sodiummuffin
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User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Scott has a post arguing against this connection.
Reverse Voxsplaining: Prison and Mental Illness
What about that graph? It’s very suggestive. You see a sudden drop in the number of people in state mental hospitals. Then you see a corresponding sudden rise in the number of people in prison. It looks like there’s some sort of Law Of Conservation Of Institutionalization. Coincidence?
Yes. Absolutely. It is 100% a coincidence. Studies show that the majority of people let out of institutions during the deinstitutionalization process were not violent and that the rate of violent crime committed by the mentally ill did not change with deinstitutionalization. Even if we take the “15% of inmates are severely mentally ill” factoid at face value, that would mean that the severely mentally ill could explain at most 15%-ish of the big jump in prison population in the 1980s.
To render the argument statistically plausible it seems like you would need to both justify why the proportion of murderers who are mentally ill seems to have declined (the linked study is from Britain so you could try to see if it's different in the U.S.?) and why most of those in prison do not seem to be mentally ill according to screening surveys. Note that, though it isn't a significant part of his argument, Scott does cite the famous Rosenhan experiment which was very likely a fraud.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Like your prior posts about Chinese people, this amounts to you presenting a few anecdotes to make an argument so weak that it borders on incoherence. You seem to to saying a few cases where Jews were lawyers in supposedly important cases is proof of some sort of phenomenon, but what even is that phenomenon? Whatever it is, how could this incredibly meager evidence prove it, and shouldn't there be much better evidence available which would result in a more useful discussion?
Is the phenomenon that you are trying to prove that American Jewish people are more left-wing than the general public even when you control for "elite" status? Or more specifically, that they are more aligned with the sort of racial politics popular among the left in the U.S., perhaps because they were allied when discrimination against Jewish people was widespread and it became culturally self-perpetuating? Then why try to prove this with some random anecdotes about Jewish lawyers and support for Nixon rather than much stronger and more direct evidence like public opinion polls asking about those issues? And why treat "Jewish people are more left-wing" as some novel phenomenon you have to guess at from scratch, rather than demographic differences in politics being a well-known phenomenon that pollsters gather data on all the time? (Incidentally, left-wing "privilege" discourse and the assumption that differences in outcome reflect discrimination carries some unintended implications about Jewish success and arguably has similarities with some of the resentment that fueled historical anti-Jewish discrimination, not to mention specifics like Harvard admissions policies. A survey asking equality vs. equity questions might get some interesting results by seeing how much difference it makes to apply the same logic to Jewish people as part of the survey.)
Alternatively, is the proposed phenomenon something more specific or controversial than Jewish people having different political demographics for whatever reason? Are we talking about genetic differences, and if so what kind? E.g. if you propose Jewish people are genetically higher in Openness to Experience which got them allied with the left historically, wouldn't you again be better off with surveys rather than legal anecdotes? Are we talking about Jewish people (or some elite subset of them) getting secret nightly marching orders from the Elders of Zion, and if so shouldn't leaking or intercepting those orders be much better evidence? Are you even consciously thinking about the specifics of the phenomenon you are proposing, or are you just grouping together Jewish people as a unit and treating them as you would an individual? "I don't like George because look at these 3 cases of him doing something I dislike." might be a compelling argument about an individual, but when talking about groups of millions of people much better evidence is available and is required to determine anything meaningful.
The actual reason it was nominated was to mock If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love being a Hugo nominee in 2014. It's short so it's a quick read if you want to better understand why its nomination was mocked.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I've never tried reading any "sympathetic to the monsters" Lovecraft-inspired fiction, but I would argue that Lovecraft himself was good at writing them in a way that was both alien/horrifying and understandable/sympathetic (in the cases where it served the purpose of the story), despite him writing horror in which it was almost never a primary emphasis. So if someone came away from Lovecraft wanting to write a sympathetic treatment without appreciating how Lovecraft himself did it, I strongly suspect they would be worse at it than he was. Most likely by revising Lovecraft antagonists until they are less alien or threatening than even cultures/political-factions/eras other than the author's own, let alone other species. Meanwhile, based on that description for The Litany of Earth, it sounds like the author gave the alien culture of "the 1920s U.S. government" less understandable and sympathetic motives than Lovecraft gave to most of his actual aliens.
Most obviously the protagonist of At the Mountains of Madness comes to appreciate the alien culture and history of the Elder Things through the art and other remnants they left behind and is outright sympathetic to them (which serves the narrative purpose of contrasting with the greater horror), but this applies to antagonists as well. The Great Race of Yith are scholars seeking after science/knowledge and their own survival, the Mi-go are also scientifically inclined and have the more mundane goal of mining resources, and ghouls mostly just want to eat/survive and sometimes serve the role of allies or neutral figures. The reader (and sometimes the characters) can appreciate the wonders and achievements of their civilizations even if they don't share the morality of the early 20th-century United States. (Something much more difficult for SJW writers and readers who tend to have a totalizing view of SJW dictates and taboos, creating a necessity to insert them into fiction where they don't fit.) When beings have goals that aren't understandable, like the godlike beings tend to, he conveys the sense that they have their own reasons for acting as they do, even if they are not reasons that humans understand or appreciate.
The Deep Ones from The Shadow Over Innsmouth are some of his less sympathetic antagonists, in that activities like human sacrifice in service to alien gods seem irrational, but of course human sacrifice is a thing that even humans did, groups like the Aztecs are historical realities, so it is hardly cheating to impute it to a group of non-humans as well. Nor are such activities their only defining feature, just what brings them into conflict with humans. Instead attributing the conflict to "the United States’ motivation for destroying Innsmouth was a mixture of racism as well as hatred for the non-Christian religious practices of the townsfolk" is just flipping it around and having the U.S. government kill people in the name of religion instead, except that the 1920s U.S. government actually existed and not as the author depicts it. Naturally "The Innsmouth people are depicted as victims and the story ignores the Marsh family’s reign of terror over regular humans.", you can't give the "racists" understandable reasons for their actions, so conflicts must be cleanly divided between evil perpetrators and innocent victims. Meanwhile Lovecraft gave "monsters" glorious civilizations that the reader can appreciate even if the incidental consequences for humans produce horror. He was an enthusiast of science who often made his antagonists scientists, which makes sense with the instrumental utility it has for even deeply alien beings. (Compare to the above review for a book where 'non-binary gender identity", a highly specific and recent cultural concept, is immediately adopted by aliens once it is explained to them.) He was an atheist and intellectual who repeatedly wrote stories where the local superstitious traditions contain a kernel of truth that only intellectuals are arrogant enough to disregard (but without depicting science and modernity as having nothing to contribute). The roles of inhuman beings in his stories are shaped by the narrative requirements of primarily writing horror stories, but he could and did write them with complexity and compelling world-building anyway, and that was part of why his stories became so popular and influential to begin with.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
However, I don't see much indication of right-wing love for these tools, and most of the space is still fairly left-wing
Well, some of the earliest adopters have been 4chan's /g/ and I think their Stable Diffusion thread is still one of the more popular communities. 4chan posters may not qualify as right-wing per-se, but they do tend to be anti-SJW. The developer for Automatic1111, by far the most popular UI, attracted some controversy a couple months ago when people discovered his Rimworld mods included one mocking the George Floyd riots and others like White Only/Yellow Only/Black Only. And one of the up-and-coming UIs is the node-based ComfyUI, which is made by a /g/ poster.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
They know they're women because they remember looking at their body and they remember being taught that growing up, but do they think they have some internal sense of womanhood that is separate from those two things? Let alone one strong enough that they would make sacrifices on its behalf? As I mentioned in this comment, do you think the average person would turn down an offer like "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", provided it didn't have any side-effects like messing up your romantic life?
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Most of the focus is on social stuff like "misgendering" though. Which combined with the "everyone has a deeply-rooted gender identity but cis people are just fortunate enough to match it" model makes some predictions that are noticeably false. For instance it seems pretty common for trans activists to try to use "How would you feel if people were referring to you with the wrong pronoun all the time?" as an argument. This makes sense from their perspective but doesn't really work because normal people don't care that much, certainly not enough to become suicidal or the like. Women on the internet sometimes correct people who assume they're men, but it's not a big deal. At worst someone might take it as an insult (e.g. in cultures where calling a man a woman is a way to call him a coward who is failing to live up to his martial responsibilities as a man, or feminists who think assuming people are men is reflective of sexism).
If someone could press a button saying "everyone calls you the wrong pronoun for the rest of your life but you get $5,000", I think most would be happy to take that option. (Provided this was some sort of mystical change that didn't have side-effects like messing up your romantic life or making your friends think you've gone crazy.) Indeed, even "everyone thinks you're the opposite sex" wouldn't be a big deal if it wasn't for side-effects like messing with your romantic life, and of course nontransitioning trans people don't have those side effects (on the contrary, quite a few trans people end up blowing up their marriages). Which doesn't fit with the "cis people are mirror images of trans people" model, since gender identity is presented as being more important than that.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Speaking personally, I have no redneg identity whatsoever. Although born as male, I feel neither as a nam nor as a namow, much like atheists who no longer feel as a believer.
That's just normal, it doesn't set you apart from the general public. It's only unusual in that most people who encounter the concept of gender identity aren't introspective enough to think about whether they actually have an internal sense of such a thing and don't have enough contrarian tendencies to call bullshit. To quote a comment I made a year ago:
The concept of "cis gender identity" wasn't created because anyone investigated whether such a thing actually existed and found that it did, it was created by trans activists as a deliberate mirror-image of their model of transgenderism. Someone who believed in the concept hard enough and was introspective about it would probably notice that he doesn't actually have any internal sense of what his "gender identity" is and decide that makes him "non-binary" or something, when really it just makes him normal. Or look until he interpreted random noise as a sign of some gender identity or other. After all, as the British charity Mermaids has taught us (and taught the organizations like schools and police that have taken their training), not being Barbie or GI Joe means you're towards the middle of the "gender spectrum", and by the way gender dysphoria can present as any and all problems you might have.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Saucenao.com is generally a good way to find the source for art, particularly anime-style art. Using it finds the artist's Pixiv account. Though apparently unlike most Pixiv users he is not Japanese, but lives in Australia and was born in Vietnam. As you guessed, the image is titled "Our Lady of Perpetual Help". The image posted prior to the Mary one (a few months before) is of Madoka (from the excellent anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica) done in a similar iconographic style, though without as many details. Also, checking the artists DeviantArt account finds a photograph of the Madoka art framed and set up as part of a Madoka shrine. So I'm guessing he did a bit of research for the sake of doing the Madoka one, which inspired him to do the Mary one. Other content that people might find objectionable for Christian reasons includes some drawings of yuri and a drawing of incestual yuri between the sisters from Frozen. Of course, most Christians do all sorts of things that some people might find objectionable for Christian reasons, so this doesn't mean much. And indeed, checking the comments for the upload on Deviantart finds him saying that he is Catholic:
Yes I am. I was inspired by Eastern Orthodox iconography when I made this piece though.
Though being a Christian doesn't necessarily mean he made the work for reasons related to Christianity.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
So, it does not apply only to disruption of trials.
That is what I said. It is an extremely broad law that was originally created with the ostensible purpose of stopping stuff like destruction of evidence or intimidation of witnesses, and was previously only applied in that way, but that going by the text can be used to apply severe criminal charges to broad categories of protest activities. Now, if it was applied equally I might be at least somewhat sympathetic to the idea of cracking down on protest in general and pushing all political questions to be settled in the voting booth. But what makes it worse is that it is clearly being applied selectively based on the viewpoint of the protesters, a novel application of a law created because those charging them find the political cause of "Pence shouldn't certify the election results due to supposed evidence of fraud" particularly objectionable.
the problem with that is that under the textualist method of interpreting legislation, legislative history and Congressional intent are largely irrelevant
Your own link admits how absurdly broad the text is:
must be limited for it would otherwise produce "an absurd result that the Congress could not have intended in enacting the statute"). For instance, a person outside the Capitol building protesting legislation while it is under consideration by a congressional committee is surely attempting to "influence" the proceeding, but no one would seriously contend that such an act violates section 1512(c)(2). The same is true of a citizen who emails her congresswoman to urge her to vote against a judicial nominee. The court therefore appreciates the dangers that an unrestrained reading of section 1512(c)(2) would cause.
So how exactly do they distinguish between political activity prohibited by the text of the law that "nobody would seriously contend" actually violates it, and political activity prohibited by the text of the law that gets you years in prison? Well, they think this protest was bad:
Defendants are accused of having, individually and collectively, acted with the purpose "to stop, delay, and hinder the Certification of the Electoral College vote." Indictment ¶ 38. Wearing paramilitary gear, and with some moving in a "stack" formation, id. ¶ 39h–i, Defendants "forcibly storm[ed]" past exterior barricades and law enforcement, id. ¶ 39j, to carry out a planned "operation to interfere with the Certification of the Electoral College vote," id. ¶ 39a. Once inside the Capitol building, some made their way to the Senate wing of the Capitol and "push[ed] against a line of riot police officers guarding the hallway connecting the Rotunda to the Senate," retreating only after officers deployed a chemical spray. Id. ¶¶ 151–154. Others moved toward the House of Representatives. Id. ¶ 156. Some entered with bear spray and assaulted police officers. Id. ¶¶ 164–168. Their alleged conduct was no mere political protest or trespass.
Notice how, for instance, other protesters committing violence renders it "no mere political protest" and serves as justification for applying the law to nonviolent protesters like Chansley. That's sure not the standard that was applied to BLM protesters, including the ones who disrupted "official proceedings" by doing stuff like repeatedly setting that Portland courthouse on fire. But of course the primary determination of how the apply such a broad law isn't even with the court deciding which protests they like and which they don't, it's with those deciding to charge people with it in the first place. Code Pink loved to "obstruct, influence, or impede" Congress, but obviously nobody ever charged them under this law. In fact after writing that sentence I searched and here's an article from 2 weeks ago:
Code Pink protesters disrupt inaugural House China committee hearing
Two Code Pink activists attempted to disrupt the inaugural hearing of a House select committee on the Chinese Communist Party and were escorted out by security officials.
During testimony by former White House National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, a woman from the pro-China leftist group held up a sign stating, “China is not our enemy,” and began shouting.
The capability of motivated reasoning to come up with reasons why such an overbroad law should apply to your political enemies is more than sufficient. The law should either not exist or at least not be interpreted as applying to cases anything close to this.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
In other words, for an extremely broad offense that was created to use against people interfering with trials and has never been used against protesters before, despite it being common for protesters to disrupt congress or other government proceedings.
Congress intended § 1512(c) – which was enacted as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 – to broaden punishment for document destruction. As the Supreme Court explained in Yates v. United States, this was prompted by revelations of Enron’s massive accounting fraud and of the fact that the company’s outside auditor, Arthur Andersen LLP, “had systematically destroyed potentially incriminating documents.”
There is nothing in the legislative history that supports the notion that Congress enacted § 1512(c)(2) to criminalize the disruption of a Congressional proceeding by persons engaged in a political rally.
While that statute prohibits individuals from “corruptly obstructing” official proceedings, courts have interpreted those terms to include making false statements (see here, here, here and here), encouraging others to do so (here and here), falsifying documents, destroying evidence, thwarting a criminal investigation, or intimidating witnesses in a criminal proceeding.
None of these things happened on Jan. 6.
Further, demonstrators often disrupt congressional proceedings. Here are some examples:
The use of § 1512(c)(2) to prosecute demonstrators is novel. Other than the Jan. 6 cases, no reported cases prosecuted under § 1512(c)(2) since its passage in 2002 have involved a claim that demonstrations that disrupted an official proceeding committed an obstruction offense under § 1512(c)(2).
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Like the vast majority of the AI voice content they're originally from 4chan. For instance a quick search of the /v/ archive for Nawbudike finds this post with one of those linked and two others. (The archive sites for the other boards are desuarchive.org, 4plebs.org, and archived.moe but that one doesn't have working search for many boards.) You could also search Youtube for "AI voice" for the ones that someone uploaded there, this account has a bunch, most haven't made their way to Youtube but presumably the ones that have tend to be somewhat higher quality.
I previously came across this list of 163 ones but they're mostly ones from /pol/, I don't know if there's a similar list with more from the AI voice threads on other boards. Creation presumably slowed down a lot since ElevenLabs started requiring payment to train new voices. Note that Vocaroo deletes files after 3 months to a year, I bulk downloaded the ones in that list of 163 but I don't know how many others are just Vocaroo links in archived 4chan threads that nobody has saved.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
I was just going off anecdotes regarding what people on the internet say influences attractiveness for them and others. I tried looking for a study to provide something a bit more substantial but didn't find anything useful after a couple searches on Google Scholar. So I tried asking ChatGPT ("Is the impact of obesity on attractiveness different for men and women? Cite your sources.") and it actually gave me real studies, one of which was what I was looking for, though its description of what the study said was not accurate. And looking up the study found there was also an equivalent one done for women. This is the first time ChatGPT has provided me with useful information, out of the 4 times I have tried using it as an information source.
Anyway, it's a pretty small study so maybe there's a better one out there, but it shows what I would expect. It's from 2005 if you think it has dramatically changed for some reason, but I doubt that, particularly since the results were broadly similar for the different cultures of Britain and Malaysia.
Male physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Female physical attractiveness in Britain and Malaysia: A cross-cultural study
Per Table 2 in both studies, BMI accounted for 84.1% of the variance in female attractiveness rated by British men, but only 53.7% of the variance in male attractiveness rated by British women.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Women have been pushing the envelope of what it means to be viscerally attractive for centuries, of course men suck at that. Can you imagine treating your face, your body, your wardrobe, your hobbies and your social circle from the time you're 12 as means to maximize your attractiveness to women?
In the United States, 84% of men and 80% of women are overweight or obese. Or if you look at obesity alone 50.8% of men and 53.4% of women are obese. This is lower for younger people, so the dating market is a bit better, but not so much as to obviate the point. This is not a population where women are "pushing the envelope" of attractiveness or where they are heavily optimizing their attractiveness from a young age. It is a population where both men and women are unhealthy in a visible way that makes them less attractive, in roughly equal proportions. And weight seems to have an even bigger impact of female attractiveness than male attractiveness. (Now, this makes the rise in overweight/obese people itself a prime candidate for the rise in sexlessness, it seems to make sense that if people were less attractive they would be less interested in having sex with each other. But people seem to think there isn't enough of a correlation for this to make sense, though I haven't looked into the statistics to check. I also don't know what the statistics look like if you look into something a bit more subtle, like if a sedentary lifestyle reduces sex-drive or motivation or something.)
The idea of women relentlessly optimizing for attractiveness is prominent in our culture, not only because the people doing that are more visible but because of its role in feminist rhetoric and pop culture discourse. Similarly, overweight and obese people are stratified by education/class/intelligence/race/social-circle, such that for many people their prevalence might seem like societal dark-matter which shows up in statistics but not real life. (Similar to that large chunk of the population which can't do simple intellectual tasks like reading a bar graph.) But we shouldn't mistake their prominence in discourse for something with much relevance to population-level statistics.
Now, one upshot of this is that if you're a normal weight it's unclear how much statistics about dating apply to you. But normal weight people probably tend to want to date someone else who is also normal weight, not just for an attractive and healthy partner but because of all the other things like class/intelligence/social-circle it correlates with, so this doesn't really correspond to being favored in pursuing that goal either.
Mizhena from Baldur's Gate: Siege of Dragonspear, a 2016 Baldur's Gate expansion from Beamdog, the publisher for the Baldur's Gate remasters.
It's particularly out of place in the high-magic medieval-fantasy setting of the Forgotten Realms, since not only is the idea of having an inborn gender identity that makes you "truly a woman" all along a very specific recent concept, but it's hard to square it with a setting where a mid-level character (and healing-spells seller) like Mizhera could buy actual transformation magic like a Hat of Disguise, a casting of Polymorph Other, the Girdle of Masculinity/Femininity which you can find in the original game, etc. Other highlights include five different ways to say the same thing and having Minsc make a Gamergate reference. This attracted controversy, and some of the remarks by the writer didn't help:
If there was something for the original Baldur’s Gate that just doesn’t mesh for modern day gamers like the sexism, [we tried to address that],” said writer Amber Scott. “In the original there’s a lot of jokes at women’s expense. Or if not a lot, there’s a couple, like Safana was just a sex object in BG 1, and Jaheira was the nagging wife and that was played for comedy. We were able to say like, ‘No, that’s not really the kind of story we want to make.’ In Siege of Dragonspear, Safana gets her own little storyline, she got a way better personality upgrade. If people don’t like that, then too bad.
https://archive.is/4HIow#selection-4337.0-4337.268
I consciously add as much diversity as I can to my writing and I don't care if people think that's "forced" or fake. I find choosing to write from a straight default just as artificial. I'm happy to be an SJW and I hope to write many Social Justice Games in the future.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Is that actually "walking it back"? People tend to love narratives like that about their political enemies regardless of whether they're true, so I tend to be skeptical of them. Saying that even Trump's legal team hasn't seen any evidence for it is clearly a very harsh argument against it. Saying that it might be true but they don't have evidence for it isn't a contradiction. Watching the second segment linked in the article, it is entirely about how nobody else has evidence supporting Powell's claims, with no defense of Powell at all. The closest it comes to being positive towards her is the end where he says that if she can prove her claims she'll have uncovered one of the the greatest crimes in U.S. history - but the implication comes across as "so put up or shut up". The idea that the update took a different stance from the original segment due to backlash seems like a narrative created by the USA Today journalist based on nothing. (Possibly aided by the fact that he's an Entertainment reporter, it's possible they have higher standards for actual political reporting.)
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Off the top of my head, GitHub censored the Gamergate OP (leading to the creation of gitgud.io) after a tweet complaining about it. I also remember they censored the popular WebM converter "WebM for Retards" (which also moved to Gitgud), presumably for using the word "retard". A search finds this thread from 7 years ago mentioning they also censored C Plus Equality, which was parodying a blog post from a feminist academic calling for a feminist programming language, and ToleranUX, another parody from the same people referencing the campaign against Linus Torvalds.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though.
His post a week ago started with "Our struggle with China is racial", focused on the supposed inherent cruelty of Chinese people rather than something more supported like East Asians being higher conformity/conscientiousness, and was poorly argued and focused on anecdotal evidence. So there's some carryover, where people take this post as a continuation of the same argument rather than just being the (quite plausible) assertion that East Asians have personality differences separate from the higher intelligence. Obviously "this race is so incompatible that we're destined for racial conflict" is a much more dubious claim, especially when the argument isn't even about the resentment that flows from differing capability or from violent crime but vague personality differences. And as I pointed out in response to his original post, he's focusing on Chinese people but they don't have that much genetic separation from other East Asians, most of which do not have China's reputation for low empathy or its political antagonism with the U.S.
Regarding this post specifically, my largely uninformed impression of the infant studies is that they're small and potentially questionable for the usual replication crisis reasons, but unfortunately it's probably difficult to do an improved version of them for political reasons. (It's also harder to know what implications they have for adults.) It would make sense, but a lot of replication crisis stuff makes sense, that's why people were investigating the hypothesis in the first place. It's not comparable to intelligence research on population differences, where the state of the evidence is much firmer and more extensive.
As far as I know as an ignorant non-expert, the genetic separation between Han Chinese people and Japanese or Korean people is pretty small, small enough to make genetics not seem like an obvious explanation for things not shared between those populations. Especially if you're going to characterize it as a millennia-old difference, rather than some more recent bottleneck like who survived under Mao (or at least civil wars postdating the separation). Something like conscientiousness or conformity I could buy, those seem similar between East Asian subgroups, but dramatically lower empathy is a much harder sell. Even if you think East Asians in general harbor a lower level of empathy that the high-intelligence and conformity is compensating for in some subgroups, it means the primary driver of conflict is cultural and political rather than racial. Certainly the racial differences don't seem to have stopped Japan from rapidly becoming an ally after WW2. Even pre-WW2 Japan doesn't seem to have been particularly cruel to each other like current Chinese culture stereotypically is, especially not when compared to pre-modern cultures of any race. Even if we buy the argument that Europe's heavy use of the death penalty made the population more genetically empathetic quite recently, either Japan benefited from a similar phenomenon or the difference isn't big enough to stop them from riding their high intelligence (and possibly conscientiousness) to one of the lowest crime rates in the world anyway.
If you want to do population genetics, even speculative amateur genetics, then you should actually do population genetics. Look at when populations split off from each other, research whether it's plausible there was the appropriate genetic bottlenecks, see what work has been done of the subject. Actually try to disprove your hypothesis, don't just go looking for things that fit your story. Don't just point to some anecdotes of Chinese culture being low-empathy and assume it must be genetic. A glance at history shows quite a lot of low-empathy behavior in every population group, and meanwhile you haven't justified why they would have such a large genetic difference from other East Asians, so cultural explanations seem quite plausible. And while I share your impression that Chinese culture is unusually low-empathy, you didn't even try to establish that beyond some scattered anecdotes. Objective measures like crime rate, while worse than other East Asian countries, aren't that bad compared to white countries, especially similarly poor or low-trust countries like Russia. I don't even know how many of the "Chinese society being weirdly sociopathic" anecdotes I hear are the product of actual differences vs. it being a product of how China views itself, like how Japan is more preoccupied with low birth-rates than various other countries that have since declined until they are even lower. Or something like Chinese people playing up low-empathy explanations for their actions because being a compassionate 'sucker' is low-status, while people in other countries do the opposite.
Other areas of human life like the ability to be moved by beauty seem similarly lacking in a civilization whose pre-1800s painting and sculpture never approximated that of Ancient Rome, much less Michael Angelo, when portraying human subjects (as opposed to landscapes were they admittedly excelled).
This is particularly silly. Japan has of course been spectacularly successful at exporting anime, an art form especially focused on human beauty. There don't seem to be any notable differences between populations in the ability to appreciate either it or beauty in general, let alone between population groups as closely related as China and Japan.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
This doesn't really seem antagonistic to me? He's using "sexist" as a neutral descriptor, not an insult. In the sense he means wanting to restrict sports teams or nude spas or bathrooms by sex is sexist, the same way that restricting them by race is racist. (Whether sexism is justifiable is another matter.) This is contrasted by how she doesn't actually seem to support any measures discriminating by transgender status, just dividing them by sex like everyone else.
This is particularly relevant to subjects like discrimination law, where some rulings have found that (for instance) a law banning discrimination by sex (and not mentioning transgender people) doesn't prohibit keeping separate bathrooms by sex but does prohibit preventing trans people from using the bathrooms they prefer. There is an extent to which stuff like "obviously X isn't what people mean by sexist discrimination" is just smuggling in the current Overton window, and under somewhat different social conditions it would be considered similarly obvious that prohibiting MTFs from competing in women's sports isn't discrimination against trans people.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Well, if you're really "knocked out as soon as anything starts" in knockout-game fashion then the 10 seconds don't matter. It's just a matter of letting someone within arms reach, which you do all the time when inside buildings. Meanwhile realistically most unarmed struggles don't involve being knocked out at all and last longer than the time inside an elevator. The length of the fight needs to be in a very specific timing sweet-spot to be advantageous to the attacker. In exchange it's going to open doors to a floor that might have people waiting in a matter of seconds, plus anyone could subsequently press the elevator button and call it to them. Alleys are riskier because they're more isolated from other people, they're not narrower than how close people get inside a building and the only thing preventing you from running away from an alley is the attacker. This is particular relevant for the "rape threat" interpretation, since rape obviously wouldn't fit inside the timeframe.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
there are risks for women alone at night in confined spaces with strange men
This argument always struck me as strange. An elevator literally opens its doors on its own and has more traffic than a normal room, it's halfway to being a hallway. Under what plausible circumstance does it pose more of a risk than a normal room? The timeframe that you can't leave it is a matter of seconds. Anything you could do in that timeframe (like groping/stabbing/purse-snatching someone) can be done elsewhere by attacking by surprise. The thing that stops someone from attacking you isn't that you can open the doors without waiting 10 seconds, it's the combination of most people not being violent criminals and the violent criminals getting arrested.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
There's a timeline (from the anti-Atheism+ perspective) here. The two things that made it blow up was when Watson "called out" Stef McGraw and then when Dawkins responded to a blog post defending that calling out. The original negative responses to Watson's video were just some Youtube comments, Stef McGraw's blog post, and Rose St. Clair's video response. Stef was a student who posted a blog post disagreeing with the idea that the encounter was an example of sexism. Watson, giving a talk at the CFI Student Leadership Conference, mentioned Stef was in the audience, called out her "parroting of misogynistic thought", conflated fear of "sexual objectification and assault", and claimed people like her were scaring women away from atheist conferences:
Because there are people in this audience right now who believe this: that a woman's reasonable expectation to feel safe from sexual objectification and assault at skeptic and atheist events is outweighed by a man's right to sexually objectify her. That's basically what these people have been telling me, and it's not true.
Since starting Skepchick I've heard from a lot of women who don't attend events like this because of those who have this attitude. They're tired of being objectified, and some of them have actually been raped; quite a number of them have been raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted. And situations like the one I was in, in an elevator, would have triggered a panic attack. They're scared, because they know that you won't stand up for them. And if they stand up for themselves, you are going to laugh them back down. And that's why they're not coming out to these events.
The call-out provoked some criticism on Twitter, and Watson responded with a blog post defending her actions and calling out some other people like Rose St. Clair and CFI intern Trevor Boeckmann. More criticism followed, such as Abbie Smith's Bad Form, Rebecca Watson blog post and McGraw's own response. This in turn provoked a bunch of blog posts supporting Watson's actions, such as PZ Myers's "Always Name Names!". In the comments for "Always Name Names", Richard Dawkins made his famous "Dear Muslima" comment mocking the idea that being asked to have coffee together at a conference was an example of sexism. (It is sometimes characterized as being a "don't complain because things are worse elsewhere" argument, but his other comment specifically said that wasn't his point and explained his reasoning.) This got too many blog posts to count calling him a misogynist and so on and got Watson to say she would boycott his work.
Often when Elevatorgate is summarized from the pro-social-justice side it's described as if Watson just made the comparatively mild original video and the atheism/skepticism community blew up at her, but what really got it going was how she responded to those like McGraw who disagreed. As well as ramping up her condemnation of the original interaction. (Something many of her supporters took even further, such as Amanda Marcotte arguing that Elevator Guy's invitation amounted to a rape-threat.)
Associating it with "violent homeless people" specifically is more plausible. Saying it had an "extraordinary effect on crime rates" doesn't seem plausible, and that is what I was mentioning Scott's post in response to. The majority of violent crime is from career criminals. It seems very difficult to argue that deinstitutionalization was responsible for the rise in the crime rate without evidence indicating most of those additional criminals are mentally ill (and seriously enough that they would have been institutionalized).
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