quiet_NaN
1mo ago
As @aardvark2 points out, artificial sperm creation could fix the destructiveness. If you create a pair of haploid cells through meiosis, you will have a pretty good idea what is in cell A from the PCR of cell B and diploid cells.
Of course, another point is costs. The company in the article seems to bill 50k$ for analyzing 100 embryos, which would come to 500$ per analysis. While doing the analysis on (artificially created) sperm cells would definitely get you more dakka, it would also greatly increase costs.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Setting up a protocol to verify which language an asylum seeker can understand does not seem so difficult. Tape recorders should be a sufficient tech level for that.
Edit: Having read the other comments, especially the discussion of military rounds that fail to penetrate a kid's skull and are thus conveniently visible on x-ray, my money is on the NYT falling for fakes created by motivated people. The doctors would not even have to be die-hard Hamas supporters bent on the destruction of Israel. If I had had the misfortune of spending months working in a wartime hospital, I might also consider telling a 'little white lie' about the fraction of dead kids who were shot to the head, if I thought that this is the best way to stop the killing.
Shame on me for believing that the NYT would consult with experts to check the plausibility of their reporting and thereby ruin a great story.
End of edit.
Overall, civilian casualties in Gaza remain within reasonable bounds for an intense war against an entrenched guerrilla force that doesn’t wear uniforms in an extremely dense urban environment.
The claim by the NYT is not that deliberately targeted kids amount to a large fraction of war victims, the claim is that such targeting happens and is tolerated to some degree.
I have previously defended the IDF against people comparing the civilian death tolls of their war against Hamas to the death toll of Oct 7. My argument was that the Hamas attacks were worse not in their death tolls, but in their malicious intent. Everyone fighting a war accepts some civilian casualties. Israel went further than most belligerents regarding the amount of collateral deaths they would stomach, especially when targeting senior commanders, but I would still argue that blowing up 50 Palestinians in a refugee camp to get one bad guy is different from Hamas executing civilians one by one.
People, states and causes are in part not judged by their median action, but by their worst action. As the joke goes, "But just one little sheep!". A doctor who saves the life a thousand patients and murders and eats three others would not be judged by his average or median impact, but by his worst deeds. Likewise, anyone arguing that the Nazis were not as evil as generally depicted because only 0.9% of the German population was Jewish would totally fail to convince any audience. The reason that Abu Ghraib turned into a scandal was because it was the median case.
Headshot six-year-olds are both unmistakably non-combatants and also unmistakably the results of deliberate targeting. I would expect dead six-year-olds, and perhaps headshot 15-yo (unless Hamas happens to abide by the conventions against child soldiers, which seems unlikely). Perhaps a hand full of headshot 6-yo could be attributed to bad luck but any more than that would suggest deliberate targeting of kids.
While I did not much care for the IDF's tactics before, I was willing to cut them some slack as their goal to wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth seemed worthy. If further evidence confirms that parts of the IDF were able to conspire to shoot small kids, then I would become indifferent between them and Hamas, as in 'they are both evil and I hope they both succeed in destroying the other, too bad about the decent people caught in their fight'.
At the moment, I am noticing that I am confused. Even if the IDF was full of people who thought that killing Palestinian kids was virtuous, neither the rank and file nor especially the command would be oblivious about the fact that the rest of the world does not share that value judgement. An IDF sniper killing a small child would bring the destruction if Israel closer in a second than a hundred Hamas fighters could do in their lifetime. Nor do I find it plausible that the command would remain unaware of unauthorized past-times of their sniper teams, we are talking about a digital age state known for its intelligence services here. On the other hand, if large parts of the IDF had a collective fetish for child murder, why would they not pick a more deniable way to accomplish that? They could just bomb a school (or wherever kids gather in wars) and claim that it was used as a base to shoot missiles into Israel, the NYT would be very unlikely to prove them wrong.
Another explanation would be that it is some kind of Hamas op. While Hamas path to victory is paved with the murders of Palestinian kids (because Israel can not be defeated while it is backed by the US, and the best way to turn the US from Israel are dead kids for which IDF can be blamed), it very much does not sound like their usual MO. "Climb on some rooftop and shoot some random kids in Gazan streets" does not seem like an order the median Hamas member would follow.
Slightly more plausible would be that they shot kids who had just of whatever 'natural causes' will kill you in a warzone post mortem, and then carried them to the hospital. Still does not seem very likely.
If IDF is targeting small kids, the obvious move on Hamas part would be to smuggle out their corpses and pass them to governments for forensic analysis. If ten different countries go 'yup, they died because of wounds inflicted with calibers used by IDF' that would likely be the beginning of the end of Israel as Harris and Trump race to the microphones to promise and end of all weapon shipments.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics
This would seem to criminalize truthfully reporting on a person with a protected characteristic doing something which some members of the general public might find bad, which is vaguely linked to their characteristic.
Say you run some venue which is recorded by CCTV, and a member of a minority assaults another person. In the progress of their investigation into the assault, the police learn that you are in possession of video material which would likely incite hate against members of that minority. This is trivially true, post a video of someone doing something bad online and people will display hate towards them clearly linked to their protected status, like "$MINORITY are violent thugs and we should kick them out of the country".
Of course, this is unlikely. No cops will go to jail over a truthful police report which might incite hatred either. But to have a broad criminal law and trust the state that they will only selectively enforce that law against 'bad people' (perhaps someone who collects 'assaults by $MINORITY' videos for some political agenda) is a fucking stupid idea.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Your view of a sovereign state is antiquated, it seems to stem from the days of Lois XIV.
Modern states are very much limited in what they can do. Internally by these pesky little things called constitutions (some of which give rights even to non-citizens!), and externally by international laws and treaties.
If Poland wants to exit the EU and renounce the 1951 refugee convention along with all other international laws, there is a process for that.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
as they're not trying to enter legally via the border crossing, but run through the woods to cross illegally, without getting involved in the asylum process?
Ideally, people could just apply for asylum in EU embassies worldwide, and would be sheltered in there until their claim is processed, with a plane ticket to EU for anyone whose application has been granted. In that case, entering illegally would be frowned upon.
Realistically, we don't do that because it would make it too easy to apply for asylum. Most asylum seekers can not simply board a plane to EU and make their request at the passport control, because we explicitly penalize airlines who transport such passengers. I am quite sure that if the migrants under discussion were walking to a border station on the Polish/Belarusian border and made their request for asylum there, they would not be let on EU soil.
If we close all legal pathways to the EU, and also say that people who have entered the EU illegally do not have a right to claim asylum, then we have de facto abolished asylum in the EU.
@MadMonzer referred to article 31 of the 1951 refugee convention:
- The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of article i, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. [...]
Granted, making the case that your life was in danger due to your protected status in Belarus will be a hard case to make, but it is not impossible.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The right to asylum has already been suspended in the EU, the catch is that it is suspended in favor of the refugees. They get all the protections of the asylum laws, they follow none of the obligations.
Governments are vastly more powerful than most humans. This is why we limit what governments can do to people, even in contexts where the individuals often don't play by the rules. For example, even if most criminal defendants are guilty, we still want trials to follow due process.
Of course a lot of people claiming asylum in European countries are in fact economic migrants. And of course many of them will not be swiftly deported. But none of that affects the rights of people with a legitimate claim to asylum.
If others can selectively apply the asylum laws why can't Poland? What justification does the EU have for enforcing this law when the EU itself doesn't follow it?
As an analogy, taxes are a legal way for a government to get funds from its citizens. Suppose that one European country refuses to collect taxes from someone. Should this give another EU country the licence to just confiscate property of some other party at gunpoint, because 'taxes are already suspended in the EU'? Clearly not.
This is a false dichotomy between "give migrants more money" and "shoot migrants". Might I humbly suggest a third option, which is to simply not offer rights and money to outsiders in the first place?
I was not saying 'give money to migrants'. I was saying 'spend money on migrants', which is different. At the end of the day, the migrants in Belarus were shipped there with the explicit goal of annoying the EU. Given the general regard for human rights in Belarus, it seems safe to assume that these migrants can be put under enough pressure that they believe that their lives will depend on reaching the EU, and risk their lives in the process. Under such circumstances, push-backs are ugly affairs.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Do you remember when in December 2023, Poland finally voted out the the far-right PiS party and moderate Europeans rejoiced to see Tusk become the prime minister?
Well, it seems that this joy might have been a bit premature. You see, Poland is currently being flooded by migrants from Belarus. Per the BBC:
Dozens continue to attempt to cross the border daily.
Dozens a day might add up to ten or twenty thousand over a year. Of course, most of them don't want to stay in Poland in the first place:
Many of the migrants who cross into the country from Belarus do not stay, instead entering Germany.
The population of Poland is around 38M, and there a about 1M refugees from Ukraine in Poland without civilization ending, but the migrants via Belarus seem to tax the Polish state beyond the breaking limit.
Thus, the ultima ratio of a state fighting for its survival:
“One of the elements of the migration strategy will be the temporary territorial suspension of the right to asylum,” the prime minister said. “I will demand this, I will demand recognition in Europe for this decision,” he added.
There are some things a government or legislature can suspend at will. If Tusk decides to suspend a civil servant or a subsidiary for farmers, that is his prerogative.
The right to asylum is not something you can suspend at will. I mean, if you are in the middle of a zombie virus apocalypse, a case might be made, but Poland is very much not on the brink of collapse.
Obviously, I am not suggesting that all the refugees entering via Belarus should get asylum. Likely, almost none of them qualify. But they should have a right to make their request and get a speedy rejection, followed by an appeal speedily denied by a judge and a plane ticket back to their country of origin.
Yes, this will mean that for every plane ticket that Belarus buys (or makes some migrant pay for), the EU will also need to pay for a plane ticket, but realistically that is the only way out of the situation. We do not want to compete with Belarus in "who is better at terrorizing delusional migrants", because that game can only be won by shooting more unarmed civilians than Belarus is willing to shoot.
This is feasible because the GDP of the EU is much higher than that of Russia (which also likes to spent its income on other stuff, such as killing Ukrainians). We can match them plane ticket for plane ticket. There are places where the number of migrants/refugees/asylum seekers reaches numbers where one might discuss how one can handle all the people. The border between Poland and Belarus is not such a place.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
A pyramid scheme is a system in which you convince people to pay you on the assumption that they will make their money back when other people will pay them in turn.
I don't think that the median twitter user is under the illusion that they should pay for premium in the expectation that they will become popular and make money from twitter, so I would not call it a pyramid scheme.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Yes, just about every successful politician is like that. Ideally, you pick out your policies well in advance so that you don't have to do a 180 in public, but sometimes it can't be avoided. Often, you can just get by with deemphasizing something you used to talk a lot about instead of actively coming out in support of the other side.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, you still might want to change your opinions because the ones which allow you to rise in a party are different from the ones which win elections.
Having a leader who has principles and is willing to sacrifice their reelection to follow their principles is better than having an opportunistic leader who will do whatever the public wants only if their principles are good principles, followed sensibly.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
While it is certainly true that the EU is not sharing their fair share of the NATO defense burden, it would be premature to conclude from that alone that NATO is hence a bad deal for the US and all the pre-Trump administrations were idiots for having the US taxpayer protect Europe.
The way I see it, the relationship between the US and European NATO countries like Germany is an unequal partnership, but not necessarily an unfair one. Germany gets the protection of the US, but it also accepts the US as the hegemon. When the US decides that they want to embargo some country, Europe generally follows them. When the US decides that China should not have extreme ultra-violet photo-lithography machines, the Netherlands make ASML comply with that rather than weighting their alternatives.
With NATO, there is at least a contractual obligation for the Bundeswehr to fight Russia if it were to invade the US, even though nobody is under any illusion about the threat the Bundeswehr poses to Putin. But the umbrella of US protection extends even over countries who are not under formal obligation to aid the US, especially in the Pacific.
I would argue that the US puts up with this because being the leader of the status quo coalition comes with certain perks. If the US had adopted a policy of isolationism after WW2, they would certainly not be the economic powerhouse they are today.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Concurring with you, I think military spending serves three roles: a) Buying stuff to win a war b) Fostering industries which produce such stuff long term c) Economic stimulus / gravy train
For (a), it does not matter where you buy, as long as they are not your likely enemy.
For (b), you want a reliable long term partner country.
For (c), there are likely key areas and companies where you want to spend money to win the next election. Basically, military spending is a money hose which you can redirect to wherever you see the biggest political advantage.
How important these various considerations are depends on the situation your country finds itself in: if Ukraine had money to spend, they would likely buy whatever gets them the most bang for their buck, while Canada is not expecting to fight an existential war where the raw number of jeeps matter any time soon.
Regarding (c), it should also be pointed out that big military projects are almost never developed in a healthy market situation. A healthy market would be that a NATO country company which wants to develop a new fighter jet will do so based on venture capital. If a decade later, it turns out that their jet is competitive, they then sell it to NATO countries, making a profit for their investors.
Instead, the typical process seems to be to first convince your government to pay for the development. If they are lucky and your project does not fail ten years in, it will be likely arrive delayed, over budget and possibly under specs. In a (c)-heavy world, this does not matter: your government will mostly buy from you even if an ally offers a superior product, because why would they subsidize the economy of an ally instead of their own?
It should surprise nobody that this socialist model of weapon development is not very efficient, especially as companies evolve to latch onto the government apparatus, extracting that sweet sweet revenue stream as their tentacles drill deeper into the administrations as decades pass by.
On the other hand, not everything can be reasonably developed in a competitive market. If Roosevelt had in 1941 simply announced the US intend to buy nukes and let venture capital fund competing Manhattan Projects, the result would likely not been that in 1945 the US could just pay 1% of its GDP for Little Boy and Fat Man.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I do not see how some tennis tournament switching to an electronic line judge has anything to do with using an LLM to judge criminal cases.
Okay, both things share the term "judge", but then I might as well say: "My municipality just decided to put up a new bank in their park. How long before the government takes over all the banks and financial independence becomes impossible?"
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
As an analogy, someone might argue that the ultimate power in society lies with the ones who produce food, for everyone has to eat. However, this would ignore the fact that there is a competitive food market: plenty of food producers are willing to sell food for some marginal profit instead of requiring to be made lords of the realm.
With the work force it is just the same. Anyone with capital to spent on salaries and PR can reliably find young persons to work for them. Provide the correct incentives, and people will work for you just almost as reliable as water powering a hydroelectric plant. We generally assign little agency to that water, because while individual molecules move in a Brownian motion which seems random to us, in aggregate we can model what water will do very well. Humans are a bit harder to model, but the principle is the same.
For quite some generations, gaining money through paid work has been the best pathway to reproductive success available for most men. As long as the boundary conditions are correct, getting some of them to work for you is easy.
I also don't understand why you emphasize fertility differences between genders in old age. The power that old people wield is almost completely orthogonal to their reproductive capabilities. Nobody gives much of a damn if a male leader is impotent or not, and it has been that way for a long time. "Leader X has knocked up five women in the last year, so his family will be very big an influential in the future, while Leader Y has not given birth in a decade, so who cares what she has to say" is a thought pattern which is alien to most humans who have ever lived, and certainly is obsolete today.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I disagree. The currency of economics is, ultimately, capital.
Sure, young men (and women) could band together and take over Somalia, and live without any older person telling them what to do.
However, most are wise enough to see that that this would be a terrible decision. Instead, they live in big cities paying high rents to older people, working in companies controlled by older people (at least indirectly), and voting for political parties controlled by older people.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Any yet Trump won in 2016 despite the common wisdom being that Clinton would likely win.
I think that there are effects in both directions.
If I think that the election result is already predetermined with a very high probability, I am less inclined to vote strategically. So if a candidate is polling at 80% in a state, I will vote for whomever I like most in general, while if two candidates are both polling at 45%, I am much more likely to the one of them whom I consider the lesser evil.
I am sure that the impulse to pick the side of the winner also exists in people. In the ancestral environment, picking the winning side of a group-internal conflict was likely conductive to reproductive success, while habitually backing the underdog was not. Rationally, this matters a lot less in representative democracies where what you do in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.
Personally, I am mildly disinclined to vote for a winning candidate. Statistically speaking, I tend not to be a huge fan of most administrations, and if it is all the same, I would rather be able to say "I voted for Kodos" than sharing the responsibility.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Basically what it means is that you are roped to your partner on perhaps easy but massively exposed terrain. Easy in this sense is usually also very relative to the ability level of the pair. It means that due to a lack of protection between you if one of the pair falls, you both fall.
As a hobbyist climber who is also an utilitarian, I think going roped without anything holding the rope to the mountain is not a belaying technique, it is a suicide pact. Like most suicide pacts, I think it is stupid.
I clicked through your article. (Protip: square brackets+parenthesis make a link on the motte.) The relevant section is:
Sometimes the climbing is hard so you need to ‘pitch it’ and place a lot of protection, then quickly after, the climbing is easy but getting rid of the rope would cost time because soon after the climbing becomes harder again, or there is a glacier with crevasses in the way. A lot of the time one finds oneself moving together on easy but massively exposed terrain. Here, a slip of one can lead to catastrophe for both. You must have ultimate trust in your partner and their ability.
I am fine with going roped over the safer parts for convenience's sake. Anyone climbing in alpine territory is taking some risk of serious injury or death. Going roped without belay is only increasing your risk by a factor of two compared to going solo (assuming that your ability is similar to that of your climbing partner). Always belaying even in easy territory would of course be safest, but will also take much longer, thus exposing you more to other dangers such as bad weather.
Rationally, you would allocate a certain mortality budget (say, a few 100 micromorts -- per Wikipedia, the Matterhorn weights in at around 2.8 Millimorts) for a tour, and then pick whatever strategy is most likely to see you finish the tour while staying in budget.
I concur that risk is likely a factor which makes mountaineering attractive to a lot of people (especially men), but for the adjacent field of rock climbing, I think that improvement in safety equipment is what let to it booming in the last two decades. In earlier times, only a small fraction of people was willing to pay the mortality price of being a climber. Today, it is a reasonably safe hobby.
Of course, some climbing regions insist on keeping the original number of bolts in the routes, so that anyone lead climbing the route will risk just as much (modulo better equipment) as the original climbers did. Personally, I find this notion silly: thought to its end, an early great climber could spent a week free soloing all the easy routes in a region, and out of respect for that achievement nobody would ever be allowed to put bolts in them afterwards. Instead, I feel that it would be enough to mark the original bolts in a different color, so the glory hounds can try to climb in the footsteps of the early great climbers, while the rest of us get to enjoy the routes without undue risk to life and limb.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Oh no, Jews are lobbying for money for their pet causes. How dare they!
Breaking News: Ever interest group lobbies for handouts. Catholics. Farmers. Unions. Employers. Students. I am not sure if there is a horseshoe manufacturer association in the US, but if there is, they are likely lobbying for some federal money to help them compete against the Chinese or something.
Congress passes the budget, with some funds being further distributed by the administration according to the rules Congress passed for the funds. If you feel that the Biden administration is giving too much money to The Jews, take it up with your Congressperson. (It used to be that one could win elections on a platform of opposing the Evil Greedy International Finance Jews, but during the 40's, that became really unfashionable for some reason. So your Congressperson might not be very sympathetic to your concerns.)
I have not checked that FEMA really paid 300M$ for Jewish orgs, but even if they have, that would be about 1% of the yearly FEMA budget. Not very impressive, as narratives go. "Jewish space laser causes hurricanes" would be more impressive, but has certain epistemological disadvantages.
I am assuming that the remaining 99% of the budget was not spent on any other, gentile pet causes which have nothing to do with disaster preparedness, because otherwise, you would have mentioned them as well instead of singling out Jewish causes? If so, that would be a deal I would take any time: 99% on target spending is an unheard efficiency for government. We should totally give random Jewish organizations 1% of the federal medical budgets if that magically means that the remaining 99% will be spent efficiently on target.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
My argument was not at all about whether the no-homo policy of the fraternities was right or wrong, it was entirely about that given such a policy, a gay man looking for sex has likely better options to get laid than joining a fraternity and hoping to meet another closet gay or bi man willing to break the fraternity rules.
Tuscaloosa is a city with 100k residents, AU has 40k students. Even in Alabama, a few of them are likely on grindr.
We can of course debate if it is immoral to join an organization who requires you to be or behave a certain way in your past or present life outside that org under false pretenses.
For most of the cases, I think lying is fine:
- It is ok to lie to the question "are there nude photographs of you?" to get into a sorority
- It is ok to lie about your sexual orientation to get into an organization which has not yet adopted 'don't ask, don't tell'
- It is ok to lie to an employer about your religious beliefs
- It is ok to lie to your liberal study group about never having voted Republican
- It is ok to lie to with regard to having or not having Jewish ancestors
- It is ok to lie to some McCarthy goons about not having commie leanings
- It is ok to lie to your church community about never having been married
Rule of thumbs, if the honest answer would be "that is none of your fucking business", then lying is fine. In an ideal world, you would find another organization which offers the same opportunities, but is not as noisy, so you don't run the risk of being found out, but often we don't live in such an ideal world.
Again, the US military -- which is hardly an early adopter of woke policy -- has been tolerating closet gays since 1994 and openly gay people since 2011. It looks to me like it can still fulfill its mission despite having gays and lesbians. I propose that the mission of fraternities (whatever the heck it may be) would likely also survive having non-straight people.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I was taught that Robert E Lee was an honorable man who fought ablely for a bad cause, lost, and accepted the verdict of battle with dignity.
The word 'honorable' can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. For someone who is a military leader, his personal conduct seems largely irrelevant, I don't particularly care if he cheated on his wife or (likely) not. Nor do I particularly care that he resigned his commission to the US before taking up arms against them, Stauffenberg broke his oath when he bombed Hitler, and still I find this the least objectionable life decision of his.
Sticking to a code of honor in warfare can be good if the code in question aims to prevent wartime atrocities and preserves the customs of war which limit the hellishness of warfare a bit. Other than that, being a good warrior or soldier has meant very different things at different times in human history, and I would count this more as 'being good at your job' without any value judgement applied.
From my understanding, the slaughter in the US civil war was largely confined to the armies, with less than 10% of the causalities being civilians. The PoW camps on both sides seem harsh by modern standard, but deliberate war crimes seem to be confined to the odd homeopath making baby steps towards death camps.
The "accepted the verdict of battle" is probably where we should give Lee credit, when he had lost, he surrendered rather than continuing to fight a partisan war.
In the end, he fought an unwinnable war for an evil cause. Other people in his place might have been worse, but he seems hardly hero material to me. I think his veneration can be seen as a clear political statement "the South was correct to fight the civil war, too bad it lost". A statue of Lee surrendering would have entirely different connotations.
The US South has provided military leaders from the revolutionary war to the present day, surely there is someone who could be venerated as a hero whose main claim to fame is not that he waged war against the USA to protect slavery?
I agree about Lenin and Trotsky being more evil than Lee. Of course, the most venerated violent figure on the left is Che Guevara, who wisely did not stick around after his revolutions long enough to get his hands dirty to the degree that Lenin did. Personally, I would cut him a bit more slack than Lee. Lee presumably had visited slave plantations and knew exactly what he was fighting for. Guevara had not personally witnessed the Red Terror in Russia. It turns out that communist countries are more repressive and economically poorer than their peers in the long run, and that commie revolutions are thus to be avoided. Still, I would not say he was wrong to oust Batista, just that the ideology which replaced him lead to bad long term outcomes.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I fail to share your extraordinary disgust at Jared.
From the looks of it, his objective was to make his career, and he did his best with the cards he was dealt. You seem to be disappointed that he showed no solidarity to his fellow Blacks (by entering a white fraternity) nor to the Machine (by calling it non-inclusive) nor to the liberals. I am sure he will find a bus to throw under his fellow LGBTs eventually.
This is just what you would expect of a successful politician. Given his marriages, Trump is certainly not personally anti-immigrant, but if anti-immigrant politics get him elected, that is what he will argue.
In the end, each of us has to decide to what groups they are loyal. Some groups we are members of whether we want it or not due to accident of birth. I think how much loyalty one should show to these groups (family, ethnicity, country, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion) depends on how these groups are treating you: if your family treats you like shit, you don't have to be loyal to them. And sometimes you might decide that it is moral to defect against a group even if it is treating you well (such as an upper class member turning Marxist or a white civil rights supporter). Some other groups we join formally or informally by choice (political movements, religions, fraternities, religious orders, military branches). Some of these groups (think a dominant political party) are almost entirely filled with egoists bent on furthering their own career, others (think EA) contain a lot of people who actually believe in the mission statement. Personally, I find backstabbing in the former much less bad than in the latter, and I think that the Machine totally qualifies as a group of the former sort.
There are obvious, mechanical reasons why someone may not want to live in a frat house with a homosexual. That is not discrimination in and of itself. It’s not clear to me what a gay kid would really want out of fraternity life, other than, you know, the obvious.
I don't think that there are obvious, mechanical reasons? Gay and lesbian soldiers are serving along with straight soldiers in accommodations which are likely tighter than a frat house, which presumably has single shower cabins? Every time I go to a gendered public changing room, I risk that some gay dude who might find me hot (fat chance!) sees me naked. The horror, the horror.
I think that the straight frat guy wants two groups of things from the fraternity:
- Entertainment (partying including booze, sex, drugs)
- Connections (academic support (illicit or otherwise), making powerful friends, finding a suitable spouse, having impressive students offices on their CV)
The connections (sans the spouse, perhaps) apply equally to a gay person (and given what we know of Jared, they were his major motivation).
Contrary to common belief, homosexuals can party with straight people and have fun at it, playing beer pong or whatever.
I think that a fraternity which is explicitly anti-gay is a pretty terrible place to find a gay partner. Even if by chance the first man you make advances to is actually into men, he made the decision to join an organisation which is anti-gay for some purpose (likely the connections) and is unlikely to jeopardize that to have sex with you.
And raping your fellow frat members while they are blackout drunk also does not seem very sustainable. While your bros may or may not cover up a sex act with a woman whose ability to consent was questionable, they will likely be much less inclined to cover up gay sex, consensual or otherwise (unless the gays have already secretly taken over, but that seems unlikely).
The only point I could see for joining a fraternity for gay sex would be if they have homoerotic initiation rituals which you like. "I thought that making out with another freshman was just a humiliation ritual, but later I learned that that monster is actually turned on by kissing men. Now I feel so violated!" The horror, the horror.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Having a mutual secret is one of the best ways to bind people together, and I truly believe in the aspect of the agoge that requires young men to commit minor crimes together to bond.
I suppose by 'minor crimes' you mean the necessity to steal food from the lower classes to survive, not the killing of unarmed helots as part of the krypteia (which would not be a crime at all, as far as Spartan society is concerned)?
Bret makes a rather convincing case that the modern version of the agoge is the child soldier.
I am not saying that your statement is factually incorrect, but even the worst possible hypothetical fraternity I can imagine (say, one where committing rape is part of the initialization) pales in comparison to the horrors of the Spartans, because initiates are older, have contacts outside the group and are always free to say "fuck this fraternity, fuck university, I will just take a job repairing cars instead".
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Dead Republicans don't vote
I don't think the numbers work out. One dead republican is very unlikely to move the result of a state election, you would probably require a few thousands at least.
However, having a few thousand citizens die due to your negligence will have political ramifications (unless you are the FDA and its red tape) orders of magnitude more significant than the missing votes of the dead people.
The US is politically divided, but neither the median Trump nor Harris voter would say that it would be a good thing if all the voters for the other party dropped dead. There are plenty of centrist Americans who would not think "they let all the rednecks starve to secure the election, that is clever" but "they let uncle Billy die, how could they!"
Big disasters are great opportunities for state capability to be seen as an unambiguous force of good. People normally don't like their governments much, but a competent disaster response can turn this around for a while.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
It is rare to encounter an institution which seems so hellish on so many different levels.
From the outside view, I see a student organization whose admission criteria are opaque and not subject to any oversight, likely governed by nepotism while also providing some academic advantage to their members (at the very least, on the order of "Professor Smith always reuses his exam questions after three years, here are yours", but possibly going to "Professor Miller is a former member of our sorority very sympathetic to fellow members"). This seems bad.
The prospective members, elite females who go to university to party until they meet their future husband while also studying some liberal art which will not land them a job meanwhile also seem to make a mockery of the purpose of education. There is nothing wrong with meeting your husband in uni, but "I was studying CS when I met my husband, and now I work part-time at a software company thanks to my master in CS while also raising the kids" is very different from "I just study to meet my man so I can stay at home and raise kids".
Then the whole gendered attitude towards sex. If getting roofied at a frat party is a real concern, that means likely that the fraternities do not operate on a strict "sex is for marriage only, and we will expel any fornicators" or even on a more reasonable "I will cheerfully bear witness against any fellow frat member who drugs any woman against her will" attitude towards this. I also find it unlikely that even in Alabama a large fraction of frat boys are willing to marry someone with whom they did not have sex, so purity will only take you so far on your way to your Mrs degree.
Then the whole doublethink where a strong statistical suspicion of misbehavior is no big deal, but positive proof marks you as a fallen woman. Likely a good fraction of women sent nudes of themselves in high school, whatever, but god help you if your nudes become public knowledge. (Technically, this seems to be a bit harder to verify in the age of AI. "Are these her boobs, or is it just AI extrapolating from a bikini picture?" seems a hard question. The obvious solution is to tattoo female genitalia with complex patterns. I wonder if conservative parents would go for that to disprove AI nudes, or if they would be relieved of the plausible deniability that AI give their daughter.) Likewise, statistically daddy knows that his little girl will get totally wasted at frat parties full of horny guys, but if positive evidence of that emerged, that would damage the reputation of the sorority.
Of course, these whole gendered attitudes to sex thing is likely exasperating rates of sexual assault. If the median woman can only forget her commitment to purity if she is very drunk, a lot of males will adopt a strategy of getting women very drunk to get laid. On the other hand, a system where female promiscuity is celebrated would probably end up with a lot of males not committing sexual assaults because getting laid consensually is easier. (The men would still be scumbags as they would be committing sex crimes in different circumstances, but I for one prefer hypothetical crimes to actual ones.)
The last hellish aspect which comes to mind is simply the fact that sororities are full of young woman selected for popularity. I guess that the high school dynamics where popular kids form hierarchical cliques will also hold true in sororities. Woe to whomever the cool girls decide is not actually cool enough for their club.
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.
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