masque

masque wrote

Believing that porn is morally “bad” is strongly correlated with feeling like you have an addiction to pornography, regardless of how much porn you actually watch. “The best predictor of self-perceived sexual-use problems, like pornography addiction, is high levels of religiosity,” says Bryant Paul, a media professor at Indiana University and a faculty affiliate of the Kinsey Institute, which studies human sexuality. “It’s a better predictor than actual amounts of use.”

People keep saying this, but surely if you actively "want" to not do something (i.e. on the level of your conscious values) but repeatedly give in to the urge to do it anyways it potentially makes sense to conceive of that as an addiction?

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masque wrote (edited )

I know someone who insists on not returning the shopping cart because "It's someone's job to go out into the parking lot and collect all the abandoned carts at the end of the day, and that's probably their favourite part of the job because they get to go outside."

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to by !deleted32548

There is an established tracking technique where certain apps will listen for inaudible tones embedded in broadcast media for various purposes (e.g. to tell which TV channels the user of a particular phone is watching, or to link a phone to a computer in order to build a unified tracking profile). Here's an article about that. I think they sometimes put these tracking beacons in physical locations as well (participating stores, etc.)

There was also a soccer league app that was caught using users' microphones to catch pubs streaming games without a license.

In both cases, the app is listening for a specific, known signal, which means that it doesn't need to transmit tons of audio data to a central server. But it's still definitely an example of your phone's microphone being used to gather information about you without your knowledge.

I've never seen any convincing evidence for the "I talked about needing a new umbrella and now I'm seeing ads for umbrellas, so my phone must be spying on me" idea. It usually seems like people just don't realize how much information they're leaking via other channels (mainly web tracking, location data, and credit card purchases, all of which can be very revealing).

That being said, I also don't buy the argument that this is categorically impossible because it would require transmitting too much audio data to a central server to be analyzed. I'm pretty sure you could run low-quality speech recognition locally, identify the most clearly spoken keywords, and just send that relatively small amount of data somewhere occasionally. The data quality wouldn't be very good on the individual level, but targeted ads and data mining are only really meant to work in aggregate anyways. I still haven't seen any evidence that this is actually happening, though.

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to by DeletedButArchived

I don't understand how people like it.

Presumably the primary selling point for most people is to eat well-prepared and/or novel food that they wouldn't normally get at home? I think most people don't see "being waited on" as the defining feature of a restaurant.

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to comment by ziq in Morality Vs. Ethics by ziq

I fully agree that words are just tools that we should be able to use in whatever way is actually effective for communicating our ideas, rather than adhering to some authority on the "true meaning" of words, but this essay as written is not very clear about whether you're explaining your/post-leftists' use of language, or whether you yourself are making abstract claims about the "true meaning" of these words.

I mean, consider this sentence:

'Moral' is a label applied by people to themselves and their group so they can be perceived as a pure and righteous person capable of doing no 'wrong'.

I guess I could interpret this as a definition of your usage of the word (i.e. when people describe themselves as being "a good person," they're using the concept that you refer to as morality, even if the word they actually say is "ethical" rather than "moral"), but it really reads like a claim about how other people use the word 'moral,' especially since this is the third sentence, before the reader has a lot of context to go on. And if we do read it as a claim about how other people use the word 'moral,' then I think it's a valid objection to say that this doesn't describe the full range of ways in which people use the word.

I feel like some minor changes to the intro would improve it a lot:

The difference in post-leftist thought between morality and ethics is a major misunderstanding leftists have of post-left politics. Most leftists are unaware of, or unable to grasp the distinction.

This makes it clearer that you're about to describe a distinction post-leftists make, instead of almost veering into the territory of telling other people that they are using words "wrong."

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to GOD is TRANS by kin

Pretty sure God is canonically nonbinary (at least, I think most serious theologians agree that god has no gender, despite usually being grammatically treated as male).

EDIT: But nonbinary doesn't imply trans in this case, unless God was somehow assigned a binary gender at birth?

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to by !deleted24301

As much as I hate the "greater good" logic of Mutually Assured Destruction, I do think it's worth noting that ever since the widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons there hasn't been a full-on war directly between nuclear superpowers. I feel like that's unlikely to change, although we might be see more Korea- or Vietnam-style cold-war-ish proxy wars, possibly in Ukraine and elsewhere. I feel like it's cliche to say there's a "new cold war" between the US and China, but there's some element of truth to it.

That being said, it does kinda seem like global politics is becoming a big game of chicken, where whoever has the guts to go the farthest wins (most obvious in the annexation of Crimea and the assassination of Suleimani), so it's possible that everyone will eventually realize this and start pushing the envelope all the way up to conventional war, or (god forbid) limited use of nuclear weapons, without actually triggering MAD.

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masque wrote

I think what matters is equality of power (including equal access to resources etc.), not that literally everything be the same for everyone. Does rewarding a winning athlete with something prestigious-but-only-symbolic (i.e. not money) substantially increase their power over others?

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masque wrote (edited )

Man, that "Global Minority Initiative" name and logo is such an intense bit of dog whistling. The most natural reading of the name is that it's a global initiative for minorities, and the majority of the logo is black & brown, implying to the casual observer that the organization is focused on people of colour. But to the target audience, the title refers to the "white genocide" idea of white people being a numerical minority globally, and the logo represents white people being surrounded and outnumbered.

Imagine how bad any angry tweet about the "Global Minority Initiative" would look when taken out of context.

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to by Mossey

There's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away,
When the glow of early thought declines in Feeling's dull decay;
'Tis not on Youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast,
But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere Youth itself be past.

Then the few whose spirits float above the wreck of happiness
Are driven o'er the shoals of guilt or ocean of excess:
The magnet of their course is gone, or only points in vain
The shore to which their shivered sail shall never stretch again.

Then the mortal coldness of the soul like Death itself comes down;
It cannot feel for others' woes, it dare not dream its own;
That heavy chill has frozen o'er the fountain of our tears,
And though the eye may sparkle still, 'tis where the ice appears.

Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the breast,
Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of rest;
'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath,
All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath.

Oh, could I feel as I have felt, - or be what I have been,
Or weep as I could once have wept, o'er many a vanished scene;
As springs in deserts found seem sweet, all brackish though they be,
So, midst the withered waste of life, those tears would flow to me.

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masque wrote (edited )

I don't know specific details (I'm very much a Linux person), but my impression of the general consensus among tech people is that Apple is a bit better on privacy than the other major tech companies. If you're currently using Windows, then switching to Apple will probably not be any worse from a privacy perspective.

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masque wrote (edited )

Reply to Paranoia by Majrelende

I always have an instinctive feeling that everyone is trying to figure out what my “real” gender is, so I try to look as androgynous as possible and worry over it. Does anyone else feel this way?

If you don't want people to mentally categorize you according to assigned sex at birth, then being a bit worried about whether people are doing exactly that in their minds seems normal to me. Many of them people probably are, because this isn't necessarily something that people have full conscious control over. There's not much you can do about it, unfortunately.

That being said, if the reason you want them to conceive of you in a particular way is in order to ensure a particular type of treatment, and in practice they seem to be treating you the way that you want, then perhaps you can convince yourself that it doesn't really matter that much?

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masque wrote (edited )

So far, Ontario has had "grey zones," lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, and an "emergency brake," all of which have been basically the same. The name means nothing, they're just trying to make it sound like they're doing something different instead of the same pseudo-lockdown over and over again.

EDIT: Looks like they finally closed non-essential in-person retail, though.

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masque wrote

Don't many solar energy proponents expect a lot of the required surface area to eventually come from otherwise-not-currently-utilized surface area on roofs etc., rather than dedicated installations that require substantial land use?

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masque wrote

Reply to comment by AnarcheAmor in by !deleted32344

These things frequently aren't even very convenient, though! I remember reading an article by someone who had "smart lights" that could be turned on and off through an app, which worked until they had to get a babysitter, at which point they realized that guests were unable to turn the lights on and off, and the best solution to this they could come up with was taping an old android phone to the wall to re-invent the light switch.

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