After the Newark riots, exactly what you suggested should happen did happen to East Orange. And now East Orange is a poor and crime-ridden town. OK, so why would I be at all interested in helping these people who hate and resent me and would harm me if they could? While I have ideas and ideals for society, from one person to another my advice is to accommodate yourself to this society as it actually is, and to do what you may for your kids to be middle-class or better.
There are things we could do to support the working class, things that would raise my taxes that I would vote for. If anyone wants to take my course on the economic analysis of law, the videos of the classes are linked on my web page, as is the textbook. All free for anyone with web access. My guess is that, at most elite universities, a non-student who wanted to audit courses would find it easy to do it unofficially at no charge. Getting an education is pretty easy for someone who really wants it and is willing to spend the time getting it.
That was all mostly true of the college I attended a moderately prestigious state school , with the exception of auditing which depended on professors: Really I should be more grateful for the books I can borrow, still having once seen the garden…. Maybe see if your local library can hook you up? MIT open courseware has some really amazing lectures available for free. Linear algebra and AI were both very much worth the time; I kind of got bogged down in the circuit theory lectures partly from life and work constraints.
I think you can get access with any iOS device. Calculus, organic chemistry, etc. I agree with David—credentials are harder to get than learning. Gave it up because I lived an hour away, and was only able to check out books for two weeks, renewable once. You get access to an incredible library. OTOH, I appreciate the need for university libraries to not become the sort of de facto homeless shelters that some public libraries are turning into. I assume you know about Project Gutenberg, which lets you download a wide range of out of copyright books for free. It was a terrific group of undergrads.
They were prepared and interested, the discussion was lively, we all learned a lot from each other. Neither I nor any of the other students had a problem with it. Thank you very much for putting it online. Others have already mentioned that there are many free courses and books. I would add that you can also download about half of the non-free books illegally.
The real danger in acquiring knowledge is rather the abundance of stupid books and stupid topics, so the real reason to miss the Pythagorean Theorem could be that instead of it you are studying e. Also, having classmates, i. But I fully agree that some people have much better conditions to learn than others, which gives meritocracy its motte and bailey flavor. It seems like intelligence and hard work determine your outcome, but another huge factor is how much of that intelligence and hard work can you effectively spend on building your human capital, and how much will be wasted on overcoming various obstacles which are quite unevenly distributed.
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For example, some people use their high intelligence and hard work to become good at computer programming, which allows them to make a lot of money. Other people start with the same intelligence and hard work, but first they need to spend a lot of time and energy on getting their own computer and some uninterrupted free time to learn. No one thinks they are bronze tier, https: This is a serious question: Austin has an interesting mix of blue and red tribers, the cost of living is rather low especially if you stay away from downtown , and people are less snobby in general.
There is a really nice Less Wrong meetup group here, too. Before we got our house we lived 17 years in an apartment in Oakland, and I never want to go back to living hearing the sounds of that neighborhood. My main grievance is not getting those things decades earlier, and my fear that my sons will have to wait as long or longer. On the evidence of your comments here I disagree. You and Deiseach are the clearest examples here of intelligent self-educated people functioning in niches not usually occupied by such people. Epstein, which has been fascinating. One of the points of The Bell Curve was that that pattern was much more common in the past.
The mechanic might easily be the intellectual equal of the wealthy customer whose car he worked on. The graduate of a state university was substantially poorer and lower status than the graduate of Harvard but not significantly less intelligent. The authors argued that that was much less true at present, due to an increasingly meritocratic society—if you are very smart and also poor, Harvard lets you in and lends or gives you the required money. While there are obvious advantages to that change, there are also disadvantages.
There are problems with more powerful people correctly believing that they are much smarter than less powerful people. Further, better sorting by ability leads to more assortative mating, which leads to a more unequal distribution of abilities, which also has problems. One of the things that irritated me about the treatment of that book and its surviving author is that it was making important points, points that should have been of special interest to the sorts of people who demonized the book without reading it.
From to the majority of Americans had rising fortunes, and afterwards an economic centerfuge occurred. I have said in the past, half-jokingly, that everyone is terrible, some people are barely good enough to recognize they are terrible. Also depression, Randy M. I get it that I am stupid and useless and unqualified and just sucking up resources, I really do.
As I said, down here we get plenty of reminders. How us Bronzies pass the time to drug ourselves into ignorance of our futility? Whether you are useful, qualified, or productive other than here I have no way of knowing. But you obviously are not stupid. As in, why do those people stick around? If you are below the bell curve in general but really, really good at something that would be motivating and give meaning. But as you mention, most of the players are bronze and I do not belief most of them are trolling others. Until you are able to put into perspective your worldview in this game and how it fits with reality, should you be trying to generalize it?
There are many activities that are not zero-sum or competitive, at which many people can participate without diminishing others. Volunteering at a soup kitchen, for instance, takes very little skill and almost no long term commitment. People who recognize themselves at the lower rungs tend to congregate towards these activities, rather than competitive gaming to use your example. Post on SSC 2. Watch The Good Place 3. Drink hot chocolate 4.
Hope that helps answer your question! That really takes a lot of the pressure off. Apropos of another comment I made, you might try vitamin D. I had that advice from a very prominent biochemist who believes a majority of Americans suffer from insufficient vitamin D. I ordered the pills for myself yesterday. As another anecdotal data point, I heard about this a number of years ago and got my doctor to add a vitamin D check to the blood work at my next physical. It indeed showed low. The pills are so cheap that it seems like an easy call.
This assumes that you derive most or all of your self-worth and self-image from your work. For a lot of people, work is mostly about the paycheck, and their self-image comes from somewhere else family, hobbies, etc. Even a low-ranking surgeon is still making well into six figures, and if that surgeon quit, he would take a massive pay cut while still being burdened with his medical school debt. However, taxes and expenses and soon inflation push the goal out further all the time, so I suspect the plan will never, in fact, work.
What safe withdrawal rate are you assuming? Inflation is already baked into the safe withdrawal rate studies: I thought the rule of thumb for perpetual funds e. And of course the point would be to enjoy life, not to switch the problem of money-and-little-time for time-and-little-money. A long time ago I met someone in an Objectivist special interest group in New York who wanted to write a novel and had concluded he first had to make a million dollars to support himself while doing so.
As best I could tell he was already working on his second million, had not written the novel. People who want to write are doing so already. People who want to write for a living… well, I think the joke about, iirc, board games applies, more and more as writing as a profession is getting harder to achieve due to increased competition in the form of self-publishing, other entertainment, and so on. First, start with a large fortune…. Being good enough at WoW to be at least average, preferably better than average, in the raid group I was with.
I eventually stopped playing after concluding that I was not going to succeed. Somewhat same here, but with a different Blizzard game Overwatch. As opposed to other games, which I might well enjoy playing when I have some free time, but do not usually feel any sort of compulsion to play, finish or be good at. After spending, perhaps to say wasting, a considerable amount of my free time playing and studying the game over the past half a year or so, and especially during the summer, the results have been decidedly mixed.
On the one hand, with my main heroes I can comfortably play in a skill range that is at or somewhat above the mean for the player base as a whole, and I think I am somewhat better than average at the game than the friends I play with. This has had I think some salutary effects on my relationship with the game. However, one thing that still does deeply bother me is my poor mechanical aim and my consequent lack of skill with DPS characters, who, as I mentioned, I think are generally the most respected and difficult characters to play.
You eventually come to realize that to make any measurable improvement in a skill area, it must consume at least as much time as a full-time job would. That usually means having a little notepad n your night stand and writing 3 good things about that day. They permit this on government well, state? Our old boss is retired, and that he said a prayer as a private citizen while current city employees happened to be nearby and silent in entirely coincidental. I really should get back to practicing.
Though there is probably some aspect of the phenomenon whereby even as you get better, there is always someone better than you, even if you are a high-level professional, so an amateur dabbler is never going to feel like they have arrived. See also, all the languages of the places I expect to visit again, and would like to speak better Dutch, Finnish, Bulgarian, Portuguese, others….
Definitely going to work. Losing weight past a certain point.
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Not quitting because I have been, by reasonable standards, successful: Plus, doing enough BJJ to have smooshed guys with abs is an ego boost. My goal is be a more muscular Right now I am at a, with a small amount of muscle, down from and far too much fat. In this brave new world a man can have children on his own. Finishing my simulation side strategy game. Because I have no other major goals or desires that are achievable.
Even if the game sucks I can at least code it and finish at some point. Drugs are apparently mostly not effective on me at acceptable doses for some reason ADHD or anxiety wise. Shrink said sometimes it just happens that way. Qualify for a Magic: I am and have been for a while good enough that I could plausibly catch a few breaks, spike a tournament and get there.
Alternatively, I could buy more tickets, in the sense of entering more qualifying events. I fail to do this partly through disorganisation, partly due to brokeness, and partly out of an unhealthy fear of failure. Do you have a plan you think will work this time, and if so, why? Offer to work for a trial period for free 2. Your employer will see how great you are and offer you a paid job 3.
Most egregious example of this, though not the only one, was local pharma company where I applied for lab tech work I actually had a three year diploma certifying me as a lab tech, this was back in the day. Literally a week later, heard so-and-so got in the lab there. Oh, has she a degree? Have you thought about ways of getting paid for it, while doing whatever else you do? You could, for example, have a blog and either host ads or have a Patreon account. Find a niche of people who would be interested in your view of the world—a very small fraction of the world population is still a very large number of people—and target it.
My daughter is a free lance online editor. You obviously read a lot. Manuscripts by authors who are self-publishing are not as worth reading as the published works you read, but there is the benefit of actually having a hand in making them better. Or write a book yourself.
- Governance, Citizenship and the New European Football Championships: The European Spectacle (Sport in the Global Society – Contemporary Perspectives).
- Scéalta: Short Stories by Irish Women (Short Stories by Women from Around the World).
- A Mountain Woman.
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Getting professionally published is very hard, but self-publishing at this point is essentially costless. Your past experience suggests that you are poor at selling yourself to employers. Sell yourself to customers instead. He considers then rejects the idea of protecting himself, in either branch of reality and instead throws his considerable diplotatic force at either Gobbobobble or Subject, if GB should happen to turn on him. Subject adopts a classic crane defense, devoting a substantial portion of his energy to this.
Gobbobobble meanwhile has learned an important lesson about throwing himself with complete abandon at a single foe. But while last time this force left him sluggish and flabby but surprisingly resilient, now he feels himself glowing with the white-hot energy of pure violence. Combined with that good old shared life force he unleashes a furious combination attack on all around him, perhaps hoping to end things here and now leaving just a token defense. Gobbobobble takes practically as strong a blow and with much less of his focus on defense the seismic slams stagger him but he stays on his feet for now.
No such luck for Particle Man, between the almost incidental blow from Subject and the concentrated rage of honoredb he falls, like so many laureates before him. Finally, as the glowing rage ebbs honoredb feels the force of the massive, diplomancy enhanced, blow from Subject suddenly and totally and then he, like Jake before him, is little more than a wet smear on the arena floor. The nitty gritty Player: Branch 1 , Diplomacy 46 Attacks made: SLF 10 Attacks made: Funnily enough, the outcome was nearly identical PM and honoredb both KO , but Gob had only 3 energy in that case.
The all-powerful cosmic force came to the same conclusion about your chances and your dignified surrender will save us a lot of busy work, so thanks for that. Honoredb is down to My attack added 92 to an attack against him, meaning I accomplished nothing. Thanks for playing all! Glad you guys had a good time, I quite enjoyed seeing it all unfold from on high and enjoyed the creative writing prompt. Is there anything good for traditional parents to show little kids, or is it necessary to just wo man up and read them the classics?
Open Thread 114.75
The films Up and Inside Out are fantastic. In general I would stick to the classics. MLP swerving left might be the least-surprising of all, given their fanbase. Full SJ with a veneer of melancholy darkness? Lots of earnest sloganeering. Sure there was an SJ veneer, but it was almost comically childish. The dark and melancholy are far more prevalent themes. Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a teen comedy. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is just another dark gritty mediocre supernatural soapy drama for the teen set.
The cat is supposed to wisecrack, dammit! Also, I find the lead actress really off-putting. Honestly, all the revampings and re-imaginings of witches and witchcraft are making me more sympathetic to the Salem judges! Quoting my earlier comment from the thread in question:. My Little Pony has been veering left lately. And have you read the leaks? The first two things I give not a single solitary crap about. Good for them, I say. Gay and lesbian couples exist too, and you may as well get used to it. But yes, you can put that caveat into my poo-pooing of your concerns if it makes you feel better.
You can if you want. When a grown man Kevin Spacey has sex with a 14 year old boy, that is rape, correct? Same thing if a grown man has sex with a 14 year old girl, correct? Or a grown woman has sex with a 14 year old? I think this is pretty much the same problem as high-fiving the year old kid who sleeps with his hot female high school teacher.
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I certainly support gay rights, but I do not support 19 year olds sleeping with 13 year olds regardless of the genders involved. However, this also applies to straight couples. The underlying problem, to me, as a conservative, is that the default assumption has become anyone in fiction in a relationship is having sex. Leaving relationships in fiction ambiguous helps everyone, contrary to the representation arguments of some of the more vocal intersectional progressives. All good points, but I think this is a bit of a case of adults projecting. How many kids are thinking about sexual relationships during that scene?
Of course, again, this is a general culture issue that relates to straight and gay couples in media equally, so not a homosexual issue. Attempts to keep romance out of media are, in my opinion, doomed. And as long as romance is there, the specter of sex will follow alongside it. I do not support 19 year olds sleeping with 13 year olds regardless of the genders involved. Adult male, teenage female: While males tend to prefer young sex partners, we have strong cultural norms and laws against this, and generally teenage females are not desperate for a man, any man, to have sex with them.
Adult female, teenage female: Women in general tend to be attracted to things in addition to youth and beauty. Adult female, teenage male: Adult male, teenage male: This is where interests align. Men regardless of orientation have a predilection for young partners. Boys, regardless of orientation are very interested in someone, anyone of their preferred group to have sex with them. Oh, and the gay culture either promotes these sorts of relationships, or disavows them with a big wink in public and then in the next breath says how great their relationships like that were.
The recent season of Voltron on Netflix features one of the main characters in a gay relationship, but not in a way that most kids would even see a hint about. The fact that they had some sort of close relationship was obvious, but without the sexual aspect, it worked just as well for close friends as for lovers. What percentage of gay men do you think actually participate in sex with underage boys? There are male and female straight pedophiles, and certainly lots of older men attracted to very young women.
Men in general have a predilection for youth and beauty in a way women do not. There was study showing what age of people of the opposite sex people found attractive by age. Women frequently liked men about the same age as them or slightly older up until they capped out around the mids. But men regardless of age were pretty much honed in on year-old women.
I can look for the study if this does not seem obvious to you. But showing age-appropriate gay relationships is not ok because it normalizes the latter. Perhaps this is due to a deficiency on the part of the English language. Other languages have more words for different kinds of love. I talk to my children about love without romance, though; in our relationship there is lots of former without the latter. It looks like you are talking about consensual situations.
Straight culture is full of memes warning young girls to not have sex at all and adult men not to have sex with underage girls. You understand there is a difference between gay and straight mating cultures, correct? I agree with everything in this paragraph. Adding love into it damages its ability to stick to the primary theme of the series.
This comment single-handedly turned a slightly-CW discussion about ideological content in cartoons into a super-duper-CW discussion about the alleged prevalence of predatory pedophilia in the gay community. On top of that, choosing to graphically describe the pedophilia was absolutely unjustifiable. Or are people objecting to the implicit condemnation of gay culture.
The moral significance is debatable but ultimately a separate question. Straight adult men sometimes sleep with 14yo girls, shall we stop normalizing straight romance? Once upon a time, yes, pederasty was central to gay culture. But, increasing social tolerance for homosexuality has resulted in a disproportionate increase in the number of healthy, adult homosexual relationships. And, the AIDS crisis was transformative, in that it killed off or scared off a significant fraction of the male homosexual community, and it was not a uniform cull.
Also, if your problem is with gay adult men preying on 14yo boys, why are you complaining about e. TV shows showing healthy romances between adult gay men? To Conrad Honcho and those who back the same argument: For any non-reproductive sexual behavior, society can celebrate or punish it in pretty much any way whatsoever. It would have to be an order of magnitude difference in rate of child molestation.
Parents try to protect their kids from all sorts of unlikely fates. Being groomed by your parish priest or drama teacher is at least as likely as a stranger luring children into their van with candy. Who is this for? When gays start shunning pederasts instead of waxing poetically about the time they were statutory raped we can talk.
The risk aversion is not the part of this that disturbs me, but the logic behind it; Conrad is almost certainly not taking similar steps to protect his children from dangers that I regard as equivalent, so I am left with two possible conclusions. One, that he considers visible homosexuality much, much more dangerous than I do, or two, that he has other objections to homosexuals.
For that, I apologize. It makes it a bit difficult to be objective. Just because you live in a jurisdicton where age of consent is 18 is hardly a reason to be more concerned about your year-old child having sex than if you lived in a country where age of consent is Higher age-of-consent laws may be justified by the possibility of pressure on an unwilling teenager to have sex that they may be unable to handle properly.
But the fact that mid-teenage girls are less likely to want to have sex than boys is irrelevant in that case. By the way, I find it weird, and detrimental to discussion, that legal language related to rape and consent has been picked up by colloquial language. Obviously a teenager can consent in the everyday sense of the world, even if their decisions may be slightly less sound than those of adults, and even if the law shoehorned the prohibition of sex with children into that of rape, and created a legal fiction around consent for that purpose.
The cultures that e. And we could do a lot worse than apparently stable, monogamous, adult pairs, if we wanted to create such a template. I know exactly what purpose is served by inserting graphic descriptions of man-on-boy rape in to discussions about societal acceptance of homosexuality, thanks.
And in fact I think it is correct, there are more libertarians here than social conservatives! Conrad is almost certainly not taking similar steps to protect his children from dangers that I regard as equivalent. It can really only confuse them. Similarly, I would not show them videos about how awesome it is to take get in the vans of men who offer them free candy. Just not really a good idea.
What do you think is the critical level of ephebophilia within a given culture at which it is no longer acceptable to display even a healthy, functional example of that culture? Arguments about norms that do not revert to government force seem like a good alternative to government censorship. In terms of conservative in culture wars, there are probably more than a few, but those people can still be libertarian in their relevant political outlooks.
I know because I disagree with it myself: The only reason I gave Roy Moore a pass was because it was in a different time and place when girls got married right out of college instead of right out of high school and he was according to his words and the accounts in his favor a gentleman looking for a wife and not casual sex.
Still furrows the brow and warrants a squinty-eyed side glance. In media adult men going after 18 year old girls for sex are depicted as sleazy, immature, or unserious, and certainly not healthy. Below that is right out. I apologize for being a moral monster because I am unwilling to propagandize homosexuality to my six year old. But as to the factual claim it is not difficult to find positive personal anecdotes from gay men about their teenage affairs with older men. See Milo Yiannopolous, George Takei. So is it okay if I tell my kids about gays, but also include explicit warnings to stay away from gays?
He is arguing that fictional homosexual couples ought not to be gratuitously inserted into works targeted at children, and that he will therefor avoid showing his children works where they are. Keeping homosexual couples out of sight imposes a pretty substantial cost on them. Every culture is crazy about something, and this is one of things ours is crazy about. There may be good reasons to prohibit sex with 14 year olds, but whether it is anything like rape in its ordinary sense depends on the particular people and context.
Mencken comments somewhere that he lost his virginity at fourteen with a girl of the same age who, he adds, is now a very respectable grandmother. This is where you go off the rails. And higher than other forms of sexual violence empirically, this is wrong — most sexual violence is heterosexual and between legal adults. This thread has been depressingly light on real arguments and your point is something that people can actually build on. But throwing around epithets is neither.
This is sort of a sideways query here, not central to your point, but is there any data that tells us whether more or less openness about sex is likelier to lead a minor to end up having sex with an adult? But I really have nothing to base this on. A factual set of questions about whether gay male culture includes a lot of older men sleeping with teenage boys, what the actual risks are, etc.
Homosexuality and gay culture are not the same thing. It certainly has been a stereotype of it and may have some truth to it or had at some point. It certainly is not central or accepted in the mainstream part of that culture. Nabil has provided a sketch of how your position might arise from protectiveness, conditional on a belief that gay culture disproportionately results in negative outcomes.
We can extrapolate from there to see what other groups might prove unwholesome. I should note my disagreement with this. Since Conrad is Catholic, he ought to, in those circumstances, be encouraging his son to live a chaste life, which means no sex. Are MLP-watching kids perhaps better? My contention is that homosexuality is non-insignificantly a result of cultural and personal conditioning. If not, what causes the difference in behavior? This is pretty loaded.
Or just drop that whole thing all together as this thread is hairy enough as it is. But if you let kids watch shows with guns in them and keep the homosexuals out, it seems to me that you think that exposing kids to homosexuals puts them at a higher risk of being molested more than exposing kids to guns puts them at a higher risk of gun crime, or exposing kids to depictions of thievery primes them to commit theft. The exposure to guns comes with lots of cautionary instruction.
As horrible a person as I am for dodging exposing him to homosexuality, how much worse would you all think of me for telling him about homosexuality, but then warning him strongly against it because of the much greater chance of disease, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and suicide homosexuals experience compared to heterosexuals? No, both are propaganda. While sexual orientation is certainly biologically influenced, large swaths of sexual behavior appear to be social constructs.
Written in the stars, my friend! There are definitely cultural influences here. Yes, straight privilege is a thing. While straight people are no better or worse than gay people, and all are equally loved and valued in the eyes of God, being straight is objectively better than being gay. You can change my mind by showing me empirical evidence that homosexuals are not at a much greater risk of disease, drug and alcohol abuse, childlessness, depression and suicide than heterosexuals. Again, this can be cleared up with an adversarial collaboration if anyone is interested in putting me in my infernal place.
Given the empirically better outcomes for straights rather than gays, how is this not rational? If the outcomes were the same and I preferred one or the other, yes, that would definitely be bigoted. And Dan, can you drive your wedge in already? I have no idea what your point is. Outcomes are better for straights than gays. Sexuality has components that are socially constructed rather than purely biological or fated. The rational thing to do is to encourage the things that have the best outcomes, minimize the things that have the worst outcomes, and deal with them if they arise anyway.
The ones pretending two obviously, empirically proven different things are equivalent are the irrational ones. This is the first study I found once I got back from lab. A comparison of sexual behavior patterns among men who have sex with men and heterosexual men and women Glick et al. Working from the values in Table I, The tabulated numbers are a bit ambiguous, because the 5-year window allows for licit teenager-teenager relationships. As best we can tell, few of the men engaging in Greek pederasty I know less about Afghanistan were gay as we think of it: I think the meta-issue here not being discussed, but still hanging in the air is the idea that the reason gays have worse life outcomes is stigma and non-acceptance.
If societal acceptance and visibility of homosexuality leads more people to become gay, then we should see evidence of that over the next few decades. I think everyone would agree that the stigma against gays has decreased by orders of magnitude over the last few decades. But from my understanding of the literature again, totally willing to do an adversarial literature review with someone who wants to put me in my place , the numbers on outcomes have barely budged.
Prove that 1 is false by showing that gays have the same or better life outcomes than straights! Prove that 2 is false by showing that homosexuality is purely biological with no social construction. Do what you will. I mean, my main quibble is that that DOI goes to Glick et al, with no sign of a more recent paper by that name in her bibliography… but it still has some relevant data? This is a marginal protection on a marginal risk, and although the real cost to your kids is small-to-nil, I do find it sad that, in your eyes, that vanishingly thin margin overcomes the value of all the art and all the stories and all the lives that gay men have produced or been a part of.
I do find it sad that, in your eyes, that vanishingly thin margin overcomes the value of all the art and all the stories and all the lives that gay men have produced or been a part of. Odyssey where a pansexual dude propositions your character to have sex with him and a goat and I told my kid to leave the room for a few minutes. Wedges are for separating formerly like things.
If you continue to decline to be distinguished from your more odious comrades-in-argument, we can go from there. That being gay and male? You continue to deflect, without even the grace of data. This is not the argument you are facing here. The specific argument that has provoked your umbrage is the notion that children be allowed to see that gay relationships exist.
In my experience, the easiest way for a Red Triber to get a firm grasp on the relevant perspective is to experience the suffering of someone they care about at the hands of a culture that believes gays are objectively inferior. The focused injustice is harder to dismiss when it hits closer to home. You will notice that this is identical in form to the most common motivation behind charity. If that still seems foreign to you, well… do what you will. Like I said, the cost to your kids is virtually nil. But this whole thing is ridiculous. I literally have no idea how that happened.
The one I was trying to link is Antfolk, Hopefully now the figure and table references I made should make sense. My intuition is that the angry reaction is all about c , for CW reasons, whereas the rational argument is all around a and b. I suppose they are effective for less enterprising youths, perhaps. This could certainly lead one to believe that this indicates 0 tolerance for that particular demographic, which is a bit different from CW and SJW endless debates. Yeah, I suspect one reason why the damage of the web filters and channel blocking is limited is that teenagers interpret parental interference as annoying and route around it.
And on the other, parents do that all the time about everything. The whole country went crazy about stranger danger to the point that lots of parents were afraid to let their kids play outside unattended in safe suburbs. Probably the same parents never twitched a brain cell about the swimming pool in the backyard. On one side of that is intolerance for gays, on the other is hostility to trying to raise your kids in a way that would have been the default assumption of how decent parents did things in most places, 30 years ago. Both are incredibly dumb, but the people who get harmed by the gay panic are way more sympathetic than those harmed by the what I think has been agreed to be paranoid and unnecessary satanic panic.
Why not [everything that is analogous]? And the homosexual intercourse and goat sex in AC: As horrible a moral monster as I am for dodging the issue, how much further into the outer darkness would you be casting me if I did that? If I instructed him about all the bad things about homosexual behavior? Does this make sense now? All the gay media is positive. No one yet has argued with my assertion that gays have statistically worse life outcomes than straights. No one yet has argued with my assertion that sexual orientation and behavior is at least partially influenced by culture and conditioning.
What are these reasons? Hoopy, in the discussion about Jordan B. Lobsterman, you said you are strongly opposed to unexamined beliefs or belief systems. How did you get this belief system? Why is it so terribly shocking that not every single person subscribes to your brand new tolerance, acceptance, promotion, and prohibition on criticism of homosexuality deontolgy that appears to have been invented out of whole cloth 20 or 30 years ago?
Stallions are bigger and have square muzzles, while mares have pointy, rounded muzzles and eyelashes. This image Dan L posted is very low quality.
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You can see better secreenshots below. You are missing some context. The episode is a St. See all those heart-shaped balloons and decorations? Here are the scenes in context. OK, I think I finally get it. A lot of the things you said earlier have finally clicked together. Where did I get this belief system?
Mostly out of Kant and Nietzsche. Experience matters a lot more to me. Art matters more too. Challenge and love and life, and how individual people experience them. I care about understanding other people and reaching towards the noumena of their consciousness. I think you are correct about how you will be viewed by much of the culture at large for being explicitly heteronormative. I think you overestimate the practical effects of that contempt.
Toddlers and young children get princes and princesses and happily ever afters. And can you, in your efforts to understand the consciousness of others, conceive why they may not be satisfied with hedonism? Universalizable materialist hedonism I find horrifying. I think that parents should model their terminal values for their children, but I do not understand or accept that parents would try to control them. I do not have words to explain the difference, only bad German poetry. I can only comprehend a rejection of this philosophy as parents not caring about their children developing their own consciousness, though I can understand why others may not agree with this evaluation.
And, if it comes down to persecution, I think the reasons for it are something to do with perseverance, maturity, and wisdom. The gay character on Voltron is completely missable. I protest this erasure of Christian role models! And that will eventually happen. The transition to bestiality scenes in adult video games is not so much moving the goal posts as tearing down the old goal posts, driving over to Shelbyville, and constructing a new set of goal posts.
Maybe because sex is different from violence. Also because we get an awful lot of additional information about how violence is bad, but you are not allowed to be critical of homosexual behavior. My original comment was never about MLP itself but about normalizing homosexuality in front of kids.
As far as the goat thing that was in addition to the gay stuff. The character in the game wants your character to have sex with him, another dude, and a goat. It was also a little funny. Being a short man is also associated with relatively negative life outcomes, given a mix of social attitudes and, quite likely, non- or less flexible aspects of what humans tend to find attractive.
What differences people tend to shrug about vs relentlessly moralize is a different, interesting question, also clearly tied to flexible social standards. Would you rather not discuss that? You agree homosexuality is socially constructed, but disagree that positive exposure to homosexuality helps construct homosexuality? Being a baker is a social construct, but exposure to baking does not influence one to be a baker? How shitty a deal this is for the wife tends to be passed over. I consider homosexuals to be distinct from bisexuals, with the former being understood as having sexual and romantic feelings towards members of their own sex, with exceptions being possible but rare.
Implicit in that conception is an inability to change that pattern of attraction — someone who could would be bisexual for these purposes. Perhaps there are no such people — that would be a different argument. But given this variety of human, the relevant questions about outcomes will be qua homosexual. One of the main positives being that it avoids the uncomfortable reality that, broadly speaking, men kind of hate women and women kind of hate men, which puts a drag on some aspects of heterosexual relationships.
I have a girl friend! Take as given that the causes of homosexuality are unknown, that and while there are probably biological influences, participation in homosexual behavior or identification as a homosexual has not-insignificant social construction. In that case there is sufficient reason to think preventing children from being exposed to depictions of homosexuality positive or negative will significantly reduce the chance that they wind up with a homosexual orientation.
But it seems naively true. Is there anything else where universally positive exposure to Thing does not make at least some people more likely to like, try, or want to try Thing? Valentine… unless God was incarnate as som kind of animal…. Social pressure against homosexuality can clearly influence entirely gay men into exclusive and generally unhappy long-term relationships with women. And part of the longstanding resentment between bisexual men and gay men is the sense on the part of the latter that social pressure will inevitably push the former into relationships with women.
And what is and is not depicted is of course a huge part of that influence. Well, it depends on what is being built into that term. Many of the straight men in that group did seem to feel a need to signal their enlightenment by kissing each other. But a they were very nervous about doing this to anyone gay-identified, to the point of carefully avoiding it and b it was not at all a risk factor, statistically speaking, for any further actions. That particular signalling was a temporary fad among a certain population, like dyed hair or tight pants.
I wonder what kind of animal might make a suitable God for talking horses? Seems like someone should have considered that before now. Le Maistre Chat, fair point on St. Valentine, but if ponies are rational animals then there must be some means of salvation. The impression comes directly from the way the explanations and arguments vacillate back and forth.
The point of contention is that your motives are irrelevant to the question of what causes homosexuality. You can choose what pressures affect your children. You have a theory about that, but the arguments for it seem to have more to do with social pressures and behavior than they do with desires. That could be true. We could argue about it. When people argue about what causes homosexuality they argue about what causes homosexuality. The first coming, in humility, would be as a lamb. This was my 2 contention that you agreed with.
I am not too confident that I could estimate whether that ratio is greater than or less than one. After all, there are all sorts of cases where the causal link between X and Y is unproven, but we still avoid X just in case. Plus, it seems that the recent push to normalise transgenderism has coincided with a large spike in the number of children claiming to be transgender. In both cases, a man who might have acted on same-sex attraction does not due to social influences. I would not characterize the man in A as homosexual and I would characterize the man in B as homosexual.
Given that the categories we have arrived at implicitly depend on in flexibility of pattern except with some? This is what I disagree with. All it has going for it is an immediate, unreflective plausibility that melts into magical thinking on inspection. The evidence for the smothering mothers theory was better, in that some people were probably noticing a real correlation.
Or any factor at all tied to sex and gender? What Conrad can reasonably claim given what we know at present is the possibility of a small effect. His focus on this particular theory, and the way he overstates the evidence for it, are not reasonable. Maybe homosexuals have worse life outcomes because people like you want to scrub them from public view.
Even if you grant that gay people tend not to be as happy as straight people, joining up with the forces that are actively worsening their lives and causing all these bad things is a far more aberrant position than maybe, possibly, theoretically adding. Consider it one very real way in which letting Moloch have his way is going to turn out worse for all. And, before you even get started: The poor life outcomes that come with being gay all have plenty to do with shared environment as well.
Also because we get an awful lot of additional information about how violence is bad…. The only point in bringing it up was to compare it to your assertion that putting gay people on TV will lead to more gay people. And this thread has left me in the dust while work intervened. However, there is one thing I still want to harp on:.
There are a lot of places in American culture and media where gays are still criticized. There used to be more; it used to be that homosexuality in American culture was universally feared and reviled. It used to be that open contempt and disgust were not just mainstream, they were ubiquitous. It even used to be legal to fire someone for being gay, up until the half-forgotten days of nineteen-oh-wait-it-still-is. Insofar as seeing homosexuality normalized makes someone more likely to end up in a homosexual relationship, I would expect the effect to be larger for a bisexual than an exclusive homosexual—the latter, in our society, will probably end up in homosexual relationships whether or not he sees them normalized in his childhood.
And I expect the real pattern is a continuous rather than discrete one, with his policy aimed more at the bisexual end of the innate distribution. You made that point more than once the last time around. How would Conrad keeping his young children from watching cartoons with gay couples in them actively worsen the lives of gay people? I assume you agree that, insofar as sexual preference is innate, there is a more or less continuous range from exclusively heterosexual to exclusively homosexual. Someone at the extreme homosexual end of the range ends up either homosexual, celibate, or in a heterosexual relationship to which he is entirely unsuited, and the first is probably the least bad outcome—and, in our current society, the most likely.
Someone farther towards the center has the probability of ending up as a homosexual increased by early exposure, and Conrad views that as a bad outcome. To flirt with a separate can of worms, IMO this is the best defense of things like disparate-impact analyses w. No comment as to how that justification plays out in current practice. It is not at all a coincidence that my challenge was designed to result in a set of empirical values disambiguating the three — if you can think of a better crucible, be my guest. To the degree to which Conrad has refused to answer, should I assume the worst?
What else am I to make of his abject failure to substantiate his position, despite empty protestations to the contrary? Men have a wider range in both directions which widens as they get older, and the lower threshold often stays around mids. There is some evidence that men are also willing to go significantly older for short-term affairs! That actually answers a few questions that I had after the last paper, and supports some of my theories while arguing against others. If someone has given you grief on the first or third, feel free to open the SJW toolkit and judo them for their problematic opinions.
Can you distinguish why one of those things might not be like the others? STDs strikes me as valid, for example. What the actual fuck? How many seconds has this been true for? Seriously, this is like claiming that the black guy usually lives through the horror movie. Conrad has consistently indicated that if and when it becomes clear that one of his children is gay he will adapt, making his position far more accepting than the one you have expressed just now and in the past.
Unless you think that Conrad will inevitably wind up projecting bisexuality onto the kid in question if and when it comes down to it. No, Conrad has made it clear over and over and over that his point is about the causes of homosexuality. Read what he is saying. There are more people willing to engage in gay sex or be in gay relationships now, because of less stigma and social hostility.
The price of being gay went down so more gayness was purchased. The price of being out went down, so more gays came out. Paint me a picture. In this conversation so far, it seems to consist of Conrad not letting his small kids watch a couple shows that portray openly gay couples. This specific discussion has recurred a number of times, and my responses to David Friedman relate partly to his contributions in past iterations. He objects to his children seeing gay people, even fictional ones, at all for fear that it will somehow?
In other words, he objects to his children being taught, nay even being tangentially exposed to the idea, that gay people are acceptable as equal and unexceptional members of society. Now, are we to assume that Conrad will teach his children absolutely nothing about people who are gay? If you believe that is the outcome which Conrad will genuinely pursue, I have a bridge in Brooklyn up for sale….
Perhaps by encouraging them to participate in MLP fandom? I apologize if I was unclear on that point in my original post. In the case of depictions of violence in video games, the violence may be depicted , but it is always treated, at best, as something abnormal, that larger than life heroes and villains do, not as something it would be okay for the player to do themselves, and in many cases it is intentionally portrayed in a negative light. Friedman expands on his game-theoretic views here. Presumably David is available to correct my impression.
Smoking is a lot like homosexuality: It shows gay couples a lot. It makes very little sense if you think that a lot of the bad outcomes are inherent. SamChevre, there are complicating factors with that comparison; see my response last time you mentioned this. So some see discouraging it as just ineffective or futile, while others see it as immoral. On the other hand, some of the same really could be said for smoking.
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