Space colonization? History teaches us that colonial empires were never able to escape their original sin: that it’s bad in general when a person moves from one place to another place, regardless of circumstances. Woe to he who disregards this grim lesson.
Last night, I called my mom in Siberia. She said that one of the major TV channels told a story of angry Americans blaming Russians for … high prices on sunflower oil and shortages.
In Russia, sunflower oil is one of the basic groceries like flour, sugar, or salt. Any price increase for sunflower oil and shortages of it would be pretty painful for an average Russian household, so the propagandists decided to use it as an example for their scary tales. Not gas prices, not even wheat, but sunflower fucking oil!
My mom had no idea that sunflower oil is not even popular in the North America. We both laughed for about five minutes after I explained her how poorly that story was created.
“rural areas need cars” do y'all think rural areas were invented in 1910
shit sucked before 1910!
Feel like we can do better in the genre of anti-car arguments than ones that could be applied as easily to antibiotics or the printing press
You can’t because cars are also an incredible technological advance that have made everyone’s lives better, including those who don’t use them themselves.
The correct arguments are a) a lot of violent crimes committed with cars are treated less seriously than similar crimes without and b) governments mandate that huge amounts of valuable land be given rent-free for the use of cars.
In both cases the correct thing for an urbanist to want is for cars to be treated like normal, not (as currently) like a privileged kind of actor. If you charge market rents for roads and parking cars will vanish from cities, and if you treat vehicular murder like any other murder you’ll see fewer dead kids. No need for bans, in the city or elsewhere.
it’s horrific and i fear to see how this will impact russian people (or, let’s be more real, slavic people in general), but it’s also patheticomic how orgs are desperate to have a stance on the conflict so they’ll do dumb shit like remove/change even tangentially russian things
“Just Dance Has Removed Ra Ra Rasputin From Their Roster”
Like, this is so…
[Wipes brow] oh whew wow I was really worried about this, the continued involvement of Russian cats in my favorite cat shows in the face of this crisis,
It is with a heavy heart that I must announce the French are rigth for once.
Can we change “two years in prison” to “public guillotine-ing” when us Americans adopt this law? Please?
Every time I see something like this, I add it to a notepad file I have called ‘Good Ideas From Around The World’
Here’s some others from France:
French preschools serve four-course lunches (including a cheese course) to educate them in taste and stimulate their senses.
Planned obsolescence is illegal in France; it is a crime to intentionally shorten the lifespan of a product with the aim of making customers replace it. In early 2018, French authorities used this law to investigate reports that Apple deliberately slowed down older iPhones via software updates.
There is a law in France stating that models have to provide a doctor’s certificate attesting to their overall physical health, with special regard to their body mass index (BMI)
Enjoy!
There’s a lot of problems in France but these are genuinely good ideas that should be implemented everywhere.
no, nobody should be unable to work because of their BMI, which is not a good measure of health even if you think it’s okay to exclude people from work because of their health. (can you just not have disabled models or models who have a health condition of any kind? you said it wasn’t just BMI!)
ffs, models are the workers here; they’re not the ones to persecute
The school lunches have in many cases been un-accommodating to children with dietary restrictions.
We should not publicly execute people for having their children participate in beauty contests. Seriously. Even when parents are severely abusive, their children often do not want them executed! Be less execution-happy, internet.
I picked up that $5 trans rights fundraiser TTRPG bundle and it has some … interesting content … in addition to stuff I might ever use.
If your game’s page opens with a land acknowledgment and closes with “no fascists, no TERFs, no libertarians” you are spending too much time on non-game things. If you ban capitalists and their lackeys you’re banning an awful lot of people.
If you write a woke homework worksheet like “brainstorming non-police ways for your neighborhood to solve problems”, that is not a game. A worksheet on inventing spells is only a game if you admit witchcraft is fake. If you say something is “a game about revisiting things that scared you as a closeted queer middle schooler”, this suggests a game about characters doing that, not a to-do list for someone to do at a place that scared them in middle school.
Finally, a bundle does not have thousands of dollars of value just because it contains goods whose normal prices total to thousands of dollars.
My understanding is the Catholic church recuses itself from issues re: democracy vs hierarchy by insisting on something called synodality, a word which can be cynically taken as “if it’s good we’re for it, if it’s bad we’re against it”
to be overly charitable I use “if it’s good I’m for it and if it’s bad I’m against it” to get out of having opinions on things all the time. however, I do not claim to be here to represent a perfectly good being’s will to the world, and very few people listen to me, and I can’t even allocate one person to full-time policy research, all of which are differences between me and the catholic church
I’m genuinely low-key mad they excluded “adult” imagery from the DALL-E training data, though, in the name of “safety” of all things. Other safety measures like filtering prompts of real people are an obvious choice, but I think our increasing prudishness about sex and technology is dumb, and weird porn is a legitimate form of human expression!
It would be very funny if as a system it devastated all the traditional art jobs except furry porn artist.
Do you understand how cursed a system designed to generate a literally unlimited amount of near-photorealistic p-rnography is?
Do you want to give zerohplovecraft more writing material for a novel where everyone is constantly horny but no one ever fucks, because you think the electric demon hypothesis makes for great fiction, or something?
Plenty of websites aren’t full of horrifying images. The solution to bad images is returning to a less image-centric state, not banning bad image production or burning out moderators. There’s nothing principled about saying that the exact kind of sexual content that doesn’t squick you can be everywhere but the squicky stuff can’t exist at all.
I mean, historically speaking, public executions were an all-day festival that people absolutely documented their experiences of watching, and major Victorian trials absolutely had crowds of screaming, fainting fans treating the accused like celebrity idols. It’s unfortunately very normal if you look at the historical context, it’s just also that “normal” is not a great measure of whether a behaviour is good or something that we should be doing.
Yeah we should stop talking about whether or not things are ‘normal’ and focus on whether they are
i fucking hate when people attribute a lot of the good stuff about indigenous culture to some inexorable Race Quality.
as if having a sustainable, beneficial, harmonious relationship to the land is due to some sort of Magic Race Genes. I mean it’s a continuation of the idea that indigenous people couldn’t have possibly done all this cultural stuff themselves so it must be hardwired into their biology.
its literally just racism and essentialism.
it’s so gross and yet i keep seeing people make this mistake
yes actually this also goes for people who are like “anyone who isn’t already an Indigenous Race is fundamentally ontologically incapable of understanding indigenous perspectives or having any sort of non-evil relationship with land.”
that’s literally just the “native people are strange and alien and incomprehensible and *primitive* and of a fundamentally different Kind Of Human than us civilized people” argument but then you say “and indigenous people are good”. like. that’s still race realism bro.
Another exquisite example of American NIMBYism - local regulations in a rural town that make illegal any house that is too small from being built on a given property. A lady wants to build a smaller house on her lot so she can build a horse stable on the rest and she just….can’t.
What i like about this story is that a lot of the narrativr around “how did America get so NIMBY” is that it was almost accidental. People wanted to preserve their neighborhood, preserve historic buildings, etc, and were fine with affordable housing conceptually but, ya know, not in their back yard. And its partially true, for sure, for every bad actor manipulating the historical preservation board is a group of willing allies proud to Save Our Heritage.
But that narrative also concedes too much, and this article shows that: this ordinance exists as part of an explicit agreement with the state agencies to “keep property values high”. Because property taxes are what funds local gov, and housing prices fund the resident’s finances. They just say it, openly, no shame, “your house proposal is just too cheap, spend more”! The idea that high property prices is a bad thing is not on the radar.
If you have a policy apparatus built explicitly to increase property values, well, not surprising that it achieves that goal.
The vast majority of post-op trans QoL studies use sample sizes of less than 30 people, unless it’s a meta-study that’s compiling the work of multiple surveys. I don’t think you want to challenge the findings of almost every single study of trans healthcare.
Deciding whether or not to trust a study’s results for reasons of ideological convenience rather than scientific validity is not science - it’s stupid and shortsighted.
I don’t need to rely on studies to determine if trans people should have the right to modify their bodies as they see fit - everyone should have that right.
Here are some larger-scale cohort studies (tho the largest is a survey, not a study) that examine trans healthcare outcomes with sample sizes in the hundreds or even thousands.
“I thought of a thing that would be bad, and there are people out there—probably anarchists, because I dislike those—who are presumably doing it. Those people—again, who may or may not be anarchists, because if they were it would be very convenient for me—are American imperialists. So if you see an anarchist, be sure to ask yourself, are they doing this thing which would be bad? Maybe! Most importantly though, if these anarchists were all big hypocrites—which I’m sure that they are—we could dismiss their claims before listening to their arguments, and wouldn’t that be convenient?”
I have known atheists who genuinely believe vaccines cause autism, tout the benefits of essential oils, and replaced a Christian fear of the Devil with a fear of “chemicals.”
I know religious people who work in healthcare and STEM, do regular labwork, author scientific papers, and speak at universities as experts in their field.
Equating atheism with “science” and religion with “anti-science” is inaccurate, bigoted, and shows ignorance about religion outside (typically American) fundamentalist Protestantism.
Suppose we have a scientist who’s still religious, either full-blown scriptural-religion, or in the sense of tossing around vague casual endorsements of “spirituality”.
We now know this person is not applying any technical, explicit understanding of…
…what constitutes evidence and why;
…Occam’s Razor;
…how the above two rules derive from the lawful and causal operation of minds as mapping engines, and do not switch off when you talk about tooth fairies;
…how to tell the difference between a real answer and a curiosity-stopper;
…how to rethink matters for themselves instead of just repeating things they heard;
…certain general trends of science over the last three thousand years;
…the difficult arts of actually updating on new evidence and relinquishing old beliefs;
…epistemology 101;
…self-honesty 201;
…etcetera etcetera etcetera and so on.
git. gud.
And if getting gud still brings you to the Catholic Church, will you scream and cry and say, “but Occam” and “but epistemology should lead to atheism, surely it’s supposed to be that way”?
Your rationalism closed around you and becomes what you accuse religion falsely of being.
You’re probably allowed to post a detailed explanation of the evidence for Catholicism on LessWrong and you’re definitely allowed to post it here. I’m sure a lot of people would be happy to find out that a 3O deity was extant and taking responsibility for the universe so they could just do their best to pursue good but not have to worry about existential risk, even if this disrupted their relationships and hobbies.
Too many doctors act like living a full life while using a wheelchair is a pitiable existence but soul-destroying pain that stops you from enjoying any of the things you love is no big deal.
The number of doctors who say how sorry they are I can’t walk (something that doesn’t bother me often at all) compared to the number who don’t give a shit that I’m in constant pain (something that bothers me a lot) is telling.
I have been thinking about this a LOT since I had to (temporarily) start using a wheelchair after an accident.
Thinking that “I can stand on my less-broken foot for brief periods of time and it’s only moderately painful” meant that my foot was weight bearing, and thinking that weight bearing meant that I was able to bear all of my weight on that one foot while hopping, the ER doctor gave me crutches instead of a wheelchair. Surprise, surprise, I wasn’t able to use them. I got a wheelchair.
But even if I could use the crutches, I can’t imagine why they thought that was my best option. That I should be in pain instead of in a wheelchair? That I should use the most difficult mobility device I was physically able to use, regardless of how that impacted my quality of life? That I should be at a significantly higher risk of falling and further injuring myself rather than use a wheelchair?
I had to modify my house a bit for the wheelchair, yes. I had to learn how to do things from the chair. But once I had it figured out, my quality of life was miles better than it could ever have been on crutches. I could be up and about for longer periods of the day. I could get moderate exercise. I could cook for myself and water my plants and carry things. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that on crutches or without putting myself in danger and unnecessary extra pain.
I saw a post about those knee scooter things that advertised one of their benefits: “patients don’t feel disabled.” Knee scooters have a significantly higher fall risk than wheelchairs and increase the risk of blood clots after surgery. But you won’t feel disabled! What does it say about the way society views disabled people that they would rather be in pain and unnecessary danger than feel like one of them?
important thing understand about the GOP’s newfound hate-on for disney is that the Democrats aren’t really involved in it at all, it’s between Disney and the GOP. the understanding here is that disney has a lot of privileges due to cronyism, and the GOP is reminding them that those priviliges can be revoked – perhaps not immediately, but soon – if they don’t start acting like cronies again. it’s fundamentally just extortionism toward a lobby-dependent megacorp.
I’m actually not sure the GOP has given thought to the left response here, which is that if this works then it will work for them as well – once it’s acceptable to think and say these things everyone will say them, and it’s functionally impossible to please both parties at once on culture-war stuff, so the net result will probably just be that Disney loses its cozy relationship with regulators and legislators regardless of what they do, and then everybody’s unhappy. Ironically the best outcome! I don’t know if that will actually happen, but it’s definitely a possible outcome if the near-term gambit ends up being highly effective.
ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.
so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.
now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house
Also protests are specifically designed to disrupt the ordinary workings of society. I’m endlessly frustrated with people blaming their delayed trains on the public transport workers who are striking, than on the contracting companies you exploit and underpay them. Please please please when you see a protest that inconveniences you, blame it in the same people the protesters themselves are blaming.
So, what, when people tear down statues of abolitionists, beat legislators, go around threatening violence against restaurant attendees, break things at my synagogue, and use the main group of protesters as cover to go burglarize shoe stores, I’m supposed to blame whoever the protesters are mad at? Really? This strikes me as incredibly exploitable.
What if, if someone threatened to burn down my house, I refused to concede, because screw that? You understand that saying “you should parse protests as ‘nice city you have there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it’” makes them less sympathetic, right?
There were BLM protests for months and I didn’t hear of a single cop who had their house burned down, so OP is just plain factually wrong.
I’d also point out all the people who were burglarizing shoe stores and the like were hitting targets totally unrelated to the protest: which was explicitly about police violence. So even if you accept OP’s premise, those people are still traitors to the cause; it’d only be praxis if they were robbing and burning down the residences and work places of cops.
All that said, I do think when millions of people rise up and say “no fucking more”, you should ask why. You do not get million person mobs often. If that many people are willing to get tear gassed, beaten up, and arrested, then it’s probably worth listening. (It doesn’t mean they’re right, but I can’t think of many enduring, nation-wide protests that I disagreed with - my enemies seem to suck at the art of protest)
If people who hit targets unrelated to the protest are traitors to the cause, then why do speakers from activist groups say things like “Our organizations will not denounce any black person’s display of grief and/or rage,” “You stop murdering black people and your glass will be safe,” and “Thank all the youth freedom fighters who were in the streets fighting last night and Saturday night. Every action is a contribution to liberation.”?
I feel pretty confident that my synagogue hasn’t murdered anyone.
ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.
so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.
now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house
Also protests are specifically designed to disrupt the ordinary workings of society. I’m endlessly frustrated with people blaming their delayed trains on the public transport workers who are striking, than on the contracting companies you exploit and underpay them. Please please please when you see a protest that inconveniences you, blame it in the same people the protesters themselves are blaming.
So, what, when people tear down statues of abolitionists, beat legislators, go around threatening violence against restaurant attendees, break things at my synagogue, and use the main group of protesters as cover to go burglarize shoe stores, I’m supposed to blame whoever the protesters are mad at? Really? This strikes me as incredibly exploitable.
What if, if someone threatened to burn down my house, I refused to concede, because screw that? You understand that saying “you should parse protests as ‘nice city you have there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it’” makes them less sympathetic, right?
Summary: If the government wants pregnant people to bear to term fetuses that would otherwise be aborted, it should pay them to do so, and provide for healthcare to maintain the health of the adopted child
Bullet point version continues after the break, with sops to Republican interests who wish to punish people who get pregnant, as well as extensive social welfare provisions:
