the pace in the status race. Other women, even those who merely seek to settle into the middle of the pack (to feel "normal"), marginally shift their priorities and goals in the same direction as the childless workaholics. This extreme shift in the female status hierarchy is relatively recent, and it is unsustainable over multiple generations for obvious reasons.
Children are a public good that is being under supplied because women now have fewer ways to internalize the benefits in the short run. Status is not the only motivation to supply public goods, but it's a big one, perhaps the biggest, and it is likely necessary to get over the hump of replacement fertility rates.
nomenym
8d ago
The immediate question that comes to mind is how functional is the market for this kind of insurance? It may be a market, but it might already be a market beset with perverse incentives that prevent prices from tracking reality.
nomenym
8d ago
There is no likely future where women retain their rights and privileges. That which cannot go on forever, won't. Correcting the problem now would lead to a softer landing, but it's politically impossible, so hard landing it is. Do not mistake this prediction for a preference.
nomenym
9d ago
It's not just a lack of socialization, but a kind of mal-socialization that seems to now go on in schools and institutions. You don't just have to learn the basics, but you also have to unlearn the bullshit ideas and habits and norms you've been acculturated into. It's like having to move to another country and integrate into a foreign culture.
nomenym
23d ago
Your Honor, even if my client is in fact guilty of the acts he is accused of, the rules of this court make it such that my client's guilt cannot be proven!
I would suggest that this kind of argument raises even more problems than it solves.
nomenym
28d ago
it is unjust for people to be limited by the circumstances of their birth
It's amusing, then, that homophobia appears to be more heritable than homosexuality.
nomenym
29d ago
I eagerly await the day I see the headline "3 killed by male wearing pants".
nomenym
29d ago
The "female in a dress" line was perfect. I can see that really catching on.
nomenym
29d ago
The actual sleeping around wasn't the trigger. That was mostly just a minor scandal that a few people were embroiled in. What kicked off Gamergate was the unified response--the circling of the wagons--that all the established videogame websites and forums engaged in. People were getting banned and punished for even mildly critical takes as all the institutions suddenly acted like a hivemind to attack and ostracize dissenters. As that happened, more and more people piled in to see what was going on and quickly found themselves branded as sexist, misogynist, and probably racist too for some reason.
It was a pattern that would go onto be repeated in many online and offline communities. The sudden imposition of extreme left-wing idpol ideology that would split fanbases, denominations, supporters, hobbyists, and everything else, with all the established mainstream institutions and power centers neatly lining up on one side, and often against the majority.
My greatest regret is not having more kids before finding out that we couldn't.
One of the things that is difficult to understand is that having kids is like a second puberty, because it fundamentally changes your motivations and interests. Ask a pre-pubescent boy what he thinks about girls and he'll give a very different answer than he would a few years later. But puberty isn't optional; it just happens (until recently!). For most of human history, kids also just happened eventually. We don't have properly calibrated motivations for things that are just supposed to happen eventually anyway. It's essentially the same reason we don't feel "hungry" for vitamin D: not going outside in the sun was simply not an option for our ancestors, and so there is no well-calibrated mechanism to motivate that behavior. Sex drive worked well enough until we solved that "problem".
Only when it's a skew that affects groups they care about.
They aren't optimizing for explanatory power but for political power; they still earnestly believe everything they say. Accusing them of inconsistency is like accusing a tiger of not fighting fair--it's just a misunderstanding of what you are dealing with. They are not playing the "game" of mutual pursuit of truth by rational discussion, and so they are not bound by the rules of that game. When they appeal to those rules in an argument, it is merely for a strategic advantage. They do not apply those rules because they believe in them, but because you do.
nomenym
1mo ago
If it was a bad shoot only if the shooter had precognition, it was a good shoot.
If the officer could reload a previous save game and redo that event knowing what he does now, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't shoot. It may have been a justified shoot in the moment, but that doesn't mean it was a good shoot in a more general sense. Perhaps on a better day, or maybe if the same officer hadn't been dragged by a car recently, then he would not have shot. I don't think he could honestly answer the question "if you could do it over again, would you do the same?" with an unqualified "yes", though he may be advised to do so for legal reasons.
Unless this is matched by a program to crack down hard on left-wing agitators and terrorists who would use this information to target and intimidate officers and their families, then it is merely a strategy for the left to empower its own masked paramilitary groups to contest policing authority. They don't want to abolish policing or borders; they just want to be the police and decide which borders are enforced.
nomenym
1mo ago
Vigilante is closer to the right meaning, though in this case it's not so much trying to take the law into your own hands than it is trying to take the law out of the police's hands.
nomenym
1mo ago
Naziphobia is a very serious problem. Everywhere is 1930s Germany, everyone is Hitler, and everything is genocide, but they've just learned to hide it. But the smart and educated have been warned, and they know just how to root out the hidden Nazis. Anyone who does anything that might be what a Nazi would do if they were pretending not to be a Nazi must be exposed as a Nazi, and fortunately we have "experts on fascism" (presumably much like our "experts on misogyny" and "experts on whiteness") who can hear the secret dog whistles that Nazis use to communicate. They must be rooted out an expelled from society, because even the smallest Nazi presence will irresistibly grow and take over if left unchecked.
nomenym
1mo ago
I presume they're even more bad luck in current year than they've ever been.
nomenym
1mo ago
Few people are truly bad people, but there are a lot of people who are bad at being good people.
nomenym
1mo ago
It works when you have allied media organizations and friendly local authorities. It's literally in the Antifa playbook. The goal is to exploit the right to protest to pursue low level paramilitary activity. They're very good at it, and they've established the norm so much that regular left-wingers often now seem confused when their protesters get arrested for intimidation, vandalism, or even violence. They've gotten away with so much that it has moved from an expectation to an entitlement.
Occasionally right-wing protesters try the same tactics only to discover that it doesn't work for them.
America still has some of the residual vitality of Western civilization, and that's just so cringe.
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