quiet_NaN
10hr ago
I do not think that describing trans women as 'men with a cross dressing fetish' is very close to reality.
There is a small fraction of people who are genuinely very uncomfortable with their biological gender. They sometimes take hormones, get surgery and go through byzantine legal processes to change their legal gender. They kill themselves at elevated rates when forced to conform to their biological gender. This is not just some kink.
Different cultures have dealt differently with non-conformists of all sorts. Killing them at the earliest opportunity is certainly a popular choice.
Modern liberal democracies generally frown on that and try to do better than just applying whatever solution would suit the majority of people. We don't accept "most straight men would prefer if they knew for certain that the man peeing next to them was not sexually attracted to them" as an excuse to kill all the gays and bisexuals, or even kick them out of the military.
The bathroom issue is simply an issue of trade-offs. Having to use a gendered bathroom which belongs to a gender one does not identify as clearly can be humiliating. Imagine getting told that you are too small or weak to qualify for the men's bathroom, or that you are too large, ugly or flat-chested to qualify for the women's bathroom.
On the other hand, there is both a perception of danger if people who are not cis-women are allowed in women's bathroom as well as possibly some actual danger.
I think that the actual danger is over-rated. With the possible exception of Hogwarts, gender restrictions in bathrooms are not strictly enforced. Someone who is entering a women's bathroom to commit rape is unlikely to care that he will also break some trivial statute about not going to the women's bathroom. Nor would punishing someone who disregards the gender sign on a bathroom (for example, to avoid waiting time) with a lengthy prison sentence be proportionate.
There will probably be some sick fucks who like to jerk off in the women's bathroom who can use the excuse 'but you see, I actually identify as a woman' if they are seen entering or exiting, but this is a lesser concern.
At the end of the day, it is a numbers game. If half of the rapes are committed by men in women's bathrooms who had previously invoked their gender identity as an excuse to be there, then I would agree that this was a huge fucking problem and we should restrict access to improve women's safety.
As things stand, I don't think it is a huge practical issue. At the risk of sounding like some woke, I think most women I know would very much prefer having to share their bathrooms with trans women to losing access to abortions.
A decade ago, Scott argued for drawing a more complex gender boundary than 'has Y-chromosome' as a cheap and easy way to improve outcomes for a lot of people. I think that his article is still spot on.
I think that the bathroom safety argument frequently is used by anti-trans people not because preventing rapes is their first and foremost concern, but because it is one of the few issues with trans rights that the average person will care about.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Saying "it would be great if the US decided to gift what is currently New Mexico to Israel, and Israel and all of its Jewish inhabitants would elect to move there and gift the territory previously claimed by Israel to the Palestinians" does not sound antisemitic to my ears.
It also is not a realistic proposal, however. Current borders are the results of random happenstances, but it is rare that they can be moved without bloodshed, which makes them practically sacrosanct. Thus, I oppose both new Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Hamas slogan "from the river to the sea", because both would entail the forced displacement of the people presently living in these areas.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The Jews as a people have a strong pervasive immoral Jewish supremacist ideology of which zionism is one angle.
Similiarly on the basis that european nationalism can threaten Jews and other so called minorities, they are unable to compromise with even the existence of European nations.
Unlike the letter signed by the architect, these statements are strangely congruent with old European tropes of antisemitism. Per Wikipedia, some 8% to 11% of the 'eligible' Jewish population (that is, the ones being allowed to migrate to Israel) live in Europe. Are you seriously suggesting that their purpose is to destroy their nations from the inside to further some Jewish-controlled New World Order? (Also, the reason that there are not more of them is that in 1945, there were very few Jews left in Europe due to antisemitism, and quite a few were understandably reluctant to return after the war.)
When a group of people behaves horribly towards others it becomes quite rich to obsess about racism towards them.
I disagree. Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, behaved pretty horrible, but that does not invalidate your concerns about racism against Gazans. No matter what you and the wokes think, most conflicts in the world are not one-sided fights between the heroic freedom fighters and evil oppressors. Look at the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and you will find that there is plenty to blame on all sides.
Likewise, the Israel-Palestine conflict -- decades of behavior ranging from shitty to crimes against humanity on both sides have locked both sides in a defect-defect equilibrium which is much worse for human striving than a compromise solution would be.
Or the BLM protests. I believe that the median Black shot by US police is a gang member who had it coming. However, that does not mean that there are no victims of excessive police violence fueled by racist perceptions. And that in turn does not mean that the riots were justified.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Agreed. The last thing that the cartels want is some 9/11 type attack which causes the US to ramp up their action against organized crime to GWB's war on terror level. That would be terrible for their profits and life expectancy.
I am not even sure that the Iranian government would want to sponsor large terror attacks on US soil. Sponsoring Hamas and Hezbollah is one thing, but poking the US in the eye would go badly for them. (Of course, a government administration is made out of people, whose goals are not always aligned with their country, but getting the US to bomb the shit out of them would likely not benefit anyone in power.)
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Another day, another controversy about what is antisemitism and what is legitimate criticism of Israel.
This time, a German architecture prize was rescinded over the recipient signing a letter condemning Israel.
The Athens-based artist and author James Bridle, [...], was announced in June as the recipient of the Schelling Architecture Foundation’s theory prize, [...]
Bridle was informed in an email that the foundation’s committee had decided unanimously not to award them the prize because Bridle was among the several thousand authors who signed an open letter calling for a boycott of Israeli cultural institutions.
Of course, the Guardian is not quite sure how the founder of the prize is called, oscillating between Schelling and Schilling:
The foundation’s prizes, which have been awarded since 1992, are named after the late German architect Erich Schilling.
The letter in question is here. Key passages:
the most profound moral, political and cultural crisis of the 21st century.
We still have 3/4 of that century to go, but good job being optimistic!
This is a genocide, as leading expert scholars and institutions have been saying for months.
This would at least be debatable.
Therefore: we will not work with Israeli cultural institutions that are complicit or have remained silent observers of the overwhelming oppression of Palestinians.
Fair enough.
the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people as enshrined in international law.
That would be the the general right self-determination of peoples, as mentioned in the UN charter? Does this also apply to the Uighur, the Kurds, the Basques, the Catalans and so on?
Or is the relevant law the limited recognition of Palestine, or the Oslo Accords?
Was the Hamas rule before the Oct 7 a shining example of self-determination?
Personally, I am somewhat sympathetic to calls to stop the IDF from bombing the hell out of Gaza. I am also fine with demanding that Israel should stick to the Oslo accords in the West Bank and dismantle their illegal settlements.
But to demand political autonomy in the context of Gaza is where I get off the train. The force of political autonomy in Gaza is called Hamas. Their primary objective is to sabotage any peace process by murdering random residents of Israel. Asking for political autonomy for Gaza is like asking for political autonomy for Germany in 1946.
Overall, I don't think that the letter is plainly antisemitic. If the author had signed a similar pledge against Chinese institutions for the Uighur genocide, and also demanded self-determination for the Kurds, I would tend to call them a general advocate for oppressed people. If their only political topic is Israel, then that would be a bit dubious.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
One thing to keep in mind is opsec.
Sometimes therapy sessions include pretty personal data.
With a regular meat-based therapist, all sorts of regulations are in place to limit how the data gathered in session can be used. Crucially, such data can sometimes not be compelled as evidence. The fact that the data is mostly in his head also makes automatic analysis more difficult.
Note that a medical professional can still call the cops on you for being a threat to yourself or others, which is likely out of the scope of current LLMs. Also note that certain faiths have a much stronger protection of data shared in confession than medical professionals both in law and professional ethics.
By contrast, assume that if you do not run your LLM locally, your conversations are stored permanently on a server without your control. From my understanding, the big AI companies do not try to facilitate anonymous payments and usage (e.g. suitable crypto-currencies and communication over TOR), as this would invite all kinds of abuse.
To keep your intimate conversations linked to your legal identity secure, at least the following would have to be true:
(a) The staff of the AI company does not read them.
(b) They don't train other AIs on them.
(c) They don't get hacked.
(d) They don't get a subpoena for e.g. 'all conversations mentioning cannibal ideation' by police.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I am not sure that the utility value concept is coherent.
So all the farmers quit one day and the rest of the economy stays the same, magically. People will likely decide that they want food more than they want shelter, move out of their rented buildings and spend their rent on what food there is to be had, establishing a utility value of food.
Except now the people running the waterworks also go on strike, and there is a water shortage. Very quickly, people decide that they would rather drink than eat. Nobody would waste precious water to irrigate crops.
And then some acute threat of violence looms, and people will trade their precious water so that they are not ripped apart by velociraptors in the next minute.
Depending on what their most urgent need is, that piece of bread is worth 1$, or a kings ransom, or nothing. So what should its utility value be?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Meta: your post is 700 characters of your own words, followed by a verbatim quotation more than ten times that length. The source you linked does not seem to be paywalled. Assume that the average reader is tech-savvy enough to click on a link if they want to read the article. Quoting two paragraphs should be plenty if you are not interrupting it with commentary. Besides I gather that the motte is likely run over a jurisdiction in which copyright is a thing, and thus relies on fair use exceptions for quotations.
The article you quoted is clearly partisan. For example, uncritically referring to the gender pay gap is a red flag for me. From my understanding, the pay gap is a typical example of an equality of outcomes, not an equality of opportunity. Women are free to pick high-paying careers like engineering instead of low-paying careers like gender studies.
To this day, young men perceive that discrimination against men is more serious than against women, even though 50 percent of women between the ages of 19-29 say they’ve experienced sexual discrimination at work, compared to 30 percent of their male peers.
The article makes it sound like that statistic clearly refutes the perception of the men, when in reality, it does nothing of that sort. Perhaps men are less likely to see themselves as victims of sex discrimination. Or perhaps the cases of discrimination men experience are more severe.
From 2021 to 2023, female sexual assault victims saw a 15 percent rise.
This sounds like the author was searching for an impressive statistic to support their claim that women are more in danger than ever. Of course, 2021 was still partly COVID. And it could be that it is simply the rate of reporting which increased, which would be great news instead. Of course, it could also be a real increase, and perhaps even part of a worrisome trend instead of a random fluctuation, but so far the author has not shown the non-partisanship that I would just assume that.
It’s an acceleration of the already widening gender gap in American politics, including an increasing number of young men rejecting feminism.
Feminism can mean a lot of different things. The message of woke feminism to white cis-het males seems to be: "You are the oppressor group. By default, you are in the wrong unless conclusively proven otherwise. Your concerns do not matter because they are not the result of structural oppression." Clearly it is a total mystery why that message fails to resonate with young men.
It’s too soon to say if the 4B movement is here to stay in the United States. But even if it isn’t, the surge in interest says something about the social forces unleashed by the 2024 presidential election.
I will make the prediction that it will indeed not stay in the US.
Lots of single people do not participate in the dating market for a variety of reasons, and I doubt that the politics of their preferred gender is the main reason. Many more people will filter dating partners by their politics.
Finally, I think that if you want to avoid having sex with Trump supporters, a better strategy might be to select on geographic location. Fucking people from Hawaii (37.5% Trump) and avoiding people from Alabama (64.8% Trump) would be more effective. Wikipedia has a convenient list of criteria. The urban (38% Trump) vs rural (64% Trump) divide is in any case much stronger than the male (55%) vs female (45%) split.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
There was enough data to conclude with relatively high certainty that Trump was on pace to win. Nate’s model didn’t pick up on this because it sucks.
There have certainly been elections which were decided by tiny margins. They might well decided by the contrast in weather between the red and the blue part of the state. Now, you can say that Nate's model sucks because it does not sufficiently predict the weather months in advance.
We can score predictors against each other. A predictor who gives you a 50/50 on anything, like 'the sun will rise tomorrow' or 'Angela Merkel will be elected US president' will score rather poorly. ACX had a whole article on predictor scoring. If there is someone who outperforms Nate over sufficiently many elections, then we might listen to them instead. "I bet the farm on Trump, Biden, Trump and doubled my net worth each time" might be a good starting point, especially if their local election prediction results are as impressive.
Unfortunately, I have not encountered a lot of these people.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
The ratsphere is among the most vocal critics of the FDA. However, I perceive that the consensus is that it is too restrictive, not pushing towards minimizing health_costs - health_benefits, but instead minimizing health_costs - 0.01*health_benefits or something, because their incentives are bad: they will not be celebrated as heroes for certifying a drug which saves millions of lives, but they will be certainly be cast as villains if a drug they certified ends up killing a few 10k. "The FDA serves the commercial interests of the pharmaceuticals" is either orthogonal to that or even in contradiction.
French fries, various prescription medications, raw milk and psychedelics all have some risks. I am all for arguments that current legislation is not consistent with regard to the relative risks posed by them, and some should be regulated more harshly and some less harshly, but I would be surprised to see Trump basing his policies on a sciency risk analysis.
(The other thing to discuss is the debate what should be regulated by the federal government and what should be left to the states. However, I do not expect any consistency from either party here.)
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I do not think that you should update very heavily.
In one model, pandemics randomly happen with a certain rate, perhaps once every 50-100 years (though we might debate if the rate should scale linearly with the world population or not).
In another model, the deep state (or whomever) will engineer a pandemic timed to prevent Trump's re-election (not that he would be eligible again).
Both of these models explain the past data reasonably well. The deep state model might predict 50% for another pandemic (after all, they might try something different, nobody would claim that a lack of another Trump pandemic conclusively falsifies 'COVID was a CIA op'), while the natural rate model would give you a 4-10% chance, perhaps.
I have not calculated it, but I think that the update would increase the Bayesian probability of the deep state hypothesis by a factor of five or ten (if your prior was reasonably small).
If this is a 'heavy update' is debatable, the overall effect is largely dependent on your prior. If you have the deep state COVID hypothesis at 20%, then this observation will certainly push you over 50%. Personally, I have the probability that COVID was intentionally released by a state government (or a cabal of similar influence) at perhaps 0.3%. Most of that 0.3% are not linked to US federal politics at all, however. So even if I multiply the probability of the subhypothesis 'it was all done to thwart Trump' by a factor of ten, it will still be very low.
As an analogy, suppose someone claims to be able to predict dice rolls. I throw a 1d20, and it comes up at the predicted value. This will certainly favor the hypothesis 'that guy is a psychic' over the null hypothesis 'he is just guessing' by a factor of twenty. But this will certainly not be enough to convince me, because I started with a very low prior probability.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
I was merely disputing @Walterodim standard for banning international orgs.
I guess that the true grade of Hamas infiltration lies between nine out of 13k (or whatever the proven cases are) and 20% (because I think it very unlikely that Mossad would miss half the Hamas members). The 10% claim might well be correct.
I think Israel had solid reasons to turn Gaza into an open air prison pre-war, controlling what goods go into it (except for the stuff Hamas smuggles in). But I also claim that such a strategy imposes certain humanitarian obligations upon Israel. If people in Haiti are starving, Israel can wash their hands of it. For Gaza, not so much.
So you need organizations to go into Gaza and distribute humanitarian goods. In pre-war Gaza, any organization will need to find some understanding with Hamas, who will likely take a hefty cut for their protection.
Presumably, the UNWRA is paying Gazans to distribute humanitarian supplies within Gaza. For that part of their payroll, I am assuming that Hamas is heavily over-represented as compared to the Gazan population. Getting a low level job at an international humanitarian org is a nice gig for your goons, and once you put the word out that these jobs are for your people only (and perhaps shoot a few civilian applicants who did not get the message), you can easily force the org to hire your people.
However, I am not sure that this level of infiltration would be a big deal. Any aid sent to Gaza will feed Hamas first, but it does not follow that we should therefore let Gaza starve.
Beyond that baseline of inevitable Hamas infiltration, there could be more serious stuff going on. Some UNWRA staff can presumably cross the border, so they are in a position to gather intelligence, or perhaps smuggle goods. And the propaganda effort seems bad, sure.
Unlike Hezbollah, which is a militia which also runs some hospitals as a side project, UNWRA seems a humanitarian organisation which also cooperates with terrorists as a side project. Israel can not just ban the latter and wash their hands of the humanitarian consequences.
I mean, if Bibi said "any NGO working in Gaza had to deal with Hamas, this is why henceforth, humanitarian aid will be given by IDF directly", that would be fine with me. I just don't think that it is politically possible.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
The result of this would be an extremely illiberal society.
The case for (a) being an international organization and (b) doubt about them being helpful to the citizens can be made for a lot of organisations, such as:
- Microsoft
- Any of FAANG
- Greenpeace
- Catholicism
- The Motte
- McDonalds
- Amnesty International
- FIFA (Soccer)
- Debian
- International Telecommunication Union
- Jehova's Witnesses
- Election observers
- Big Media
- IKEA
If you forbid by default, you get places like Iran or North Korea. In the free world, you have freedom of association, which includes citizens joining international organizations (plus there is a tendency to let foreigners visit, even if they are on business trips). Of course, you want to forbid some organisations for very good reasons (e.g. Daesh, the Mafia), but then it should be up to the state to demonstrate that they are dangerous, not going 'meh, they are probably net-negative for us, verboten!'
quiet_NaN
23d ago
I don't think that the quid-pro-quo works as you imagine. The people writing for the left-leaning newspapers are true believers. At least some of their readers are true believers as well.
Economically, I think that they would do much better under Trump. Not because of his policies, but because of the culture war. Every day they could lead with "You won't believe what Trump has Xeeted now". They would be an integral part of the people who style themselves la resistance.
Bezos messing with the editors is going to massively decrease the value of his newspapers. If people want to read what billionaires think, they can just use social media. I think that he has solid business reasons though. It is not about changing who is winning, a newspaper endorsement is unlikely to change that. It is about being seen as an ally by the winner.
What is more likely? President Harris going: "You prevented the editors from endorsing me. No more US government deals with AWS!" Or President Trump going: "Your newspaper endorsed my enemy! No more US gov deals with AWS, traitor!"
--
If you are certain about the election outcome, it should present an amazing opportunity for you to double your net worth, because 538 is still 53 vs 46. Just figure out how certain you are and what odds the prediction markets are giving you, and calculate your Kelly bet.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
Here in old Europe (Germany), almost no organisations endorse political candidates. Not newspapers (at least, not respectable ones, and even the tabloids endorse implicitly only), not churches, not unions. Even individual celebrities rarely canvas for a candidate (politicians non-withstanding, naturally).
I kind of like it this way, you Americans might want to try it some time.
I think that the timing is a bit suspicious. If Bezos had decided right after the 2020 election that going forward, his newspapers would not be endorsing candidates, that would be fine. Him taking this principled stand just before an election where one candidate is known to hold grudges and would likely influence government deals with Amazon just out of spite is an amazing coincidence.
It is like an recruit who has been ordered to storm a trench having a long look at the barbed wire and the enemy MGs, and then telling his sergeant that he can not follow the order because he has just discovered that he is a pacifist.
quiet_NaN
23d ago
the exercise of religion necessitates regular practice and study, and this necessity conflicts with the time schedule and obligations of secular education.
This argument would be stronger if school was monopolizing students time. From my understanding, the school is not. Plenty of kids have enough free time to learn an instrument, play a sport, get really good in some video game, become an expert of some nerdy lore like warhammer, baseball or LotR, etc. I am sure that there are religions who mandate that their followers study their scripture for at least five hours a day, but if you feel you need to accommodate these in public schools, then the next thing you will be someone saying that their religion requires them to loudly yell 'Blessed be His Noodly Appendages' every five minutes.
allow the taxes of religious people to go towards their own religious education
Do you generally propose a system where the general taxes of people in some special interest groups are used for the goals of these groups? So the religious taxpayers get to fund religious education, while the taxes paid by of fans of adult entertainment go to fund state-run strip clubs?
Ideally, taxes are there for universal expenses. Almost all citizens use roads. Almost all citizens benefit from not being invaded. I will grant you that a lot of the sinks modern states pour taxes into are not that clear-cut public goods: public education, aircraft carriers (for the US) and welfare, preservation of the environment, cultural events and a zillion other things can be debated at length.
But the key point is that taxes go to what society has decided are collective needs. If you are proposing taxing religious people more so that their extra taxes can fund religious education (and the same for the admirers of scantly clad females and strip clubs), then I am ok with it. Of course, the easier system would be that the state does not collect these voluntary taxes, and people get to spend their money after taxes however they want.
quiet_NaN
24d ago
So, the Knesset has voted to ban the UNRWA from operating in Israel over claims that 10% of its staff have affiliations to terror organisations.
What is interesting here is the way the votes went.
One of the bills passed 92-10 (with eight MK missing or abstaining), the other 87-9.
The Knesset has ten members representing Israeli Arabs which I assume voted against the bills. Otherwise, it seems that most Israeli parties, even the ones much more moderate than Netanyahu's coalition, voted for it.
I find it a bit reminiscent of the post 9-11 unanimity towards GWB war on terror, were some bills were literally only being opposed by a single representative.
Personally, I think that it is likely that Hamas has infiltrated UNRWA. If your organisation worked in pre-war Gaza where Hamas ruled uncontested, you were not really in the position to tell them to go fuck themselves if they require that you extend paychecks and diplomatic privileges to a few jihadists.
However, I also think that this organisation plays an important role in securing basic humanitarian necessities to the people in Gaza.
The steelman might be that unlike other aid organisations (which will be infiltrated by Hamas in short order once they operate in Gaze), UNRWA has special privileges as a UN organisation. However, if this is the case, I don't get why it would not be sufficient to make a law to take away their privileges, making their activities in Israel fully subject to Israeli interventions (e.g. for passing propaganda material), instead of banning them outright.
quiet_NaN
25d ago
Don't forget that there are also people knocking on doors and people directing other people on which doors to knock.
In fascism, you can be on the one side of the door one day and on the other side the next day.
Take the fate of the SA leadership. They were Nazi through and though. They were the muscle of the NSDAP and instrumental in their rise to power. They ran the first 'wild' concentration camps and murdered political opponents. None of this saved them. The moment Hitler was in power, he threw them under the bus.
So if your plan for the fourth Reich is to be spared because you are helpful enough in their purges, I have every hope that you will join the rest of us after the first tiny internal power struggle hickup.
quiet_NaN
29d ago
I think that your comment would work equally well if one replaced 'trans' with 'gay', and I don't see the Dems rolling back gay rights so that the urbanites have more grandkids or something.
Personally, I think that we should treat gender dysphoria as a medical condition and leave the treatment options (from getting over it to full transition) up to the medical establishment. Kids should learn that the condition exists, just like other psychiatric conditions such as depression, but we should not bestow special status on trans kids. No 'she is so courageous for coming out', more 'I am sorry that she is suffering from GD'.
The woke victimhood totem pole is not helping here. Going from straight cis-male to lesbian trans-female turns you from the evil oppressor to the blameless victim.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
This does not matter as much as you think, because politics is not genetic.
The argument I have heard is that an effective administration requires skilled bureaucrats, i.e. university educated elites, and that the Trump administration had trouble attracting such people.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The second part of the first question is literally "how much do you make?"
As far as the ad is concerned, personal romantic relationships and status games are literally the same thing.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Approximately no one dates based on politics.
I think that this is an oversimplification.
I think most Americans would not date a KKK member, a Stalinist or a Taliban. There is a certain (subjective) Overton window. Personally, I would filter less on who a partner supports than on why a partner supports them. There is a big difference between supporting GWB despite gitmo and supporting him because of gitmo.
Some disagreements are more emotionally charged than others. I would totally date an anti-nuclear woman -- I may believe that she is mistaken about what we need to get rid of fossil fuels, but that is hardly a moral failing. (Perhaps being pro-nuclear feels less excusable from the other side, though.)
Other disagreements are the opposite: abortion is always a hot-button topic, "baby murderers" vs "handmaid's tale".
Some beliefs, political or otherwise, indicate an epistemological incompatibility. Or, phrased less politely, I basically consider some beliefs crazy. Believing in Nazism is excusable if you are a kid raised in the third Reich, but if you were raised in post-WW2 USA, it is a red flag. Likewise, if you believe that Trump, once elected, will succeed in turning the US into a Fuehrerstaat, that would be a red flag. Likewise, if you believe that Trump won the 2020 election, and the deep state conspired to steal it from him.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Your description should mention that both the man and a plurality of women in the video likely qualify as black. (You might not care about that, but the target audience will.)
I agree that it the spot does not work targeting men. The message is basically: to get a girlfriend, you need to (1) make 100k$ a year, (2) be tall, (3) be athletic, and (4) vote Harris. The number of men who fit 1-3, but still don't get laid and can be convinced that this is because of their lack of voting should be basically nil.
Also, I find that spot incredibly cringe. I am aware that income and hotness are influential for partner selection, but starting with 'how much do you make?' as an icebreaker question seems incredible vulgar. The way these things normally work (afaik) is that both sides have plausible deniability. There are whole brands surviving wholly on their value as an income signal. If a woman shows interest in a man wearing expensive, tasteful stuff, there is that veneer of deniability: there is always some probability that she does not care about his wealth at all, but just is interested in his charming personality or whatever. If you ask explicitly, that creates common knowledge of the transactional nature of the relationship, at which point the man might ask himself if he would not be better served by an escort. The male version of 'how much do you make?' might be 'I will pay you 500$ for a blowjob', which likewise highlights the transactional nature of the relationship. From my understanding, this is a big no-no when flirting with women who don't consider themselves sex workers.
Even for hotness, some people might feel offended if it is implied that their physical characteristics will get them the relationship. Invert the genders, and instead of height and athleticism, the suitors might ask the woman about her breast size or hotness on a scale of 1-10. The Harris campaign would be the first to decry this as demeaning the woman by reducing her to a sex object. (Aside, the lack of a screen between the man and the women makes the questions about his physique bizarre: presumably, the women can see how he looks.)
Also, there are unfortunate implications about the women who are so interested in their suitor's finances. Are these not supposed to be strong independent women, who have their own six figure jobs, and could well support a stay-at-home dad? The vibes I get from this clip are "I am looking for a hot, rich guy to earn my Mrs degree."
It makes more sense as a power fantasy targeting women ("of course I am so hot/charming that hot rich guys will want to date me, but I can be picky enough to just date Harris voters"). Still, the fact that the ad did apparently well on A/B testing is kind of scathing for the target audience.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Personally, I think selecting for intelligence is a non-brainer and should not be controversial. Being smarter is good for the kid in the same way that not being blind or not being psychotic is.
The slippery slope would be parents (or states) selecting on criteria which are not in the interests of the kid to have.
Selecting superficial criteria like eye color is already a bit icky. Green eyes work just as well as blue eyes, so it is not directly against the interests of the kid if it is picked by eye color, especially if it's parents really have a strong preference for an eye color. In a world in which not everything can be optimized simultaneously, one could however argue that that kid would have benefited more from being selected for an additional IQ point.
And then you have myriad selection criteria where the interests of the kid and the parents diverge. For now, these seem to be far beyond what current genetics can predict. If kids will keep near their place of birth, will keep following their religion and will end up with a sexual orientation and life style their parent approve is not very predictable from genetics, even though these certainly have a genetic component.
Optimizing for professional sports likewise could likewise easily be detrimental to a kid. Most things which influence sport performance come with trade-offs. Being the tallest person on earth will really help in basketball, but also comes with severe health drawbacks. Likewise for high testosterone. Anyone selecting an XY fetus with androgen insensitivity syndrome in the hope that her kid can perform at an Olympic level is likely not doing their kid any favors.
Sex selection (which only requires an ultrasound, no fancy genetics) is another thing which can often be detrimental to the kid. I mean, if a couple uses it for their second kid to balance their family gender ratio, I have no issue with it -- the prevalence of families with unbalanced gender ratios does not seem especially important to preserve. On the other hand, some societies will have a general preference, which will lead to skewed ratios, which is likely not in the kids best interests.
A related scissor statement would be "parents should prefer socially favored phenotype embryos in bigot societies". For example, if I had to chose between being born as a boy missing a foot or a healthy girl in Afghanistan, I would much rather be the cripple. It is uncontroversial that the quality of life impact on a disability depends on society (like the presence or absence of wheelchair ramps), but likewise one could postulate 'pseudo-disabilities' which are entirely caused by societies reaction to a phenotype. One might argue that if QALY's and the like are supposed to track utility, one should indeed treat 'living under the Taliban as a women' as a disability.
Of course, for the Afghan example, this point is largely moot, most couples living in Afghanistan do not have access to sex-selective abortion.
I think you underestimate the reluctance of NATO to become directly involved in a war with Russia, which would easily spill outside of Ukraine.
The logic of the cold war was to prevent any direct conflict between two blocks. If the US gets involved in Vietnam, then the USSR does not ship their troops there to directly fire on US soldiers. Instead, it provides weapons to the Vietcong. Likewise, if the USSR invades Afghanistan, the US will simply provide weapons to their local opponents (Bin Laden and the Taliban, as it turned out) to fight the USSR.
This logic is still very much in play even today. NATO is totally playing by these rules, we arm the Ukraine (with non-nuclear weapons) and let them fight and die for their country as long as they wish to.
Quite frankly, Ukraine is not worth a direct conflict between Russia and NATO. Even if the conflict was initially restricted to Ukrainian soil, these things have a tendency to escalate. Say air defense stationed in Poland becomes involved, then Russia bombs it, then Poland declares that an attack on their soil and invokes article five.
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