Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
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User ID: 290
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
9hr ago
· Edited 9hr ago
Interesting set of anecdotes. If you are not in favour of desegregation, what alternative would you propose for ensuring that the Black schools are not systematically neglected as they were prior to Brown?
Ironically enough I say that segregation was the Chesterton's fence that was broken.
But in that case, the people tearing down the fence do know why it was put up; that's why they want to tear it down!
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
9hr ago
In the specific case of Mrs Levine, the possibility to which I was alluding was that, not being a lesbian (or bisexual, which I probably should have included), she is only interested in a male partner, and defines that not to include transwomen.
In the general case, some lesbians, and some straight men, are attracted to natal-anatomy!women, some to current-anatomy!women, some to appearance/'presentation'!women, and some to identity!women; mutatis mutandis for gay men and straight women and various definitions of men.
The 'cotton-ceilingers' are objecting not to the non-existence of the latter categories but to the existence of the former, and my response to them is the same as to those who object to the existence of people who don't pursue intimate relationships across racial boundaries.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
10hr ago
Because that just brings us back to the question of whether the Admiral is a man or a woman, and whether it is appropriate to consider the biological factors correlated with that question.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
22hr ago
I come in in clothes which I have been wearing for a week which have tomato sauce on them
the sexually deranged catboy wearing programming socks
One of these things is not like the other....
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
22hr ago
Strictly speaking the schools weren’t even segregated, the neighborhoods were(and there was no way to fix that easily).
Gerrymander the school districts?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
22hr ago
...whose wife predictably divorced [her] shortly after [her] "coming out", as she had no interest in playing along....
Or she is very much not a lesbian....
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
22hr ago
Is it appropriate for a woman in power?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
If anything, I think a calm-worded threat would probably seem more plausible to them.
"There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man." -- Patrick Rothfuss
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
Honest, capable, sober people can also cause considerable damage to America, perhaps even more damage. [...] They just have bad values and so all their good qualities are worthless or even negative.
This is part of why Trumpism and similar movements elsewhere came about; the Very Serious People responded to the financial crises of 2008, and subsequent public ire, by putting a seemingly-respectable façade on an ideology that effectively amounted to 'compassion and equality for groups that can be proportionally represented in the C-suites; ruthless social Darwinism for individuals, especially those who are not Members Of An Oppressed Group'.
Re Judge Clark, I'm going to invoke Chesterton's Fence on the American taboo against segregation.
After the end of Reconstruction, many Southern plantationists resented that they could no longer coerce unpaid labour from Black people at whip-point without a fig-leaf of a criminal conviction. Having racially-separated schools allowed them to subject black people to worse conditions than their white counterparts, and 'separate but equal' rarely if ever stayed equal for long. (There was one school district, I think in Texas, that gave the schools in Black areas names at the end of the alphabet, and then implemented improvements such as air-conditioning in alphabetical order!)
That does not mean that any particular method of desegregation is necessarily advisable, and I would be interested to hear any alternative you might have in mind.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
1d ago
What's wrong with Admiral Levine's aesthetic? The impression I get from her is of an outwardly-stern but decent grandmother.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
2d ago
nuclear power, with its massive engineering requirements and historic status as bete noire to environmentalists
...and its ability to provide power when we tell it to, rather than when the weather feels like it.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
Apparently we're not doing phrasing anymore...?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
This isn't possible. Specifically the word "ever". An industrial civilization with 1940s tech can make a nuke. "Ever" is a very long time.
Unless by 'they' one means 'the mullahs' regime'.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
"I am a worm and no man" is not what the Strong [...] say of themselves
That might depend on the definition of 'worm'.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
4d ago
But I expect most people aren't so uncomfortable as to really desire that, and certainly the most rational amongst us realize that the cost of such a step would be insanely high, and the risk of something worse replacing it is real and serious.
That is addressed in the next sentence.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
Apparently the bridge in question wasn't quite finished.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
communism is dead
Not that certain capitalists are doing their part to keep it that way.... 🐸☕
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
5d ago
Prior to Tubal-Cain.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
Ok, so then this goes straight back to my pedophilia example. If I can't even condemn pedophilia because it's "disapproved of by the Community" and the community can sometimes be wrong, then, what, are we supposed to play cultural relativism and pretend that every standard across every society in all of history is just as valid as any other? (After all, the ancient Greeks really loved pederasty.) I don't accept that.
No, we condemn or tolerate things on the basis of whether or not they harm other people.
This is an extremely naive view to take.
It is not 'naïve' to disagree with you.
There's a reason I said that it's exponentially harder for a woman to remove an unwanted man from her space. A woman is unlikely to want to confront a man; she likely fears his almost-certainly superior strength.... It's much easier for a woman to tell off another woman if the latter is being creepy or weird than for a woman to tell off a man.
The same applies to a 99th-%ile-size cis-man harassing a 1st-%ile-size cis-man. Should we have facilities divided by size as well as gender?
Well if your only exposure to trans-identifying women is through online pictures, then sure, they do pass more easily than trans-identifying men. If you actually look at them in real life, though, not so much.
I used online pictures because Markdown does not have a 'link to Real Life' formatting option. The one trans-woman I have knowingly met in person did not appear to be obviously male.
I disagree, see my response to the toupee fallacy.
Your response was, anti-quote, "...making a wig look natural is much easier than making a man look like a woman."
Making a dugout canoe is much easier than making a Falcon-9 rocket; does that mean that anyone who thinks that they are connecting to this forum via Starlink is delusional?
Really? The policy is further away from what I'm trying to accomplish? How so? Because compared to your proposal of abolishing gender segregation, the policy would result in exponentially less incidents of sexual harassment.
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'Exponential' does not mean 'big change'; it means that, given equidistant a, b, and c, c / b = b / a, as opposed to a linear relation in which c - b = b - a; if you only have a and b, the difference between 'linear' and 'exponential' becomes meaningless. (Also, it's 'fewer', not 'less'.)
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The 'proposal of abolishing gender segregation' was if I were designing society from the ground up. Going forward from the society we have now, acceptable options from my view would include any compromise in which passing trans individuals are not compelled to out themselves, less-than-passing trans individuals are not compelled to confirm any suspicions held by bystanders, and neither are required to affirm the anti-trans worldview, in order to participate in public life to the same degree as cis individuals.
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If what you are trying to accomplish is a reduction in harassment, a policy of 'Do not harass others' is closer to your goal than a policy of 'Do not use the cross-gender facility', in much the same way as a policy of 'Do not commit murder' is closer to the goal of reducing murders than a policy of 'Do not possess any scary-looking device'.
Are you seriously claiming that gender segregation is just like administering extrajudicial violence to a suspect before even convicting him at trial?
No, I am not claiming that one is just like the other; I am claiming that the difference is a matter of degree.
In both cases, one has a justifiable purpose, and is tempted to take a shortcut that will make accomplishing that purpose easier at the cost of adverse effects on a small number of innocent people.
(But the soul is still oracular, amid the market's din
List the ominous stern whisper, from the Delphic cave within
They enslave their children’s children who make compromise with sin.)
Silence doesn't mean disavowal, it usually just means lack of knowledge.
And how many trans people are familiar with the cotton-ceilingers?
You seem to have switched standards. Literally in the preceding paragraph, you said "most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd", implying that silence is disavowal. Now here, you notice silence from gender-critical people, and interpret that as... endorsement of sending trans people to death camps?
Please pick a consistent standard by which people should disavow the more extremist parts of their faction.
I am attempting to apply the same standard to your side that you apply to mine.
"Most trans activists avoid mentioning the cotton-ceiling crowd" was a response to your statement about people avoiding mention of the New Zealand Agriculture Webbed Site.
A consistent 'silence = disavowal' standard would support your statement, but would undermine claims of relevance of the more extreme pro-trans voices.
A consistent 'silence = approval' standard would mean that you can blame the trans activists for their more insane allies, but you will then be blamed for the eliminationist attitudes on your side.
A position of 'silence = disavowal when it's the right wing and calls for LGBTQFHTAGN+ to be [insert Deadly Euphemism]; silence = endorsement when it's the left wing and calls for the deadnames of mid-career-transitioned celebrities to be memory-holed' means that I'm not the one who's being inconsistent.
I'm confused why you seem to keep tracing things back to genitals and gonads. I don't care about people's anatomy, I care about what gender they are. I don't need to think about genitals in order to look at someone and recognize what their gender is.
And the dispute at hand is what gender certain people are; thus I am attempting to replace the symbol with the substance.
To point to a category that includes Taylor Swift and Elliot Page, and excludes Breakfastnook Cowcatcher and Caitlyn Jenner, I can either refer to 'karyotype=XX' or 'parts at birth=ovaries'. The former runs into the issue that, sometimes, someone with one set of chromosomes will develop the organs usually produced by the other chromosomes; the hormones, and all other biological features, will follow, and the individual will not know that anything unusual has happened unless they have their DNA tested, which is not a universal procedure.
Do you genuinely, honestly think that switching genders is as easy as switching hair color?
I wasn't the one who brought up hair colour. You asked, anti-quote, "So I can't take notice of other people's bodies at all, even things which are obvious like their hair color? Am I supposed to pretend to be blind and not know what color someone's hair is?". I was merely applying my principles to your example.
This is a fully general counterargument against asserting any claim with any confidence, ever.
No, it is a caution against asserting that "My claim is different from that one because it just is!" while ignoring that, from outside, they look veeeery similar.
A "trans woman" is already announcing his biological characteristics to everyone in the area by simply existing
Then why do so many cis-women get accused of being men in disguise?
Please point me to literally any case where this has happened. Actually, point to at least three, since you said "usually". I've never seen it happen.
Dani Davis, Lake City, Florida, 2025.
Jay Rose, Las Vegas, 2023.
Aimee Toms, Danbury, Connecticut, 2016.
Jasmine Adams, Staten Island, New York, 2023. (Not even in a women-only space!)
Kalaya Morton, Tucson, Arizona, 2025.
Ok. I think this is a noble principle, and it is also a quite banal one that I don't think anyone would disagree with. But it's also just kind of not really relevant here. None of my arguments require knowledge of private medical history.
If Alice is a trans-woman who looks more feminine than 20% of cis-women, the only reason that 'Alice was born with XY chromosomes and everything downstream thereof' isn't considered 'private medical history' is to support the house of cards that is our narrow concept of gender roles, some of which are younger than some members of the U. S. Congress.
That we don't have the right to refuse service to anyone (modulo CRA/ADA). Which seems like a pretty radical proposal for how society should work.
That 'right' ought to have gone out the window in the 2010s when a supermarket floated the idea of using Big Data (the predecessor of AI) to identify which customers were on a fixed budget and make their experience deliberately unpleasant so as to drive them away and focus on people to whom they could upsell.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
I asked for "rough" numbers. Please provide them.
Somewhere between 5% and 95%.
Current so-called "anti-racist" (to use your misleading phrase) policies cause DEFINITE harm, as opposed to speculative harm.
But the harm is, so far, smaller. Yes, it has the potential to get worse, which is why some of the wokists' policy proposals are so reckless.
would you agree that a high standard of proof is necessary before concluding (for purposes of policy) that black underperformance is the result of white misbehavior?
Depends on whether you mean 'misbehaviour by some white people, who may or may not even still be alive' or 'misbehaviour by the most recent white people to interact with the black people in question'.
As another poster requested, please illustrate your claim with three specific news stories.
Skokie, Ill., 1977: Municipal authorities prohibit neo-nazis from marching; the closest thing they get to anyone siding with them is the ACLU filing court cases arguing that their opinions, while terrible, cannot technically be made illegal per the 1st Amendment.
Charlottesville, Va., 2017: Far-right mob marches while espousing white-nationalist conspiracy theorieshypotheses; half the frelling country makes excuses for them.
Palm Beach, Fla., 2022: Former U. S. President, and leading candidate for his party in the next election, has dinner with known white supremacist; still gets elected two years later.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
And what is their policy towards Mr/Ms "I Just Hope Both Teams Have Fun!"?
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
I'd say it's more Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick.
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
media which increases the positive valence of western culture at a young age (Little House on the [Prairie]), decreases positive valence of other cultures (old YouTube documentaries on foreign savagery)
That was the mainstream position prior to circa 1960; Western white people Could Do No Wrong, and everyone else was seen as half-beast. Then people realised that that view wasn't entirely accurate, assumed¹ that the opposite of a false claim must be the truth², and adopted the position that people of colour Could Do No Wrong, and white people were half-demon.
The truth of the matter is that cultures both in and out of the 'western' cluster have done both good and bad things.
"There are very few black or white hats in history; most are in the charcoal or slate range." --A. J. Jacobs, The Know-It-All
¹...and do you know what happens when you ass u me?
²"A car with a broken engine cannot drive backward at 200 mph, even if the engine is really really broken." --E. Yudkowsky
Celestial-body-NOS
Liberalism has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
8d ago
If you want to prevent your kids from being crazy wokescolds, don't take politics too seriously. Horseshoe theory: the opposite of the wokescold isn't the religious conservative, that's just a switch in valence. The opposite of the wokescold is the normie who shrugs and just kind of gets on with their life and ignores everything else going on around them.
So teach them to grill?
Because it's the right thing to do.
Because while some Black people will grow up to be criminals even with well-run schools, and some Black people will educate themselves even if they attend poorly-run schools, there are almost certainly a large number who could go either way.
Because if Black people are systematically denied the tools necessary to support themselves, and they thus turn to crime, the Blue Tribe will be more sympathetic to their sob stories and be that much harder to convince that anything ought to be done about crime committed by Black people.
Because somewhere in the U. S., there are future versions of Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, and they deserve a proper education just as much as white children do.
Because a society which stomps on its ethnic minorities risks seeing karma hand it its own arse.
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