Anything that even slightly has to do with LGBTQ people will likely end up getting blocked from children’s eyes, while anything to do with non-LGBTQ people won’t.
Age appropriate books intended for that still get banned, so the assumption is just that the decisions about it won't be made in good faith. "X has two dads" kind of books aren't really adult, and yet...
unless they're gonna bribe Clarence Thomas and the rest of the Bush appointees with more $$$ and goods that their current backers that approach is going to fail
the Tea Party's main goal was to get their people into local / state / federal circuit / SOCTUS positions, and they have succeeded.
Have you paid attention to the discourse of the would be censors? They've been conspicuously trying to turn crossdressing from a longstanding tradition (albeit mostly comedic) to obscenity. Hell, even calling trans people inherently obscene. Talk about giving away the game.
I'm currently reading Foucault's history of sexuality, and the reason you might want this is because population!
Obviously we are facing a population crisis, and we will need more bodies for the factories and retirement homes. Or at least this was the idea in the 1800s. We might have morally coated it with religion, but biopower is a real thing.
The current hypothesis is that the ever evolving LGBTQ+ is a way to sell niche products to these groups. You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.
I don't really believe this, I'm an anti-realist and I think continental philosophy is BS... but this is a classic. Also, there are sooo many ways our sexual taboos are all about economics. Once you see it, you cant unsee.
I'm wary of reasoning that boils down to using utilitarian arguments to back up moralistic fundamentalism - especially when there are so many other things that would achieve similar results but continue to go unaddressed. We could start with making sure every child has abundant access to food and healthcare so they grow up as healthy as possible. We could address the economic treadmill wherein two incomes have become de facto mandatory, causing many straight women who want kids to put it off indefinitely. And if increasing our population is a desirable goal, we could even use public money to outright subsidize the cost of caring for kids. Never mind America-first policies like immigration to increase our own population at the expense of other countries.
> You can imagine that with every new gender, there is a facebook ad and amazon order to be sold.
This is veering off into conspiratorial thinking land. Of course there is an element of truth to it. But that same element of truth applies to basically every other meme as well.
FWIW I didn't say "no". I said it was dubious to place emphasis on that specific approach when there are other approaches that could help the same goal and are more in line with our Western values, but they aren't being followed (in fact they're closer to being actively rejected!)
In general it's extremely important to exercise one's judgement/heuristics of which arguments are worthy of focus, lest one end up being taken in by superficial criticisms and actually end up harming the thing you're claiming to want to fix. Like in this instance the proponents of religious fundamentalism are also responsible for pushing a lot of backwards policy that actively harms children once they've been born - their own heuristics are just wildly out of touch with the modern world.
I'd say you're using this idea of "fallibility" as a license to make unsubstantiated assertions and then avoid responsibility for the implications. Or maybe you just need to put down the bong, detox, and touch grass. Nobody is "denying reality and science" here.
From the article: "The crisis strengthened Nasser's standing and led to international humiliation for the British—with historians arguing that it signified the end of its role as a superpower—as well as the French amid the Cold War."
I'm sure they can afford that, but would that end up paying for itself? Would that end up bringing in enough new paying users to justify spending all that money on a team of Android engineers?
They probably haven't done it because it doesn't make sense for them financially.
Wikipedia has an excellent article about exactly this [1], in their editor information section. There's a section called "Undue emphasis on significance, legacy, and broader trends" that provides some examples:
>Words to watch: stands/serves as, is a testament/reminder, a vital/significant/crucial/pivotal/key role/moment, underscores/highlights its importance/significance, reflects broader, symbolizing its ongoing/enduring/lasting, contributing to the, setting the stage for, marking/shaping the, represents/marks a shift, key turning point, evolving landscape, focal point, indelible mark, deeply rooted, ...
Once I read this, it started sticking out to me all the time.
I like the take on "undue emphasis on significance." To me, that's such an obvious tell. That's actually an old pre-LLM tell, we just used to call it "pretension." Once we get into long lists of specific words, it feels like we're getting into rules. You can't use this or that word cuz LLMs do. That's crazy problematic. It has to be about the way the emphasis and the overuse of certain words in a single piece reflects inauthenticity. But, eff if I'm gonna stop using "significance" cuz some LLM does.
I ended up doing something similar to this project a year or so ago: for nearly an entire year, I tracked every single thing I ate or drank.
Who knows how many hours I spent scanning nutritional facts on the backs of boxes, estimating amounts of liquids, and even tracking sips of water. And weighing myself! Thank goodness I used a "smart" scale at least, and I didn't have to worry about carefully inputting my weight to an app each time.
But the whole project was an exercise in perfectionism. "I have to remember this sandwich and log it the next time I'm alone" made me anxious, but once I logged it, I felt a sense of completion. The database and my personal history are now at nirvana. Everything is complete.
All for me to learn things every human alive knows today: eat more food and you'll gain weight; eat less food and you'll lose weight. Yes, I can now tell you the exact average difference in calories I'll eat, statistically speaking, on a day that I have adderall in the morning vs a day that I don't. Yes, there's a similar (but much smaller) difference in average calories per day if I have caffeine in the morning as well. And I can tell you that I generally eat an additional 200-400 calories per day on a Fri-Sun than on a Mon-Thu. Wow, groundbreaking.
I've always had a lot of water, but matching foodanddrink.csv to my HealthKit data showed that I have more water on days that I walk more steps. Mildly interesting to see it written out for me? I guess. But was it worth cataloguing every cup of water? Absolutely not.
Was any of [gestures broadly at me pulling out my phone and cataloguing each item I ate] necessary to learn that? Of course not. It gave me a chance to look back at the database and say "Wowee! I did that! Every day for a year, wow, I'm so cool!" and not much else.
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