Schadrach

It’s easy to see someone holding up a camera or cell phone making it obvious they are recording.

Really? I routinely keep my phone in my breast pocket whenever I wear a shirt with one, and enough of it sticks out for the camera to see above the top of the pocket. I’d look no different recording or not, let alone it being obvious if I’m doing it. It’d be shaky body-cam style footage, but that’s not the point.

He was downplaying gun violence using a racist dogwhistle whilst standing under a giant ‘prove me wrong’ banner when he was shot with a bullet that had ‘owo what’s this’ written on it fired by a lily white Mormon cop’s kid.

Yeah, it doesn’t get much more ironic than that. Don’t forget that he’d previously (though not that day) said that the price of the 2nd amendment was that sometimes people were going to be shot and killed, but that that bargain was rational and prudent. I always wonder in the very last moments he was conscious if he thought about that, and if he still thought it was a rational and prudent bargain now that he was holding the check?

a jezebel article.

I have been totally unwilling to give Jezebel an ounce of attention since the article with several of their staff joking and laughing about hitting their boyfriends. One of them because he though he might have cancer. Their absence in my life these many years has managed to effect me not at all.

I have no clue who he was and why some people are upset. For the rest of the world he was like me, nobody, so cut the crap and stop explaining who was this nobody.

Being serious just in case.

He was a right wing talking head running an org called Turning Point USA that are basically nationalist christians and had risen to a degree of prominence within that niche by challenging people (mostly young women) to “debates” in which he basically steamrolled over people who really were not in any way prepared to challenge what was said. Anyone he didn’t steamroll just…wouldn’t be included in the footage he’d distribute.

To be less serious about it, he was best known for chronically publicly masturdebating to defenseless college girls. And for having a wife that seemed weirdly close to JD Vance immediately after Kirk died. There’s a part of me that expects JD to divorce his wife for the widow prior to making his next big political move, since his current wife is not exactly…blonde and white enough for a significant part of the white nationalist christian audience Vance is usually playing to.

then cite an MA THESIS in PSYCHOLOGY that doesn’t even say what you claim to think it says.

Only thing I knew of that even touched the topic - do you have a better source for someone looking into how other people perceive high or low levels of benevolent sexism in someone and how it relates to their presumptions regarding that person?

Also from the conclusions, since my direct quote of the abstract apparently doesn’t reflect the paper well enough for you: “While men’s endorsement of BS is viewed as a sign of a univalently positive attitude towards women, their rejection of BS is perceived as a sign of univalent sexist antipathy. Low BS men were judged as more hostile towards women than high BS men, suggesting that perceivers inferred that low BS men were indeed misogynists. Negative evaluations were reduced when men’s rejection of BS was attributed to egalitarian values, supporting the hypothesis that ambiguity about the motivations for low BS in men was partially responsible for the attribution of hostile sexist attitudes to low BS men.” I liked the phrasing in the abstract better, but you do you.

If I oppose a common but bullshit example of benevolent sexism (media minimizing wrongdoing when done by a woman), and your response is to invent an entire profile of me you can easily hate based on a single word choice (and it really does come off like your initial profiling was based heavily on my use of the word “malagency”, despite it being very often descriptive of reality), it very much does seem like an example of what that thesis was seeing - I expressed a not just low-BS view but an anti-BS view, and your response was to attribute it to misogyny. It felt appropriate to bring it up.

Going back to the original case, go look up other reporting on the case, without specifically searching for the use of the word “rape”. Note that the Guardian is one of the only outlets to call it what it is, while the vast majority of other sources refer to her as “having sex” or similar softening language. That just isn’t done when it’s an adult male and an underage female, unless you have the sort of wealth and/or status that lets you buy that kind of softening language.

And I say AI confidently

…and you would be wrong. Just because I’m aware of a somewhat obscure thesis that shows something interesting, doesn’t mean an AI chatbot was involved (I actually saved a copy of that one when I first read it years ago, and then Googled the title and author when writing the post to find a current link). Part of me wants to look up the value for em dash now and just start sprinkling them throughout just to fuck with you (you know, cause AI is fond of the em dash)…

You seem to have built an entire profile of me that you are very confidently very wrong about based on very, very little.

I also notice you didn’t engage with anything else.

To be fair, you don’t want to engage with the hypothetical because you and I both know of pairs of groups for A and B where you’d want to say those gasp are evidence of As being oppressed and also pairs of groups for A and B where those same gaps exist (and some are even wider than the previous case) where you’d want to attribute them to literally anything but that because your underlying worldview requires reality to conform to the prescribed hierarchies which means the need for an apologetic, which would prove my point. For anyone not knowing what I’m talking about, that same series of relationships between A and B show when A and B are black and white folks, respectively but also when they are men and women, respectively with the sex gap for some of those measures being larger than the race gap, though both apply to any given individual (and yes this means black men in particular get screwed by the criminal justice system being on the wrong end of both racial and sex gaps).

You don’t want to engage with me asking your opinion about the 2018 KY child custody law because the problem of course with the 2018 KY custody law and it’s rebuttable presumption of shared custody is it is on it’s face the least sex discriminatory policy attempted to date but who supported it and who opposed it is hard to stomach for a certain sort of person.

You didn’t engage with anything I said about Koss either. Which ultimately is built on the notion that Koss has expressed views that are…let’s just say unfortunate…for anyone who wants to consider male victims and female perps seriously. Since a lot of her work is foundational to sexual assault research, her leanings have also left a mark on that research (see things like often classifying common ways women sexually assault men in subcategories that make comparing it to men sexually assaulting women less intuitive). It’s not all bad though, things like “date rape” are useful terms and I actually like her talk about “unacknowledged victims” who essentially mentally frame what happened to them in a way to not make themselves victims, though I suspect she’d disagree with my view that this impacts male victims a great deal more than most think because of underlying social views about who perpetrators and victims can be making what happened to them not something they can readily identify for what it is.

Frankly, I have no issue with polyamorous people, but I honestly can’t understand how they get it to work.

Some people are just built different. I don’t understand how they get it to work either, but if it works for them, good for them. I don’t have to not think you’re weird to accept that you exist.

Going to get ranty here, a bit stream of consciousness, but feel free to engage.

Lots of signs of some internet education and naturalized perspective going on here.

I’m being descriptive, not prescriptive - I’m not saying the way society does shit is good or right or inherently natural, just that it is (and I would prefer it otherwise). I know you operate from a model where the fundamental structure of society is “a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” as Sylvia Walby might put it, but that…doesn’t align with reality very well, especially not current reality. It (and related theories) are built on a foundation of Marxist-style class conflict which fits about as well as the demographic breakdown you’re using works as a proxy for socioeconomic status (this is why the similar class conflict logic for race fits better than it does for gender). Which is why if you look you can keep encountering situations in which society does the opposite of what patriarchy would predict, usually with some apologetic to shoehorn things back into position rather than consider alternatives. “The patriarchy hurts men too” is the equivalent of classical geocentrists inventing epicycles and deferents to shoehorn their model back into place when the sky did not behave like it should.

Let’s try a hypothetical. I’m going to divide adults into three groups based on a demographic axis. One of those groups I’m going to set aside because they either land in between the two groups I want to discuss, have a dramatically smaller population that makes comparisons unfair, or both. The other two I’m going to call A and B. All the following comparisons are relative to A and Bs share of the total population. As are more likely to be stopped by police. As are more likely to be arrested. As are more likely to be convicted when tried. As get longer prison sentences than Bs for the same charge. As are dramatically more likely to be killed by law enforcement. Violence against an A is seen as less serious than violence against a B, especially if a B is the perpetrator. People of either group tend to get higher punishments for hurting or killing a B than an A. Now, is this evidence of As being oppressed? Are As just innately criminal, evil and monstrous? Hell, is this somehow evidence of Bs being oppressed? Or are these stats totally meaningless to that kind of discussion? I’d post sources for those, but that would be telling how I’m grouping people and the whole point is to make you think about how your view of reality is decided by the model rather than the model describing reality.

“Malagency” is a word …

Malagency is the concept that society broadly tends to assign men more agency and responsibility than they often have and tends to assign women less agency and responsibility than they often have. That’s it. And it works well to predict what will actually happen in a wide variety of situations where expecting society to behave as “a system of social structures, and practices in which men dominate, oppress and exploit women” would lead one to expect different results. This is of course fucked up and needs be opposed. But saying we need to kill benevolent sexism (and saying we need to stop minimizing women’s misdeeds is an example of this) will be read as hostile sexism by third parties, see Amy Young’s thesis “Lay misperceptions of the relationship between men’s benevolent and hostile sexism” which suggests that not engaging in benevolent sexism is viewed by third parties as hostile sexism, unless you clearly signpost that your actions are egalitarian in nature. To quote the abstract: “The low BS male target (compared to high BS male target) was judged to be higher on HS, less supportive of female professionals, less good of father and husband, and more likely to perpetrate domestic violence. Ratings of the low BS male target were as equally negative as those of the high HS male target. In Study 2, low BS male targets were judged to be low in hostility towards women only if they explicitly stated that their low BS was motivated by egalitarian values, otherwise men’s low BS was assumed to indicate misogyny.”

While I’m at it, how do you feel about the 2018 change in the law in KY regarding child custody in contested cases? The move to the notion that judges should start from a position of equally shared custody unless there’s a good reason to be otherwise? I’m curious because most of the backlash against it came from feminist circles, and it’s more or less exactly a policy position that MRAs had been fighting for for most of the prior decade+ using the phrase “a rebuttable presumption of shared custody” to describe the concept.

I am 100% certain that you do not give a single fuck about young men who are victims of sexual violence. You have even sunk to using their victimization to platform views that reproduce the conditions for that violence to continue. Vile behaviour.

You would be wrong. Though I’m curious how invoking the notion that men are often assigned by society greater agency/responsibility than they actually have while women are often assigned by society lesser agency/responsibility than they actually have (and that that often applies regardless of who benefits) would “reproduce the conditions for that violence to continue.” The whole point is that male victims (especially those with female perpetrators) are minimized as victims because they are treated as being more responsible for what happened to them while female perpetrators have language around them minimized because they’re viewed as less responsible for their misdeeds. The whole fucking “NICE” meme via South Park was from an episode that was basically a satire of this taken to the extreme. To be clear, this is a problem.

I know I go after her immediately below this, but Koss’ concept of unacknowledged victims I think impacts men even more than women as a consequence of societal malagency - if you get told by society time and again that only men perpetrate and women are only victims, that men are responsible for whatever happens to them, etc, etc and then something happens to you as a man that is done by a woman, you reframe and internalize it in a way that makes you not a victim and her not a perpetrator. I know that’s how it worked for me, and it took me years and exposure to ideas not in that framing to get over that shit. That was almost 20 years ago, thanks for my daily reminder I’m turning into an old man.

This line of minimizing female perps extends into the research as well, it’s why for example categories like “made to penetrate” exist and get filed under a subcategory of “other” in some of the research. A lot of the foundational research around intimate partner and sexual violence operated by explicitly minimizing male victims and female perps. See Mary Koss as an example (you may know her as the person who produced the first real study on rape in the US, who came up with the oft-repeated “1-in-4” stat, who coined the term “date rape”, testified before Congress to get VAWA passed, her survey instrument [SES] is still widely used, etc, etc). Once in an interview when asked about male victims of female perps she responded in disbelief with “How would that happen… how would that happen by force or threat of force or when the victim is unable to consent? How does that happen?” and when given an example of a man who had been drugged into compliance declared that that was merely “unwanted contact.” She had also separately stated on the topic “It is inappropriate to consider as a rape victim a man who engages in unwanted sexual intercourse with a woman.” If malagency is the fruit of a poison tree that poisons anything it touches as you seem to think, why isn’t anything descending from her work on the topic likewise, aside from that being most of the research on the topic?

“To women and billionaires.” Now, that is a telling line to draw. Did you think I pointed out the cultural moment because billionaires are like women

I’m not implying some sort of general moral equivalency between women and billionaires, but rather merely that both categories routinely get their misdeeds minimized in reporting. The reasons for both are different, with billionaires essentially paying for a white glove treatment while for women it’s an effect of the general malagency given them by society. The net effect in how their sexual offenses typically get reported is essentially the same, even if the cause is very different.

If she were a man, that it was called “rape” would be par the course rather than a refreshing exception. Hell, I looked up this very case on Google and of the top 5 stories on the case, 2 refer to her as “having sex”, two refer to a “sex crime” (and in the article describe that crime using “having sex” rather than “rape”) and the other was the same Guardian article linked in this Lemmy thread. So, yeah…refreshing exception. May it be the start of a trend.

Much like I expect her 10 and 7 year maximum sentences will almost certainly add up to less than 5, probably less than 3, with a significant chance she gets a suspended sentence or some probation instead of prison time - as a society we don’t like putting women in prison and we like putting them in prison as long as similarly positioned men even less. We won’t see that result until April 17, though.

In America, where most states the age of consent is 18,

It isn’t. 16 is more common (30 states, if I recall?), with only around a dozen having an age of consent of 18. It seems like more because those states include NY and CA, which are where most of the media in the US comes from. But yeah, most states have close in age exceptions and a couple have marriage as an exception to age of consent. Tugging that thread further, 48 states require you to be 18 to get married without an exception (usually involving court and/or parental consent), one requires you to be 19 and one 21. When you include those exceptions the hard minimum age of marriage in most states is 16 with several higher, with one state where it’s 15 and four with no hard minimum at all (including California and Mississippi, Massachusetts was one of these until 2018).

Probably more common than anyone thinks, though. Just because of the illicit nature of it, most of them are going to be trying to conceal themselves, and a bunch more are going to sublimate their sexuality however they have to out of fear of punishment. Most of them aren’t going to publicly set up and attend NAMBLA meetings, for example.

Guardians of Pedos. They aren’t all pedos themselves, but they sure as hell work to protect them.

I mean in the sense that I have years of experience of one set of things happening, and this is a violation of that trend. It’s either unique in terms of the author or the incident in some way that means she doesn’t get the softened language typically granted to women and billionaires when they do wrong, or this is the start of a trend. If the latter, I welcome it.

Sure, but is the full human brain the minimum set necessary?

Sentience/sapience is probably an emergent property of a set of neurons needing to coordinate, plan, predict the future and oneself in relation to it.

I suspect that AI is capable of sentience with sufficient complexity and training, but it’s not there yet. I also suspect we’ll be well past the point where it is there before we realize it is, but not until we make some kind of fundamental change in how we do it - we know human level intelligence is possible in the volume and power consumption of, well, a brain so we’re orders of magnitude off of efficiency limits.

It’s interesting that you concluded with “this must be an exceptionally violent case” and not “culture is shifting enough that explicitly calling these cases ‘rape’ is becoming more acceptable.”

Cynicism. Well founded cynicism. Though if this is the beginning of a trend and not a one-off I’ll be happy to see it.

Two charges. Two sentences. Be surprised if she gets even 5 years in actual prison.

I mean, it’s much more often called “a romp” or “an affair” when it’s a female predator and a young male victim. Usually the r word is reserved for female victims. Hell, one of the experts who did a bunch of the foundational work in studying SA in an interview about a decade ago balked at the idea that men could be victims of women at all.

Epstein’s friends get softened language because they’re rich and powerful. Women usually get softened language by default. I wonder what made her so awful for this to be reported as a “rape” and not a “romp”?

Nothing in the law requires some kind of online server. Only a local API, which a local library that can be linked is. And it only requires age to bebe described in four brackets, hence just storing a value 0-3. Didn’t see anything obvious as to why this wouldn’t actually meet the requirements, while being as dumb and pointless as possible.

Am I missing something or would the following not meet the requirements?

Add a module that does the following:

On first account login to an interactive interface, ask for an age category (<=13, 15-15,16-17,18+). So a value between 0 and 3. Store that somewhere alongside user-level application settings. Include a library for applications to link against. Library contains one function, that function just returns whatever value was stored before.

I think that meets their bare minimum while also demonstrating just how dumb this is.

Really? I would have figured the Rapture route would be workable with the right engineering. Especially given the massive amounts of borderline free cooling and non-existing regulatory environment if outside territorial waters.

Adding one more person adds more than one comparison. Assuming birthdays are evenly distributed (they aren’t), 2 people have a 1/365.25 chance of sharing a birthday. But adding a third person adds 2 more chances. Adding that 23rd person adds 22 more chances than adding the 22nd person. 1+2+3…+22=253 separate checks, of which only one needs to match.

People at the heads of nonprofits are often highly compensated, and it’s rare that any of them solve the underlying problem or even make meaningful headway. It’s why there is so much “awareness” and short term band aids involved. A nonprofit that solves the problem it’s supposedly trying to solve has no reason to exist and will cost people well paying jobs managing it.