Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
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Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4hr ago
distribution of child pornography is worse than child rape and child prostitution.
Because the former cannot happen without the latter, thus all victims of the former are also victims of the latter.
Even if one considers a child to suffer 100,000 units of harm from being abused, and only 0.0001 units of harm from recordings of that abuse being circulated for the gratification of other predators, 100,000.0001 is still a bigger number than 100,000.0000.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
16hr ago
It seems that we have a tradeoff here: the more tightly you enforce central planning and limitations over how parents raise their kids, the more you reduce odious practices. At the same time if the central authority wishes to enforce an odious practice on all kids they have the power to enforce that in this hypothetical. At the same time, giving parents unlimited authority means you have no way to stop child abuse.
Which is why I support checks and balances to parental authority, just as with any other form of government.
I default to general libertarianism as the local maxim[um].
That would give neither parents nor the State authority over children. A child should not be thought of starting as a piece of property, with some protections from abuse tacked on as epicycles; rather, a child should be thought of starting as a human being, equal in every way, and then whatever power and responsibility we give parents are the epicycles. The burden of proof ought to lie not on 'anyone interfering with how a parent raises their children' so much as 'anyone overriding the child's preferences'. Forbidding a carnal relationship between a five-year-old and a fifty-year-old, or forbidding adolescents from practising the unspeakable vice of the Serbians, are examples of things which overcome this burden; forbidding a child from seeing any depiction of the values of the tribe opposite their parents' does not.
The latter case applies both to a child of Red Tribe parents seeing depictions of LGBTQWERTYUIOP+ living fulfilling lives, and a child of Blue Tribe parents learning examples of Western Cultures having the moral high ground over People Of Colour (e. g. the abolition of widow-burning by the British Raj).
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
17hr ago
Link fixed; it should point to the relevant section of the article.
Pierre Fermat, circa 1637, wrote in the margin of a book "It is impossible to separate a cube into two cubes, or a fourth power into two fourth powers, or in general, any power higher than the second, into two like powers. I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of this, which this margin is too narrow to contain." The theorem was proven in 1995 by Andrew Wiles.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
23hr ago
· Edited 17hr ago
I don't think I understand the Agatean wall. Would that just be a verbal agreement that the social media companies would not optimize engagement for revenue generation? If so, I don't see why these companies would ever do that.
In my proposed architecture, one side of the wall would handle content-curation algorithms and interface design, with the instruction to make it convenient for the end user to see the content they want to see, with any advertisements or sponsored content kept to designated spaces clearly labeled as such. The other side of the wall would deal with anyone seeking to purchase advertising space or aggregate data, but would have no method to adjust the experience of end-users to keep them on the site longer; advertisers could either accept however many eyeball-minutes occur without engagement-maximisation tactics, or leave the attention of social-media users to their competitors.
This gives at least some possibility of squaring the circle of having a service both free-at-the-point-of-use and prioritising the preferences of its end-users.
As for how to bring about such a state of affairs, I have discovered a truly marvelous regulatory structure accomplishing this, which this comment box is too narrow to contain.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
...the simple solution is to get children off of social media completely.
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken
Your proposal has two flaws: the first is that it puts children at a greater risk of hermeneutical injustice at the hands of their parents. Imagine the ideology of your outgroup, the worldview you find most odious; do you really want a parent who holds that ideology to have absolute power over whether their child is aware that some people, fully endowed with reason and conscience, disagree with it?
The second flaw is that many adults are also led astray by extreme content boosted by social media algorithms; many of the adherents of Queue A Knon were already adults when social media became a thing.
I believe a better method would be to adjust the incentives further upstream, by requiring social media companies to implement an Agatean Wall¹ between user-experience and revenue-generation.
¹GNU Terry Pratchett.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
2d ago
people who have a hard time fitting in, who don't get along with their peers, for whom social interaction is challenging.
And a society which tries to integrate them, to find a place where they can live well, even if it is not always successful, will get better results than one which continually signals to them that they are not wanted and that it would prefer that they quietly disappear.
"The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth." -- Igbo Proverb
Your suggestion also sounds suspiciously like a threat. "You see what happens when you don't go out of your way to validate the heckin trans kids? Do you see what happens? Be a shame if it was to happen again..."
It's not a threat, per se, so much as karma.
What goes around comes around, and if you are cruel to the least of these, whether for 'the greater good' or for your own convenience, sooner or later it will come back to bite you.
I am not advocating for such retaliation, merely pointing out that the most effective strategy for preventing it is to practise the same universal benevolence you ought to have been practising all along.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
3d ago
...the root cause is being a weird outcast....
So maybe we shouldn't cast out people for being weird then! ("Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs." -- William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice)
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
they're just judging people by their own standards.
Exactly. People would be less bent on seeing others punished for breaking the rules if they themselves had been extended the same leniency; when Alice is expected to follow the rules herself, even when the rules are both unreasonable and difficult, under threat of harsh punishment for the smallest infractions, and then sees Bob flagrantly flaunting his flouting of even the most reasonable policies, without any consequences whatsoever, that is when Alice becomes predictably (and in my opinion, very justifiably) cheesed off.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
6d ago
Yet they’ll run news coverage on the Mars rover pinpointing the location of a bacterium and declare to the world they’ve found “life” on another planet.
But they don't claim to have found people on another planet; a bacterium is alive, but it is not a person. Thus, I would phrase the question not as "When does life begin?" so much as "When does the developing life-form become a person?".
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
6d ago
Were Democrats (members of the Democratic party, people involved in fundraising for the party, etc.) defending the film, or just generally left-wing or progressive people? Are the defenders representative of the Democratic party?
Were the people 'defending' the film saying "It is good that it exists.", or were they saying "You don't get to demand that it not exist."?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
7d ago
Red tape and bureaucracy can be better stumbling blocks than hitting the local Imperial detention centre (which may be rebuilt afterwards).
The Office of Strategic Services (predecessor to the CIA) realised this in 1944.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
Or if the President of France were named Charles de Gaulle.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
9d ago
Apartheid was a racial conflict. Truth and Reconciliation was the codification of a particular social perspective of that racial conflict
Namely, the social perspective that racial conflict is a Bad Thing, and that it would behoove us to try to learn to live together, that we not all die alone.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
10d ago
Would it still be wrong to give them the cold shoulder if they were blasting loud rap music at all hours, street racing, and selling drugs?
That would fall under 'the content of their character'.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
11d ago
This is a fringe view. The majority position is that Imam Mahdi will reappear first, and then he will lead the forces of Islam to liberate Palestine and defeat the West.
Unfortunately the fringe happens to be in charge of a country.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
11d ago
What gain Iran would have from instigating a nuclear war
What they would gain, and what they think they would gain, are two different things.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
11d ago
stop playing these games against their government, open trade, and slowly worm ourselves into their society through the soft power of prosperity.
We tried that with the Red Chinese. How well has that worked out?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
11d ago
Neither does the EU occupy the entire world.
But all the countries put together occupy the entire world, whereas all the data centres put together are only a small fraction of it.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
11d ago
Your response to whom?
Someone who objects to someone else being willing to date a cis-woman but not a trans-woman.
This is isomorphic to someone objecting to someone else being willing to date a white person but not a black person; both 'a lesbian (or a straight man) not being intimate with trans-women (or a gay man or straight woman not being intimate with trans men)' and 'a white person not dating black people' are personal decisions, and neither, in itself, is an act of wrongdoing.
Thus, my response to both "Lesbian!Alice won't date trans women" and "White!Bob won't date Black women" is the Minnesota Golden Rule.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
12d ago
Because data centres don't collectively occupy the entire world between them.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
12d ago
So why bother?
Because it's the right thing to do.
Because while some Black people will grow up to be criminals even with well-run schools, and some Black people will educate themselves even if they attend poorly-run schools, there are almost certainly a large number who could go either way.
Because if Black people are systematically denied the tools necessary to support themselves, and they thus turn to crime, the Blue Tribe will be more sympathetic to their sob stories and be that much harder to convince that anything ought to be done about crime committed by Black people.
Because somewhere in the U. S., there are future versions of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, and they deserve a proper education just as much as white children do.
Because a society which stomps on its ethnic minorities risks seeing karma hand it its own arse.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
13d ago
· Edited 13d ago
Interesting set of anecdotes. If you are not in favour of desegregation, what alternative would you propose for ensuring that the Black schools are not systematically neglected as they were prior to Brown?
Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken.
But in that case, the people tearing down the fence do know why it was put up; that's why they want to tear it down!
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
13d ago
In the specific case of Mrs Levine, the possibility to which I was alluding was that, not being a lesbian (or bisexual, which I probably should have included), she is only interested in a male partner, and defines that not to include transwomen.
In the general case, some lesbians, and some straight men, are attracted to natal-anatomy!women, some to current-anatomy!women, some to appearance/'presentation'!women, and some to identity!women; mutatis mutandis for gay men and straight women and various definitions of men.
The 'cotton-ceilingers' are objecting not to the non-existence of the latter categories but to the existence of the former, and my response to them is the same as to those who object to the existence of people who don't pursue intimate relationships across racial boundaries.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
13d ago
Because that just brings us back to the question of whether the Admiral is a man or a woman, and whether it is appropriate to consider the biological factors correlated with that question.
An associate of mine asked several autistic people with autism what terminology they preferred; one respondent rather crankily stated the View that the entire debate was a disingenuous attempt to wave a shiny object in front of them, in order to gain anti-ableist credit without having to do anything inconvenient such as making workplaces and hiring processes less Kafkaesque.
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