domain:felipec.substack.com
Throwaway05
3m ago
"Reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."
The fence is not some abstract Platonic solid locked in time, it is a thought experiment to remind you to understand why the current state of affairs exists instead of some other possible state of affairs.
I have provided numerous questions whose answers may help explain the current states of affairs. You have quibbled over a fence like it is some sort of shamanic totem that if only you shake it in the right way argumentative success or understanding is reached.
This does nothing to address the issue at hand.
hooser
5m ago
TapWaterSommelier translates some Russian gallows-humor jokes from the start of the current war / special operations. The original source of the collection is great but it's in Russian, and jokes are some of the hardest writing to translate.
My favorite:
“Good morning, here is your conscription notice.”
“Who are we fighting with?”
“Fascists, of course!”
“Ok, and against whom?”
The original source is an anthropologist who studies jokes-as-coping-mechanism in Russian-speaking world. TapWaterSommelier gives a good summary of the trends. The joke I quoted is an example of a "common-man" character who obstinately and deliberately remains clueless about anything political.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
14m ago
What I see is that both of you are doing what is very common in Internet debates, which is, being very confident that you're right and the other person is wrong, adopting a rather condescending tone in explaining how wrong and ignorant the other person is. I do think @Throwaway05 is being a tad condescending, but we don't generally mod for being "a tad condescending." You, however, were getting increasingly heated, especially in your last post.
I very frequently find myself writing a post layered with sarcasm and condescension directed towards someone I think is being an ass. I usually (usually) rewrite it and manage to take a more neutral tone.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
24m ago
I think you're right that the zeitgeist has a lot to do with it. I remember at the nadir of my dating life (before Obergefell) looking in the mirror and asking why I couldn't find an awesome woman. And at least very briefly thinking that I'd be a good one myself (fit, tall, all those cool male-coded interests: what's not to like?). But it wasn't a popular idea to consider at the time, so it got shoved aside never to return and things got better for me within a few weeks. I'm occasionally thankful it didn't get further consideration at the time.
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
28m ago
Not necessary to it, although I did notice, and it adds another level to it....
TheFooder
29m ago
Illinois gonna Illinois.
Ain't that the truth. I didn't realize how bad it was until I moved to another state.
KingOfTheBailey
33m ago
So the Doge of Venice wasn't part of the pun?
ControlsFreak
35m ago
So, what I think you're saying is that you want to talk about the current operation of the farm, given the existence of the fence. That may be an interesting conversation, when we can get to it, but the current operation of the farm is designed around the fact that there is a fence there. That a current farmhand says, "I've kinda figured out at least something nice I can get out of this fence here," is not our first question. Our first question is why. What for. What problem was it designed to solve? I have tried to endeavor to understand why it was put into place. What for. What problem it was designed to solve. What information am I lacking on that question? If I am not lacking in information on that question, I would appreciate some acknowledgement on that point, and then we can move toward other issues. As of now, my sense is that you're saying that I'm just so completely lacking in any information that I still don't even have any idea why it was built, what it was for, what problem it was designed to solve.
TeknOShEeP
38m ago
Or he's multi-tasking, as in that wonderful leaked SpaceX call where we learned the Starship was one second from abort on the tower catch, while Musk was streaming his diablo run the whole time.
SBF also famously did this with league of legends, but was also notoriously bad at LoL, whereas Musk appears to be actually good at Diablo. Maybe we should start judging business leaders by their gaming chops.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
40m ago
But some people's intense romantic fixations can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy ways which violate the boundaries of the object of their affection: repeatedly texting them, calling them or buying them gifts when they've made it perfectly clear they aren't interested; following them; bothering them in public places; sending them hateful messages; and (much more rarely, of course) physically intimidating or assaulting the object of their affection, or their current romantic partner. We call such a person a "stalker", and much of the aforementioned behaviour is actually illegal (however difficult it is to enforce), and rightfully so. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone whose affections aren't reciprocated and is feeling sad about it, my sympathy ends when they engage in unacceptable behaviour like this.
I am a reactionary on this one: I think the stigmatisation of deep love and persistent suitors is something modern society has gotten badly wrong, and is a symptom of safetyism and inauthenticity. Threats and physical attacks of course have to be off-limits (though even then, there used to be far more sympathy than there is now; note that Romeo and Paris literally fight a duel to the death over Juliet, and neither's intended as an unsympathetic character), but most of the other stuff you mention in many cases is a non-issue blown up by hysterical fear and in other cases is a mild annoyance that can be trivially dealt with by blocking the stalker's number.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
42m ago
See, to me there’s the “I hate people who do this” thing where everybody just dunks on whoever we’re talking about, calls them gross and disgusting, and tries to make them miserable. I think life is too short for that. And sure, there’s nothing to be gained by saying to a gay couple that they’re disgusting people, degenerates, and so on.
But the other side of tha5 is some bad behavior simply shouldn’t be normalized due to the knock on effects on society. The trans issues especially come with a lot of real, serious baggage. The WPATH files more or less show this, as does the literal explosion of kids under 15 or so suddenly deciding they’re trans and being given drugs. There might well be a case for “okay, fine, if you’re of legal age, you can do whatever with your genitalia and we’ll leave you alone for the most part.” I have reservations about restrooms and trans people being in positions of power over children. But I think for the most part, I’m like okay, this guy wearing a dress is 40 and shopping at Walmart, I don’t need to get out the pitchfork here, he’s not hurting anyone. I might not hire him to babysit, but beyond that, I think there’s something weird about people spending too much energy on it. Once the bad policies that open up the door to harm are closed, there’s not much to talk about here.
Folamh3
47m ago
I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
It's a real "there but for the grace of God" situation, isn't it. It's funny when you see street clashes between Proud Boys and Antifa, and for all the talk of this being a clash between a racist organisation and an antiracist organisation, both groups look about as racially diverse as rural Sweden, or in some cases the Proud Boys are more diverse than the Antifa guys.
I read somewhere (possibly in a review of The True Believer) that the number of literal Nazis (as in, members of the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s) who were previously communists is off the charts. I also read somewhere that in the UK in the 1980s, both far-right skinheads and antifa recruited from the same pool of talent: football hooligans, young frustrated men spoiling for a fight, who could easily be radicalised into one extremist ideology or the other (or even both in succession) if there was the possibility of getting to bust some heads with impunity in it. See also my post about how being generally dissatisfied with your life is a far better predictor for endorsing an extreme ideology than anything else.
Throwaway05
48m ago
"(public policy) The principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood."
It is not literally a fence.
reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood
aqouta
48m ago
My empathy for trans people is precisely why I find the entire phenomenon so impossible to look away from. I can find in myself some ability to reason myself into what they're claiming to be going through. I can imagine myself as a kid, not particularly popular and with plenty of angst, deciding that what is really wrong with me is my gender identity and clamping down on that idea. I am privileged to know what not doing that results in and it's a good life where I get over my angst. I fear for people who might trap themselves in a false understanding of the world that will lead them to living much worse lives than they could have led.
I know that memes are powerful enough to do this people. Memes can bend people into myrters, Jihadists, self immolators kamikaze pilots, and many other forms in service of the meme. Maybe the framing where I'm cis by default is true and they really are experiencing some extra sense that I am blind to. But I know, absolutely know, that given the right circumstances growing up I could have been made to think I was feeling that sense. I know, absolutely know, that if I had convinced myself of it I would be stubborn enough to cement it into my identity. Because of this I know that there is a boy somewhere that is going to sacrifice his health and exceptionally happy future to chase being a mere mimic of a woman. I see myself in him, I recognize that for the grace of god go I, and that breaks my heart.
Folamh3
51m ago
How big would the number have to be to justify the framing, in your opinion?
Celestial-body-NOS
🟦 All human beings are equal, **even when they aren't.**
52m ago
I dislike the continual minimizing/maximizing of windows and the break in flow of thought
I forgot that not everyone here is using a desktop browser. Would footnotes¹ bee a better alternative?
linking to a website instead of simply explaining in words what it is you yourself have intended in your post.
OK, I will try to explain it in words. "wow. very revenge plot. which caskete choose? argument much clever." is a description of the plot of The Merchant of Venice in the dialect associated with the 'doge' meme, for which Elon Musk has a particular fondness.
The Merchant of Venice is a play by William Shakespeare, containing the line "Thou calledst me dog before thou hadst a cause. But since I am a dog, beware my fangs.", meaning that Shylock was treated as villainous before he had done anything questionable, and therefore was not incentivised to be forgiving. (Act III, scene 3.) I was alluding to that line in the first part of my comment, in that Mr Musk was also treated as deplorable by the chattering classes prior to having thrown in his lot with the Trump campaign²; the spelling of 'doge' and 'fange' was an allusion to the same meme.
¹Like these.
²A comparison can also be made to the Dazexiang Uprising in late-3rd-century China, in which two officials realised three things:
-
The then-ruling dynasty imposed the death penalty for being late.
-
The then-ruling dynasty imposed the death penalty for rebellion.
-
The roads being impassable due to rain, they had no chance of arriving on time.
daguerrean
54m ago
If I'd been born ten or even five years later, dollars to donuts I'd be calling myself Lilith right now.
I know this feeling too. At the end of high school, around 2008 I had a friend confide in me his feelings of gender dysphoria (although he didn't word it that way, being before the whole transgender trend) thinking I shared them. Of course I didn't, but he must have taken my autistic personality traits to signal it. I wonder if others, like say antifa members, occasionally look at Proud Boys and recognize in them a shadow version of themselves.
Dean
54m ago
How are religious beliefs experienced differently?
A chaplain I knew once credited it as to experience the sublime in a way that changes your perspective afterwards on the world.
'Sublime' is a word that's often used as just another synonym for quality in art, but it can mean more than just 'pretty.' Something sublime is something that strikes one with awe- not simply being impressed, but the much more intense feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear and wonder. Once you experience it, you are forever changed, because while your feeling on the thing may change afterwards, the reverence / respect / fear / wonder changes how you see the relation of things.
This is not, to be clear, a 'solely' religious experience. It's a somewhat common attestation of astronauts who go into space and look down on the earth- seeing how small their home countries are puts the their formerly massive worlds into a new perspective. Astronauts, despite coming from often committed career professional paths of government cultures, often have a reputation for being more post-nationalist/more internationalist, not because they don't care about their countries but because their paradigm is shifted by the scale perception and how they view their homelands. That sense of being taken out of your previous perception paradigm and thrust into another has other analogs as well, often when dealing with items of scale- some people get put into awe by nature, or by mega-engineering, or by diving deep into conceptually massive items.
The point here isn't 'what' causes your perception shift, but rather that you have one, and what that means going forward. Just as an astronaut is never going to look at earth the same way again even when they return, or an environmentalist struck by the grandeur of nature will never be as impressed by industrial output, the very way people connect the world together has changed in a way that is not 'merely' a choice.
You do not choose to undergo the sublime experience (you can go look at something other people say is sublime and feel nothing), but likewise when you do experience the sublime you do not 'choose' to let it change you- instead, you are the one changed, because that is part of what strikes the reverence / respect / fear. And after that sort of experience, well... you can try to argue with a converted environmentalist that industrialization is good, and they might be swayed by specific arguments that industrialization may be a net positive for society despite it's harm to nature, but the underlying paradigms of how they put the world together has changed. You can't really argue people out of that any more than you can argue them out of their own visual perception.
Religion is a broad set of dynamics and relations, but the sublime religious experience is broad enough / shared enough that people who have experienced it can find enough of each other to validate and further the beliefs, in a similar sense that you and I both know what 'love' is as an experience despite not knowing eachother or eachother's experiences. For those touched by the sublime, something similar exists, and through it the sense of solidarity that the sublime experience, rather than being purely personal, is a shared sense of something else- and that something else is God, with all the fear / wonder / awe / reverence that implies.
quiet_NaN
56m ago
The justice system is not designed to handle prosecutors actively trying to thwart punishment of criminals. The solution here seems not to be to add epicycles and do retrials with special prosecutors, but to not re-elect prosecutors who offer sweet-heart plea deals. Oh, wait:
Foxx won a second term even after Smollett’s case became a topic of national outcry.
If her electorate is happy with her, then there is little one can do, I guess.
UwU
58m ago
Some people purporting to be trans could just be using it to legitimize their cross-dressing fetish, but it’s not a significant enough number to justify the framing, and definitely not in the Sarah McBride case to justify the framing in this circumstance.
Most "trans women" are autogynephiles.
If someone showed me a study concluding that "most men are autogynephiles," I wouldn't have any difficulty believing it. I have seen several studies suggesting that a significant percentage of "straight" men find male genitalia sexually arousing. There is also quite a lot of evidence that men are extremely sexually adaptable, i.e. will have sex with anything, if necessary for release--historical accounts of homosexuality at sea or on long military campaigns contribute much to this perception, but also further edge cases like the cross-cultural recurrence of bestiality. So I'm not sure where arguments like this really get you.
I am sympathetic to "empathy" arguments. I gain nothing, personally, through cruelty to others. However "be nice" cannot possibly mean "always affirm that what others are doing is good for them and/or for society." You say:
So anyway, next time you see some dude in a dress, with long hair and breasts but a face and voice obviously male despite his best efforts, think about what kind of emotions must have driven him to that place, and have a little empathy.
This seems fair, but what is the actionable content of that empathy? When I see a homeless person passed out in the street, filthy, half naked, and clearly stoned out of his mind, surely the empathetic response is not, "aw, look at that guy living his best life. It's not what I would choose, but hey--different strokes for different folks!" Similarly, if I see a man wearing a dress, I'm unlikely to say anything to him about it--but if I see a man walking into a ladies' changing room, I might quite reflexively say, "Hey, do you know that's the ladies' room?" So: what should I do if I see a man in a dress walking into a ladies' changing room? Do I try to help him the way I would try to help any man making that mistake, or do I exempt him from the care I normally afford to others, to help them avoid embarrassing and possibly dangerous errors?
("How do you know he's a man!?" Well, if a man in a dress really looks like a woman, then it would not occur to me to stop him from entering the ladies' room. It's true that I am not always a perfect judge of an individual's sex, but I generally do not permit my own fallibility to stop me from helping others when it seems warranted to do so, and see no reason to deviate from that policy in response to the existence of edge cases.)
I have no reason to defend moralizing busybodies who make a hobby of policing even the tiniest of deviations from the social status quo. But I think there are many reasons to, politely but firmly, refuse to go along with trans advocacy of this kind. For one thing, I suspect that for every person with serious gender dysphoria, there are at least dozens of people whose lives will be made worse by indulging trans advocacy--for example, by giving edge cases a nudge to behave in ways that will actually make their lives worse, than if they had just not. When I read that "28.5% of Gen Z women and 10.6% of Gen Z men identify as LGBTQ+," but in 1992 "3.2% of men and 1.6% of women aged 18–49 identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual," I find it very unlikely that this is the result of people being more free to behave as their "true selves." Rather, that looks to me like a serious mental health crisis born of a toxic memetic environment. That is: it looks like social contagion. How does one treat social contagion? I don't know, but I feel pretty confident that acting as if there is just nothing wrong or bad or sad or regrettable or even worth mentioning about transsexuality is the opposite of helping.
Not accidentally, your entire post could just as easily have been written about drug addicts, schizophrenics, preppers, Nickelback fans... people like what they like. Tautologically! People do what they do. I don't think there's any reason to be cruel to any of those people. I think it's a better world where we are all kind, and thoughtful, and polite, and treat others with humanity and respect. But that doesn't free us from the hard work of making value judgments, and finding ways to act on those judgments. There is a large-breasted man I see on my walks, sometimes. I have never commented on the fact that he looks like an especially tasteless parody of a woman; I'm pretty sure he knows, and I suspect it's even deliberate. There is also an anorexic woman I see on my walks, sometimes, and I don't comment on her obvious mental issues, either. But if either of them were a family member or particularly close friend--I would definitely comment, and it wouldn't be to affirm the validity or goodness of their choices.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1hr ago
Agreed. I also prefer two spaces of indentation to four, four is just such a waste of space for (imo) no readability benefit.
07mk
1hr ago
I actually recall watching this film back when I was a teenager, under the belief that it would feature Jennifer Love Hewitt running on a treadmill with just a bra on top (I learned an important lesson at that point that movie studios lie in their marketing). Was a decently funny comedy with its share of laughs, otherwise.
But your question about the fraud reminds me of the real-life fraud conviction in Japan earlier this year of a "sugar baby" who baited lonely men into giving her money. I recall learning of the details of her scam and also wondering why that was illegal, since there was no business transaction, not even implicitly. There was no contract, no sales, no storefront, no promises, nothing of the sort. It seemed akin to a college student asking his parents for money to buy books with the plan to spend it on beer (obviously parent-child relationship is different from this, but also, I don't know why the law would treat it differently). IANAL so I have no idea if I'm just not well versed enough at fraud law, or if Japanese law is different from American.
ControlsFreak
1hr ago
That is later then when the fence was erected. What information am I lacking concerning the how/why of the fence being erected?
To clarify, I'm not saying that obsessively texting or calling someone should be illegal, and it's rarely more than an annoyance for the person at the receiving end. But I also think that pestering or bothering someone is bad behaviour, and that when the object of your affection has made it perfectly clear they aren't interested, you should respect that. I'd put on the same level as ghosting someone: obviously not calling for it to be banned (how could it?), but I consider it inconsiderate and disrespectful unless proven otherwise.
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