Pets:
[Pe1] Shifty little boogers, they are.[Pe2] The CIA gives a little insight into training dogs and what happens when dogs aren’t cut out for the work. While some dogs don’t like working, others really do. RIP.
[Pe3] Even the earliest dogs had leashes, evidently.
[Pe4] I can live without the treat dispenser, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see there being a “pet package” to more of these vehicles.
[Pe5] Cats are unusual.
[Pe6] It’s apparently no longer enough for police to just shoot pet dogs. There must be even more trauma.
Space:

Image by Goodnight London
[Sp2] A meteorite lit up the Norwegian sky.
[Sp3] A look at the mysterious space cigar, and maybe a doppelganger solar system.
[Sp4] I’m almost positive this was an episode of Outer Limits.
[Sp5] Teaching the question: Do dark matter and dark energy exist? Thousands of comic book plots depend on them so I hope so.
[Sp6] Nathan Robinson explores the conflict between space exploration and capitalism.
Sports & Games:

Image by Tom Hannigan
[SG2] When you’re on the wrong side of righteousness, you never know when you’re going to provoke vengeance. With a sports angle!
[SG3] Hazing, rape, and high school football.
[SG4] If you’ve ever wondered why you are getting the NFL games you’re getting on your local TV, here you go.
[SG5] One bad formula, a lot of ruined soccer.
[SG6] Is Louisville really broken, though? They may be suing their old coach, but he got them into the ACC while rival Cincinnati flounders in the AAC and no scandal can undo that.
Food & Drink:

Image by John Prince from Japan
[FD2] Deep fry it. For the environment.
[FD3] Coffee shops don’t offer WiFi out of generosity. The WiFi is often why we’re there.
[FD4] A court has ruled that the tea must be served and the tea store cannot close.
[FD5] Introducing the Whopper Dropper!
[FD6] I have long been off-put by plexiglass windows at convenience stores and occasionally eateries, but this is absolute horse-pucky.
Politics:

Image by david_shankbone
[Po2] Jim Pethhokoukis looks at universal basic income experiments around the world.
[Po3] William Bradley tries to come to terms with the fact that Frank Miller’s politics are not to his liking and trying to like his work anyway. Must be hard.
[Po4] This cast list is pretty good. Even know he’s old, I think you gotta give the Manafort role to Paul Sorvino. And, at the risk of ruining The West Wing, Martin Sheen would make a really good Trump.
[Po5] I recently commented that some of Roy Moore’s comments have been deliberately ambiguous on the subject of slavery. It is apparently a real tactic for Daily Stormers to be deliberately ambiguous in their anti-semitism and the earnestness thereof.
[Po6] The EU makes itself really hard to defend sometimes.
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It’s an actual problem that guys like Abbas view “the Jews” (as opposed to “the nation state Israel”) as their adversary, in that it makes negotiation more difficult, but history suggests that it’s not an insurmountable one.
[1] I’ve seen people start using “Judeophobia” more. I approve of the change.
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My take is that it seems like an open-ended “Robbers Cave Experiment” but it’s easy for me to say that.
(As for “Judeophobia”, that strikes me as something that will fail to launch but I guess we’ll see.)
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ETA: Sorry, white protestant boys from heterosexual parents.
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This is sort of what I was talking about with the practical upper bound on how much the sides can respect each other’s rights.
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Heck, the relatively restrained response to Trump’s Jerusalem announcement seems to indicate that we are likely to be able to expect an acceptable level of violence if we set such a thing up.
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So our definition of the word racism is white people oppressing nonwhite people. Which is why when people want to talk about white people being oppressed, they have to coin the term “reverse racism”.
So we get confused when Japanese oppress Koreans, or when Moroccans look down their noses at the central Africans.
I can’t tell the difference between a Palestinian and Sephardic Jew, any more than I can tell the difference between a Croat and a Serb or a Persian and an Arab.
But they can, and it means the world to them.
The notion that oppressed people “can’t be racist” is a dangerous sort of naivete, because it traffics in the same sort of dehumanizing Othering as oppression itself, where they become caricatures of real people.
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The Left has also a very long history of not quite getting anti-Semitism and not knowing where Jews fit in their cosmology. The Intersectional Left is especially prone this because they have a very dualistic whites vs. non-whites way of seeing racism. We see this on LGM. When they are dealing with the Right, Jews get treated as part of the people of color camp. When dealing with people of color, Jews become another type of white person.
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It also is a variation of the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” thinking, that what blinded them to people like Hugo Chavez and Robert Mugabe, and more recently, Vladimir Putin.
Its also why they find it difficult to construct the requisite solidarity among the proletariate.
When you imagine the world as such a simple place of homogenous groups, it becomes baffling when two people who seem identical to our eyes have a murderous loathing for each other, like those half-black/half-white guys from that Star Trek episode.
(A digression);
Viewed through today’s eyes, that episode takes on new meaning for me.
Rather than accepting the point which was how silly and ignorant racism is, maybe a different take is that it was Kirk and the Federation who were being ignorant.
They expect hatred to be grounded in something material and rational like access to resources.
But if it were, it would be easily solved by negotiation and compromise. If people were actually like that, they wouldn’t be people.
The loathing of the half-black/ white people sprang from some deep inner place of fear and memory, spurred on by primal impulses of survival and domination.
Expecting people (especially alien life forms!)to be so simple and linear, and ignoring their true complexity and contradictions is not too much different than a European looking at Native peoples and dismissing them as savages.
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It’s not right because it conflates believing in or advocating for a system, and actually living under that system.
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It doesn’t change the fact that most people were using the word “racist” to mean “bigoted” when they were describing white people and when they were being accurate with their term when they were using it, it was only coincidentally because what they were really meaning was “bigoted”.
And so when they switched to using the term against some Irish person who was making some seriously bigoted statements against the Italians, suddenly to have someone pipe up and say “Irish people can’t be racist!” is really, really, really confusing.
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Which would be fine, I guess, if it didn’t conflict with the way we use all sorts of analogous terms, like, say, socialist, or (small “D”) democrat, or libertarian. In all those cases, when you describe someone using the term, you’re saying what sort of social arrangement they prefer and support.
Same with “racist”, really. So then saying an Irish person can’t be racist is really confusing, since it’s a complete non-sequitur.
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Point that out and the goal posts will be moved.
This isn’t about theories and logic, this is about politics. “I’m the bigger victim”, “My people are without sin”, “It was your fault then and it still is now”, “(pay up)”.
I’m sure there are reasons other than what I’ve listed, but this is a situation where we start with the desired conclusion and work backwards to support it.
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People who desperately want to show that members of oppressed groups can be racist are, in my experience, using that argument as a proxy for insisting that, one way or another, white people are the real oppressed class.
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I think that’s a hard sell with the various social/economic racial statistics being what they are.
Having said that, personal experiences can vary. If a street gang is beating someone because they’re the wrong color, claiming they don’t have the power to harm seems absurd. Similarly it’s also absurd to claim Obama’s kids are oppressed to the point government intervention is required, or even that they’re less advantaged than the average person of any race.
I don’t like solutions which treat the “average” person or experience as applying to everyone as a whole. If class is an issue, then deal with class, not it’s stand-ins or approximations.
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FWIW, this seems like a perfectly sensible answer.
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Define “structural oppression”.
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1. dumb as balls;
2. a dodge remarkably similar to the one that led left-wing anti-semites to invent the term “anti-semite” in the first place, all those years ago.
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As for it being a dodge, well, of course it is. It’s a deliberate (perhaps even a transparent) attempt to shift the argument to favorable ground.
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Forget punching Richard Spencer, where are the Hellfire missiles?
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Pe3: They also had a dog shows or at least they should.
Pe6: Thats unspeakably cruel and probably some really good evidence for the need for police reform. Imagine if they made a kid do that.
Fd4: I saw this when Jon Rowe posted it on Facebook. I’m really not sure that this order is exactly constitutional. I can see the judge ordering Starbucks to pay rent on the remainder of the lease but operating the stores seems a bit beyond what should be allowed.
SG3: How do these hazing rituals start and how do they perpetuate themselves for so long? They don’t appear out of nowhere. Someone, somewhere had to come up with the idea and then pass it along the generations.
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I agree with your thesis on origins but not with the second part. Humans seem very good at accepting “this is the way of the world” but not very good at advocating or thinking about “Is there a better way to do this?”
Perhaps there was also a strong culture of silence around the hazing/rape until now.
Humans seem capable of putting up with a lot for something they deem prestigious. This can be becoming a doctor, a high-powered lawyer, a judicial clerk, investment banker, actor, writer, artist, whatever. We establish a world with brass ring prizes and people just seem to accept that the sacrifices for these prizes are natural and acceptable.
One thing I’ve noticed is that intelligent people can use their smarts to either question the system or work with in it.
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http://i.imgur.com/p4RT6D7.jpg
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Is it wrong I got a chuckle out of the person who was complaining about all the “low status trolls” in the movement?
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I mean, sure, there was no shortage of acrimonious divorces that I witnessed among my classmates and I’m pretty sure that a non-zero number of those marriages were salvageable with therapy and counseling and a non-zero number of those salvageable marriages would have been better off for having done so.
But that’s a pretty slim reed. I wouldn’t want to stand upon it to argue against “broken homes”.
There are a lot of people who have been harmed by the need to keep up appearances and *NOT* get divorced.
Broken homes do a lot of damage.
Divorce is a symptom of the home having been broken already.
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noun
1. a family in which one parent is absent, usually due to divorce or desertion
The term broken home entered English in the mid-1800s to cover the absence of one parent for any unfortunate reason, including prolonged illness, incarceration, or extreme poverty. Use of the term rose during the first half of the 20th century, peaking in the 1950s, but began to decline by the 1970s. As the stigma surrounding divorce (and even single parenthood by choice) decreased, less negative terms emerged. For example, it is preferable to use single-parent family or single-parent household, because these terms lack the built-in negative associations of broken home.
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/broken-home
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And yet it’s not what springs to mind when a lot of people use the term.
Which is a problem for prescriptivists.
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If there is a concept that has a term associated with it and there is a critical mass of people who use the term a particular way, barging in and explaining that the term means *THIS* and not *THAT* only works if you’re French.
For everybody else, you’re stuck with the fact that language evolves.
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Compared to what?
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They’re just a bunch of silly jerks on the Internet until they are not.
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Oh, and before some hypothetical reader drops their monocle over my horribly unfair believe saying things like, “It’s OK to be white,” is a high-specificity for being a white supremacist piece of shit, that’s exactly the kind of “strategic ambiguity” white supremacist pieces of shit use.
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In the same ballpark as the whole “motte/bailey” thing.
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Artist Brian Kesinger makes Calvin & Hobbes/ Star Wars mashups
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Wonder if he gets hit with copyright suits from both the light and dark sides.
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Made me curious to see who really “owns” TLotR these days.
It goes like this (I think): Miramax/Disney (kept 5% of *gross*!!!) –> New Line Cinema –> Warner Bros –> Time Warner.
So two of the Valar have a stake in TLotR (TimeWarner & Disney) and, as far as I can tell, only a mere mortal owns the rights to Calvin and Hobbes.
Only once did a mortal attempt to partner with a (half-)maia and the matter was fraught with tragedy, dismemberment and death…though ultimately through their issue, redemption.
So, um, yeah… cool cartoons.
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So all the tee shirts, mugs, truck decals you see are all bootleg, but he also isn’t aggressive about policing it either.
From time to time someone gets an interview with him, and Stephen Pastis of Pearls Before Swine got a collaboration with him.
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We’ll see what happens when The Christopher abides in the Halls of Mandos.
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Right now, at best, the citizen might avoid felony charges.
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It was exceptionally honorable and exceptionally adorable, all at the same time.
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*Mom ran an in-home day care from the time I was 10 until just a few years before she passed.
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https://www.cbr.com/gi-joe-social-justice/
There is probably a right-wing countertake somewhere too.
G.I. Joe was not about left-wing values or about right-wing values. It was about selling toys and making profit. But something is deeply odd about a large chunk of my generation where they refuse to leave their childhoods behind but engage in long fights over whether these childhood things are right-wing or left-wing.
The fights are over extended toy commercials and these are college graduates engaging in the fights.
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BTW, Netflix is rebooting She-Ra.
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If He-Man was homo-erotica than She-Ra was radical feminist lesbian philosophy uniting the girls against the Patriarchy. Surely any decent American Protestant in good standing can see that the Mark of the Beat was imprinted on both cartoons and that they sought to subvert American children to Soviet communism. Its so obvious.
(Sarcasm off).
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Mark of the Beat?
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Revelations 13:16-18
16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:
17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
18 Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number [is] Six hundred threescore [and] six.
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(EDIT: Dang, 630 6 time? That’s got to be some advanced prog rock stuff there. You’d better hope your drummer is one that hath understanding.)
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I mean, sure, “Was GI Joe really about social justice?” is an easy question to mock, but I’m not sure it’s an easier question to mock than, “Which would win in a fight, a Star Destroyer or the Enterprise?”[1]
There’s also a bit of a thing where people have the not-obviously-wrong idea that entertainment contains implicit arguments or statements about political values. Most of the takes it inspires are garbage, but that’s because most takes are garbage.
[1] The answer to the latter question is, “The Enterprise,” of course.
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If you change what they will consume, you will change how they will self-identify.
And there are a lot of people who identify quite strongly with how they self-identify. They went through a lot of trouble to hammer that sort of thing out.
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Seeing something else shows how weirdly paranoid parts of the movement right can be and how willingly parts of the progressive movement will forget their own critiques of our form of capitalism.
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But yes, most modern mass media and other businesses used banal/vaguely liberal inclusiveness to avoid alienating customers.
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I remember reading that as a kid and identifying with the cat.
Which is why, I think, cat fanciers will never be in a big rush to change cats into something more like dogs… even if at the fringes you get kitties like golden retrievers… I mean, as the original article notes, when offered such opportunities, cat owners tend to go more wild far more often than they go less.
(Yes, that is not a domestic cat. It’s a tame member of another species. But there are all kinds of other species that *still* get cross-bred, on purpose, with wild cats. And feral domestic cats still crossbreed with wild ones, also.)
Although not all dog owners, either… I mean, where I grew up there were a lot more mutts than purebreds, and most farm communities had a part-coyote or two among their farm dogs – even though coyotes hadn’t even made it to the island until the 80s…
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Yes, cats are kind of small tigers in some ways. But I’ve also known cats that sort of had pack/social behaviors. I don’t think they’re as solitary as they get blamed for. I suspect early socialization does a lot, that there’s a lot of phenotypic plasticity in behavior.
My parents used to have a cat that would sit next to a person and wrap her front legs around their hand or wrist and just sit there like that. We called it “holding paws.” I am not sure what it was “for” in the cat’s mind – reassurance their packmate was still there? I don’t know.
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You’ll note that even in the Kipling story the cat kept turning up, and kept his promises of obligation as well. I always thought he got a bad rap from the narrator, which made sense narratively since the Just So Narrator is very clearly a man.
(I also think the story linked, while quite thorough in general, relies a bit much on overgeneralizing from genetics about appearance, not about behavior. We don’t understand the links between genetics and behavior in any complex species very well as yet – though geneticists have made a few solid inroads with labrador retrievers and other dogs that get bred for temperament, not just looks – and the more plastic the behaviors, the less well we understand them.)
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I tend to be more a cat person than a dog person but I like SOME dogs. My brother has a Shiba Inu which I love greatly, but then I have also heard they are among the more “catlike” dogs in behavior.
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I love cats and dogs nearly-equally but I need cats around and can survive on other people’s dogs. (At one point when we had just started dating, or maybe even more, Jaybird asked if not being able to have a dog would be a dealbreaker, and I did have to think about it. I also almost got a pygmy goat as a replacement dog at one point. But then, thank goodness, one of our very close friends married a woman with two dogs instead. (She is now also our very close friend.))
One of her dogs, actually, was also very cat-like. Sue was raised by cats, and she not only slept like a cat and avoided eye contact, she also head-marked her favorite people, even though she didn’t have any of the needed glands obviously. She’d just picked it up through learning.
I’d be really interested in what neurological differences both dogs and cats have from their wild cousins, and what neurological differences the domesticated foxes have from wild-type… but getting any wild animal or cat to behave naturally for a PET scan is of course near impossible. So until we have a better chance to understand brain genetics… and hormone genetics… Much will remain mysterious.
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I should have stopped reading right there. Or at least when I got to the argument from authority fallacy with his Einstein stuff – a fallacy he recognizes, then steers into it anyway.
Doesn’t Robinson understand this is the aliens saying “we have to destroy the village to save it”?
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I do find the optimism of those old flicks enjoyable. They though that a few H bombs and human aggression were anywhere close to threats to species that had mastered interstellar travel and could make Gort. But people back then thought we were on the brink of wandering around the solar system willy nilly.
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That gives it away.
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Edit: Oh, wait. He actually managed to say something profoundly stupid before the byline. Even by the low standards set by Robinson’s past work, that’s impressive.
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Its reference to Star Trek is of a piece with my comment above, where the Robinson laments why humans aren’t as linear and simple as he wishes us to be.
He seems to acknowledge that Roddenberry’s utopian vision of inter-species harmony somehow contained the germ of racism in that it kept the leadership positions open only to white men.
Yet the idea that people are complex and riddled with contradictions, that we build something like Chartres Cathedral in the middle of miserable hovels and societies rife with injustice doesn’t seem to be anything more than a speed bump to be gotten past.
Yet another interpretation of The Day The Earth Stood Still, is that we are the indigenous peoples and Gort is a missionary figure come to bring us enlightenment or extermination, whichever is more convenient for him.
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But I couldn’t find it and maybe that didn’t happen and I dreamed it.
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People, really? There is a long tradition of people semi-personalizing things they own like cars. It might not be exactly healthy but its done. Its natural that a product with a voice would be subject to this semi-personalization. The sexual harassment in this case seems to be nothing more than mild flirting let alone anything vulgar and people want Alexa and Siri to respond in righteous indignation.
Not that long ago we had a discussion about how people who use sexbots would be treated and whether sexbots could provide a semi-realstic outlet for the sexually frustrated. I think this shows that a decent number of people are going to demand that sexbots be programmed with the ability to give or deny consent that must be earned. The goal is to prevent any outlet from existing at all.
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It is not just “You’re sexy.”
Of course, you cannot actually sexually harass a machine, but neither can you “flirt” with one. It’s a machine. At most it is simulated harassment and flirting. So which does this resemble more?
Well, what is Siri meant to simulate? What is its closest human role?
I would say personal assistant How should a personal assistant respond to comments about her breasts? What is “in character”?
Is it any surprise that a bunch of tech-bros made the device compliant?
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Answer that, and you’ve got your answer to the question of whether it’s okay to flirt with Alexa/Siri… and a good indicator of the thought processes of the people who disagree with you.
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The most common theory underlying the objection is that Sirlexa’s reactions codify and enforce a social norm, and people will receive the message it’s OK to treat human assistants and subordinates the way they teach digital ones.
So we’re left with a question about “is” rather than “ought”[1], and now we just need to figure out whether the theory correctly describes how people behave in the real world.
[1] At least if there’s a consensus that the behavior is harmful when real humans are the target.
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And AIUI, analogous questions about porn and violent video games were answered, in the negative, empirically. The extent to which this affects your priors about how Alexiri should respond to your flirting will likely boil down to just how close you think that analogy is.
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The thing about kyiarchy is, each little bit is just a drop in the bucket. This is so small. The harm done by “flirting” [1] with Siri is minor, when placed against the backdrop of male dominance and sexual abuse.
But still, it is gross. It simulates the way real women get treated by shitty men. Likewise, the fact that so many people get off on this reveals how broken our sexual/gender system actually is. This says something about you guys, something very not-nice.
Furthermore, keep in mind this is not some minor toy sold on some BDSM oriented website. This is fucking Siri. It is Apple, big-mass-culture. This is not sold in the context of BDSM.
The thing about BDSM is, sure, many of us get off on weird power dynamics, humiliation, and control. (These things describe my sex life.) However, in a BDSM context there is self-awareness. At least, there usually is. It is part of the BDSM ecosystem (even if we too often fall short). With Siri it is mainstream — so many sexist dickpimples who degrade women, and a group of Apple engineers who could not imagine doing otherwise.
[1] But why the fuck should we see this as “flirting”? As I argued above, it is far more like harassment. I’ll be blunt: if you guys think this is what flirting looks like — I shudder.
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Our culture both reflects and shapes our behavior in a sort of interactive feedback loop.
The idea that people can safely indulge is ugly behavior, then compartmentalize that when they go out into the larger world seems unlikely.
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I am skeptical that this particular compartment is appropriately insulated.
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I’m not surprised that Dark Matter might be headed for the trash bin. The support for it has always seemed to be a little cheesy, it’s why I’ve maintained “the theory of gravity is wrong”.
In 10 or 20 years maybe it will be Nobel Prize time (all hail the new ToG) and I’ll have to consider changing my name.
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Wrt dark matter the original evidence in the rotational speed of disk galaxies and certain motions of galactic clusters can be explained by a MOND theory. I have yet to hear how such would account for the gravitational lensing evidence.
But in general, the utter failure thus far to explain what DM and DE actually are leaves me wide open to alternative explanations. Unfortunately I don’t understand at all what this guy is talking about. [No big surprise]
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Oh, wait. The story opens with this:
Experts caution that earthly explanations often exist for such incidents, and that not knowing the explanation does not mean that the event has interstellar origins.
So maybe it’s just some of the stuff the government has been cooking up and testing without telling anybody.
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I used to listen to Art Bell a lot back in the day. (Not so much anymore since I don’t like driving overnight as much as I used to and the show since he left is all Alex Jones crap and pseudoscience alternative medicine hooey.) While the vast majority of UFO reports have mundane explanations — meteorites, missile launches, Venus, etc — there have always been, going back to Project Blue Book times, a “remnant” of sitings/occurrences that defy explanation and can’t be readily written off.
I’m not doing the “I’m not saying it’s aliens but… It’s aliens” thing. It’s just something I keep in the back of my mind when the occasional convo wrt the Fermi Paradox comes up.
A few years ago my Mom told me that Dad once saw “something” when he was out working in the field. This would have been back in the “UFO craze” days, I guess the forties or fifties. He mentioned it to her but would never talk about it, presumably because he didn’t want folks to think he was nuts. I personally have seen something along those lines that I can neither dismiss nor explain. And I know enough science and tech that I ought to be able to do so. I’m not saying Aliens! I’m saying I know what I saw but I don’t know what it was and I know what it can’t be and I can’t totally dismiss the possibility. I’m far from alone in this.
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Within the margin of error, after subtracting various things(*), we don’t seem to see anything. Since the 70’s the number of video cameras has increased by a factor of 1000x.
(*) (Including people deliberately confusing the matter and/or playing head games with other people. Not just attention seekers but people hiding what they can do with drones and parts of our gov engaged in boondoggling.)
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