Macronectes giganteus @giantpetrel - Tumblr Blog

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There's nothing more obscene than being exploited because of your conscience, by means of your conscience, by people who lack conscience altogether.

o-craven-canto

Gotta love the mammals of the Paleocene, living in a world just emptied out of its giants, figuring out how to fill the niches of great hunters and browsers that had never belonged to mammals before. Extreme "perfectly generic Beast" energy, too

(top row: Chriacus, Phenacodus, Taeniolabis; bottom row: Barylambda, Protungulatum, Stylinodon, all pics from Wikipedia)

godlessondheimite

it’s actually really easy to satisfy audiences with Good Representation. you can’t depict someone struggling with their Otherness because that portrays it in a bad light but you have to depict them struggling with their Otherness because if you don’t, then you’re romanticizing how hard it is to be Othered. be super careful not to depict anything that might be adjacent to a common stereotype but if you go too far to avoid all stereotypes, then you’re still building the characters around stereotypes, which is a stereotype in its own way. if your storyline uses tropes, then it’s cliche, but if it avoids tropes, then it’s inauthentic. if you lampshade any of this, then you’re speaking down to your audience but if you don’t acknowledge this, you’re also speaking down to your audience. this is all really easy stuff i don’t know why people don’t get it.

godlessondheimite

forgot The Most Important thing. you absolutely CANNOT make them perfect because that dehumanizes them, but if you give them flaws? hoooo boy…let’s just say, you do *not* want to give them flaws…

samueldays

@northshorewave

aftonfamilyvalues

the original post makes me cringe but the fact a woman is being harassed over her pedophile ex-husband using the judicial system to abuse her and her daughter because she was mean to transwomen

fictionalauthorityii

Wow, it’s almost as if troons are a bunch of mentally ill egomaniacs

dittography-direwolf

Very interesting how they will quickly... almost eagerly... side with a child molester over someone that hurt their feelings. Almost as if they have more empathy for and see more of themselves in the child molester than they see themselves in the woman. Hm.

dittography-direwolf

One of the interesting things about Jews is that they don't act as if they feel guilt, remorse, or that anything they ever do is wrong, yet they clearly do understand they're evil by the fact that they will look at the villain of virtually any story and say "This is about me, isn't it?"

tropylium

Casual reminder that genetics exists and is sociologically relevant.

(Denialism about this is one of the major points driving me away from today's leftist coalitions. Truth must come before justice, all else ends up in insanity.)

tropylium

(Reblogs cut.)

There's a long history of eugenics and, more generally "Obviously we have to control you because you're naturally predisposed to be inferior and dangerous" and going, "Right but you should assume we won't do that again" annoys me for like…

No one has asked you to assume there won't be control! On the contrary — all policies involve some degree of control over someone or something. And if a conclusion of "we will not make any policies informed, even indirectly, by any of this" was foregone, if we could know in advance that all information from studying a topic will be useless and impractical, yeah in that case there would not be much point to discussing it. Pretty tall order though & I don't think you mean to advance a fully general proposal "we cannot talk about research if it might inform a policy and end up with someone controlling someone else".

What drives my annoyance is rather that "control" has vast range to it, starting from the very, very soft control of "we will remind that X is impolite" or "we will recommend Y as the best practice", or the very, very restricted control of "we will order bureaucrats B to maintain paperwork about topic Z and not involve anyone else". Seems disingenious to forget the possible width of policy-space only once the discussion has anything at all to do with human genetics.

(Even that doesn't seem to be the boundary actually; most people have no problem, you presumably don't, with it being a widely known fact that people committing violent crime are disproportionally men.)

And who is "we"? In a democratic society, you too are among the people who have the power and right to contribute to discussion on crime, criminalogy, criminal law… and if you do, the discussion will end up containing slightly more opinions to your liking. Really you are already a part of this discussion, & have asked questions (fairly few, but more than zero). Are you therefore one of "those" people who are "asking questions"? Or is there perhaps some other, more specific issues you are leaving unnamed? I could make vague guesses but a part of the problem is after all that this shroud of "let's not go there" is vague, lacking any stated boundaries of where you don't want discussion to go.

And I would like it to be also understood that discussion itself is not a brainworm, if anything it's the opposite, a necessary part of 1. figuring out what's actually true and 2. what should be done with the information.

…at any rate yeah this is still being very tedious — a step up from a refusal to discuss anything at all or explicit ill will, but sidestepping to "here's some reasons for why I don't want to talk" is still obviously uncooperative. Might we be able to agree at least about that point?

morlock-holmes

Okay, here in Oregon the legislature is working hard to recriminalize drug possession, on the grounds that this is easier than building out voluntary drug treatment programs (The ones we have now are full and constantly turn people away).

Down in California, they're making it easier to imprison the mentally ill.

Look, if you start a sentence with "We need to be more willing to talk about the generic aspect of criminality..." that sentence doesn't end with "...so we can give people who are genetically predisposed to crime free cake and ice cream."

Even you talk about false positives, which proves the point; if the policy is to, say, fast track welfare and free preschool for people who are genetically at risk for crime, false positives are less of a worry than false negatives.

But we both know that part of the assumptions here are that by talking about the genetic aspect of criminality some bureaucratic (presumably government) organization would be getting some kind of permission to do something to the genetically impure that they probably won't like, or at least that won't particularly benefit them.

This sort of po-faced "Why there's all kinds of things we can do with this information" thing bugs me. Because in the country I live in, the government is constantly tempted to do bad things with that information.

So if you want to talk about it, I want to see that kept in mind. What DO you think should be done with this information? Because I'm not inclined to think that policies based on it are going to be neutral and subtle, given the actual history of the country.

balioc

This is less a policy position than it is a discursive position, right? Most of the time?

...I mean, I'm sure there are some people out there who are eager to create the Division of Race-Driven Precrime Enforcement, as soon as they can get the political/social cover to do so. But that seems like it's going to be quite rare. Even the most-explicitly-race-conscious conservatives tend not to be advocating for anything like that, outside the fringiest of fringe corners.

Rather, the stance is something like: Science tells us that Minority Groups X and Y and Z are genetically crime-prone. So -- if our prisons are full of people from those groups, if kids from those groups receive disciplinary measures in school at disproportionate-seeming rates, if our culture has a general vague vibe that people from those groups are kinda shady, that is not evidence of an Evil Racist System in need of reform. That is society working as intended, and processing the true underlying facts of the world. The chattering class should stop using those outcomes as a cudgel in order to force through ever more anti-institutional and pro-minority-group reform; and, more important still, the chattering class should stop yelling at me about them.

And, of course, you can respond to that stance in all sorts of ways. You can certainly, with some justice, maintain that the government might easily come to use "genetic criminality information" in evil/oppressive ways.

But I think it's hard to justify the stance that the people talking about this issue are all secretly gunning for that. Their actual affect, and demonstrated priorities, suggest something different.

samueldays

You can see an infuriating representative of the chattering class in the replies on this very post.

A reason to believe these people were guided by genetics and not social factors is RIGHT THERE IN THE OP. Puzzleleafs responds to evidence by saying there's no evidence. Puzzleleafs is acting so astoundingly bone-headed and obscurantist, he tempts me to Bulverist speculation about his real motives.

I screenshotted him because he's close at hand and commented on this specific item; but my experience from listening to more officially-credentialed people on other items is that some sort of Nontheistic Creationism ideology runs right to the top in America. People who don't believe in God, but do believe that some implicit godlike power is restraining evolution from doing certain things to human genetic traits and phenotypes and distributions thereof. Apparently that would be "complicated". What is this, the progressive remake of Irreducible Complexity?

Protip: The breeder's equation describes selection on a phenotype without regard for complexity.

Animal breeders have been selecting for complex traits in animals since before the discovery of genes. Complexity is no obstacle to a bit of fucking around and finding out approximate solutions. Engineering is prior to physics.

I am half upset, half laughing here because seeing Nontheistic Creationists like Puzzleleafs makes me immediately sympathetic to Young-Earth Creationists. Many of the YECs believe that "evolution" isn't a real science of life, it's a dishonest excuse to deny Christianity and a stick to beat the Church with, and Puzzleleafs is living down to their expectations.

If you understand evolution - no, let's taboo that loaded word, and be more precise here. If you understand the Darwinian-Mendelian model of cumulative change in organisms over generations by mutation, replication, and selection on variation, then obviously it has to apply to humans too! Humans have discrete genes! Humans replicate imperfectly! Humans have reproductive fitness variation! Et cetera.

And obviously there will be genetic variations in human capability for violence, propensity to violence, impulsiveness, intelligence, foresight, empathy, and other factors that go into "criminal convictions". It would be very odd for things to not be this way. Understanding the Darwinian-Mendelian model should tell you that genetics is sociologically relevant before you even see OP's paper, the paper is for making it obvious to people who don't understand evolution or genetics.

"You have no reason to believe-" Hand in your geneticist license!

dittography-direwolf

I try to keep a grounded viewpoint (relatively, it's a crazy world) about why people do the things they do.

But sometimes it really is difficult to see any motivation from leftoids other than that they're genuinely evil and want to destroy everything.

dittography-direwolf

Friend you just summarized the entirety of the "pro-choice" stance.

unterwaesche

Yeah, it occurred to me after I posted lmao

wageronancap

The Golden Rule is a hypothetical conditional and therefore impossible to comprehend by NPCs.

wageronancap

Low time preference requires the ability to explore hypothetical conditionals

And since NPCs can't explore hypothetical conditionals, they simply are high time preference, because the present is the only timestate they can process

wageronancap

And as a result, NPCs act in tremendously destructive fashion in pursuit of hedonism.

These are the people who are incapable of managing their own resources and therefore must live off the resources of others because they can only consume -- which loops right back into the OP: NPCs would be incapable of saying "if I got stolen from, I would feel bad, therefore I should not steal from others" because they would answer "but I'm not the one being stolen from" and carry on with their thievery.

Turns out NPC psychology is just your good-old-fashioned D&D orc.

giantpetrel

The more NPCs with this mentality I run into, the more I become convinced that “Homo sapiens” is a wastebasket taxon.

#Homo sapiens is a wastebasket taxon #Goblinmind #biology #This blog is racist to goblins #npcs

schmoyoho

back to ruin 2 (or 3) more songs, forgive me

spiderisoffweb

respect to the people out in the snow plows, but the roads better be fucking cleared by tonight i need to go out and talk to people i'm not related to please please please

massachusetts-official

Official Post of Massachusetts

tragbarerpanzrabwehrkomplexfagot

wageronancap

The Golden Rule is a hypothetical conditional and therefore impossible to comprehend by NPCs.

wageronancap

Low time preference requires the ability to explore hypothetical conditionals

And since NPCs can't explore hypothetical conditionals, they simply are high time preference, because the present is the only timestate they can process

wageronancap

And as a result, NPCs act in tremendously destructive fashion in pursuit of hedonism.

Turns out NPC psychology is just your good-old-fashioned D&D orc.

wageronancap

I use the word "goblin" to describe a creature governed in equal parts by fear and envy -- a creature that will gleefully bully anyone it perceives to be weaker than it, but will grovel cravenly to any creature it believes to be more powerful; a creature that relies solely on the strength of the mob because it is both too weak and too cowardly to do anything on its own; a creature who is willfully incapable of providing value to the society it lives in, and therefore must scavenge from those that do provide value, all the while hating those that do provide value for living a better life on their worst days than it will ever have on its best day.

This has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with leftists.

wageronancap

I hate leftists so much it is unreal

dittography-direwolf

The gradual and increasing death of curiosity among urbanite bugmen and conservatives of every stripe proves that sentience is something humanity can lose.

dittography-direwolf

Say what you will about shitlibs, their literacy rate is visibly way higher than the MAGAts.

wageronancap

The number of people born in the 50-60s who get a letter in the mail from my employer (where they are customers) and then call me while holding the letter, having an active anxiety attack, begging and pleading for assistance, is incaculable

It literally got so bad that in the last three years, we had to update our systems to include a digital copy of those letters whenever we send them out, attached to their account (don't know why it took to the 2020s to have done that in the first place, actually), so we customer service department folks can look at the letter alongside them instead of having to walk them through fucking breathing exercises before asking them to read the letter to us so we could clarify

How am I supposed to believe they were "contributing members of society" 30 years ago if they can't fucking read their own account activity today

It's no wonder evil people got away with shit, they didn't even have to lie, their constituents and customers and labor forces are illiterate and fully domesticated slaves

jungwildeandfree

so this guy right he makes ancient egyptian themed furry costumes. he makes all kinds but mostly he specializes in Horus heads. it's his passion really. he loves to make the beautiful falcon head of the Sun God. anyway so he's at a con one day and he sees this whole bunch of people in middle kingdom dress with these indistinguishable animal heads. he's like. oh man these folks could really use a new source, i can hardly tell what animal those are! so he goes over and he says "hey guys! i see you are into ancient egyptian mythological themed furry costumes--if any of you are interested in being the radiant Son of Ra, I am the BEST in the business!"

and the group of people look at each other, then at him. awkward. finally one of them says: "uh. no thanks. we're all Set."