There is art that blurs this line. Lolita, for instance, blurs this line. Cuties is not anything like that. The emotions you're intended to register are very, very clear. The camera keeps panning away from the kids to reveal the shocked, saddened parents, and after the routine finishes the girl breaks out into tears. It's a traumatic moment.
The movie is about the way that little girls grow up in the society that we all actually live in. If you're not interested in seeing honest representations of the the world you inhabit, no one's forcing you to look, but don't think your decision to close your eyes has anything to do with protecting little girls.
Sidebar, but the "Cuties debacle" is nothing more than a moral panic. Cuties is a great movie about an immigrant kid struggling to cope with a broken home by escaping her parents and becoming a "normal French girl." She doesn't know how to fit in so she tries to gain acceptance with her non-immigrant school-friends by hyper-sexualizing herself. The story a searing criticism of the sexualization of children, not a celebration it. The dancing scene that everyone complains about is deliberately constructed to disgust the viewer, not to titillate them: you're meant to see it as the protagonist's lowest point, when they realize that they are pretending to be someone they're not in a bid to escape her parents' marital trauma. People got upset about it without seeing the movie. It's a great movie.
What you're saying makes zero sense. What is this commodity that you think will skyrocket forever, that people should perpetually hold as an investment vehicle?
I interviewed with Terraform Labs less than a year ago. The guy interviewing me was a pretty standard eng manager who'd left Amazon for the excitment of a crypto startup. I tried to prep for the interview by researching their white papers to figure out how the various balancing and investment mechanisms actually functioned on a technical level. But it was difficult to make sense of their white paper, which was fairly general, and different portions of their documentation seemed to contradict one another. When I asked what I'd been misunderstanding, he told me that I hadn't misunderstood anything: their white paper was not a full spec, and their documentation was out of date. In that case, I asked, how could one actually understand the protocol? "It's probably not possible at this point," he told me, "These things are in motion all the time." I thought his answer was pretty eye-opening.
Their interview question was: design a simple app which allows one to query the effect of crypto price changes on the supply & price of LUNA. I gathered that the upshot was, how big a movement would be required to break the $1 peg? I wonder if their models weren't good, or if their models were good, and they were just accepting a high level of risk?
Yes, you can. You don't have to dig very deep into the crypto world to realize that a lot if not most of the participants have are not plain ol' honest folks making a big ol' mistake giving their hard-earned savings to a slick-talking salesman. They are conscious participants in what they know to be a get-rich quick scheme. They know it is shady, and they don't care, because they think they're going to get out before it crashes. They're motivated by greed, not innocence.
You can recognize this and still support regulation of the industry. One of the big reasons you need regulation is to protect people from their own stupid greed.
You may be disinterested, but you're not informed. The people above you are not arguing about whether LUNA is a successful coin in general, but over how it reflects on "proof of stake" vs. "proof of work" protocols. If you think LUNA losing their peg is a good argument against PoS, you don't know enough about cryptocurrency to judge these arguments. LUNA's peg to the dollar is ensured with a scheme that has zero to do with either proof of stake or proof of work. Saying Luna's failure redounds on proof of stake protocols is like saying that AOL's failure redounds on the HTTP protocol.
I don't like Paris' broad boulevards. In my opinion they're the least interesting part of the city. The best places to congregate are always off the main line of commerce, away from cars and trucks. Obviously, proper waste disposal and lamps are good, but I don't know why we're taking it for granted that criticism of Hausmann's aesthetics is "hilariously wrong."
Exactly. It's sickening to see a billionaire like Elon Musk push around the ordinary people who currently own Twitter! (The ordinary people are Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, and State Street Corp.)
This is a dumb statement every time it's asserted. Sanctions are not an act of war in any sense. Not in theory nor in a pragmatic sense. The distinction between war and other modes of interstate hostility is an important one which we should not abandon. "Sanctions are war" is the same sort of statement as "speech is violence": it's sophistic, and it collapses nuance instead of encouraging it.
I said 'a strain in left-wing thought views the "traditional family" with extreme suspicion.' I didn't say "the majority of Democrats". The polls in question demonstrate that Democrats (though only the white ones) are proportionally more likely than Republicans to make statements in tension with a desire for 2-parent households. OP asked for hard data to back up the hypothesis that Republicans are stronger in their political commitments to 2-parent households than Democrats, and I tried to produce something like that. If you have more compelling data that points in the opposite direction, by all means post it.
A lot of what you said is reasonable, but I think you're really stretching your argument when you say that 1) liberals refrain from advocating for the "two-parent family" because to do so would imply pushing back on workplace equity and benefits for single parents, and 2) support for fathers' inclusion in paid family leave is proof that liberals care about two-parent families. I think you are seriously underplaying a very real strain in left-wing thought, which views the "traditional family" with extreme suspicion, and associates exhortations for couples to marry before they have kids, to stay together for the sake of the kids, and so on, as essentially patriarchal, religious encroachments on personal liberty.
Since you want hard poll evidence, I browsed Gallup and found a poll:
41% of Republicans vs. 61% of Democrats think having kids outside of marriage is "morally acceptable". [1]
61% of Republicans vs. 73% of Democrats think divorce is acceptable. [1]
Interestingly, you can look at [2] and see that these issues fall pretty neatly into OP's argument about "luxury beliefs". For instance, on the "having kids outside of marriage" issue, only 38% of black Democrats think it is morally acceptable, but 64% of non-black Democrats think it is morally acceptable. The black vs. non-black numbers for sex outside of marriage are 46% to 68%. Given the prevalence of exactly these behaviors in the black community relative to the white community, I think that this constitutes pretty hard evidence that OP's "luxury beliefs" hypothesis has a lot going for it.
I think there are a significant number of liberals, and not just crazy people on the internet, who think this. A data point: a while ago, I fell down a rabbit hole arguing with social justice people online who maintained that the notion that fatherlessness in the black community was problematic was a "myth." They justified their claim on the basis of a US government report which indicated that single black fathers spent more time with their kids as single white fathers. Seeing as this was a clear instance of Simpson's paradox (since non-single fathers of all races spend more time with their children than single fathers of all races, and there are more black single fathers than non-black single fathers), I assumed they'd just misappropriated unbiased research. But digging into the surveys they cited, I found that the researchers themselves had misrepresented their research in press outreach, in their official capacity as researchers. It was such an obvious case of statistical malpractice, I was shocked to see highly credentialed, well-published researchers engaging in it. What I have taken from this incident is that there are a substantial number of activists who have become so invested in social justice for African Americans that they will automatically discount any theory which they believe might place the locus of responsibility for change within the black community, even if the evidence for that theory is very strong.
1. Rosenbaum wasn't on trial. He was Rittenhouse's assailant.
2. The defense needed to present a motive for Rosenbaum's having attacked Rittenhouse, and they felt his prior convictions helped establish that motive.
3. The judge did not allow the defense to bring up Rosenbaum's prior convictions in court.
Like I said, I followed the Rittenhouse case extremely closely, and you are completely, 100% full of shit. That you are so confidently spouting off about it means that you are a completely unreliable writer, and no one should trust a word of what you have to say on this thread.
I would be find what you wrote much more convincing if I didn't have sufficient knowledge of the Rittenhouse case to know you were deliberately misleading us by selectively presentating and omitting key facts.
1. You omit the defense's stated reasoning for bringing up Rosenbaum's prior convictions. Their theory was not "pedophiles bad kill pedophiles good." They wanted to argue that Rosenbaum lunged at Rittenhouse in order to take his firearm, because, as a convicted felon, Rosenbaum was not legally able to purchase that firearm. It was important that they show evidence that Rosenbaum had a pernicious motive to lunge at Rittenhouse, because the prosecution was alleging the only reason he did so was in self-defense.
2. More crucially, you omit the fact that the judge prevented his defense from mentioning these convictions in court for fear it would be prejudicial. Because of this, the jury never found out about Rosenbaum's extensive criminal history. [1] This craters the relevance of this example. It doesn't demonstrate any sort of double standard.
Yes, though "town square" is a metaphor which typically refers to public space generally, and usually includes things like streetcorners in its definition.
No, you're imagining complications that don't exist. The very boring answer is that if two people (or groups) want to exercise their right to free speech at the same time, the government is charged with fairly apportioning the space to each of them in turn, in such a manner that both will ultimately be able to express themselves. If one of the parties feels the government is unfairly restricting their right to speech, they can take the government to court, and the court will adjudicate the dispute.
What people are describing as "cancel culture" is a totally different phenomenon.
I agree with most of what you've written but I don't think it's correct to think of social power having been "democratized." It seems more accurate to view the transformation we've seen as existing mostly at the top of society. Highly networked, social-media savvy college-educated elites have figured out how exert power on structures which were previously by other highly networked, college-educated elites.
In general, there is nothing wrong with the government legislating what its employees may say when acting as agents of the government, just as there is nothing wrong with a corporation telling its employees what they may say when acting as agents of the corporation. Free speech does not mean, "Your employer cannot fire you for publicly contradicting company policy while on the clock." Note that there are limits to what the government can mandate with regard to its employees' communications, and the Florida bill may run up against them.
If there is a pulpit in the town square, then the 1st amendment says that a speaker *is* entitled to that pulpit. This is the essence of free speech, and always has been. The 1st amendment is very explicit about this: citizens have a right to assemble *in public* and air their opinions *publicly.* Cordoning off opinions and declaring them unfit for certain public squares is a classic form of censorship. Communists, Republicans, the KKK, NAMBLA, the NRA, GLAAD, Gay Geeks for Bernie and the ASPCA all have the right to march on the National Mall.
When Elon buys an ownership stake in Twitter, he's taking an ownership stake from other billionaires, so it doesn't make sense to think of it as an example of billionaires increasing their power in society.