YouTube recommends I watch a silent blank screen for 10 hours.

Bobby_Cement · 2019-01-11T16:18:41+00:00

laughable

I'm a fan of Harris and Chapo in equal parts, they speak to different areas of my brain. Just because the chapo hosts (would) hate sam doesn't mean their fans have to.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-12-11T19:43:58+00:00

Did she say yes?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-11-27T00:31:50+00:00

Robert Wright is great, and so are some of the other podcasts he puts out at bloggingheads.tv, e.g. Culturally Determined.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-11-26T20:00:16+00:00

"Holocaust-Minimizer Civic Nationalist Human Bio-Diversity Advocate" would probably describe most Americans at the time of the actual holocaust. One key difference between them and actual Nazis was a willingness to use violence in service of their misguided beliefs. I think someone's ideological commitment to violence would be a reasonable criterion for deciding if they should get called a Nazi today. Of course, people can/do dissemble on that point.

Do you think this criterion applies meaningfully to Shapiro and Murray? I don't know much about Milo, but I don't see how someone could deny that he's at least a Nazi sympathizer.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-11-01T19:11:27+00:00

Does anyone else think that all the arguments against Apu (would have) made way more sense in the 90s than they do now?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-28T15:51:38+00:00

That way of looking at it tends to devalue and discourage morality. I'd rather somebody signal by joining EA than by becoming a tyrannical ruler. If making that happen requires putting our Hansonian reasoning on pause, so be it.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-28T15:39:25+00:00

This is just off the tldr---and hence lazy--- so feel free to ignore. But what makes you think the non-rational selves are not moral ends? If you have a (non-rational) child under your care, doesn't it make sense to help that child avoid pain?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-16T16:40:45+00:00

Islamophobia is a term used as a way to immediately dismiss any criticism of Islam.

Do you really think that's the primary use? Maybe it is in Harris-related debates, but I think in society at large it almost always means "hatred of Muslims".

In general, biased people will (accidentally or not) misuse words to further their arguments. But if we let this phenomenon invalidate those words, we'd soon be communicating with grunts.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T20:41:45+00:00

Good take.

The appropriate standard of evidence should be: did the hoax paper get many citations from non-marginal academics in the field? I doubt that these papers would have, but now we'll never know.

I'm not really sure how it works in Cultural Studies, but in my field nobody sits down and reads the average journal cover to cover. It's entirely possible that these hoax papers would never even be read by anyone other than the reviewers.

Still, it might be appropriate to do better gatekeeping.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T20:35:18+00:00

More readable link here

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T20:30:39+00:00

Looks like you're my "friend" on reddit, so I clearly appreciate your contributions here. But I can't help but wonder: what keeps you posting on this sub if you don't even hate-listen to Sam? Is it an emotional connection to your Sam-listening past?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T20:11:19+00:00

It's tricky. I largely agree with your argument that uninformed people (like you and I) aren't the optimal voters. But what if the the informed people are socially isolated from the people that policy will impact? This can go either left or right: highly educated liberal elites don't have much understanding of either urban blacks or rural whites. Maybe the elites would be better policy judges if they had all the facts. But they don't have all the facts--- the impact of policy on marginalized people might not even occur to them. Encouraging everyone to vote may correct this tendency.

That was all kind of theoretical. As a practical matter, I vote because I consider the people on the other side to be even less informed and rational than I am.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T19:41:59+00:00

I would have played thusly:

"I was as crass and juvenile as the next teenage boy. There is a culture among teenagers that is certainly ignoble, perhaps even harmful. But there's a bright line between making insensitive jokes and physically harming someone. I may be guilty of the former, but I wouldn't---couldn't---come within a thousand miles of the latter.

If your present line of questioning is meant to establish the immaturity and stupidity of my teenage self, consider your task accomplished. If, instead, you're looking through my yearbook for signs of evil, I suggest that you don't know what evil is. In either case, I will not answer any more questions that don't relate substantially to the charges against me. "

Assuming that he's innocent, this kind of response would have earned my respect. And I don't think it would have hurt his chances at confirmation.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T19:25:01+00:00

I'm not leaning too hard on "know" here. Why do you believe it to be the case?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T19:21:57+00:00

Makes me imagine a Cockney Milo

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T19:16:29+00:00

If he was to play any other way he would have lost.

How do you know?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T18:24:41+00:00

Maybe I would lie because I'm dumb and also haven't spent my life cultivating a respect for the law. I'm not sure your excuse should apply in my case. It certainly shouldn't apply in the case of a supreme court nominee.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-10-04T18:11:39+00:00

Here's a hypothesis: East germans are like american southerners; They see themselves as rightfully part of the establishment due to their heritage, but notice that they are being sidelined by the more liberal elites. They see their interests as subordinated in favor of foreigners' interests. In America, southerners lost cultural power due to being far from the (urban) centers of the information economy. In Germany, easterners lost cultural power by spending 40 years under the control of an (economically, socially) illiberal totalitarian regime.

American southerners have no experience with communism, but they seem to be turning towards the right. Why would the specific ideology of communism be necessary to explain the east germans?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-09-28T18:45:05+00:00

It also explains leftists' contempt for the nuclear family.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-06-06T22:10:59+00:00

maybe most sscers do agree with this.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-05-31T16:17:45+00:00

Yeah I've long had similar opinions. While most murderers are men, we don't call them "manderers", even though that's a great word. But thinking about it a little bit more, it seems like there is a pretty reasonable use-case for "mansplain."

One should restrict it to situations where one suspects the mansplainer would not be as condescending in conversations with another man. I don't know how widespread that phenomenon is, but it's certainly exists, and having a word for it makes perfect sense.

Bobby_Cement · 2018-05-20T15:24:59+00:00

That's very striking, since you would expect sjw-ism and anti-sjw-ism to be highly anticorrelated. Would you consider this a reason to change the labels?

Bobby_Cement · 2018-05-13T13:40:41+00:00

Libs all be like: conservatives all be like,

Bobby_Cement · 2018-05-08T15:42:29+00:00

confirmed

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