I can't believe that we've managed to escalate past seeing parents as negligent for letting their kids walk home from school or play outside. Is this the new normal? You are negligent if you let your kids ... talk to people online? I uh, am outraged. What if kids start having thoughts their parents don't approve of?
Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.
Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.
> do not grant grace to those who make mistakes, especially those that you have never met or otherwise spoken to
> do not seek to understand those you do not already understand
Are these not reflected in your comment?
For unrelated reasons (looking up the author of a quote in the bsd fortune file) I was looking at François de La Rochefoucauld's wikipedia page and learned that he wrote this in the intro for his book of maxims on human behavior:
"... the best approach for the reader to take would be to put in his mind right from the start that none of these maxims apply to himself in particular, and that he is the sole exception, even though they appear to be generalities. After that I guarantee that he will be the first to endorse them and he will believe that they do credit to the human spirit."
Responsibility is to those that give status. Duty of the pro-social sort is what you buy status (regard) with.
Neither subjective or consensus accounts of truth (neither of which correspond with postmodernism or utilitarianism in the way you imply) are obviously inconsistent. Philosophers would not bother talking about them if that were the case.
Funnily enough, I can't tell which of Stalin and Mother Theresa you are worried will be confused with the other, given that many people have opposite ideas of which was moral and which was immoral.
Modern religions define objective morality, not objective truth (excluding metaphysical assertions, which are not what one usually means by truth).
Of course you don't get it: you're not autistic. Did you expect to get it?
There's what's that quote about good art disturbing the comfortable and comforting the disturbed.
Eating is very stressful for many autistic people because of trauma and lack of (non-enmeshing) support in childhood. They don't learn how to make a comfortable environment for themselves or that it is even possible. Every meal becomes stressful. Force feeding or depending completely on others.
Masking goes so deep, it's just not possible to easily convey with words, because after a lifetime of masking you don't even notice all the things that you do that count.
"Presenting behavior in a socialized way when necessary" has a hidden part. Presenting what behavior? To whom? Presenting autism-coded behavior around autistic people is stress-free.
Yup, these people are perfectly fine. They don't need to identify each other and band together. No one is targeting them[0]. They need to stop making mountains out of molehills[1]. It's not like anything bad has ever happened to these 'high functioning' whiners[2]. I mean who cares if they are 'treated' by withholding food to force them to pretend to not be traumatized[3]. They should understand that if they stop identifying with the label or as oppressed victims it will be better for them[4]. Just like all those people with drapetomania[5] who don't realize what's best is a tough hand to guide them. Don't you miss how things used to be?[6] Back when there was more tough love[7].
Pricing in externalities (such as national defense impact) is a basic function of economic policy.
I searched 'economics 101 strategic industries' and found this[1] within 30s which includes an overview of 'national self-sufficiency'. It presents the standard argument, including the parts you claim the standard argument ignores.
I personally favor decentralized planning over markets, but I find it unnecessary to slander economics.
I was making the deontological argument because I assumed that was the meta-ethical framework you were using, which can be extended by just saying "abiding by moral commitments and oaths is a matter of moral necessity". I think all the arguments you levied can be addressed by that extension.
Trump didn't run on project 2025 precisely because he knew it wasn't the will of the public.
My personal view is that much evil in the world occurs because people who make decisions and those that do them are not the same set. That any one, or any small group, can inflict so much unnecessary suffering seems surely to be a sign of pathology in the structure of our civilization. The fix, in my view, is to reassert direct personal responsibility, and to deny the legitimacy of looking to systems of rules to launder responsibility.
If I was a fed right now I'd probably already have been arrested for breaking people's legs. There are way more feds than there are people telling them what to do.
Federal employees swear a constitutional oath that supersedes presidential order and they have civil service protections beyond what most workers have available. Many are in unions.
As executive workers, they have a legal obligation to execute the law irrespective of what is decreed. Even then, they have their own - private - moral principles. The Nuremberg trials were clear: following orders is not a defense.
The technique might have 'merely' prevented deep sleep due to interruptions; similar to why uberman[1] doesn't work.
When I was younger I stayed up to see what happens. The worst experience of my life was when I lied down to sleep and felt 'too tired to go to sleep' and then started hallucinating sirens. I have no idea how long I was up; after a few days I lost track. I had to paced to stay awake, which I did the entire time. I got pronounced disassociative symptoms - which I'm prone to anyway - ("it's not me in control of my body; there is a mutiny", "my reflection is weird/scary/different; that is not me", "the lines that make up the walls and reality don't seem to lay correctly"), gaps in memory, broken pattern matching (everything looks like a spider, chasing down mundane sounds to figure out what they are), and mixing up memories and imagined thoughts (e.g., fill up a cup, go to drink from it, it is empty and I'm not sure if I filled it up and then drank from it or imagined filling it up or if my memories are out of order).
Given the loss of contact with reality, I could see it being easy to manipulate people if you are in the room with them. I was alone, but if someone told me another me talked to them and then drank from the cup, the mix up could easily seem like evidence that it had actually happened that way, especially if I was trusting, vulnerable and open-minded. And once someone has a model that suggests that, they would probably make up stories on their own to support it.
So, yeah, definitely agree on the importance of sleep.
The thing being pathologized here - gender fluidity - is at its heart nothing more than willful insubordination. Hate doesn't require anger, and control isn't love.
Wow what a blast from the past. Sounds like /r/Tulpas. I've always thought it was a purely rhetorical trick + disassociation, and obvious what is happening and why. Sleep deprecation has always been part of it since that makes it harder to notice the errors at the edge of your perception. It goes back to at least the 2010s I think.
There is some precedent; the Twin Flame cult coerced transition in some members if I remember correctly. My guess is it was emotional manipulation used to make them do something that makes them more vulnerable to control. If you transition and you are not trans, you are going to have a hell of a lot of dysphoria, and shaming people and telling them it's because they are not trying hard enough/a good enough person/etc. would absolutely make it hard to break away.
Making excuses for abuse is just as unhealthy as seeing it everywhere.
I have been diagnosed both autistic and adhd and I experienced food insecurity despite living in a house with several balconies and a detached garage bigger than my friends' families' houses because my parents thought I would get over it and start going out to eat with them if they didn't bring me any food. I don't think they intended deliberately to harm me - or realize that me not going out to eat with them didn't mean there was enough food - but their authoritarian way of thinking did the harm nonetheless and it's a completely predictable outcome of such a way of thinking; so it's not "I didn't mean it" so much as "I don't want to think differently because I value my attachment to this mode of thinking more than the wellbeing of others; and when I harm them I'll say 'nothing could be done' because changing how I approach the problem isn't on the table".
The healthiest thing most autistic/adhd people ever do is moving from 'I am sick' to 'the society I inhabit has an autoimmune disorder'.
Fascism's power is situated on lying to a 'chosen majority' and telling them they are special, unique, destined for greatness, etc. (often by simultaneously giving them insecurity - that if they don't take up the mantle of chosen majority they are losers, worthless, no one will love them, they deserve to suffer, etc.) so that you can use them to get rid of opposition, and then split off small groups repeatedly, until finally screwing the chosen majority too over because they no longer have enough power to resist.
A critical part of this is controlling information; people need to be convinced not to unite, because if they notice what is happening early on, they can brute force victory through sheer numbers.
Another element of that is maintaining/gaining control of institutions with 'true believers' who are willing to commit cruelty to satisfy the party's ambition is a critical part of progressively removing minorities without the chosen majority realizing that they might be next.
Additionally, making the situation uncomfortable and scary to get people to voluntary leave whittles down the population of people who might be capable and motivated to resist. And making it seem like they have more power than they do and making it unclear what will cause harm to them can cause people to 'obey in advance', giving up power to the party which they do not have.
I call it a kink because I attract women with the kink.
I'm referring to pragmatics not semantics; the use of dictionary definitions is a category error.
No, I was not bullied. People like I describe would posture, I would raise my eyebrow and wait, and then they would treat me nice and pretend it didn't happen. Dominance as form outside the bedroom is remarkably ineffective. That's why I call it dominance as form.
"When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’;
When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’;
When he says no, he is not a diplomat. —Voltaire (Quoted, in Spanish, in Escandell 1993.)
These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — may or may not be fair to diplomats, but are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, it is possible for different speakers in different circumstances to mean different things using those words. How is this possible? What’s the relationship among the meaning of words, what speakers mean when uttering those words, the particular circumstances of their utterance, their intentions, their actions, and what they manage to communicate? These are some of the questions that pragmatics tries to answer; the sort of questions that, roughly speaking, serve to characterize the field of pragmatics."[1]
(Dominance-related) insecurity is being pathologically averse to being seen as weak, which leads to preferring dominance as form over dominance as function. If the meek hippie gets everything he wants from his wife, his neighbors, his peers, etc., and the physically impressive traditional man is ignored and rejected, then the hippie is more dominant (i.e., leading and getting what he wants) than the traditional man (even if he is abusing his wife the whole time she laughs at him).
The actually effective strategies are available to the insecure but shunned and rejected because they cannot be tolerated, creating a self-imposed impotence.
The word alpha, in almost every context I've observed, is used exclusively to refer to such dominance as form, especially in substitution for dominance as function. i.e., it is applied almost exclusively to people who are definitionally not dominant.
The only exception I have encountered is women-focused kink literature which, being fantasy, maintains that dominance as form is dominance as function so as to make sexual fantasies seem more real.
In short: you are describing a kink, not real life. Though I consider that you might be joking too; I really can't tell.
Suppose a model of reality M (which makes predictions) and doesn't admit a higher metaphysical plane as part of the model. Now assume Mp does admit a higher metaphysical plane and makes the same predictions as M for all observable phenomena (or for all reality in the sense of 'this reality').
In such a case, the existence of a higher metaphysical plane is purely aesthetic. In terms of predictions, both models are equally correct, being identical. The correctness of the internal representation is beyond epistemological limits, and arguably a meaningless or ill-formed proposition. For a significant difference, the models must make different predictions. But the conventional understanding (say the standard model) is carefully constructed and deviations by laypeople are invariably simplifications or are due to impaired reality testing.
This situation is the same as religion, because it is one. Either the religion doesn't make predictions about reality, in which case it's difference is purely aesthetic (as a model of reality), or it does and in practice is either trivially falsifiable or copying what is already known (note that the old well known religions have long since had their predictions tested).
Psychedelic experiences could, in theory, produce interesting hypotheses about reality; just like Scientology and the "Twin flame" people could. But in practice it almost always seems to produce crackpot stuff like "you can make a perceptual motion machine with time crystals and fractals; also Einstein, Aristotle, and Tupac already knew this but no one was paying attention; luckily drug-induced divine revelation has bequeathed this information via direct transmission; if only everyone else experienced ego death, then maybe they could be as great as I".
This is the hubris I perceive in the idea that scientists, philosophers, etc. that have dedicated their life to the study of particular tiny pieces of reality and honed a disciplined sense of intellectual rigor are going to be outdone by random people tripping. It is uniquely offensive and arrogant.
That said, in so far as 'reality' is 'my model of reality', individuals may gain psychological insight by partaking in 'spiritual' activity, including psychedelics, and it follows that they may gain a 'special understanding of (their) reality' in that way. The problems are the magical thinking implicated in universalizing personal insight, the pitfall of assuming independence of realities beyond subjective experience, the belief subjective perception is unlimited by physical reality, and in some a tendency to insist that such insight cannot be gained in other (more mundane) ways.
Further, facebook users could chose to use platforms that don't exploit their users. By allowing facebook to benefit from the network effect, they are responsible for kids wanting to be on the platform. They give facebook power, and then facebook uses that power to exploit children. Yet facebook's adult users don't even see the need to defend themselves. To take responsibility.
Some of these laws affect mastodon, so these laws are not a regulation of facebook. What exploitive features of mastodon deserve such a ban? Are children addicted to mastodon's default chronological feed? It seems like it would benefit facebook to establish a regulatory moat that smaller non-ad-driven competitors don't have the resources to comply with. It certainty doesn't seem to have affected their stock.
Also there is reasonable suspicion that meta lobbied for similar laws: https://tboteproject.com/git/hekate/attestation-findings
So much for holding facebook accountable.
Oh, also: https://xkcd.com/743/