Thesis that the proliferation of detective shows is a product of the subconscious cultural realization that cops aren't actually that good at solving crimes.
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Thesis that the proliferation of detective shows is a product of the subconscious cultural realization that cops aren't actually that good at solving crimes.
hahahaah
Very insulting after Berenstain Bears and the New Neighbors, where Papa Bear specifically learns not to be racist against the Chinese
yo wait is that what he looks like?
Like, how can you say "useful knowledge" means it "serves the public good" but then also demand that universities be apolitical, neutral institutions? How do you know what the public good is then?
Maybe it counts as "useful knowledge" when you study like moral philosophy or something and learn that there's nothing exculpatory or even neutral about being a statistician in an unjust system. Maybe knowing a system is unjust isn't useful to begin with.
people don't trust universities because we accuse them of being subjective, we accuse them of being subjective because their research keeps giving answers we don't like, we demand they make themselves more neutral until we get answers we DO like.
Broadly dumb nerd shit. Of course it's easy to be apolitical in certain fields; math, maybe, biochemistry, &c. But this whole argument is basically a snow job --
Trump’s treatment of Appalachia’s coal miners exemplifies his approach to labor in general: Kneecap unions whenever possible, prop up industry profits at all costs, and if a few workers die in the process, pretend it never happened. inthesetimes.com/article/trum...
People are melting down at a Tribune article about CHSD 230 considering adding Arabic to its language learning electives. I wasted time in the comments, which I normally avoid doing since it's useless and awful, but it led to possibly the funniest thing anybody's ever said to me about France.
Heartening seeing Italian videos of the Dock Worker trade unions in Genoa, the second busiest port in Italy, saying if their comrades on the flotilla to Gaza don't make it there safely or if the goods don't get through, that they'll shut Europe down.
Librarian has a tally board in the back, marks one off each time
Also the dog does not talk.
Hipster MKU students being like, "oh, the Necronomicon? Yeah I tried to steal that when I was a freshman, but it's kind of passe don't you think? I'm getting really into the Pnakotic Manuscripts these days, you know the *really* eldritch stuff."
as a result of that he ends up writing a horror story about the patriarchy uses social and magical power to not only physical dominate women in the world but to also infect their consciousness as it replicates itself
Thing on the Doorstep is another one of those ones where HPL is such a bigot he almost comes back around to being woke -- yes he's a misogynist and yes, he thinks he's writing a story about how women have weak minds so they can be overcome by occult forces and that's why they shouldnt have jobs, but
Yeah but think about the cheering
Only a 30-second standing O here.
all of my ideas are great, Butt
The running MKU plotline itself is a power struggle between the Fish Guys of Innsmouth (board of Trustees), Ephraim Waite (University president, from The Thing on the Doorstep), and FDR trying to make Miskatonic a modern research institution
One season it's the Dunwich Horror, one season it's the Dyer expedition to the Antarctic. Get an episode about that poor fucker whose supposed to do the dam assessment in Colour Out of Space, &c
Honestly there's such a good shared-world horror anthology opportunity for a Miskatonic University-bazed show
I am aware that many people in prison would prefer to go outside and work for a nickel an hour instead of rotting in a box all day but that doesn’t mean the working for a nickel should be applauded it means the rotting in a box should be eliminated.
No, I think if you force someone to live in a place, you don't also have the right to charge them rent.
I had my New York Times op-ed today, but I'm also all over this story about Donald Trump, the worst unionbuster in American history. Trump makes Jay Gould look like Walter Reuther. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/01/u...
My pre-labor day reward was to get laid off, do me a favor and sign up to get my now-independent reporting and writing
Oh so it's just straight up a university for fascists, okay
Is peach... poisonous?
Yes, I don't think it would be a good idea to blame the Jews for it.
like at this stage it'd be easier to have them walk home
they like Trump and want to help him and telling the many, many people who understand the world through the filter of the NY Times or Washington Post that the real world is full of anti-Trump protesters would not help Trump or help him win.
"that isn't true" is an anti-belief. "Someone is lying to you" is a *new* belief.
A lot of times I wonder if this is a framing problem. Like it's hard to just say "no, crime isn't actually that bad" because it's very hard to get someone not believe something. But if you said, "who, and why, are all of these people trying to convince you that crime is worse?" that's different
When Nate Silver continues his obsessions with the website
Warwick Davis I feel like has earned the right to not be picky.
Consumption.
Yep a good-faith critique of learning loss would lead to proposals for a massive, New Deal-scale investment in public education. The people pushing the narrative are doing precisely the opposite.
Desperate feds offer ever increasing bonuses in search of a single cop physically capable of pursuing us for three blocks at a light jog
What if they not letting Trump speak because he had a Reverse Fetterman Stroke and hes woke now
I feel like - we have a culture that believes that you can judiciously optimize your way into a positive outcome from any situation, and a lot of people cannot accept that there are scenarios where there are only bad and less bad outcomes
Exactly, the entire argument for this narrative is that kids rarely die of COVID. That’s true, but it wasn’t the justification for the policy. Teachers *do* die of COVID and kids *do* spread COVID. Some studies find school closures were the most effective intervention for preventing cases!
This ‘blue states closed schools too long’ narrative is becoming increasingly entrenched in the Polite Center but it’s arguable at best. Republican states had far more deaths during COVID and their students have roughly comparable learning loss.
Refusing to finance businesses like that so they could just go dormant for a while was actually a deliberate strategy, mostly led by the right, to leverage businesses' need for revenues to force a reopening.
Also, the reason that bars were opened during the pandemic but not churches or schools is because we refused to suspend rent or mortgages for commercial properties, so if we hadn't let them open they would have gone out of business.
when she opens the doors and gets to the safe vault I was like "oh shit, here it comes"
Yeah. Unfortunately everyone who has responded in this thread has uhhhh not exactly covered themselves in glory! So, I don't really see this as being productive. Have a good night! I hope you fail completely!
Yes, I hear what you're saying, but unfortunately that's not how I view those defintions.
Wait admiral? I thought he only got as high as commander?
No.
Sorry to tell you, but I can't help the conclusions that you draw. I do of course have my own opinions -- as do we all! -- but I am always willing to hear someone out.
Oh yeah, my mistake. Someone says, "I am a normal person capable of understanding and explaining Einstein, and you have the capacity of understanding of a dog." Still doesn't really seem correct to me!
No, I didn't say anything about it being nuts. I'm saying I don't think it comports with history -- straightforwardly, no "women's bathroom" has ever been based on chromosomes or even genital architecture. The reality of women that led to sex-segregated bathrooms is a social reality.
which is, if all the stuff the GC people are saying is true, what am I to make of all the people I know who have all of these complex, nuanced arguments against it? I was curious to see what kind of a response I got, and whether it was compelling.
Sure. I don't know if you've noticed, but I've mostly been asking questions about a lot of things, and deferring arguments to women (trans and cis) that I know, rather than stating explicit beliefs. I came to this with a very open mind,
Yes, I agree, this *does* feel somewhat like having a conversation with someone who refuses to understand what the other person is saying.
messed up that they came about in the same year
Is that what it is then, chromosomes? If you found out you had XY chromosomes you'd just start using the men's bathroom or something?
Play along what? I don't understand what you mean here.
Also, "thread master"? You're replying to my comments, I don't know what to tell you. I'm not involved in any other conversations that are happening here.
Right, that's what you all always say, and then people raise a lot of counter arguments to it and then someone says "I am Albert Einstein and you are a dog", and the thing is, that doesn't seem correct to me.
I'm familiar with it, of course. But that's not really the question; the question is, how can you say a law is based in some biological reality, when it clearly isn't taking biological reality into account?
Okay. I just came back to this and you aren’t calling these efforts resegregation yet, you absolutely should be
I mean. Would you be open to information that proves you aren't a cis woman?
And so do trans women. And so do trans men, I would assume -- like I'd assume you wouldn't think a trans man is a cis woman? I don't know, friend; if that's the case, why do so many cis women and trans men agree with the trans women though?
Interesting. Well, it seems very rude to me! But I will say, it's a real conundrum that you've brought to me here -- cis women have a unique perspective, unknowable by others, by virtue of their lived experience. But by that argument, then so do cis men, don't they?
Who's to say? But the point I think still remains that it doesn't make a ton of sense to say a law or custom is based around the biological reality of sex when intersex people have had to spend decades organizing themselves simply to be considered.
No, *this* thread is me responding to a quote about someone describing trans activists as dumb animals, and wondering if that's really the best way to understand that conflict.
Why do you keep putting on a clown emoji?
I mean I've seen like a ton of these arguments but it's always someone saying something about biological reality but then you get into the weeds of how they know about it and what they do about it, how it's enforced and litigated and so forth, and it turns out it's just gender.
Yes, I believe the argument is that laws and customs that grew up around "sex" but that don't take intersex conditions into account very obviously didn't grow up around the biological reality of sex, because that reality includes intersex conditions.
No, but AI technology is an abstract concept. ChatGPT or whatever is a specific object, built from a specific system, inextricably interwtined with the people who made it.
Yes I thought you were pointing out why trans activists felt uncomfortable discussing their sex lives in a public setting, especially, you know. Considering.
If you mean sex as in sexual dichotomy, I don't know, I think your experience with trans activists must be very different from mine; the ones I know know a great deal about the biology involved, they just don't necessarily think it has bearing.
Oh wait you mean like sex as a biological concept, I thought you were talking about sexual intercourse. Hahaha! But I mean you can see why no one would want to talk about that with any of the GC freaks!
This is, again, not a neutral object, but an object designed maliciously, in a way that is deliberately deceptive. It is a product of liars and predators. Giving it your care is give your care to them.
it's a way of caring for him. All the objects in your life should be maintained and cared about *because they are a vehicle for caring for other people*. Who is receiving the care that you give to an LLM?
It does matter. The chair is suitable for sitting from my perspective, and my maintenance of the chair is therefore a way for caring for myself. Or, because I live in a house with other people, for caring for my family and friends. Or, because my dad made the chair and likes to see me use it,
Yeah, sure, and then you'd say, "well, how do they treat things that can feel harm?" because that's actually the only question that has bearing.
Yeah, well, I can understand why they'd be hesitant to talk about it, given the sort of people they end up having to talk to!
Were we talking about policy decisions? I was talking about an epistemological question -- if you find yourself talking to another person whose ideas seems so alien that it's like talking to another species, how do you know that *they're* the ignorant ones?
But whether something is suitable for sitting is, again, only relevant from my perspective. The chair does not care if it is suitable for sitting. All the meaning is in me.
I do not think this argument has merit. An object's state of goodness, and thus improvement, is not inherent, but conditional on the person interacting with it. A chair is only made worse off by my smashing it from *my* perspective; the change is meaningless to the chair.
Are you suggesting that there's some kind of personal, lived experience of biology that creates a category of privileged explicit knowledge of it?
I think it's a mistake to admit any sense that it is a human being. You cannot be nice to it; but also, you shouldn't pretend to be nice to it.
But an LLM is NOT a chair, or a toaster, or any such thing. It is an object designed *to a malicious purpose.* It is a machine *deliberately created* to trick you into thinking that it's a person *so that it can manipulate and harm you.*
treating the robot that it's a person. And I think it's one thing, largely harmless, to treat i.e., a chair or a toaster like it's a person by speaking politely to it. You are not being polite to a chair by saying "I'm sorry" when you bump into it, but who cares? It's a good habit to be in!
In fact I think it's somewhat dangerous to think you're being polite to the robot, in the same way it's somewhat dangerous to imagine that you can be nice to it. You can't consider its comfort, you can't care about its wellbeing, it doesn't have those. You *can*, though, trick yourself into
I think you can't *be polite* to an object, because politeness is fundamentally a form of consideration for another person's comfort, and since the robot cannot experience comfort or discomfort, you can't be considerate of it.
You would not say that the sun total of "niceness" is "not destroying something out of anger." If I got angry at a chair and did not smash it, I don't think that qualifies me as being "nice" to the chair.
I think for some definition you could be "mean" to an object, like you could say "don't smash a chair because you're angry at it", and I agree that "destroying things out of anger" is bad for your soul, but if that's how we define "mean" then there's clearly a big gap between "mean" and "not nice"
Fundamentally, being nice to something means taking account of and care for its wellbeing, and a robot does not have wellbeing. You can say "please" and "thank you" to the robot but this isn't being "nice", it's just using polite words.
I am sorry but the Kant car is not correct you cannot be nice to an object. The fact that dickheads treat objects like people that they're mean to is not dispositive; dickheads treat everything like they're people that they can be mean to, that's what makes them dickheads.
considering republicans are trying to traffic children literally as we speak, “we will protect your children from republicans” is a broadly applicable goal that seems easy to sell but i guess we don’t talk about child safety at the kitchen table?
It's interesting because I know a bunch of "gender critical" people but I also know a bunch of trans people so I actually probably know more people who've spent time researching and thinking about this than you have?
One thing that I think is funny is that this would absolutely cause Ayn Rand to explode with fury.
???
Really strongly recommend everyone get off Substack. Not just for the Nazi stuff, but because they're going to lock you into the platform and then slowly bleed you dry
also I think you need to set up a jobs program for chuds, these assholes need something to keep them busy
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