domain:web.law.duke.edu
WhiningCoil
9m ago
This is my preference, but I'll work in whatever the code base I'm playing in already has.
SteveKirk
9m ago
Do you have one of those gradual brightening wake lights?
My system for winter mornings is having one of the bedside lights on a cheapo dial timer (the whole setup is dumpster loot for testing the concept). It works, but it's a bit too sudden a change in light level. Looking for something better.
The variable alarm apps that listen for you stirring are also very nice, since you won't be broken out of a deep sleep.
Astranagant
45m ago
People thinking that vegans in general are obnoxious and morally self-righteous because those are the only vegans they notice. They might pass plenty of vegans in the street and just assume that those people are meat-eaters, since eating meat is the default. But obnoxious vegans draw attention to themselves, hence come to represent vegans in general in the public mind.
I'd like to bring up the opposite problem, too;
Vegans claim to never meet pushy, irritating vegans, and like to assert that those people simply don't exist. But the reason they don't meet them is because the irritating vegans simply have no reason to be preachy and irritating to someone who is already a vegan, creating a massive blind spot where they refuse to believe that the type of vegan who annoys meat eaters at every opportunity is not just made up because those people, who might even be standing right next to them at the salad bar, just never display those behaviours towards them.
felis-parenthesis
54m ago
One complication is the Golden Rule and private autogynephilia. Let me start with a three way sub-classification of private autogynephilia.
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Repression It would be so easy to buy a dress on line or at a thrift shop and dress up and blush. No! That would be wrong. One makes ones mind a battle field and victory is not giving in to temptation.
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Binge and Purge One gives in to temptation, dresses, make-up, maybe even a wig. Then one gets disgusted by what one is doing, and throws them away. But a year later one does it all again.
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Limited, private indulgence One gives in to temptation. Release turns into relief, and one puts ones cross-sex items away, in a suit case or a drawer, knowing that one will be tempted again, and indulge again. But also aware that the over-all effect on ones life is negative. Without turning ones mind into a battle field, one tries to avoid temptation and leave off for months or years.
The Golden Rule is often written as
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you
All three classes of private autogynephile see autogynephilia as a misfortune. It takes them away from seeking a girl friend or a wife. It takes them away from sublimating sexual impulses in other, satisfying alternatives. Yet it is so horribly unrealistic. They are a bloke, not a girl; autogynephilia involves fighting a war against reality and reality always wins. And they cannot expect any-one else to join in and humor them.
What would they have others do unto them? They hope that others will refrain from encouraging them. No "woman of the year" for a man. No "Stunning and brave" for a man. No inviting a man to use she/her pronouns. They hope to avoid cultivating and strengthening their fetish. They don't want to get outed. They don't want to have to say "please stop talking about positively about transition, because I'm both tempted and sure that it would work about badly for me." It is the same as when the ex-alcoholic is invited to go for a drink. He doesn't want to reveal his private past and he doesn't want to be cajoled.
And what then does the Golden Rule command them to do unto others? They see it as partly idiopathic and partly social contagion. They keep it private to avoid contaminating others. They oppose publicity and encouragement around transition. This is rooted in compassion for those with autogynphilia. It is a net negative for them. As best they can judge, it is a net negative for others. They wish to avoid harming others by encouraging the fetish, just as they hope that others will avoid harming them by validating and encouraging their fetish.
Jiro
59m ago
I think there are plenty of trans people who are chill, but on both the left and the right people are motivated to elevate the obnoxious, deranged activist subset of trans people.
Yet I'm sure you can name groups for which this doesn't happen much. This isn't something that automatically happens with every group; some groups have more extremists and less control over extremists, than other groups.
Jiro
1hr ago
Gay men generally don't want to do things that would have a different impact on other people based on whether they are gay. The trans do. There's also a lot of worry about trans children being encouraged into irreversible treatments, which isn't a problem for gay children.
Indian Tycoon and alleged oligarch Gautam Adani is about to be in deep trouble given the indictment by the US for bribing inidan government officials and the amount is 265 million. South Asia is super corrupt and Adani has been very close with Modi for decades now. The Indian supreme court did not investigate Adani for what seems like very obvious case of mass bribery if the evidence with the US is true.
Reactions on this have been mixed so far, quite a few Indians want him gone stating how indulging in obvious corruption that too as stupidly as his people did is worthy of having your stocks tank. Adanis firms were under fire by the Hindenburg report on him which did cause some turbulence in his stocks. people at Hindenburg also pointed fingers at the cheif of SEBI, the SEC equivalent here and SEBI simply refused to talk about it. This indictment also came with a cancellation of deals in Kenya. The people involved in this includes pretty much the entirity of Indian political elite, irrespective of their geography, though he is still seen publicly as Modis guy.
The reactions to this are not surprising, BJP supporters are not defending him as fervently as last time which is not a good sign, no one in Indian stock market wants to fuck with stocks that are deemed suspect by the US so they probably are trying to cut ties with him without flipping 180. He is being defended quite a bit by tech bros many in finance are telling others to abandon ship. These are not ideollgically motivated people either. I had never expected to see people who talk about free markets come and defend out and out crony capitalism, the government changed its laws to let Adani bid and win multiple auctions, this is extemely well-documented too.
The tech bro argument can be boiled down to "he may be super corrupt like the nation but you are prosecuting him because he has control over Indian ports and is trying to move to international markets"." In contrast, some finance people just think that a firm that has had so many issues with regards to moral lapses is a terrible investment from a monetary perspective. Adani bought the only non BJP supporting new outlet NDTV which is an ultra progressive media house and just unwilling to say anything at all.
To any americans here, how bad is Adani case? Is this simply something being done out of fear of investors losing out on much or are the allegations of political turmoil true?
teleoplexy
1hr ago
The meme-ness of it is the main reason I'm opposed to widespread normalization of trans minors. I've seen multiple young people (my relatives even) playing around with the idea of transitioning based on the social and online groups they were in. All of them stopped being interested in gender when separating from those groups. One push from a gender-related medical specialist and I can totally see any of them cementing gender beliefs into their identity.
roche
1hr ago
The primary lesson is that it all falls apart once you get to the edges, so we shouldn't dwell too long there. Hence most of our bright philosophers like Descartes, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, Leibniz doubling as scientists, historians, politicians, missionaries and giving the rag of philosophy a squeeze to extract whatever potential was in it. Any effort you'd like to invest in philosophy should be redirected toward psychology, IMO.
The trans debate suffers from the very common problem of "the most loud, obnoxious, and obvious members of a group come to represent the group in the broader population's minds".
Other examples of this phenomenon:
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People thinking that vegans in general are obnoxious and morally self-righteous because those are the only vegans they notice. They might pass plenty of vegans in the street and just assume that those people are meat-eaters, since eating meat is the default. But obnoxious vegans draw attention to themselves, hence come to represent vegans in general in the public mind.
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People thinking that individuals who are concerned about climate change are all annoying lefty activists who want to destroy capitalism.
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People thinking that the majority of black Americans are inner city gangbangers.
Etc.
I think there are plenty of trans people who are chill, but on both the left and the right people are motivated to elevate the obnoxious, deranged activist subset of trans people. On the left, there is a purity spiral - "Do you even support trans people at all if you criticize these trans activists for being obnoxious and insane??? How dare you??? Are you even a leftist?". On the right, there is the obvious motive to focus on the most annoying trans activists and act as if those people represent trans people in general, since that helps the right overall get a culture war win.
Personally, I have never had any issue with trans people. I just find many of the more vocal trans activists to be repulsive. Not because they are trans, but because they are shrill and irrational fanatics.
On a side note, one thing I find interesting when other men say that they find male homosexuality disgusting is that I do not experience this, to the point that it's hard for me to even understand having such a reaction. The idea of having sex with a man repulses me somewhat, but there is no moral dimension to this feeling, for me it's just a subset of "the idea of having sex with someone I am not attracted to repulses me". When I see two men kissing it does not bother me in the least bit. I do wonder why some men grow up finding male homosexuality to be a fundamentally disgusting thing and others simply don't.
One thing I've learned over time is that it's, true, "love is love". To me, a loving homosexual relationship is much more beautiful than a bitter, hate-filled heterosexual one.
One thing I want to mention about your quote:
Holding her hand is electric. You just want be with her forever, to sweep her into your embrace, and damn it, why the f&!k are you getting a boner right now, you were having this pure and chaste and beautiful reverie and now you're thinking about sex.
I think this is the classic "Madonna-whore complex". Or, more broadly, this kind of attitude is a limiting and in my view incorrect view of love and sexuality that separates it into, on the one hand, "pure beautiful love" and, on the other hand, "dirty sex". This is a very damaging way to exist, psychologically. It's damaging not just to oneself, but also to one's sexual partners. I say this as someone who used to have this kind of psychology when younger, but have since largely overcome it. I'm someone who is into some pretty kinky, rough, BDSM sex and I can say from experience that nothing about that kind of sex is incompatible with love and tenderness. Fulfilling each others' sexual appetites, no matter how raunchy and wild those might be, is one of the most loving things that two people can do for each other.
roche
1hr ago
Oh sure. Deep sleep is insanely important and basically changes your life. Most of my post was a bit of contra-doomerism, which is probably good on this topic because anxiety plays a sinister part in the insomnia loop. Glad to hear you recovered.
Rov_Scam
2hr ago
It's not a plea bargain, but a non-prosecution agreement. Whether or not jeopardy attaches is irrelevant because the court didn't overturn the conviction on double jeopardy grounds. The court ruled that, as a matter of public policy, prosecutors have to honor non-prosecution agreements once the defendants have performed their end of the bargain. They note Santobello, where a defendant had struck a plea deal where he agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a favorable sentencing recommendation. He plead guilty, but the prosecutor asked for the max and got it. The basic premise is that if the defendant gives something of value in reliance of getting something from the prosecutor, the prosecutor can't reneg.
Here, Smollett agreet to forfeit his bond in exchange for the charges being dropped. He forfeited the bond, and a nolle pross was entered. Cosby gave up his right to Fifth Amendment protections, Smollett gave up cash. You may think that one is more valuable than the other, and that dropping the charges for $10,000 wasn't justified, but that's irrelevant—deals like this don't work if you allow the court to second guess whether they were worth it or not.
the prosecution cutting a (corrupt) deal to drop the charges without the court's involvement doesn't cut it.
The court's involvement has nothing to do with it. The deal is between the defendant and the prosecutor, not the defendant and the judge. In Santobello, the problem was that the prosecutor didn't make the promised recommendation, not that the judge didn't impose the desired sentence. Santobello plead guilty on reliance of the prosecutor's promise, but the judge can typically impose whatever sentence he wants to. There are compelling reasons I won't get into here why this rarely ever happens (and why if a judge has a problem with a plea deal he'll usually give the defendant the opportunity to withdraw the plea), but it is technically permissible.
More specifically, in the case of dropped charges where no guilty plea is involved, the prosecutor doesn't offer a dismissal with prejudice because this isn't within the prosecutor's power. Prosecutors can't dismiss cases; judges can. Technically they could file an unopposed motion and a judge could sign off on it but they don't do this because they've never had to before, and because it gums up the system when you have to wait 2 months for a judge's signature. And I don't even know if this would work because the practice isn't customary and until some custom develops around it the judge's default is always going to be to dismiss without prejudice. I've been an attorney for over 10 years and I've never seen a judge dismiss anything with prejudice. I've heard of a few cases, but these are either criminal cases that involved constitutional violations so dire that the judge wasn't confident the prosecutor could ever make a case, and one civil case where the pro se plaintiff was obviously nuts and the judge didn't want to deal with it anymore.
And won't cut it in future cases when the political element isn't included.
Future cases are one of the reasons the case went the way it did. The opinion is pretty clear on this. There are various diversionary programs where defendants are given the opportunity to have their cases dropped if they complete them. They get nolle prossed and if they flunk the charges are pursued and if they pass they stay nolle prossed. It would be perverse to suggest that someone would participate in such a program and be prosecuted anyway after successful completion. Some of these programs have high success rates saying that prosecutors aren't bound by these deals would put them in jeopardy.
the prosecution cutting a (corrupt) deal to drop the charges
What's corrupt about the deal? Do you have evidence that Smollett paid a kickback to the prosecutor in exchange for lenience? Or is just that you don't like the politics that you assume was behind the decision?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
2hr ago
When you are forced to refer to an MTF transsexual as "she", you are being compelled, under social duress, to assert as an ontological truth that this person just is a woman (and all parties are aware that that's plainly what's going on here - otherwise it wouldn't be such a heated topic of disagreement in the first place). I can't accept being compelled to assent to such a contentious position.
This is the crux of my objection as well. I have issues with the idea of taking a healthy human and mutilating their body to make them a crude facsimile of the other sex, but at the end of the day I think adults have the right to choose self-mutilation if that's what they want. But what I will not play ball with is the attempt to try to get me to affirm a lie (that a trans person really is the sex they claim to be) as the truth.
I try to treat trans people I encounter with respect and compassion; they are my brothers and sisters just like everyone else. And Lord knows that they have enough on their plates without me disrespecting them. But "respect and compassion" does not include telling bold faced lies just because that is what they want to hear. I'll avoid the topic of gender as much as possible for their sake, but if it's unavoidable then I'm not going to lie about it.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
The Greek-Catholic belt in Eastern Europe, Georgia the country, and the American red tribe have TFR’s ~2. It’s achievable even if I couldn’t really point to the unifying factors- western social conservatism, religiosity, and ruralness, I suppose.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
Men in a dress and a wig? Yes.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I mean, the solution for this poor unfortunate is to work through whatever issues drive interest in transgenderism rather than transitioning. Make your bed and now lie it, I suppose- using the men’s locker room is a risk for some biologically male transgenders, but society oughtn’t to be in the business of protecting individuals from the consequences of their own bad decisions at the expense of people who haven’t made such bad decisions.
roche
2hr ago
Of course I have empathy. Trans-bashing has never entered my mind. It's more like, every trans person I've come across has some deep mental problems and not-being-a-woman isn't even foremost of them. They're neurotic. They're obsessed with porn. They hate their parents, and conservatives. They're pale and sickly. They cut their own hair and make awkward looking bangs. They only want to talk about themselves. You rarely come across a trans person that makes you think, "Huh, this is just a normal person that wants to be a girl". The rejoinder is: "Our fucked up society is the reason they turn out this way!" Which... yeah, sure. But if you agree society messed you up, isn't priority #1 then to repair the damage?
Actually, what bothers me about them is the odd double standard where they demand recognition from our society, yet refuse to play by any of its standards and so indulge in hypersexuality, self-harm, gross fetishes, disruptive behavior etc. which is what made the gays so hated in the past. If transexuals were otherwise healthy adults that acted like the opposite gender, almost no one would mind.
waffles
breakfast food
2hr ago
I read the Matthew Walker book when it first came out. At the time I was sleeping maybe about 6-ish hours on weeknights, maybe 8-9 on weekends, sleeping in or whatever after staying up late or going out, dreading the alarm clock on a Monday morning, all-around normal stuff for someone in their mid 20s. In retrospect, there were hints that I wasn't getting enough rest to function well (e.g. tiredness during mid-afternoon, inability to focus on highly technical work, waking up groggy on weekday mornings) but guess I didn't pay much attention to that until I finished the book.
(Obviously our bodies are all different, some of us need more sleep than others, and I feel like I'm sightly on the right side of the bell curve for quantity of sleep required to function optimally)
I made some lifestyle changes, some major, some minor. The most significant was consistently sleeping and waking up at the same time. I got myself a wake light, and started using that instead of an alarm clock. After a while, I realized that I could wake up without an audible alarm, and the feeling of waking up refreshed, every morning, instead of to a blaring alarm clock, beat the pants off my former lifestyle.
Minor ones included avoiding blue lights or bright lights before going to bed (to the best of my ability) which makes it easier to fall asleep. I also cut out alcohol near bedtime, which appears to give the sense of deep sleep but studies (?) and personal experience suggests otherwise.
It wasn't until a couple months of this that I realized how truly sleep deprived I was before. Consistent quality sleep is truly mind-altering and I can't imagine going back.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I mean, trying to pull permits for a literal rocket launch would do they anyways.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
This is the purpose of government under liberalism. You can totally have ‘different people live under different laws and there’s complex rules about who defers to whom’, and have a state, as long as it’s not a liberal society.
I don’t think trans realize that.
TwiceHuman
2hr ago
I suppose so, yeah. Some people arrive at axioms "I think therefore I am", others arrive at nothingness "Nothing is real" or at least the conclusion that thinking is fundamentally limited "The dao of which can be spoken is not the real dao", "where one cannot speak one must be silent", "I can only know that I know nothing", "Life is absurd".
That "something cannot come from nothing" does not take into account the mystery of why anything exists at all, it also doesn't imply that anything is truly universal - but that something arbitrary seems to be all which exists. You can call laws of physics, human nature, and the universe fundamental, but they're "specific", things which exist in themselves, and thus not thing which generalize outside of themselves. Different people could exist, different universes, different laws of physics. Ours just happen to be what we were given.
And in all honesty, we cannot even communicate or think unless we use a foundation, so I think it's fine just to choose something. Just like it's fine to choose a language, a culture, a religion, an axiomatic system, a system of values, a morality. None of them will be universally valid, but they will be valid in the scope in which they exist, and that's good enough. It's the same for me, I must have a personality, a job, and a social role. I can only specialize, as general improvement stop being possible at a certain point (since the areas of further improvement contradict eachother). I actually recommend not learning too much or growing too wise, as you may lose your ability to believe in the arbitrary things that you've chosen. The alternative to having both pros and cons is simply having nothing at all, which is worse. In other words, we must be egoistic and take actions which from certain perspectives, are mistakes. Our locally valid ideas are only valid in a limited scope, but we must believe in them nonetheless. We must believe in ourselves with no external validation beyond the fact that we exist. We solve nihilism by rejecting the idea that universal validity/external proof is required for something to be real (in other words, rather than solving the problem, we reject the problem). In the words of Max Stirner "I have based my affair on nothing" (meaning on himself I suppose). My own existence is an axiom to me, that's the solution to any existential problems I may have.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Heard chief.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
And this is specifically autistic, though. Your plumber dissatisfied with his love life hits the strip club instead.
My Factorio: Space Age playthrough hit a brick wall at Gleba. This will not become an industrial hub. It took forever but I finally got some iron and copper production going that doesn't stall out constantly. Now I'm just trying to get the bare minimum going to build a launch pad and start shipping out research. I'm importing all my belts, drones, solar panels, etc from Vulcanus, and I give zero fucks about that. I haven't really had to build any defenses yet, but I can see pentapods creeping closer on my radar. Big ones even. I got some turrets and ammo automated, but I think I'm going to play around with delivering ammo by drone to gun pods and see if that can keep up with threats.
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