pro_sprond
1yr ago
I realize this is kind of besides the point, but it's pretty funny to be worried about the US becoming a majority black country. Currently the white and black fertility rates are nearly equal and a higher percentage of immigrants are white than black (though most immigrants are neither). You could make the case that the US will eventually become majority Hispanic (they have the highest fertility rate of any major group and also a high immigration rate), but majority black would require some pretty extreme changes in current trends.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
It's sort of interesting that the movie adaptation of "Cat Person" has been fairly widely panned by critics. For example, on Rotten Tomatoes it has a 45% critic score (and a 71% audience score, which is also interesting: it's one of the few liberal-coded movies I'm aware of that has that kind of critic/audience split). A lot of the critics seem to like the first 2/3 or so of the movie but claim it goes off the rails towards the end and becomes a horror movie, which is pretty curious given the source material. Another weird point: it's pretty difficult to find a complete synopsis of the film online. Even the Wikipedia page doesn't spill the beans on the final act horror-movie twist.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
It's also very possible to regret not having sex when you were drunk
This is a fair point and one that I don't think I ever stated any disagreement with. Sometimes sex while drunk is a good idea and sometimes it's not is not an exciting conclusion but it's probably true.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I don't find your response very convincing.
- I didn't say that "not taking an action to reduce your personal risk" makes what happened to you "more deserved or justified." I simply said that advising people to take actions to reduce their personal risk is good advice. I think it's less clear what Moran meant but she does not every unambiguously say that simply not taking an action to lower your risk means what happened to you is more deserved or justified. She does seem to say that some men who are falsely accused of rape have done something wrong but here argument seems to be more "the circumstances that most commonly lead to false rape accusations also tend to include some wrongdoing on the part of the man" rather than simply that the man is to blame for being imprudent.
- Calling my argument BS with no explanation is simply not a convincing reply to anyone who doesn't already agree with you. I stand by what I said: classifying every sexual act as either totally-rape-and-completely-horrible or totally-consensual-and-completely-fine is simply an inaccurate picture of the world. There are sexual behaviors that I view as less bad than "jump out of the bushes and attack a stranger" rape but still not completely okay. There's a reason that we have categories like manslaughter which are in-between murder and self-dense/no-fault accident. The world often does not consist of sharp dichotomies and does not necessarily perfectly match the categories we try to impose on it.
- "Even if you are deliberately banging a psycho chick that you don't really like, because you don't want to be a virgin any more, it does not mean that her falsely accusing you is somehow deserved or justified." I never said this and I don't think it's clear that Moran would agree with it either (though I am not certain about her beliefs). Saying that something is good advice does not mean that the consequences of not following it are "deserved or justified." Saying that even in a situation where someone has been wronged they may have also acted badly does not mean that they "deserved" the wrong that was done to them. Honestly, you and I probably agree on a lot. I think that false accusations are more common than the media often makes it seem, that a false accusation is often really horrible and completely screw up someone's life and that even when a falsely accused person has acted badly, it's still very wrong for them to be falsely accused. But I can think all of those things while at the same time acknowledging that there are some behaviors that put you at greater risk of false accusations, that it's (often) worth avoiding these behaviors, and that some people who are falsely accused of rape have done something wrong (even if it wasn't rape and they don't deserve to be accused of rape).
Aside from these specific responses, I want to make a broader point. You say "You could equally steelman the argument of those who oppose 'victim blaming'" and the main substantive argument you present seems to be "Victim blaming creates an atmosphere where the crime is slightly more acceptable thus slightly more likely to happen." Actually I mostly agree with this. The kind of advice Moran gives might well contribute to an atmosphere where false accusations are slightly more acceptable. So we have a tradeoff here: there's some value in giving people good advice and in trying to say true things that you believe but there are also some downsides to doing that. Different people may have different opinions on where the balance of that tradeoff lies; I think in this case the downsides are smaller than the upsides. Perhaps you disagree. But the broader point I want to make is that this type of tradeoff is completely normal and the existence of downsides to something does not mean the upsides don't exist (or vice-versa). So sure, you can steelman a case against Moran's advice. That doesn't mean the case for it is wrong, it just means that Moran's advice may have both upsides and downsides, which is not surprising.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I certainly wouldn't say that having sex while drunk is always a bad decision, but certainly sometimes it's a bad decision. In my experience, it is plenty common that people make bad decisions while drunk. I'm not sure whether those bad decisions are "things that they'd like to do, but are too inhibited for whatever reasons" but I do think they are things the person involved regrets.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I honestly don't care if it sounds patriarchal or not. I'm not a modern progessive (though I'm not exactly conservative or traditional either) and the things I care about are not based on what sounds patriarchal or not. Consent is not the only moral value that matters in sex and sometimes you do have a responsibility to not enable people to make bad decisions, and especially not to take advantage of their propensity to make bad decisions for your own benefit. That's true when a man does it to a woman, when a woman does it to a man or any other combination of genders.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I mean if that's really your view then I guess I probably can't argue you out of it. But it honestly seems kind of strange to me. Suppose that your friend gets really drunk and wants to drive his car. Assume for the sake of the thought experiment that he's going to drive it on a totally deserted road so there's no risk of him hurting other people. You think it would be funny to watch him drive his car drunk so you give him his keys when he asks. He then crashes his car and gets badly hurt. Do you really mean to say that his injury is strictly his responsibility and you have no blame at all?
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Why does the man have the responsibility to look into the future and use his good judgment, when the woman couldn’t be bothered/failed to do so?
As I think I stated pretty clearly, my view is that both parties share some responsibility and how much each one is responsible depends on the details of the situation. When people are extremely drunk they often make bad decisions. Of course they are responsible for making those bad decisions, but if you abet them then you are also responsible. And even more so if you knowingly abet their bad decisions for your own benefit.
I don't think I'm saying anything too crazy or that most people would even argue with if sex and gender weren't involved.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I agree that it's certainly possible to make an accurate guess in many situations but I also don't think everyone possesses this skill.
I don't think @fuckduck9000 thinks it's impossible either just that the difference doesn't matter. Unless I'm misunderstanding.
He said "How would you know/foresee this?" in response to my comment "I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight" which was in the context of potential problems with having sex with drunk people. It's not quite the same as saying it's impossible to know when a drunk person really planned to get drunk in order to have sex and when they didn't, but it's not so different.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that you can perfectly tell the difference. Even so, many other young men probably cannot and for these young men, Moran's advice is probably useful.
Also, it's sort of funny that you are confident you can always tell the difference and fuckduck9000 thinks it is impossible (though in a slightly different context).
Both parties share some responsibility; how much depends on the details of the situation. As an analogy, imagine your drunk friend asked you where his keys were because he wanted to drive. If you help him find his keys and then he drives drunk and gets into an accident then he certainly is responsible, but so are you. If you have sex with someone intoxicated and know that they will likely regret it then in my opinion you are partly responsible.
Edit: "How would you know/foresee this?" The same way you try to predict how other people will feel about something in any other social situation. Of course sometimes it is possible to make an honest mistake. For example, suppose that someone wants to have sex with you and tells you over and over that they just want to hook up but later you find out that they really wanted a relationship. In most such situations, I think your position would be quite defensible and the person who wanted to have sex with you should bear most or all of the responsibility for their decision. But I think anyone who's been an adult long enough has seen some situations where a man was knowingly using a woman's emotional neediness for sex and I don't think that's a good thing (and even less so if intoxication is involved). By the way, I think you could read Moran's advice to young men from the OP's post as, in part, advice for "how to know/foresee this."
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I honestly find this a very strange attitude. First, sex can and often does have nontrivial physical consequences, ranging from mild soreness the next day to pregnancy or STDs. Second, many people obviously have a very strong emotional reaction to sex. I certainly think emotional consequences are different from physical consequences but I don't think they don't matter at all. For example, suppose you had a child and told them they are stupid and unlovable. No necks have been broken and yet it's clear that your actions are morally relevant (I'm not trying to equate this example to drunk sex, just trying to point out that physical harm is not a prerequisite for moral relevance). I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight. Obviously a lot depends on the situation, often both parties are partly responsible and just because something is morally wrong doesn't mean it should necessarily be illegal. But I think it's wrong to discount it completely.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I was assuming we were in the context where the girl is already drunk and perhaps so intoxicated that she may not be making decisions she would agree with when sober. In this context, I think it may be hard to determine if part of her reason for getting drunk was to make it easier to get laid (and I wouldn't necessarily trust the accuracy of an extremely drunk person's response to such a question).
pro_sprond
1yr ago
How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not? Surely you agree that not every drunk girl at a party is trying to get laid and that there is some level of drunkenness where someone's failure to dissent (or even positive consent) should not be taken very seriously (e.g. if your friend got falling-down-drunk and asked you to help him jump off a bridge into shallow water you would be an awful person if you helped him do so).
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Perhaps this counts as "victim blaming" according to the way the phrase is generally used in popular culture, but it also seems like relatively good advice and to me, that's the more important thing. To slightly steelman the argument, I think there are a few key points:
- There are actions that you can take to reduce your personal risk. Yes, maybe in a perfectly just world, people who don't lock their bikes would never have their bikes stolen, but that's not the world we live in. In practical terms, advising someone to never lock their bike because advising otherwise would be "blaming the victim" would be doing them a huge disservice. Advising young men (and young women) to be careful about who they sleep with is good advice for a whole lot of reasons.
- Not every false accusation is completely false. In reality, viewing everything as a dichotomy between "totally rape and a horrible crime" or "totally consensual and completely fine" is wrong. There are lots of things that are not clearly rape but still bad. For example, most people would agree that having sex with an unconscious stranger is clearly rape and having consensual sex with a sober person is fine. But what about in-between? How intoxicated or incoherent does someone need to be before it counts as rape? The most accurate view is that there's a sliding scale of badness with "unconscious" at one end and "sober" at the other. So if you have sex with someone in the middle of that spectrum and they accuse you of rape then maybe it could be considered a false accusation, but you still did something wrong.
- Some things that are legal are still wrong. This seems to be one of Moran's main points. Suppose you are a young man and you meet an emotionally unstable young woman, have (consensual) sex with her and then ignore her. Yes, you haven't raped her and you haven't broken any laws, but you still haven't treated her well and her life is probably worse because of you. And if you did so knowingly and intentionally to fulfill your own sexual desires, that's even worse.
- The optimal amount of crime is not zero. Reducing the incidence of some type of crime comes with costs and it is usually the case that the costs outweigh the benefits before the amount of crime is literally zero. False accusations of rape are the same. Adjudicating "he-said-she-said" cases are difficult, especially when one or both of the parties was intoxicated at the time of the incident. Always believing the accuser is probably not optimal, but neither is always discounting what the accuser says. In this environment, advising young men to try to avoid potential "he-said-she-said" situations is both good advice on an individual level and potentially makes adjudicating such cases easier in general since it decreases the number of false accusations.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
This is very interesting and thanks for bringing it up! Do you know a place where I can read the details about this program? Everything I was able to quickly find (e.g. this article) talks about "homeless families" being provided accommodations in hotels in Dublin. Depending on what homeless families means, this might be quite different from the most visible segment of the homeless population in LA, which seems to consist of single people with no children present. This makes me wonder if there is some screening that goes into who is eligible for the program in Ireland or if the homeless population in Ireland is just significantly different from the homeless population in LA. Also, I believe the rate of opiod abuse is much lower in Ireland, which might make a big difference.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
I think the union, as the sponsor, is allowed to unilaterally withdraw the proposition.
Interesting, I didn't notice that part. Even taking this into account, it still seems a bit dangerous: if the union hasn't reached a deal with hotel management by the deadline to withdraw the proposition then they need to either reveal their threat to be an empty one or go through with it, in which case it could well pass.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Having cops constantly going to your hotel also sounds disastrous for business. I agree that hotels would do a lot of things to try to keep rooms from going empty, including gifting all excess rooms to employees each night, if allowed. A lot would depend on what enforcement looked like I guess.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Especially in LA, which has tons of other municipalities embedded within it.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
This is such an extremely poorly-thought-out idea that it's kind of hilarious.
The obvious problem is that any kind of substantial homeless presence in hotels would have such a negative impact on business that hotels would go to great lengths to avoid it. Perhaps they would follow some of the suggestions listed in other comments and sell hotel rooms at bargain prices to people who are flexible in their booking (e.g. booking day of, or willing to move around their booking) or even gift some guests an extra room or two. More simply, they could gift employees free rooms whenever there's a vacancy. It's also possible that most hotels in LA proper would simply close and relocate to cities in the LA area which wouldn't be affected by this law (there are many other municipalities essentially embedded in the city of LA).
But after thinking about it a bit, I think an even bigger problem is something pointed out in the article: the number of vacant rooms in a hotel can change unpredictably from day-to-day so you either have to constantly kick out homeless residents on short notice or essentially accept a permanent fraction of your rooms being used to house the homeless. Even worse, if you opt for the latter then every time there's a dip in your number of regular customers, you risk having to increase the "permanent homeless" fraction of rooms. And if you opt for the former option then you will constantly have to get into fights with homeless people who don't want to leave and risk a huge public relations disaster if that ever goes poorly. Not to mention it would be insanely disruptive to regular customers.
I think the hypothesis mentioned in the article—that this is a negotiating tactic by the hotel workers' union—makes a lot of sense. Basically it is a threat against hotel owners that if they don't increase salaries then they will be put out of business by an insane law. If this is really the union's strategy then it seems a bit risky. There is always a chance that even the law will take on a life of its own and get passed even if negotiations succeed and salaries are raised. And then everyone (hotel owners and workers alike) will be out of a job.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Musk actually did (very briefly) start a PhD in materials science at Stanford before dropping out to start his first start-up. So I'm not sure "he's not a physics doctorate" is a convincing argument that he's not smart. However, I do basically agree with you: Musk is not a genius, but he is probably still very smart and also has other unusual skills (Scott's book review refers to his high level of intensity, focus and work ethic). More generally, I suspect that many of the most successful people in business are not quite the very smartest people. Intelligence is correlated with other useful traits like conscientiousness, but not perfectly so, and to succeed at the very highest level in business, those other traits also matter a lot.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
This reminds me a bit of these two blog posts from Data Colada, a blog focused on statistics and the behavioral sciences. In those two posts, the bloggers point out a problem with some studies of racial discrimination. There are several studies which attempt to measure racial discrimination in hiring by sending out identical resumes some of which are made to look like they are sent by black applicants and some of which are made to look like they are sent by white applicants. Sometimes, the way that resumes are made to look like they are sent by black applicants is by using stereotypically black names. The blog posts I linked to points out that since some stereotypically black names are often seen as indicative of low socioeconomic status, this is not necessarily a good test for racial discrimination.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
Yeah, I wasn't trying to disagree with you. I agree it may be revealing about what Lance himself believes (perhaps I didn't indicate that clearly enough). I just wanted to comment that there are pretty good responses to this question, even for the most die-hard of abortion advocates.
pro_sprond
1yr ago
This is a minor point but isn't the more obvious argument against pregnant mothers doing meth (from the perspective of an advocate for late-term abortion) is that there is a chance the baby will be born with severe disabilities and have a lot of trouble throughout their life because of that? It seems logically consistent to believe both that killing fetuses is basically fine and that doing things that will result in children who experience needless suffering is not fine. I realize Lance didn't reach for that justification and that perhaps reveals something about his moral intuitions, but the "what about meth" argument doesn't actually seem like much of a gotcha to me.
Totally agreed that such people exist (though I suspect that they're not very common). In my view such an opinion is appalling, but I do think it's pretty funny to be afraid of America becoming a majority black country.
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