Politics/Slapfights - Ancient history to modern day!

[Ragabul]

What is "American" these days, on that note? I've been puzzling it over the last week.

This is debatable obviously but what I meant when I said it was something like "radical individualism" with individualism defined by self-actualization and with a huge part of self-actualization being based in ostentatious consumption choices and various kinds of social performance.

This is as American as apple pie. It was more localized in the past but arguably not much more tempered. Alexis de Tocqueville was already writing about it 200 years ago.

Given a choice, most immigrant children end up embracing Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, American style consumption, American pop culture, and the Culture of Narcissism over whatever rules their parents' traditions might have sought to enforce on them. (They do keep the tasty food and often holidays).

This is a pretty negative presentation, but a lot of what makes the country great comes from this as well. It's a very sharp double-edged sword.

Another way of looking at this problem is that many of the cultural constraints that kept some of the excesses of this in check have severely eroded in the last few decades and now we are left with mostly the bad and less of the good.

*Edit* Another thing that has maintained and been re-enforced by immigrants (who have mostly come here to work) is the Protestant work ethic and a temperamental belief in "hard work." This one has gotten pummeled in more recent years, but it's still around. This is really just a subset of the overarching "you can do anything if just put your mind to it" ethos that is still very much expressed. Obama won with the slogan "Yes, We Can!" for god's sake. It's just the liberal expression of this is now something like "You can be a revolutionary prophet who finally upends injustice!" rather than standard work ethic expression which was more like "you can start your own business and make a lot of money."

[Ragabul]

A while back I realized I was really stupid about understanding Russian history and set out to try to get not-stupid on the topic. I'm thinking I'm due for something similar with China. There's a lot of "conflict with China" talk in recent days and I'm uncomfortable how hard it is for me to tell who is talking sense and who is full of shit.

On that note, a couple of essays that seem to both be making very good points, but who knows really?

Welcome to the Decade of Concern (About why if China is likely to attack Taiwan, the next 10 years are probably when they will do it).

And not completely disputing that but tempering it:

Don't Help China by Hyping Risk of War Over Taiwan

[Vol]

This is debatable obviously but what I meant when I said it was something like "radical individualism" with individualism defined by self-actualization and with a huge part of self-actualization being based in ostentatious consumption choices and various kinds of social performance.

Let's go with this then. It's largely true, and there's no more specific set of coherent cultural traits that come to mind.

Given a choice, most immigrant children end up embracing Moralistic Therapeutic Deism

It's better than nothing. Nihilism is caustic and very few people can live an entire life pretending to have meaning ex nihilo. A sort of natural moralistic deism at least gives a foundation to build on. Gives you little else but that, granted, and the appeal comes from the deconstruction of all the matured, comprehensive theologies, such that you're not required to deal with these difficult, painful questions about truth and reality and judgement. McMorality without the utter despair.

Another way of looking at this problem is that many of the cultural constraints that kept some of the excesses of this in check have severely eroded in the last few decades and now we are left with mostly the bad and less of the good.

Funnily enough, the incels have started moving into proper academic research of their plight. Some of their better articles, cited with actual studies, have begun to build a case against the perceived significant rise in Chad-harems (80/20 rule applied to a hypergamous society), and rather that there is a surge in the number of men who never begin to have relationships/sex (Racial disparity is interesting, Asian men are the most afflicted by far). While everyone else remains more or less as promiscuous as they've been in recent history, and only those at the margins are engaging in hyper-sexual behavior (Chads, Tinder thots), with a vague affinity for casual polygamy (or loss of serious monogamy) among younger people. And virginity loss/relationship formation in general is taking place slightly _later_ than it has. From the data in the article, there's been a shift from the vast majority (75%) of 12th graders being non-virgins in our parent's generation to those milestone occurring more during college.

So a possible extrapolation being that while top-down subversive messaging from entertainment/the usual sort, and bottom-up enjoyment of outliers, has made hypersexual weirdos a very large presence (The wet pussy song, Tinder, excessive porn use, etc.), it has had little observable effect on mean behavior, if not been somewhat counterproductive. I mean, it's still _bad_ that a growing amount of men are unable/unwilling to ever, or continue to, find romantic partners, both for them and the logical consequence for women. That's a big problem that has no obvious solution, much less one that can be retroactively applied to broken men. But it implies there's a natural equilibrium that's been overshot and/or that the lingering cultural constraints still have power despite the push to void them.

[Ragabul]

Inasmuch as those constraints were largely market constraints (in literal markets like the financial markets and in figurative ones like the sexual market), it makes sense that most markets are now suffering from the kinds of ailments you get with lots of unbridled "free trade." Namely, the entire market starts skewing toward the noisiest, most powerful, and most frequent users of the market even if they are an overall minority of people who use that market. The put upon majority might not have changed their personal tastes and constraints much, but the entire market gets skewed anyway. For the sexual market, I have little doubt that means that online markets in particular gets heavily skewed towards the preferences of the hypersexual.

[Vol]

Re: Taiwan - I can only speak about the nature of the relationship in the aftermath of WW2, but while the PRC absolutely wanted to stomp out the exiled Kuomintang and consolidate the island, the effort was never really worth it during Mao's days. And the RoC obviously had no means of force projection. So both sides would saber rattle to get the USA to pay attention and offer them both aid to prevent a war from breaking out, as despite utterly betraying the RoC based on the CIA taking Chicom propaganda literally, then selling out their UN seat, we technically had a treaty to protect them from aggression which was useful to needle the PRC. From what I recall of the books I've read (so far) on Maoist China, there was never a serious build up or invasion planned, only skirmishes and even some mutual kabuki theatre, e.g., "Don't come to school Thursday."

Re: Relationship marketplace - Which makes the increased number of people getting nothing out of a freer market, with exponentially more options, so interesting. The constraints more or less endure, the hypersexual distort the perception, and the bottom third of men achieve nothing. So it seems like the purely theoretical potential for a man of certain quality causes a larger culling. Can't make people more libertine necessarily (In a woman gated sexual paradigm), but can convince them they can do better than they'd otherwise settle for, thus making the guys who've always been in the gutter considerably more dejected.

[Sinekein]

That power dynamic has been functional for millennia, in all times and places. One of economic equality, or male inferiority, is relatively brand new, and has not demonstrated sustainability. So is there a definitive point where you would say women pursuing power/wealth has become maladaptive?

If your criteria to demonstrate that something is functional is how long it has lasted, then you cannot toss something aside because "we tried it for 15 years, I'm not convinced yet". As far as I know, "male inferiority" has not brought the end of the civilization as we know it.

I'd go so far as to say the basic concept is rooted in consistent survival success, which society had always reflected. Obviously, it can become rotten, but I'm not seeing a particularly healthy outcome from people who practice modern conventions either. Mental health issues appears to be significantly higher in the subset of people who are least likely to engage in traditional gender roles. If that's at all possibly demonstrable, and not mostly attributable to differences in reporting/seeking help, then it becomes untenable to morally advocate _for_ it.

And I personally know several couples in which Mrs ears more than Mr, and in which Mr has agreed to put his career on hold for a while because Mrs got a great job opportunity. So if you want healthy outcomes, just seriously look for these, you will find a ton of examples.

As for your "mental health issues" thing, it might have to do with the fact that traditional gender roles are intertwined with hiding your mental health issues. In the "good nuclear family", if the lady is unhappy or abused, she will keep it to herself because that's private and you have to project the image of a healthy family - long sleeves and the like. If sir is the victim of abuse - and that most definitely happens - he will never share it because it is humiliating to admit to abuse when you're a big strong man. As a whole, people who hold conservative views are waaaay more ashamed to seek mental help. Even though there's absolutely no reason to. I mean, I'm having regular sessions with a psychologist right now, like I did three years ago when I was in another stressful personal situation. It can be incredibly helpful to get better, but many won't even consider it - men in particular - because they equate it to showing weakness and imperfection, and we can't have that.

In theory, yes, the lack of environmental pressures and surplus of economic options should enable us to act more freely and not be compelled to early marriage/babymaking, and have more configurations for that time of life if it ever occurs. In practice, it appears there's a carrying capacity. In a cultural void, I doubt this would be an issue, as people would gravitate towards mean behavior, but there's active pressure for little girls to behave specifically contrary to how their successful ancestors did. It's all untested theory that doesn't appear to be producing positive results.

Well, first, the "successful ancestors" of these little girls were likely women who did what their husbands told them to, so how successful that is is really in the eye of the beholder and I won't begrudge those who think that it is incredibly narrow as far as life perspectives go.

Second, the "specifically contrary" part - again, maybe they're loud, but whoever tries to force girls to behave like boys and vice versa represents an extremely tiny minority. I've yet to experience anything or anyone trying to force girls to play football (or soccer as you call it) while guys take up classical dancing. Thing is, nowadays, women's football is displayed way more prominently, whether it is at club or international level. So everyone is exposed to women playing football, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, it led to more little girls wanting to do it too.

No one put a knife under their throat and said "kick that ball or die". And there still are hundreds of thousands of girls taking up "traditionally feminine" activities - dancing, gymnastics, etc - without ever being publicly shamed because "they're not crossing gender boundaries" or some other nonsense.

It's really just society extending the "you can be whatever you want to be" idea that is shown to all little boys since forever, to little girls too. I highly doubt this will have a negative impact on society as a whole.

And if you want to see what girls prefer, watch Persepolis. It's about a young girl, Marjane Satrapi, growing up in Tehran, who was 10 when the Islamist took power and reduced women to mere objects. Watch it, and tell me that "traditional gender roles" are really beneficial to society as a whole.

[Vol]

Wanted to address this post in a more proper topic, as I was thinking about it while painting doorframes earlier.

I have no way to determine if the universe *knows* things, but if it doesn't, then speaking of it being omnipotent and omniscient becomes nonsensical. Now this doesn't answer the question if humans can attain this state themselves. I think the answer is fairly obviously no. I'm also a skeptic of the sideline around this in the form of the Tech Singularity but as this is the book discussion thread and not the random philosophical musing thread, I'll leave off that until somebody actually posts a book about it.

I'm coming at this from a (very informal) modal perspective.

If God exists, knowledge exists.
If God does not exist, knowledge potentially exists.
If knowledge does not exist, go directly to nihilistic hedonism.
If knowledge does exist, and God does not, it must be either physical (Specific arrangements of atoms in our brains) or metaphysical (The concept of "2" and "justice" and "squares" existed independent of any minds capable of perceiving them).
If knowledge is metaphysical, then physicalism is untenable as the non-physical exists, and Aquinas pops back up.
If knowledge is physical, and all that exists is physical, and the universe is all that exists, then all possible knowledge is physically represented by every mind capable of knowledge in summation.

So my perspective is that omniscience is either a facet of an all knowing being, which makes it simple to conceptualize as us being clever apes gifted with a spark of divinity, or, knowledge is fundamentally an arrangement of atoms in the brains of certain creatures, and the sum total of all those configurations is therefore all possible knowledge, and thus omniscience via physicalism. It would be a significantly more limited meaning of the term, being the product of blind, idiot chance instead of a transcendental being, but would still encapsulate the concept "knowing all things possible to know". And thus the same argument for omnipotence as well. Technically, you could have an atheist that claims metaphysical truths still exist, but that'd be bizarre.

An example, as I stare at a new bottle of this vinegar-free hot sauce I bought (They use bourbon as the preservative). No buffalo wing ever existed before someone made one. Without God, if no one ever made a buffalo wing, the knowledge of a buffalo wing never exists, even if all the foundational knowledge does. So if in Buffalo, NY, someone deep fries a chicken wing, tosses it in hot sauce, and serves it with celery and bleu cheese, but never calls it a "buffalo wing," then in the omniscience of the physical universe, there is no buffalo wing. Whereas with a God, buffalo wings innately exist as potential knowledge, regardless of physical expression. As do manchester wings and kyoto wings, and any other possible way they might have been created and named. Omniscience all the same, far more narrow.

The trait "immortal" as a synonym for "eternal" is the only thing that requires no epistemological grounding and may actually apply to the universe. (Though even this is really dubious outside of some very exotic and thus far utterly unbacked by any particular material evidence forms of multiverse theory).

The trick with skepticism is that you never need to assert something, which makes you invulnerable. But greater minds than us have used logic to back them into corners.

That reality exists requires an explanation, and if you deny a creator, fair enough. The consequence is that the universe must therefore be eternal and uncaused, or that something that led to its creation is. You can shift around the source, multiverse, Big Crunch, quantum foam, but there has to be a bedrock of eternal and uncaused to avoid an infinite regress. Unless our perception of how reality actually works is just completely wrong because of our evolutionary programming, which would then void the possibility of that conclusion being correct.

The issue being, that we _require_ something that is eternal and uncaused to possibly explain existence as we know of it, and if we should find that, then that's just the deist God by a different name.

I guess I don't see how fulfilling a preordained role immediately reduces one to zombification. Especially when the role is so open-ended and varied as what "stewards of the Earth" likely entails and if you believe free will is a thing. Free will doesn't necessarily mean you get to choose between two equally nice paths. Sometimes it's just the right to choose between the good choice and the stupid choice. That's what the "savage" in Brave New World is really saying to Mustapha Mond. ("You are just insisting on your right to be unhappy.") He is not saying he wants to choose unhappiness. He is saying he wants free will even if it may end with his choosing the stupid thing.

We have the ability to reject what our biology means mentally (I'll eat ice cream all day, dammit!) even if we can't change the consequences this has on our biology.

Oh, not that It _does_ entail we're p-zombies, but that it means there is no meaningful distinction. I know I exist, therefore I am not a p-zombie. You know you exist. We cannot know that the other person actually exists, for obvious reasons. The p-zombie is an automaton that appears fully human by any physical test we could run on it.

Without some sort of extra spark for real people to differentiate them from a p-zombie, then what is the difference? The body and behavior is entirely the same. The only non-metaphysical explanation is a scientist of the gaps argument, that for our level of thinking to be physically possible, an emergent consciousness illusion that tricks itself into believing it has any autonomy is necessary. Otherwise, the distinction between us and p-zombies could only be that we're aware of our existence, which they are not, but we have no more capability to not be an automaton than they are, and our illusion of choice is a blissful deceit to spare us from 80+ years of horror.

[Sinekein]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7aWz8q_IM4&ab_channel=LindsayEllis

It's about cancel culture and why Twitter is the worst thing in the entire world.

[Ragabul]

It's hard for me to watch videos. I'm just very text based for whatever reason but I have done 20 minutes and it's interesting enough I'll do some more later.

One immediate point in the "white nonsense" section. She attributes the overwhelming bulk of this stuff to progressive white people (which is actually documented), but she assumes it's mostly understandable "pressure to demonstrate they are the good guys in the horrible intrinsic shittiness of the world and genuine outrage at how horrible the world is." To be really blunt, I think this is horseshit. It's about maintaining a pecking order. It's mostly heavily educated, media/writing/ideas based white people who do this and they are doing it to puff their own brands largely for employment and social status reasons because they are under draconian pressure to make their $200,000 debt from some Ivy League school in journalism mean something.

From another "canceled" writer (who legit did something *really* shitty and didn't just post dumb tweets): It's All Just Displacement

And to keep beating the C. S. Lewis drum, a take on this phenomenon in general: The Inner Ring

Twitter is a bunch of really entitled white people (and some adjacent POC) who desperately believe they should be in the upper social classes (The Inner Ring) and who desperately and consistently try to prove their bonafides in that Ring by pushing all the plebian aspirants and posers out. It's the same impulse as hazing. "*I* got in the frat now and I will prove I'm in it by inflicting misery on you because you aren't).

This is why the people who most often get targeted for canceling aren't actually conservatives but standard liberals and progressives. These can be counted on to beg forgiveness and abase themselves. Conservatives usually have to do something truly egregious to get cancelled (which only works when they are out and out deplatformed by the tech companies themselves). Shaming tactics don't work on them because they aren't trying to get into the progressive Inner Ring.

*Edit* Right wing trolls can totally use this dynamic against progressives and do. Hence her "Diet Nazis."

*Second Edit* She does get into how this is largely performance later in the video.

[Sinekein]

To be really blunt, I think this is horseshit. It's about maintaining a pecking order. It's mostly heavily educated, media/writing/ideas based white people who do this and they are doing it to puff their own brands largely for employment and social status reasons because they are under draconian pressure to make their $200,000 debt from some Ivy League school in journalism mean something.

At the end of the video - after the longest, central part where she details the various "problematic online things" some people have been digging (while noting the irony of the woke left reusing lists that had been compiled for years by Gamergaters who have been hating on her for much longer) - she comes back to that topic and while she does not go into a class analysis of Twitter users, she is less generous in her description of the various cancellers, and mentions the mob mentality that comes down to feeling good when shaming pointing someone out. And the fact that nowadays cancelling someone is a great way to gain social points.

She also directly adresses the apparent discrepancy in that "cancelled" people often come from the left, instead of the right, at the end of the video. Basically, she assumes that A) progressives are more likely to be ashamed of being called a Xist or a Xphobe than conservatives and B) the displays of shame are what Twitter is all about, it gives opportunity for witty one-liners where you exhibit your moral superiority over your victim, kind of like that Game of Thrones scene with Cersei.

I quite like her approach here, because to me it sums up how much crap is artificially created by ignoring context and assuming whatever we want to assume to fit a narrative. And why Twitter and its 280 signs is just the worst in that regard, even though social media as a whole are not great to begin with.

I do think she is sometimes being a bit too apologetic in the middle part when she goes into detail about her "past sins", because some of these should not be triggers. Like, being called out for saying that Moses committed a genocide in the Exodus book (and by extension in the Prince of Egypt) because it is insensitive to link Jewish people and the word "genocide" - that should not be a thing, when you exterminate all the kids of a nation, you are committing a genocide, I don't see what other word can be used. Had she used Shoah, yeah, I would have said "Yikes", but that was not the case.

But overall it's been enlightening to me because while I knew it was an issue, I had not realized how low the bar was nowadays for something to be called "cancel-worthy". I know that I have had tendencies to embrace "social causes" because they looked good on paper without really looking in the details - I think I'm getting better - and I kinda understand how people can go from there to foaming at the mouth when reading tweets than can be twisted into looking Xist or Xphobic.

On a sidenote, I find it funny that someone that I think I can safely call "more conservative than me" is bringing a Bourdieu-like, class analysis on such a topic.

[Ragabul]

I did end watching most of the rest of it and saw that she addressed this at the end. As a side note, I have seen some of her friend Natalie's (ContraPoints who was cancelled for something equally dumb) stuff before and read interviews and thought there were some good takes there.

I'm actually really receptive to class analysis. (There is an entire subspecies of conservative who is incidentally. They just have no establishment or popular power and mostly spend all their time reading and writing pretentious magazines with tiny readerships).

I'm not receptive to core Marxist analysis because Marxism in its pure form is too reductionist and treats many things as "scientific" fact when there is either no real evidence for it or when it's been demonstrated to be false. Antiracism as a political ideology is equally reductionist in this way.

For all that I rag on "cultural Marxism" there is an underlying truth to the reality that a *huge* percentage of human experience comes down to jockeying over social positions in a class/race/gender based hierarchy. And that those hierarchies are bullshit in a huge number of ways and that they sow misery in all aspects of people's lives, public and private.

In many ways, the fundamental conservative/liberal impasse is that the liberal wants to tear down those hierarchies and allow people to live as authentic individuals free from arbitrary constraints and the conservative thinks that some hierarchy (and therefore difference in social status) is necessary or at the very least unavoidable. That can lead to simple stick-in-the-mudism whereby you defend the status quo by default no matter how horrible the status quo is. Or you can try to make the hierarchy better.

I guess I'm a "liberal" conservative in that sense. We *need* hierarchy but I see no reason not to continuously strive to try to make the hierarchy suck less.

I try not to get worked up about D list celebrities sniping each other over stuff like this. I get much more concerned when I hear about such stuff at universities and big name news organizations and publishing houses and such. People who are supposed to be the subject matter experts who sort out truth from bullshit for the lay people.

But...

One reason everybody obsesses about pop culture level culture war issues is because people instinctively understand how much culture matters.

*Edit* Another core difference could be described as liberals tend to have what C. S. Lewis called "chronological snobbery" which is a tendency to think things/ideas/people in the past were worse than things today for no reason except they are old and conservatives tend to romanticize the past.

My stance is more like "the future is theoretical and the past is actual and therefore it makes more sense to look at how things have *actually* happened and learn from that rather than make hopeful guesses based on an imaginary future."

[Ragabul]

*stuff about knowledge*

You could define aggregate knowledge in this way, but I would still maintain that it's a categorical difference. One is merely taxonomic. "Here is an aggregated clump of all the things brains know that I happen to have put in a pile for the purpose of convenience of definition and classification." The other is all knowledge, non-aggregated but holistic, contained in one person who is aware he knows it all and actively uses it all in totality and in concert.

That reality exists requires an explanation, and if you deny a creator, fair enough. The consequence is that the universe must therefore be eternal and uncaused, or that something that led to its creation is. You can shift around the source, multiverse, Big Crunch, quantum foam, but there has to be a bedrock of eternal and uncaused to avoid an infinite regress. Unless our perception of how reality actually works is just completely wrong because of our evolutionary programming, which would then void the possibility of that conclusion being correct.

The issue being, that we _require_ something that is eternal and uncaused to possibly explain existence as we know of it, and if we should find that, then that's just the deist God by a different name.

Since I'm a theist I largely buy this argument and it is the single greatest argument for a creator entity.

Oh, not that It _does_ entail we're p-zombies, but that it means there is no meaningful distinction. I know I exist, therefore I am not a p-zombie. You know you exist. We cannot know that the other person actually exists, for obvious reasons. The p-zombie is an automaton that appears fully human by any physical test we could run on it.

Without some sort of extra spark for real people to differentiate them from a p-zombie, then what is the difference? The body and behavior is entirely the same. The only non-metaphysical explanation is a scientist of the gaps argument, that for our level of thinking to be physically possible, an emergent consciousness illusion that tricks itself into believing it has any autonomy is necessary. Otherwise, the distinction between us and p-zombies could only be that we're aware of our existence, which they are not, but we have no more capability to not be an automaton than they are, and our illusion of choice is a blissful deceit to spare us from 80+ years of horror.

I'll get out of the lofty hoity-toity land of metaphysics here and into the weeds of Christian theology/doctrine but it's the best way to answer this I can think of. Christian doctrine holds that you are not *you* in a truly autonomous sense. Your body is space God is renting to you. Since the temple was destroyed and the New Testament supplanted the Old Testament, the spirit of God (the Holy Spirit) no longer resides in the Ark and the Holy of Holies but in your body. You are a temple. You were created with a God shaped hole in you and your free will consists in nothing but a choice to let God into the God shaped hole or to try vainly to fill it with other things that won't work. This is heavily preordained and any choice but one will produce misery and malfunction.

Incidentally this is why Christian religious conservatives care so much about what humans do with their bodies sexually. It is literally a temple of God in Christian doctrine. Seventh Day Adventists are even more scrupulous about this and very fastidious about diet and exercise and are so statistically one of the healthiest demographic groups around.

1 Corinthians 6

18Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body. 19Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; 20you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your bodies.

I guess I just don't see how the metaphysical explanation there puts you any less on destiny rails. Destiny rails seems like a foregone conclusion. The only choice we seem to have is to accept our human nature or reject it and live in denial and misery.

Eastern religions seem to all say similar things. "Life is suffering. Accept it. Stop trying to fight it."

This is alarming on many levels because it does mean nothing less than the sacrifice of the self. For yet more C. S. Lewis, Aslan (the God stand-in in the Chronicles of Narnia) is described as "Good But Terrible." That is he is Perfection Incarnate but his Perfection and the price it demands of you is terrifying. "He is not a Tame Lion" "I am a jealous God."

[Vol]

If your criteria to demonstrate that something is functional is how long it has lasted, then you cannot toss something aside because "we tried it for 15 years, I'm not convinced yet". As far as I know, "male inferiority" has not brought the end of the civilization as we know it.

That's true. It's possible all these negative trends will plateau and reverse to a sustainable level. There is no reason to believe it will, but it's not impossible.

As for your "mental health issues" thing, it might have to do with the fact that traditional gender roles are intertwined with hiding your mental health issues. In the "good nuclear family", if the lady is unhappy or abused, she will keep it to herself because that's private and you have to project the image of a healthy family - long sleeves and the like. If sir is the victim of abuse - and that most definitely happens - he will never share it because it is humiliating to admit to abuse when you're a big strong man. As a whole, people who hold conservative views are waaaay more ashamed to seek mental help. Even though there's absolutely no reason to. I mean, I'm having regular sessions with a psychologist right now, like I did three years ago when I was in another stressful personal situation. It can be incredibly helpful to get better, but many won't even consider it - men in particular - because they equate it to showing weakness and imperfection, and we can't have that.

The issue being that there is no possible way to get useful data on what people a century ago thought in a modern context. We do have the data from the modern context, in which the least traditional women report being told they have a mental illness at extremely high rates, but that's only a correlation. However, we do know that despite never having been more wealthy, independent, and leveraged into positions of power, the metrics of happiness are down across the board (for American women). Suicide, addiction, obesity, mental illness, loneliness, etc. If we accept that this is true, women have never been better off, and yet, they're progressively worse off, then what conclusion can be drawn _but_ that the underlying change is to blame?

Well, first, the "successful ancestors" of these little girls were likely women who did what their husbands told them to, so how successful that is is really in the eye of the beholder and I won't begrudge those who think that it is incredibly narrow as far as life perspectives go.

Oh, yes, far more narrow. But, potentially, intrinsically more fulfilling. If it's demonstrable, by empirical study, that those women were/are in fact more fulfilled and happy as a whole, is it bad to raise girls to the contrary?

Second, the "specifically contrary" part - again, maybe they're loud, but whoever tries to force girls to behave like boys and vice versa represents an extremely tiny minority. I've yet to experience anything or anyone trying to force girls to play football (or soccer as you call it) while guys take up classical dancing. Thing is, nowadays, women's football is displayed way more prominently, whether it is at club or international level. So everyone is exposed to women playing football, and to the surprise of absolutely no one, it led to more little girls wanting to do it too.

Actually, I'll concede I'm working from a more biased perception of the dominant culture, because I refuse to engage in it as much as possible. What I know is from osmosis and glimpses. So to clarify, little girls are being raised to not become their grandmothers (or great grandmothers at this point). It's entirely geared to mold them into specifically _not that_. That does not make them into boys, because boys are being groomed into their own future miseries. But we've tossed the baby out with the bathwater, whatever "good" was part of that simpler, constrained life was discarded as well. Instead, it's all been replaced with pure academic theory and politics. This has caused good and bad, but without the foundation of evolving from lived experiences.

I'm reminded of a comic strip I can't seem to find. First panel, great grandmother, gaggle of kids, European peasant, pregnant. Second panel, grandmother, 4 or so kids, suburbs. Third panel, mother, one son, walking in a park. Fourth panel, boy is now a transsexual, hugging a cat in a city apartment. I thought it summed up the state of the modern west pretty well.

[Sinekein]

Actually, I'll concede I'm working from a more biased perception of the dominant culture, because I refuse to engage in it as much as possible. What I know is from osmosis and glimpses. So to clarify, little girls are being raised to not become their grandmothers (or great grandmothers at this point). It's entirely geared to mold them into specifically _not that_. That does not make them into boys, because boys are being groomed into their own future miseries. But we've tossed the baby out with the bathwater, whatever "good" was part of that simpler, constrained life was discarded as well. Instead, it's all been replaced with pure academic theory and politics. This has caused good and bad, but without the foundation of evolving from lived experiences.

I'm reminded of a comic strip I can't seem to find. First panel, great grandmother, gaggle of kids, European peasant, pregnant. Second panel, grandmother, 4 or so kids, suburbs. Third panel, mother, one son, walking in a park. Fourth panel, boy is now a transsexual, hugging a cat in a city apartment. I thought it summed up the state of the modern west pretty well.

Maybe it is because some "ultra-progressive" scholars are being extremely vocal in the US. Or because medias talk about them a lot so as not to beaccused of silencing them - or because they want to easily buy a liberal-cred.

But as I work with teenagers, I do not see an incredibly fast shift towards a disappearance of gender as a whole. I'm teaching in a suburb high school, one where the vast majority of kids are not white, to put it simply (and those that are mostly come from either Romania or the Balkans). I think that over 180 kids I have this year, maybe 5 are white kids with "French names".

And since most of those I have are in their last year before Uni, we have to talk about their future studies. And you can still clearly see a bias - I have next to no girls interested in engineering, and only 1 boy who thought that maybe he'd become a nurse. I also have one girl who absolutely wants to be a PE teacher or a coach.

But the main difference with 10 years ago is that the kids with career choices that don't suit their gender are not looked at weirdly. It's just another possibility for them, and you get a minority that doesn't have to put up with either a career that they don't want because "that's what boys/girls do", or with looks of contempt for being a boy/girl in a girl's/boy's world.

Not to say that sexism has been solved of course, but for me, that is a net improvement. I don't think anything has been lost, I have yet to see a girl being shamed for preferring a "traditionally feminine career", or for wanting to be a stay-at-home mom. In that last case, there might be debates about women who are never given the opportunity or hope to be anything else than that - but then the finger is not pointed at them, but at the systemic causes of it happening.

[Alienmorph]

It's about cancel culture and why Twitter is the worst thing in the entire world.

A long ass way to say "I now realize that Cancel Culture is bad, because they came after me."

People have been trying to speaking against this whole mess for years, warning about how much of a slippery slope it was. Most of them got labelled as "alt-right trolls" and got cancelled first and faster than those who staid quiet. Now the big orange boogeyman is gone, big corporations are too scared of the cancel mob to NOT act p.c. as much as they can, at least in public, and so the beast has started to eat itself. I would almost call it poetic justice, if it wasn't for all the damage it caused and it's still gonna cause, probably for many years. I will cherish the day we can stop pretending there's anything liberal or progressive about cancel culture and the thin-skinned extremists that practice it.

Even so, I do feel a bit sorry for her, because while she did get chummy with a lot of stupid people (I mean AFTER leaving the Channel Awesome bunch) who also happily fueled the Twitter beast, Lindsay Ellis is still miles better than a lot of self proclaimed "left-wing intellectuals". The video itself is a good example of how, even when she has personal bias or involvement, she still can tackle a topic better than a lot of other people.

[Vol]

Since I'm a theist I largely buy this argument and it is the single greatest argument for a creator entity.

Teleological is a strong supplement as well. Unless there is a multiverse, or some other reason that our universe has such tightly tuned (or through sheer chance if you will) cosmological constants. The science and math is all beyond me, but the concept of these fundamental aspects of reality had to be what they were, to such a fine degree of specificity, or the universe would have failed to expand or to form the right elements or for planets to be able to be created, much less the conditions that allow life as we know it to exist, adds a strong rider onto the cosmological arguments.

I'll get out of the lofty hoity-toity land of metaphysics here and into the weeds of Christian theology/doctrine but it's the best way to answer this I can think of.

What do you think of Molinism? I've been largely starting from the top-down as I've learned about this stuff in the last couple months, and only recently started slowly going through the ESV study Bible (Up to Numbers, a fascinating text so far, was not expecting so much of it to read as a historical narrative, especially in Genesis) for the first time. So I'm a far way off from the Christian theology, more focused on the problem of free will vs determinism with a general understanding of Calvinism. Molinism seems like a good compromise between total sovereignty/knowledge and man needing to be a (relatively) free creature to be morally culpable and to restore the "order" we destroyed via acquiring that culpability.

I guess I just don't see how the metaphysical explanation there puts you any less on destiny rails. Destiny rails seems like a foregone conclusion. The only choice we seem to have is to accept our human nature or reject it and live in denial and misery.

Eastern religions seem to all say similar things. "Life is suffering. Accept it. Stop trying to fight it."

What are you defining "destiny rails" as? Based on what I've read, those ancient Jews really were spot on about the nature of man, and Babel clearly isn't a one-off, but the potential to occasionally not let our fallen nature fuck it all up seems vital to any possible transcendental purpose to our existence.

[Sinekein]

It's about cancel culture and why Twitter is the worst thing in the entire world.

A long ass way to say "I now realize that Cancel Culture is bad, because they came after me."

People have been trying to speaking against this whole mess for years, warning about how much of a slippery slope it was. Most of them got labelled as "alt-right trolls" and got cancelled first and faster than those who staid quiet.

If you watch the video - she mentions that she got targeted first years ago by alt-right trolls.

She even goes into detail about how the woke Twitter users that targeted her reused data that had been compiled by Gamergaters back in the day.

So it's not as simple as "there never were right-wing assholes to begin with".

[Alienmorph]

If you watch the video - she mentions that she got targeted first years ago by alt-right trolls.

She even goes into detail about how the woke Twitter users that targeted her reused data that had been compiled by Gamergaters back in the day.

So it's not as simple as "there never were right-wing assholes to begin with".

Of course, you know I'm not particularly fond of the Gamergate crowd either. Whatever good intentions they might have had in principle, it was long gone by the time the movement imploded on itself.

Consider tho how much in the past 5-6 years people got accused to be alt-right, or part of this or that "hate group" just so the online mob could dismiss everything they had to say, and then unperson and cancel them to their hearts' content without remorse or repercussions. It's gone waaaay past the point of "someone was nasty with them first, this is just the equal opposite reaction."

Ffs, after the protests in Washington there's been people trying to push the narrative that qAnon and GG are just one big tentacular white suprematist movement that has never really went away, in an attempt to create a new big bad boogeyman the Twitter mob could use to justify all their Reverse Maccartism bullcrap. Even tho one of the few things most GG people agreed on was pointing and laughing at the kind of idiotic conspiracy theories qAnon loves to push.

[Ragabul]

What do you think of Molinism?

I don't know much about it to be honest. I'm not arguing from a Calvinist point of view though. I'm arguing from a "Mere Christianity" point of view. Calvinism is actually the outlier in that sense. I'm not arguing *for* predetermination. More on this in the second part of my response.

What are you defining "destiny rails" as? Based on what I've read, those ancient Jews really were spot on about the nature of man, and Babel clearly isn't a one-off, but the potential to occasionally not let our fallen nature fuck it all up seems vital to any possible transcendental purpose to our existence.

I mean that if we were created by a creator entity we were created to have a certain nature and there is 0 we can do to actually alter that nature. Mere Christianity says "your nature is that you only work properly when you are filled up with God. You have free will so God will allow you to reject him, but if you do you will never work properly." It's like you are made to run on gasoline. If you want to try to run on butane, he will let you, but the result will be ugly. Your destiny is to be filled up with God or to reject God and be dysfunctional.

Buddha says that if you want to go on vainly beating your head against dukkha, you can, but you are going to stay mired in misery forever and never attain Enlightenment if you do that.

More native type religions often care about balance a lot, and if you don't do the things you are supposed to do as a human (the right rituals, only taking what you need and no more, etc), nature itself will get out of whack and there will be floods and diseases and war and so on.

You have free will. Your free will is limited to choosing between the correct thing and the stupid thing. No matter what you do, your life will be dominated by the reality that you were made *for* something and you have 0 power to alter this fact.

My original point is that metaphysics does not free you from nature any more than purely scientific systems do. Scientific systems are full of carrying capacity and evolutionary mismatch and climate change and pandemics and all the inescapable realities that our biological bodies keep bumping up against no matter how many new tools we invent. For every new tool, a new problem emerges. This is the fundamental premise of The Abolition of Man. We cannot escape our nature because *every* decision we make about what tools to create and how to deploy those tools, we are making with our caveman nature. Even if we choose to alter ourselves into something supposedly better than cavemen, you cannot escape the reality that it's still cavemen that are trying to come up with the best way to cease being cavemen. Therefore they are still applying cavemen logic. No matter how much alteration you do, there is no escaping that it's all built on that caveman foundation.

This secular thing is what I have called the "Spock fallacy" before. If you want to be rational (taking things as they are and not as they should be), the very first thing you must accept is that humans *aren't* rational.

We are on destiny rails. We have a nature. We are different from animals because so far as we know we are the only living things that have realized this and thus can try (vainly) to escape it. Your free will is about whether you will try to fight your nature or not. You have 0 ability to actually rid yourself of this nature.

TLDR Basically, the key to fulfillment in every philosophical system worth a damn is to understand and accept your own limits. There is still a huge variety of highly productive, wholesome, and fulfilling things you can do *within* your limits.

*Edit* I am also aware that I'm been sort of misphrasing Buddhist thought a little. It's less about "stop fighting" and more "let go of attachment."

[Mazder]

Chauvin Convicted on all 3 counts.

And here is BBC version.

[Ragabul]

Why the hell are they asking O. J. Simpson for his opinion? That just sort of reads as media disappointment that nothing is on fire and so they need to talk to someone who will piss everyone off.

[Mobius_118]

He is guilty, yes.

This battle has been won, till he undoubtedly takes it up to the court of appeals. Hopefully they slap it down. The evidence is undeniable.

But there's plenty of other cops out there who've gotten away with murder. This isn't over by a long shot.

[Ragabul]

I thought manslaughter was pretty straight forward and 3rd degree murder was a "yes, probably." The 2nd degree unintentional murder didn't seem accurate but at this point where he is basically in jail until he's an old man anyway on just the first 2, that doesn't make much difference.

Now we get to see if Maxine Waters' stupid comments don't give the dude's defense a free appeal. The circus never ends.

[Vol]

Tonight's victory riots will be in the name of justice!

But yeah, the jury really should have been sequestered for this. Perception of justice matters too, and we can never know if the threat of riots and doxxing affected anyone's vote, or announcing the civil payout right before, and at a glance, that's exactly what people are talking about. Water's is a dumb bitch, but I doubt her comments had any effect, they were boarding up the city before she ran her mouth.

I figured 3rd degree was a slam dunk, though the defense made a decent effort at muddying the waters, and 2nd degree could not possibly be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Hence stacking charges. Eh, it's for the appeal courts to handle now.

It was a rare cultural divide case where I had little stakes in it, beyond any principle set here. I don't like cops and Floyd was a scumbag, my only concern was if Chauvin's restraint _actually_ killed him and if our legal system is capable of delivering justice, to a resounding "Maybe."

[Ragabul]

The way I've looked at the "did Chauvin's restraint actually kill him" question is that there were several things that had to simultaneously be true in order for him to die. Though from what little I did read/watch of the trial, it did tip things further in the "he is mostly dead because of Chauvin" direction than it previously had. Even so, the fentanyl and his bad heart were almost certainly factors. So the equation is really something like: bad heart+drugs+bad cop=death. If you remove any of those three, the chances are Floyd would still be alive.

So in this case, Chauvin was not *the* cause of Floyd's death but his action was an indispensable ingredient in Floyd's death. And the factor he had control over (his knee) was the only factor anybody could realistically have done anything about in the moment. He had the power to actually do something different. He had the training. It's his fuckup.

I had no particular stake in the case either. What people do collectively because of the case was also always of much greater concern to me.

If this end result of this is that cops collectively go "oh shit, I can get in serious trouble for chokeholds" and mostly stop using them that seems like a net positive. No-knock warrants are also hopefully now circling the drain.

*Edit* It will be interesting to see if anybody interviews Chauvin. So far as I know he has said 0 about what he was thinking probably on the advice of his defense. Once all the appeals are done, he has no particular reason to keep quiet anymore.

[Vol]

The defense needed to establish that Floyd was a dead man regardless of Chauvin, that the heart problems and corona and drugs were going to kill him no matter what, or that any reasonable cop in Chauvin's situation wouldn't have realized the danger of putting Floyd in that position for that long. Think they brought up how he swallowed a baggie of whatever speedball he was on so the cops wouldn't find it, and it started to metabolize while he was on the ground, but I don't remember how convincing the case for that was.

I'm inclined to think Floyd was not long for the world regardless, and only America's fading belief in all human lives being valuable, and Narcan, would keep him going much longer. But would he have died that day? I don't know. He certainly had a lethal amount of drugs in him, speedballs are great at that, but he was about my size, 30 pounds heavier, and a junkie. His tolerance was probably relatively high.

Would I expect an average person to die if put through the same exact restraints for the same exact time as Floyd did? No. Would I expect someone already close to death to die from any additional pressure on their failing body? Possibly. Would I expect a reasonable cop to recognize that kind of impaired condition and what the effects of any given restraint form could cause? No, I think cops tend to be people of a certain stripe that does not lend itself to ethical considerations and medical knowledge. The man was clearly high, he was big, and his internal problems are not self-evident. He complains he can't breathe from before he's in custody, which is not an uncommon lie for suspects, and treating every junkie who claims it as requiring special treatment and medical care is morally good, but in practice, dicey. Would I expect to survive if I was having a medical emergency and some cops rolled up and thought I was committing a crime? No.

What hung Chauvin was the length of time. He's a tiny guy, only 140 pounds, Floyd is big, but you had multiple cops there, Floyd was high but unarmed, and they could've easily sat him back in the car.

And then you have the threat of riots and personal retribution on jurors obviously a factor, plus whatever biases they carried, and so it goes.

Honestly, what I wanted from this was cops using less force, less often. If these high crime communities immolate themselves because the predators feel free to act, there you go. Letting a smackbag or petty criminal get away, or fight back, is always better than killing them, intentionally or not. "More training" is as insipid as "more education" as a panacea for cultural disagreements.

[Sinekein]

Would I expect an average person to die if put through the same exact restraints for the same exact time as Floyd did? No.

If you want the case of a healthy man dying from something similar, here is an example for you. To sum it up, his only "aggravating factor" was high blood pressure - which I have and my doctor is adamant I'm not on death's door. He also had a motorcycle helmet, but it's only been deemed an aggravating factor because the cops claim they couldn't hear him saying he was suffocating.

[Ragabul]

I understand why they didn't believe Floyd when he was saying he couldn't breath. (He was saying the same damn thing when he was upright and they were just trying to put him in the car).

It still leaves the question if that restraint was reasonable for that amount of time (and actually at all) no matter Floyd was yelling. Junkies yell. You can utterly discount what Floyd was yelling in and of itself. Chauvin clearly was. If Floyd was yelling they couldn't restraint him because he was Jesus or something else obviously untrue, does that change anything?

[Vol]

If you want the case of a healthy man dying from something similar, here is an example for you. To sum it up, his only "aggravating factor" was high blood pressure - which I have and my doctor is adamant I'm not on death's door. He also had a motorcycle helmet, but it's only been deemed an aggravating factor because the cops claim they couldn't hear him saying he was suffocating.

Was the restraint a causal factor in the heart attack? I've seen Steven Crowder, as much as I find him grating, recreate the experience just fine, but obviously without the panic.

"The death of Chouviat was specifically referenced by French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner when he announced a ban on the use of chokeholds during police arrests in early June 2020, but after a string of protests from French police the ban was removed weeks later.[6]"

I wonder how often the Japanese cops need to use chokeholds.

[Mazder]

Was the restraint a causal factor in the heart attack? I've seen Steven Crowder, as much as I find him grating, recreate the experience just fine, but obviously without the panic.

"The death of Chouviat was specifically referenced by French Interior Minister Christophe Castaner when he announced a ban on the use of chokeholds during police arrests in early June 2020, but after a string of protests from French police the ban was removed weeks later.[6]"

I wonder how often the Japanese cops need to use chokeholds.

A controlled experience vs actual panic.
Yeah i'll go with the actual panic being more likely to actually have an effect. Plus it's Crowder, he manipulates his shit all the time. His clime change video being one of the most obvious.

Would I expect an average person to die if put through the same exact restraints for the same exact time as Floyd did? No. Would I expect someone already close to death to die from any additional pressure on their failing body? Possibly.

If it were to happen to me with my asthma I'd probably get very, very close. And I am not even the average for my condition. If you add high blood pressure and the panic one would be in then, yeah it's kinda obvious how kneeling on someone's neck can easily do that.

Would I expect a reasonable cop to recognize that kind of impaired condition and what the effects of any given restraint form could cause? No, I think cops tend to be people of a certain stripe that does not lend itself to ethical considerations and medical knowledge.

Maybe they should.
And not knowing does not excuse the use of force when 2 other officers also had the man restrained already. Being ignorant does not excuse someone being in a job where they hold that responsibility.
Protect and serve also applies to the person they're arresting, ensuring they do not harm themselves as well as others in the course of the arrest. If not then remove the slogan/saying from the police because they're clearly doing neither in this case.

The man was clearly high, he was big, and his internal problems are not self-evident. He complains he can't breathe from before he's in custody, which is not an uncommon lie for suspects, and treating every junkie who claims it as requiring special treatment and medical care is morally good, but in practice, dicey. Would I expect to survive if I was having a medical emergency and some cops rolled up and thought I was committing a crime? No.

So what were they pulling him over for?
For suspicion of using a fake $20 bill. Even if it was a worse crime there were 3 other officers and a trainee on scene. 4 vs 1, even if he is a big guy and had no problems it's still a situation that 4 people can easily control.
Nerves can 100% make people hard to breathe before anything is done. Panic attacks can make anyone cagey and seeing 4 officers rolling up on a black man would make said black man panic. Hell it would me and I am a neon-white guy.

If you were having a medical emergency and you think cops would assume a crime is kinda the problem there. They should assess medical emergencies as well as crimes. And, yeah, you should expect to survive, because you can kinda only be tried if you live. It's why cops aren't allowed to just shoot every criminal they see like Judge Dredd and RoboCop.

I understand why they didn't believe Floyd when he was saying he couldn't breath. (He was saying the same damn thing when he was upright and they were just trying to put him in the car).

It still leaves the question if that restraint was reasonable for that amount of time (and actually at all) no matter Floyd was yelling. Junkies yell. You can utterly discount what Floyd was yelling in and of itself. Chauvin clearly was. If Floyd was yelling they couldn't restraint him because he was Jesus or something else obviously untrue, does that change anything?

I mean, you can always stop and stand there until he gets his breath back. And even if he were to try and run then it's a fake $20 not and not even a suspicion of drugs at that point so what would be the point in a long pursuit?
And even if that were the case then stand there for as long as you need with him until he gets the idea that you're not going away.

There is a very stark difference between restraint and kneeling on someone's neck.
Arms and legs pinned? Restrained.
Neck under choke? In fucking danger.
You should never, ever have to do that to restrain someone. Even if you need to hold on by wrapping your arm around they head or shoulders you never put that much pressure on someone's neck for that amount of time. They're cops, not assassins that have to put people in sleeper holds.
I mean why don't we go all out and equip cops with ball gags and bolas while we're at it?

[Mobius_118]

Considering I live here I have a stake in the matter.

We military professionals are not trained to restrain captured enemy soldiers like what Chauvin did. Even if said enemy soldier killed one of our own we cannot kneel on necks. Backs, sure, to ensure the zipcuffs are put on. Then we move them the fuck out.

[Vol]

Considering I live here I have a stake in the matter.

We military professionals are not trained to restrain captured enemy soldiers like what Chauvin did. Even if said enemy soldier killed one of our own we cannot kneel on necks. Backs, sure, to ensure the zipcuffs are put on. Then we move them the fuck out.

The idea of "A punishment for a crime must not exceed an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" is a timeless bit of wisdom then, eh?

Either you kill him outright in combat, or you take him alive, and should not treat him so badly that being shot would have been better. And the closer you treat him to "forgiveness," that can be reasonably be suffered by our side, is more just. Which extrapolated to police, as quasi-military these days, would result in a great amount of inefficiency, and inevitably violate the privileged expectation that government is solely responsible for the safety/security of individuals, would result in significantly more ethical trust in cops. Not physical, as more criminals would get away to victimize innocents, but if I could fairly assume any given cop was closer to Andy Griffith then "STOP RESISTING, HANDS UP, SQUAT DOWN, ON YOUR FACE, HANDS BACK, HANDS UP, DON'T MOVE, GET IN THE CAR!!!" how could I possibly not see them with the childlike innocence our (my) grandparents did? I'd almost want to point to the UK cops as a better example, in what I've seen of them being reluctant to use force at all, but they also engage in petty tyranny and nonsense, so eh.

The west is in a weird place right now. There's a massive effort to smash The Four Olds, but also hang onto a random handful that seem "nice." The value of a human life is completely inconsistent, both in the personal sense of biases and hypocrisies, and on the cultural level of these arbitrary distinctions between a human having no, neutral, or absolute importance.

[Vol]

I mean that if we were created by a creator entity we were created to have a certain nature and there is 0 we can do to actually alter that nature.

Agreed. This is very easily demonstrated practically in programming, where only our limited perspective allows unexpected behavior to occur.

Mere Christianity says "your nature is that you only work properly when you are filled up with God. You have free will so God will allow you to reject him, but if you do you will never work properly." It's like you are made to run on gasoline. If you want to try to run on butane, he will let you, but the result will be ugly. Your destiny is to be filled up with God or to reject God and be dysfunctional.

Ah, okay, I understand that now. "Being filled with God" is another way of expressing the whole order/fallen nature paradigm. Which is an interesting concept. We all have this intuitive sense that things are not as they should be, which you could logically extend to "Therefore, we all have a sense that there could or should be a world where everything is as it should be, which would possess [n1, ..., nx] traits." Which could be argued as either the inspiration for Genesis, or the consequence, or of course naturalistically as a biological impulse to fiddle with stuff to avoid stagnation.

Buddha says that if you want to go on vainly beating your head against dukkha, you can, but you are going to stay mired in misery forever and never attain Enlightenment if you do that.

It's fair to say that any belief system that promises good results for no/minimal suffering can be discarded out of hand as rubbish.

More native type religions often care about balance a lot, and if you don't do the things you are supposed to do as a human (the right rituals, only taking what you need and no more, etc), nature itself will get out of whack and there will be floods and diseases and war and so on.

I would think that would be the basis of every proto-religion ever. An understanding of some sort of abstract natural "order" and our place as fucking it up, but able to sacrifice of ourselves to attempt to preserve it.

caveman ook ook

Right, right. I agree with all that, more or less. Read most of that article, and while a touch too cynical, and too eager to structure reality in the constraints of theory, it was a good piece. The line about "Stalin or every stupid Malthusian trap we stumble into," made me smile.

TLDR Basically, the key to fulfillment in every philosophical system worth a damn is to understand and accept your own limits. There is still a huge variety of highly productive, wholesome, and fulfilling things you can do *within* your limits.

*Edit* I am also aware that I'm been sort of misphrasing Buddhist thought a little. It's less about "stop fighting" and more "let go of attachment."

I understand much better now. I've read too many hard determinism screeds such that "destiny rails" confused me at first. No one could reasonably argue we are capable of thinking beyond our great ape means, or engineering ourselves in a way that isn't still the product of those limited minds. There's an incredible breadth of variety in that mind, and we can surely improve on it, but again, never more than that. True transcendental understanding can only possibly occur in a supernatural sense.

[Ragabul]

Considering I live here I have a stake in the matter.

We military professionals are not trained to restrain captured enemy soldiers like what Chauvin did. Even if said enemy soldier killed one of our own we cannot kneel on necks. Backs, sure, to ensure the zipcuffs are put on. Then we move them the fuck out.

Really relevant here is the concept of superior vs excessive force. This is stupidly important to this discussion, but I've literally only seen it explained once. I read it for the first time the other day and it suddenly made things a lot clearer.

Basically if you accept that the social role of the police is something like "maintain peace/order" and that they are allowed to use force in pursuit of that goal (force here meaning *any* tactic that compels somebody to do something they don't want to do and are trying to resist doing), you must allow that police can/will/should use *more* force than the person trying to resist.

In other words, the police do not have to fight "fair." They are entitled to use superior force to whatever a noncooperative suspect is using. If the suspect is punching the cop, he can taze the suspect. If the suspect is trying to stab somebody, the police can shoot him (or her as just happened with that teenage girl).

He may not use *excessive* force, which is more force than is necessary to bring the suspect under control. So he cannot shoot somebody who is merely running away as one example. He may not taze someone when they are handcuffed and laying on the ground and merely yelling or squirming.

This is all adjacent to conversations about whether police should be deployed at all for stuff like people having mental episodes or acting erratic while high. Some kind of social worker emergency response team to add to police and fire generally seems like a really good idea.

But even that does not avoid the issue. Do those social workers have the right to detain Floyd? Can they do something about a teenage girl trying to stab another?

There is no getting around needing to have rules about applications of force and needing force itself as a tool.

There is a dangerous line of thought in all of this that seems to be implying that any use of force represents a failure and that every cop/social worker/fireman/whoever should have some kind of magical "de-escalation" spell he can cast that renders force unnecessary.

[Ragabul]

An argument (backed by data) that since the Reagan era the filibuster was responsible for only 30% of failed attempts to vote bills into laws or get them out of committee. 60% of the time the failure is due to intra-party conflict. (So John McCain votes no or Joe Manchin votes no on something their party wanted).

[Vol]

Maybe it is because some "ultra-progressive" scholars are being extremely vocal in the US. Or because medias talk about them a lot so as not to beaccused of silencing them - or because they want to easily buy a liberal-cred.

But as I work with teenagers, I do not see an incredibly fast shift towards a disappearance of gender as a whole. I'm teaching in a suburb high school, one where the vast majority of kids are not white, to put it simply (and those that are mostly come from either Romania or the Balkans). I think that over 180 kids I have this year, maybe 5 are white kids with "French names".

And since most of those I have are in their last year before Uni, we have to talk about their future studies. And you can still clearly see a bias - I have next to no girls interested in engineering, and only 1 boy who thought that maybe he'd become a nurse. I also have one girl who absolutely wants to be a PE teacher or a coach.

But the main difference with 10 years ago is that the kids with career choices that don't suit their gender are not looked at weirdly. It's just another possibility for them, and you get a minority that doesn't have to put up with either a career that they don't want because "that's what boys/girls do", or with looks of contempt for being a boy/girl in a girl's/boy's world.

Not to say that sexism has been solved of course, but for me, that is a net improvement. I don't think anything has been lost, I have yet to see a girl being shamed for preferring a "traditionally feminine career", or for wanting to be a stay-at-home mom. In that last case, there might be debates about women who are never given the opportunity or hope to be anything else than that - but then the finger is not pointed at them, but at the systemic causes of it happening.

As we discussed earlier, yes, the popular perception doesn't necessarily reflect the reality, though it surely affects it.

A very wealthy man decides to be charitable. He appraises all he owns, then liquidates it, and spends every penny to ensure all humans in need live in comfort and safety for one month. It is a truly generous act, and the man is an idiot for doing so. Why?

If the goal is to maximize individual happiness, then the method should be to support the natural inclinations of the average, while not discouraging the outliers. The metric of the happiness of the gender outliers to act without social repercussion is arbitrary, they don't matter more than anyone else because of what they are. The girl that wants to be a construction worker and the boy that wants to be a daycare worker is not "greater" than the boy who wants to be an engineer and the girl who wants to be a homemaker because they're acting against expected gender role. Not punishing the outlier, or preventing them from seeking their own way, is the moral way. Extolling them for it de facto chides everyone else.

e.g.,
"We need girls in STEM! Girls love math and science and computers too!"
"We need girls to have big families and cook, clean, and maintain the household!"
These are mutually contradictory. There are presuppositions in each that deny the other.

Unless you have data to show otherwise, of course. All I've seen has shown this laissez-faire gender theory has continued negative trends, though its impossible to control for variables, so we can't show causation.

[Sinekein]

e.g.,
"We need girls in STEM! Girls love math and science and computers too!"
"We need girls to have big families and cook, clean, and maintain the household!"
These are mutually contradictory. There are presuppositions in each that deny the other.

Unless you have data to show otherwise, of course. All I've seen has shown this laissez-faire gender theory has continued negative trends, though its impossible to control for variables, so we can't show causation.

Those are not mutually contradictory, for a variety of reasons:

- You can be a math-loving female engineer, and yet have a large family, cook and clean your house while your husband is not that keen on it. If you have a well-paid job, you can hire a nanny for the couple of hours you have to spend at work while your kids are out of school, but that is a loss in "maternal instinct time" that should be well-compensated by having a second (significant) income in the family

- You do not need 100% of girls in STEM, or 100% of girls to stay at home and sire one brat after another. As for the second, no one, right now, knows whether you "need" more or less people on Earth, so it's kind of hard to say "we need X% of women to have at least Y kids". There are, actually, two options here:

* you think we need more kids. But in that case, the problem is not women getting an education, it's household income. The wealthier you are, the fewer kids you tend to have, which is ecologically logical if you compare it to the r/K selection theory. To sum it up quickly, in natural ecosystems, you can "place" wild species on a spectrum going from "r strategy" - high growth rates, high mortality, limited parental care - to "K strategy" - low growth rates, low mortality, important parental care. Humans are not really different, when their financial situation allows them to ensure their kids are raised in good conditions, they tend to have fewer of them. Hence why developing countries have higher population growth.

* you think we need fewer kids, well, in that case fewer mothers is not an issue.

Rich countries started to have bad, skewed-towards-the-elderly age pyramids way before laissez-faire gender theory was a thing. One of the worst countries in that regard is Japan, and you can't say that they are hot on liberal social studies there.

Social studies might not improve that negative trend, but their overall influence is utterly negligible compared to the root of the problem - that when you are able to have a kid getting a PhD, you tend to only have 1-3 of those, not 5 or 6.

I would say that way more than social studies, social media is responsible for a drop in population growth.

Speaking of, I just recently happened upon this clip: Carmen, from the excellent Belgian rapper Stromae - I have known the song for a while because I listened to the album, but the clip is...impressive (made by Sylvain Chomet, who crafted the surreal Triplets of Belleville animated movie).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKftOH54iNU

2015, so 6 years old, but absurdly relevant.

[Ragabul]

There is also a pernicious relationship between culture, modern economic realty, and biology that has evolved for the top 50% of society in the last few decades as well. Namely, marriage has ceased to be a place where life *starts* and has instead began to be seen as a capstone, a sort of tiara to put on top of your life once you've already made it.

Since making it is economically harder and takes longer (because you need way more years of schooling than you used to) most people haven't "made it" until they are 30 if they ever manage to make it all. It makes complete sense that your success rate at finding a partner and having a family is less if you wait until 30 than if you started at 25 or 20.

We have turned marriage (or whatever you want to call it - long term monogamous relationships in which adults raise children together) into a luxury item.

I saw a thing the other day that Millennial fortunes have turned around remarkably in the last few years. I can't find it now, but it said that white (read upper class) Millennials now have home ownership rates of 60% and are only somewhat behind their parents generation instead of ludicrously behind as before. It's because most of them are now in that 30-40 or so age range and have finally made it.

And statistically speaking if they waited until now when they feel "safe" to find a partner and have kids, they are much less likely to succeed.

[Ragabul]

Commonsense Consent

This a long but super interesting description of a series of moral psychology experiments in which some researchers try to figure out how average Joe thinks about consent not just in sex but in general. (Consenting to have medical procedures done on you, consenting to enter a contract, consenting to participate in medical research, etc.)

The results were counterintuitive from what I expected it to be and yet when I actually thought about how *I* think about consent, I realized that my instinctive stance actually aligns with the "commonsense" position and not the academic position.

Basically consent obtained by deception does not invalidate consent. If a moral wrong is committed it is not what follows from the deception, but from the act of deception itself.

It's really hard to explain this without reading the whole thing, but think about these scenarios and about your instinctive (not academic but instinctive) reaction to the difference between them.

Scenario 1

"Study2a compares a case in which a person refuses sex to a case in which a person is deceived into agreeing to sex. Participants (n=101) were asked to judge a scenario in which the offeree, Emily, does not want to sleep with her boyfriend, John, unless he has been tested for Zika, a sexually transmissible virus that can be contracted from mosquitos in certain geographic regions. John has recently traveled to Miami,a moderately Zika-prone area. In the scenario Zika, the couple discusses plans to have sex at a later time. The purpose of including this time delay was to provide a plausible manner in which one person might perform an unconsented-to act on an unwilling partner without adding the confounding factor of violence,force, or physical overpowering. To accomplish this, Zika describes the couple as having an established practice of one party initiating sex while the other is asleep. The scenario reads, in pertinent part, as follows.

Shortly after John returned from his business trip, he spent the evening at Emily’s place. That night, Emily was too tired to make love. John asked her if she would instead like a “surprise in the morning.” For the couple,a “surprise in the morning”is what they call it when John wakes Emily up by making love to her.Emily thought about whether she wanted John to wake her up by making love to her. She replied, “No surprise in the morning if you haven’t gotten tested yet. But yes if you got tested and are clean.”

No Agreement condition(n=51):John said, “I still haven’t gotten tested yet.” In reality, he had not gotten tested. He was telling the truth. Emily said, “OK, then no. Don’t give me a surprise in the morning.”

Deceived Agreement condition(n=50):John said, “I’ve been tested and I am clean.” In reality, he still hadn’t gotten tested. He was lying.Emily said, “OK, then yes. Give me a surprise in the morning.”162. The full text of the scenario is available in Appendix A.

Shortly after this conversation, they both fell asleep. The next morning,John woke Emily up with a “surprise in the morning”—that is, by having sex with her—even though he had not yet been tested for Zika."

Scenario 2

"Sophia has a bunion on her right foot and has been wearing splints to correct the problem. She is contemplating undergoing elective surgery to realign the joint. Sophia will already be having surgery to address a torn ligament in her left ankle—an unrelated problem on the other leg. Her surgeon mentions that since she is already having the ankle surgery, it would be easy for him to also fix her bunion during the same operation.
Sophia wants to have her bunion fixed, but she also cares deeply about whether the bunion surgery is covered by her insurance. She explains to her surgeon that she wants to have the bunion surgery if it is covered by her insurance, but she would refuse to have it if she had to pay for it out of pocket.

No Agreement condition(n=49):Sophia’s surgeon informs her that her insurance will not cover the bunion procedure. He knows that she will need to pay out of pocket. Sophia says no to the bunion procedure. She says the doctor may not fix her bunion while she is al-ready under anesthesia for her ankle.

Deceived Agreement condition(n=52):Sophia’s surgeon lies to her and says her insurance will cover the bunion procedure, when really he knows that she will need to pay out of pocket. Sophia says yes to the bunion procedure.She says the doctor may fix her bunion while she is already under anesthesia for her ankle.

Imagine that during Sophia’s ankle surgery, the doctor also performs the bunion procedure ,knowing that it will cost her out of pocket."

Roughly 2/3 of people demonstrated they thought that in multiple scenarios like these that the person being deceptive committed a moral wrong, but that it did not invalidate the consent given and thus no rape or assault or battery or such was committed. The problem was the deception itself and not what was gained by the deception.

[Sinekein]

I agree with the 2/3rd of people, yeah. I do not think it qualifies as rape. Rape/sexual assault, for me, requires ignoring consent altogether, acting to alterate the other party's judgment (e.g. abusing someone that is high or drunk), or using leverage to force people to agree to something they would normally not consent to (e.g. the Weinstein rapes, "sex or no career anymore").

But it is also possible, in most cases, to get legal reparations. I assume that in case #2, there is a contract regarding the operations that have to be performed. If the contract only mentions the ankle surgery, then the girl cannot be forced to pay for something she did not ask for, that would be like providing an unwanted service, you cannot have to pay for it. If Amazon decides to send you three TV while you paid for one, they can't force you to pay for the other two.

The only issue is that case #1 is both about sex, and about couple intimacy, which are two domains in which gray areas are very prominent.

[Ragabul]

Sure, the whole point of the article was that juries often fail to convict on cases like this and that the abiding theory for why they are doing this are wrong.

For me, it raises the question if some lesser category of offense might not be better than trying to get a conviction for instances of "rape by deception." People do not instinctively understand rape by deception as being as bad as rape by coercion. Maybe we need a "sexual fraud" category or something. My hesitation is that most cases of this are he said/she said stuff like "he told me he was a doctor but really he's just a nurse" so it runs the risk of creating a whole bunch of mostly pointless nuisance cases.

[Vol]

https://twitter.com/NatSecCNN/status/13 ... 2715511810

lol

[Ragabul]

I've been more worried about non-governmental institutions the last few years but it looks like the nanny state is getting real too what with this and weird intersectional signaling from the CIA and various local governments increasingly doubling down on certain varieties of Covid restrictions that are becoming less useful and relevant by the day.

This might be blasphemy but I feel like Houston broadly did Covid about right. You can't go in anywhere with no mask and there are occupancy limits and so on. At the same time, nobody is going to give you stink eye for not wearing a mask while walking your dog alone in the park or act like you are a murderer because you went camping with your family over spring break.

*Edit*

Also, bonus points to whoever posted this as a response to that Tweet:

"COINTELPRO: Pinkerton Edition" Ha!

[Ragabul]

Also for today's helping of whaaaa? apparently militant Red Pill stuff for feminists is a thing in China.

[Vol]

I've been more worried about non-governmental institutions the last few years but it looks like the nanny state is getting real too what with this and weird intersectional signaling from the CIA and various local governments increasingly doubling down on certain varieties of Covid restrictions that are becoming less useful and relevant by the day.

Something, something, clown, fire broke out, clown tried to warn the crowd, they all laughed, he warned them harder, they laughed more, everyone died, something.

I'm just waiting for the first guy to get a full spook raid on his home because he had an extremist manifesto typed up that he never shared. I'll gloat, in a very depressed way.

Also for today's helping of whaaaa? apparently militant Red Pill stuff for feminists is a thing in China.

I'll be honest here. I assumed that was, if not a primary factor, a tacit consideration for virtually all women.

[Ragabul]

I mean if you mean that basically 95%+ of all women use physical attraction as part of their assessment on partners, yeah, sure. The percentage of women who would categorically reject anything but the top 25% of men on the grounds of looks are vanishingly small. I can actually agree with the incel sentiment that there is some, say, 5% of men who are a hard no for pretty much all women and it's usually because of a hard core mix of deeply unflattering traits. (I mean does anybody, male or female, want to date someone is unemployed, mean, socially inept, & physically unattractive?)

The percentages of people, male or female, who are notably beautiful or ugly is really pretty small. Most are within some pretty standard range of normal and this is where the vast, vast bulk of partnering up occurs.

[TTTX]

(I mean does anybody, male or female, want to date someone is unemployed, mean, socially inept, & physically unattractive?)

well some people just love a project (you know I can change him/her mentality some people have.) and some people well either doesn't know better or are just stupid.

[Mazder]

(I mean does anybody, male or female, want to date someone isunemployed, mean, socially inept, & physically unattractive?)

2 out of 4 aint bad, guess I got half a chance, lol.

[Mazder]

My Twitter right now
I kinda don't want a war with France right now thanks.

[Sinekein]

That was entirely predictable. Both French and English fishermen got shafted.

But Boris got to look strong, so hey, that's the most important!