sophia-epistemia

[sophia-epistemia]

well i'm a professional slut. but also a giant lesbian. and a very dedicated hedonist. so that's multiple reasons to prefer there be more sluts

I'll never understand anyone hating on sluts. Sluts do so much good for the community and people's mental health. We need less cops and more sluts.

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I'll never understand anyone hating on sluts. Sluts do so much good for the community and people's mental health. We need less cops and more sluts.

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Autistic puppygirls always seem to be the heroes in this cyberpunk dystopia we live in.

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guys please tell me about the voices you give your character's beast's, wrong answers only

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parents are an extremist movement that cannot be reasoned with

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The extremely wealthy are more or less constantly committing crimes against everyone else, because it is hard to hold them legally accountable. One can sue them, but this process is prohibitively expensive, and attorneys will not always work on contingency, so may lawsuits that are not frivolous but are unlikely to win go unfiled.

Traditionally, one way that less wealthy plaintiffs deal with this is by filing class action lawsuits. However, this both requires that all plaintiffs have suffered the same type of loss and that GOP legislators have not erected legal barriers to class action suits.

I propose an alternative that gets around both of these issues: lawsuit compacts. Imagine that you have 1,000 people who have been wronged by a much wealthier and more powerful individual. Let's call them Melon Husk. Each of these people individually has perhaps a 1% chance of winning a lawsuit against someone who can hire as many lawyers as Melon Husk can. But now suppose that all 1,000 people bring suit anyway, having agreed that anybody who wins their case will give half of the judgment to be distributed among all those who did not. Now you get 10 major judgments against Melon Husk, and everyone who sued has at least recovered their legal fees.

Obviously, there are wrinkles here. You can't have scammers joining the Compact to file nuisance suits, lose quickly, and then collect from the winners. But I think you could mitigate this by having the Compact hire a panel of lawyers to evaluate claims and decline membership if a claim is deemed genuinely frivolous.

I'm also open to other ideas for systems to bring the powerful to account that don't simply rely on electing perfect politicians every few years.

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I am exceptionally lucky in that my parents never hit me, grounded me, confiscated my things, banned me from my hobbies or threatened any of these actions to make me behave as a kid. as an adult it has made me realise how very very long a road most people have to traverse before they can take a statement like 'no rule that must be enforced by threat is legitimate' seriously.

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funny thing is that humans are so fucking stupid you can keep doing that for e v e r

Alright, last Current Events Drama post, is not a super valuable activity after all. I have seen a lot of Discourse that goes like "I may oppose these efforts but man the PR strategy of this Musk thing is pretty genius, they have a whole generation of people thinking USAID was funding the Liberal Media now". And they certainly aren't without agency, I agree there is an intentional PR strategy going on. In particular it is not just the creation of narrative, but the creation of momentum - every day is a new discovery, a new victory, a sense of progress.

But this isn't really that hard when your supporters are just really stupid? Like you can make shit up for these people! They don't care, they don't have that instinct that goes "okay hold up I'm going to need to see some sources here". The current Admin didn't make that happen, that is a deep, structural change around the internet flattening hierarchies and all that shit. When you know your audience wants results and also you can just invent results out of thin air then, idk, is this that hard? How could you not deliver that?

It is funny because the actual playbook here isn't even their invention, it is the same as the 2010's "Woke Boom". That entire model was that deep, slow, technical solutions to structural inequalities achieved via grinding electoral politics is boring. That shit is for fucking losers. I am not gonna have a role in that all! So instead we will achieve social change via randomly harassing my progressive coworkers for their black comedy tweets about AIDS until they get fired and have a nervous breakdown. Obviously - just like with the current right, don't be tricked! - there was another side of this movement that was much more serious, a huge side actually (we are just focusing right now). But for so many that serious side was window dressing, the real mush was that you got to feel like you were a part of something, doing something, and at a certain point they started running the show. This playbook being reversed really isn't that impressive (and also, in a sense, inevitable)

I will give the Social Justice aggros though that they had some standards - passing around photoshopped tweets was uncommon. Most of them did actually believe in this model for change (and so invented insane ideologies to justify it, but w/e). That isn't really as true on the right - I should partially walk back my statement above, a lot of these people aren't that gullible? They are just apathetic. So many people retweeting stuff about how The Deep State funnels millions to Politico don't really even care, for them it is a game. It is funny to own the libs. They laugh off your attempts at calling them out for accuracy - you care about that? What a cuck you are.

Which makes it particularly sad when you see the earnest ones, the ones writing essays about the implications of what USAID propping up the New York Times means for our political future. Nothing worse than being a true believer in a church where not only the leaders but also your fellow congregants know it is bullshit.

It reminds me of the Gamestop Meme Stock Crash and its slow, agonizing burn (a not unrelated event!). A bunch of people on the rise of the stock created the idea that buying Gamestop could Stick It To The Man, you could short squeeze the hedge funds, diamond-hands-hold that yield, bring Wall St to its knees - to the moon, baby. And some people bought it! And then the wheel turned, the crash happened, and most of the people posting those memes sold their stock and dipped so fast they had disappeared from the subreddits before they could even begin to say "bro, you thought I was serious?". Leaving a stalwart few holding the bag, spinning epicycles of conspiracy theories to justify why they had it to begin with. Which happens on autopilot a this point. You don't really need any PR strategy to make this happen.

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yeah, that's a very good Idiot Test!

Consider the argument:

"It didn't happen. And if it did, it wasn't that bad. And if it was, then they deserved it."

People often act as if this is automatically a bad faith abuser gaslighting argument. But I claim that it is reasonably common and normal to use this kind of reasoning.

Example: Carl the capitalist says "Under Biden's new spending bill, my taxes are going through the roof!"

Sandy the socialist might think in response: "First, do I even trust Carl that the spending bill contains a tax increase? He might have made that up, or heard it from a propaganda source. Even if there is a tax increase, my prior is that centrist lib Biden wouldn't raise taxes by much, so Carl is probably exaggerating. And if he did raise it a lot, good! Rich people like Carl deserve to pay their fair share!"

Like, this response involves Sandy assuming that Carl is probably not telling the truth, but that is often the correct way to interact with claims you see online.

Sandy will often phrase the argument as "Don't threaten me with a good time."

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see, the Cis Man role has An Look*. just like the Cis Woman one does. "bald scrawny nerd" is outside of the acceptable parameters; a bald guy is ok, especially if he's swole, a gloriously maned twink is also ok, hell even the male pattern balding dad can be, but "latent space of incel poster boy caricature" lol nope.

iow yeah i can totes see how hairline fixing is absolutely a gender-affirming procedure: transition from "failed [gender]" to "[gender]-looking [gender]".

like. i want my hairline fixed bc i stupidly didn't start hrt before i began losing my hair. and that is a gender-affirming procedure for me, a male-to-female transsexual, so, why would it not be one for a nerd-to-masc tranny also?

*: yeah, an array of looks, ykwim, between lithe twink and gigachad and santa and whatevs, inb4 inb4s

All right, so memes showing a younger Elon Musk with visible male-pattern balding next to a present-day Elon Musk with a thick head of hair, and using that to claim that Musk is a hypocrite for opposing gender-affirming care since he has clearly had gender-affirming care, are a thing. A... bizarrely confused thing. Isn't medicine to restore a man's hair from male-pattern balding closer to the opposite of gender-affirming care, if anything? There's nothing more gender-affirming for a man than getting thin in the front part of his hair (or starting on the crown of his head)!

Anyway, trying a little harder to engage with what memes like that are getting at kind of leads us to a place where we're saying that gender medicine is comparable to cosmetic surgery/treatments for looking younger / "better" / more conventionally attractive. Which I'm not sure is the message anyone defending gender medicine actually wants to be going for? (It's not 100% not valid, but it would seem to be overall the wrong take, I would think.)

Sometimes it feels like every day I see a new cultural snippet floating past me that reminds me of how uniquely confused and confusing this whole cluster of issues is to us collectively.

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Some devastating facts about abortion rights in Europe:

Polish abortion laws lay out that the rights of a foetus are more important than those of pregnant persons.

In Malta, women are sent to prison if they get an abortion.

In Austria, abortion is written into criminal code - this means it is considered a crime if it is not carried out as by the law. Doctors in Austria use papayas to learn how to perform an abortion.

Women in Hungary are forced by the law to listen to “the foetal heartbeat” before they can have an abortion.

The current law governing abortions in Germany was accepted during the Nazi regime. It is still referred to as “the Nazi law” by some movements.

In Italy, 80% of doctors refuse to perform an abortion. Plus, the government is financing movements that enter abortion clinics and harrass women who want to get an abortion.

Abortion rights in Europe are fragile. Sign our initiative to make abortion safe and accessible to everyone in the EU.

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My working theory of gendered occupation gaps:

"Social skills" is naturally a normally distributed trait, that has no inherent gender bias. There are women that are dogshit at social skills. There are men who are amazing. Where you fall on the normal distribution is probably hereditary but not gendered - if your parents have shit or great social skills this may have a cultural or genetic component and you may inherit one or both of these components. This is probably not very gendered.

However social skills are changeable, like any other skills they can improve with effort.

There is an absolute floor on social skills in free society - people who fail the cut off are removed via incarceration or institutionalisation. (This is an observation, I'm not saying this is morally good). This covers behaviours that upset and distress other people, mostly violence or threatening behaviour.

There are "soft floors" on social behaviour as well, which vary for different groups. People who fail the "soft floor" come across as unpleasant or bad in some way. I find it plausible that on average, the soft floor is different for men and women (it differs in different settings as well).

Allistic people are highly responsive to social sanction and social reward, but allism/ autism is a spectrum, so many autistic people will also modify their own behaviour in response to other people, just not as consistently or as "correctly" as a more allistic peer (and sometimes, despite overwhelming desire to fit in, an autistic person simply cannot, it is beyond their ability to meet allistic behavioural standards).

On average, due to the pressure of a higher "soft floor", women have better social skills than men. I find it plausible that the female social skills curve has a higher bump around the female "soft floor".

The ceiling is unlimited and also not gendered. Typically these people absolutely thrive off social reward, so they go through a positive feedback loop where their superior social skills get them social rewards which makes it rewarding for them to keep developing them until they're highly charismatic. Both genders have highly charismatic people. I'm not sure what's the relative incidence across gender lines, though. There's probably also some kind of competitive effect here, where highly charismatic people are competing against each other and the tail is all the way out there.

A lot of professions have natural cut-offs for social skills, either by hiring for adequate social skills or just through adverse selection (those without sufficient skills drop out). I find it plausible that these cut offs vary significantly within professions. Teachers need more social skills than landscapers. Sales staff need more social skills than accountants. Any office role needs more social skills than truck drivers.

Comparative advantage: people tend to use those to select professions. If the average woman is better at being empathetic than the average man, then professions where being empathetic is a core requirement will end up with more women. Fields where empathy is not an explicit requirement may have less women, because they'd been "fished out" by better jobs requiring those baseline levels of social skills.

Alice has enough charisma to do sales, and also enough technical ability to do programming. Bob does not have enough charisma to do sales but has enough technical ability to do programming. If sales and programming post equivalently "good" jobs (on axes that both Alice and Bob care about equally), Alice will probably go for sales just to compete with fewer people and become more successful. Or, conversely, she might apply to both, but Bob isn't going to apply to the sales job because he's not charismatic and not interested in being charismatic, and Alice ends up with the sales job and Bob with the programming. This happens even if programming has zero bias against women, as long as there are as many equal (or better) status, equal (or better) benefit jobs competing for the same talent pool programming is fishing in.

(and there definitely are. Normies who are good at maths or logic go into finance, investing, design, etc)

This also explains the effect that women in male dominated spaces tend to be particularly into whatever niche that space is (or are a bit autistic), because the normies are probably working somewhere else, playing to their own comparative advantages. Likewise, men in female dominated spaces are particularly into whatever that thing is or are particularly high empathy individuals (e.g childcare - the average guy perceives that he's going to be less successful, so he picks something else, unless he loves children enough to that it's inconceivable to do anything else).

But I don't think it's necessarily natural, it's just a society wide thing where on average, men have a lower standard of allowable behaviour, so don't develop as much aptitude in that kind of thing, and then people intelligently using their comparative advantages sorts out the rest.

(this is also why this kind of thing is going to be wildly different in different places, because all of the different profession based social skills cut offs, and gender based floors, and so forth are different. And it's probably hugely variable over time as well as standards for acceptable behaviour change).

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did u kno that president Lyndon B. Johnson set up a commission on obscenity in pornography in 1969? (nice) The supreme court had just ruled that people could view whatever content they wanted in the privacy of their homes, and the country was in a moral panic over it. (Stanley v. Georgia) The commission was comprised of a wide array of scientists, who performed extensive randomized surveys of the country…and commissioned Berl Kutchinsky to study the legalization of hardcore pornography in Denmark. His report was titled Studies on Pornography and Sex Crimes in Denmark (1970). Kutchinsky’s findings showed that increased availability of pornography had not led to an increase in sexual violence. He found that the incidence of certain sex crimes had in fact fallen, including rates of child sexual abuse in Denmark.  As a result, the presidential commission published it’s report which recommended sex education, further funding into research on the effects of pornography, and we as restrictions on pornography access to minors…with free access for adults. The report also found:  -That there was “no evidence to date that exposure to explicit sexual materials plays a significant role in the causation of delinquent or criminal behavior among youths or adults.” -That “a majority of American adults believe that adults should be allowed to read or see any sexual materials they wish.” -That “there is no reason to suppose that elimination of governmental prohibitions upon the sexual materials which may be made available to adults would adversely affect the availability to the public of other books, magazines, or films.” -That there was no “evidence that exposure to explicit sexual materials adversely affects character or moral attitudes regarding sex and sexual conduct.” The report was met with disgust from congress, who denied the research results. Nixon, who had become president by the time the report was released, also rejected it. When Reagan took office, he appointed his own commission in 1984, headed by his own attorney general. Reagan’s commission released their own report in 1986 that claimed that there was a causal relationship between pornography and delinquency. Who did this research? No one did. The commission did not have any scientists. 

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Ok, so obviously this is not going to convince the people who already don't agree with me on this, who find it contradictory or unsatisfactory, but I'm merely stating and not defending the position in this post:

I care about about people, I care about the general population of every country equally, and I don't care about countries or nations as entities. Actually this is not quite true—I believe that caring, if coherent, has to involve some degree of adopting others' ends as your own. @tsarina-anadyomene thinks this is one characteristic of love, and I would indeed like to be able to say that in at least some minor degree I love every person (indeed every creature) in the world. Uh, Serbian nationalists care about Serbia and therefore I care about Serbia, at least a little bit.

But governments, well, first of all fewer people care about governments qua governments as much as they care about nations in the abstract, but more importantly I think that governments as individual entities do a lot of really heinous shit that makes it impossible for me to like them. This is distinct from any anarchist position that the state should not exist—it's more like, point at any individual national government. Do I like those guys? Do I think those are good guys? Well they do some good stuff, they keep the roads paved, hopefully, deliver the mail, all that's great. But they also do a lot of killing and torture, and economic sabotage and shit like that, that hurts a lot of people. And the closer you get to the top, the closer you are to discussions of "grand strategy", the more you're explicitly or implicitly talking about shit like economic sabotage and killing people and the less you're talking about delivering the mail. I guess building roads definitely comes up, and that's good, but it's always "building more roads than the other guys so we can sabotage and/or kill them better" which is :/

I've always been a little contrarian on governments. I've always been a little bit of the famed "median voter" on governments. Get me talking about my preferred system and I'll sound sound like those peasants from Monty Python. Uh. I've made a bunch of posts about it. I want some kind of decentralized, directly democratic, cooperative, federated bullshit like the ancoms talk about for real life and the techno-libertarians talk about for software. Everything other than that is, uh, bullshit, it's the man keeping you down, man. But second place, if we don't get that? I'll take a well-run oligarchy, I'll take the façade of democracy to reduce political violence and attract foreign investment while a party of crony-capitalist technocrats actually runs the show, I'll take the 1955 system before the Plaza Accords, you get the idea. Representative democracy is a sham, basically, it's a sham. So if you're not going to give me freedom, which none of the liberal democracies do, at least give me peace, stability, and prosperity—which they're pretty good at!

But this means I look at, say, China, and I think... sucks they don't have freedom of speech, that's a big issue for me. I mean not so big an issue that I couldn't live there, just a big issue. I'd strongly like it to be otherwise. But the rest of it? Single party state? Who cares. Standard of living is high (for the urban middle class—actually this is my biggest issue with Chinese policy at the moment, they need to do massive wealth redistribution towards the rural poor) but anyway, standard of living is high, there's political stability, it's fucking fine. I hung out with a tone of Chinese international students in college and none of them were like, unhappy with the state of China, although the really wealthy ones all wanted to park their wealth abroad for pretty obvious reasons—

Right, that's another thing China needs to fix: fears about overall stability lead the local elites to siphon money out of the economy and park it abroad. I think, as a non-expert, it seems like Xi's rise and centralization of power have been worse for this. Go back to Deng, go back to term limits and power sharing! God I love Deng Xiaoping.

Uh, freedom is a ruse, uh, Ted K was lowkey right that in a modern techno-world freedom is kind of a ruse. I mean people have to be uh, we have to act or be made to act like worker bees if we want a hive this big and cantankerous to function. Uh, sucks man, sucks that we had to choose between freedom and antibiotics. Maybe we don't, right, that's my whole idea. You know how they had the Juche idea, Kim and his assholes had the Juche idea, well I also have an idea. Maybe we can have decentralized, directly democratic control of economic and civil institutions and still maintain a modern industrial economy. Maybe we can escape Ted K's trap <- new name for it I am inventing. Well one can dream, one can solve a lot of math problems and maybe one day I'll read a bunch of econ books and solve the right math problems and discover the answer. Marx, I love Marx I'm a genuine Marx fan but he doesn't have it. Sorry. Just does not got it. Soviet Union was in a Ted K trap just like all the others. They drained the Aral sea bro! That's hard to forgive...

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if any site is forced by "circumstances" (civilizational decline) to redact its archives, then let it at least retain the metadata and entries for what was redacted. let there be cenotaphs. "here was where, at swordpoint, we were made to betray history."

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The "War for Oil" shit has stuck around for so long despite not actually making sense or having evidence, but because it's a conspiracy it sticks to the mind easier than "2000s Neocons wanted to spread Freedom(tm) at the end of a sword and were riding a wave of jingoism all the way to 100,000 dead Iraqis"

And it's important because the next war, and the one after that, will be justified as a matter of freedom or oppression or whatever, and you need to be able to point out why that will lead to thousands of horrid deaths. You can, as some do, fall back on "If the US likes it, it's an imperialism, and if they don't like it it's good", but framing will immediate lead you to being incorrect about foreign policy everywhere. You need to know why people, including people in power, do things.