From your description I was expecting far worse. Both entries are freely critical in terms of the facts selected for high level inclusion and neither are complimentary.
E.g. Khomeini's entry ends: "Khamenei's critics viewed him as a repressive despot responsible for repression, mass murders and other acts of injustice."
Trump's entry ends: "Trump's actions have been described by researchers as authoritarian and contributing to democratic backsliding. After his first term, scholars and historians ranked him as one of the worst presidents in American history."
Rosencrantz2
1d ago
On the contrary, deciding which side is 'the worse side' is basically a side issue when forming an opinion about a military situation.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
Well it's a mixture. Women's tennis often has more varied and exciting rallies because it's less serve dominated, for example, and see 07mk's view on ultimate frisbee.
Rosencrantz2
3d ago
I'd go further and say that women's sports are often better than men's sports because they can be more fun to watch. No pretending required: I sincerely don't care if the men could beat the women any more than I care that gorillas are stronger than weightlifters. When it comes to sports I'm exclusively interested in whether they are entertaining.
Rosencrantz2
4d ago
My ex once burst into tears in the middle of a restaurant because, after several days of sending me Instagram reels about female emotional labour (and me managing to discuss them as dispassionate sport), I sent her one reel back about how male weaponised incompetence (“babe, where do we keep the paper towels”) gets wives incandescent with rage but female weaponised incompetence (“what’s this light on the car dashboard mean”) is treated with amused paternalism by husbands. “Why would you defend being a useless husband who doesn’t know where the paper towels are?!?!” she wailed, over the wagyu beef I paid for.
I don't love the sound of your ex but this is surely a lot about areas where partners are proud to have knowledge. A lot of men are proud to know a bit about cars, compared to women being proud to know about cleaning kitchens.
Weaponised incompetence by women can be as legitimately annoying as by men, in household finances for example, but I definitely don't find it hard to understand why 'Where are the paper towels?' wrt one's own household would annoy someone, anyone, everyone outside of a household setup so traditional as to be anachronistic.
Rosencrantz2
4d ago
Do you have any evidence to think that UMC women were especially bothered by this? I didn't notice. For sure his low class taste is another way to mock Bezos in a world where a lot of people want to mock him (for reasons good and bad). I'm not sure I saw UMC women taking advantage of this opportunity more than the UMC in general though.
Rosencrantz2
18d ago
The general argument form you've sketched, apart from the word 'environmental', is the core of a vast range of positions in politics. I agree we should be sceptical of all such arguments but there is simply no avoiding them, or it will be difficult for anyone to raise concerns about things unless they are personally unaffected.
My own view on the overpopulation question is that a flatlining population is necessarily good at some level of population/technology/culture, otherwise our species will be courting disaster. Whether we have got close to this point yet is an empirical matter.
Rosencrantz2
19d ago
One question I find myself asking is: should we try to keep expanding the population up to the point where we see mass deaths due to resource shortages?
Or stop earlier?
There seems to be a similarity between AI and woke thinking in the workplace.
Right now in many businesses the expectations have flipped so that rather than being ashamed of using AI, one has to either use AI, pretend that you use it to your superiors, or keep quiet about the subject and hope it goes away. If you say out loud you don't use it, you are a drag, a buzzkill and a dinosaur (maybe a young dinosaur as I don't think intensity of AI use or AI boosterism corresponds with age).
Many people are even under pressure to use AI in cases where no one even pretends it is adding anything, so long as it gives them bragging rights to tell their bosses 'we used AI for this'.
It is/was pretty similar with woke thinking. There was a pressure to believe, pretend or keep quiet.
Both AI and things labelled woke can often get good results though.
Rosencrantz2
21d ago
He changed his name so he could launch a 'political' career without people realising he had a conviction for assaulting a police officer. It worked for years.
Rosencrantz2
24d ago
It isn't bad to be annoyed by stupid shit. If someone who is your ideological foe says stupid shit for malign reasons you probably get irritated too, whether they're trolling or not, especially if they are very powerful. Be honest with yourself.
Rosencrantz2
24d ago
If true it makes a difference but not that much of one. It's a divisive strategy that is contemptuous of democracy and makes him an enemy of democracy.
Rosencrantz2
25d ago
I don't agree with this myself, but I suppose another steelman position would say that prior to transgenderism, terms like "women" and "men", "fathers" and "mothers" etc were not highly resolved, just like most natural language terms. We had not had cause to decide whether they refer to outward signs of feminity/masculinity, internal states such as genetics and gamete size, or psychological ones such as the sense one is a man. All these things were usually clustered together. Once edge cases appear, though, it's in our gift to further specify how we'll use the words in future.
Under this reading, sure, it is a language change or precisification to stipulate that we have always really been talking about e.g. psychological identity, but it would equally be one to say we have always been talking about gamete type. Examination of the previous usage of terms may not give a 100% clear answer.
(I guess this is basically Kripke/Putnam/Wittgenstein applied to gender, so no doubt there is a philosopher somewhere who has publicly adopted this position.)
Rosencrantz2
27d ago
I enjoyed it more than you (though it seems unlikely to ascend to previous Vince Gilligan heights, and the lag time between seasons is a bit of a killer).
It doesn't break new philosophical ground but it really landed 'overly efficient logistics = the death of all that is human' in an emotional way, for instance in that opening scene to the finale with the singing tribespeople, who fall tragically silent. I haven't seen that before. I also found the choreography of people moving as one throughout really cool to watch. And I think it's really funny in places.
Sure, Carol is very flawed, but also, her wife suddenly died, and then humanity was replaced before her eyes, and it seems like the whole construction of the show requires her to be antisocial in counterpoint to the extremely socially motivated Others ...
7.5/10
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
If we've done that already, I think it's sad but inevitable. If we haven't done it, and there is, say, an unsigned cliff edge, I think it's worth kicking up a fuss and lobbying for someone to put up a sign.
In the case of ICE, it seems apparent that we haven't done this work. It is not currently minimising risk nearly as well as it could.
Edit: I'm not sure I entirely understand the stipulation that the wreck wasn't their fault, can you elaborate?
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
This is exactly where OP equivocates. This passage fails to deny the 'traditional' reading of 'deserve'. (In addition it also implies that Pretti necessitated his own killing, which obviously many people think is not the case, even if it wouldn't have happened were it not for high-risk decisions that he took.)
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
I don't think it was a shocking event at all so on that level I agree. It was a dead cert that something like this would happen. That's one of the reasons they should have better policing practices, training and comms in the first place.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Pretty strongly. We should try and do something about it on both sides. Warn your friends not to drink and drive. But also, create institutions and road safety infrastructure that reduce the probability of drunk people at the wheel getting in accidents.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
"Deserve" implies should. (OP dances around that a bit but, then, I only said his post was tantamount to saying such people should be killed.)
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Well blind soldier for the cause here, I guess, because your post seems tantamount to saying that everyone who does dumb and risky things should be killed.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
But why suppose an atheist who says "I don’t believe your religion is true, but according to your religion you should act this way" is more likely to be someone who uses 'arguments as soldiers' (any more than e.g. a co-religionist)? They could be prioritising logical validity, you don't know until you listen to them.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
You're welcome to use that as your personal heuristic – ignore arguments from people in different camps to you and stick to your own ideological kind, to avoid being outwitted by an enemy 'soldier'. But this is a nominally rationalist forum.
Rosencrantz2
1mo ago
Does that meme actually reduce the validity of what the atheist says though? Someone from outside your group may not share your basic goals but might still have a point.
Who knows? (You can certainly tell yourself that as you watch Kier Starmer's state visit to China this week.)
I don't disagree but 'vastly kinder' led me to expect a much starker contrast.
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