That's nice that you can admit that sort of thing. For what it's worth, I can admit that every time I have to act pro trans against my will in small or large ways, I usually am surprised that it doesn't feel as bad or hurtful to me or my pride as much as I thought it would. At the very least I feel like it's definitely worth it in order to have a job.
it still leaves a ton of latitude for trans people to seek out their version of human flourishing as best they can
The pro trans argument regarding the small things usually comes to "if you don't do these things than you're denying that trans people are people". That's such a silly phrasing that they've chosen, and I'm always surprised that more non leftists don't call it out. Since when is it a given that getting to choose your own gender is a defining aspect of being a person?
I gotta say, I had never even heard of Kirk before the shooting. Maybe this is because I deliberately try not to engage in politics anymore (except on the Motte), don't know. It's completely possible I'm years out of date on this stuff. To be honest, I still don't know much about him at all.
Now I'm seeing all of my leftist friends rattle off lists of why Kirk was basically in bed with Hitler. It makes me wonder if they'd heard as little about him as I had, and are simply regurgitating the talking points they heard other leftists say after his death, essentially as a mechanism for virtue signaling.
People do these things because they believe they will be popular with those around them.
To make my position clear, I think this in completely absolutely no way justifies political violence against the left. But the (from my point of view) typical leftist can be incredibly vicious even when the person who was killed wasn't someone who advocated that gun deaths are worth it if it meant protecting the second amendment.
And probably most people (including the typical leftist) feels weird about this on some level, but there's varying levels, like "I probably shouldn't say this, but my friends will get a kick out of it", "I probably shouldn't say this, but other people are doing it so I guess it's okay", "I probably shouldn't say this, but he did have it coming", etc.
haroldbkny
6d ago
I was tickled pink to find that the Motte just went through it's fourth birthday, apparently,
Nitpick: third birthday, if you're referring to this site. We launched in September 2022. And the original Reddit forum was many years before that.
haroldbkny
9d ago
Not really, maybe sometimes with regard to individual incidents, and sometimes those do result in me changing my mind on small things. But I've mostly come to terms with stuff by now.
I agree with you because I am just like everything you described. But I have to ask the question: are we being too cautious? Once bitten twice shy. We have been in the trenches in the most awkward of warfare, and I know I've lost friends and opportunities from being too vocally centrist. I hate getting yelled at and lectured to.... So I'd rather just not start it anymore. So I keep my damn mouth shut.
But truthfully I don't think it's the case that we are being too cautious, not yet. But I must raise this question because there may come a day when society does, or could, accept centrists again, but it won't happen if centrists don't feel free to let our middle-of-the-road freak fly. If people don't start speaking up, others who agree will stay suppressed themselves, due to lack of common knowledge of centrist acceptance.
So basically, I think we can say that the woke conditioning of the past 15 years was massively successful. Even when things are starting to get better, we can't go back to feeling better and acting like we used to. We've been trained to act like the woke, even though we are not, and this makes it all the harder to change society to non woke.
haroldbkny
11d ago
To be clearer about my fears about social justice mobs; I'm less concerned about people actually getting killed by them than I am about them changing social norms that make people's actual lives actually worse.
haroldbkny
12d ago
Look, it happened a long time ago. I specifically don't memorize every thing Trump's ever been accused of, or why the accusations were false. I don't want to devote all my mental energy to Trump, one way or the other. All I knew was that I'd seen that journalist argument before, and I knew it didn't hold water in some way back then, and that made want to illustrate exactly why none of these accusations actually tarnish Trump's name, why people like me check out. Because so many previous accusations don't hold water, and we have epistemic learned helplessness.
haroldbkny
12d ago
I'm not fully sure what you're saying, but it sounds like you're downplaying my skepticism, as if it were caused by this one example. Like I said, it's not just one example. It's every example of something people said about Trump, from the earliest ones I can remember where everyone was calling him racist and kept telling me how he was calling all Mexicans rapists. That sure sounded bad, until I looked into it and saw that's not what he said at all, on several levels.
haroldbkny
12d ago
That's interesting. Can you cite historical examples, from various time periods over the past century? What specific tactics are we talking about?
haroldbkny
12d ago
confected
A-
I love it, but I see most people actually refer to it as Partygate
Haha, my wife and I were just talking yesterday about how we haven't seen em-dashes in LLM output for the past couple months, so they probably retrained the models to not use them. But also that still no one is going to ever use em-dashes anymore for fear of being called an LLM.
haroldbkny
12d ago
Haha yes, that's fair. I really don't remember the details, I just remember that when I looked into the details 7 or whatever years ago, it was another straw on my personal "Believe Trump's Critics" camel's back.
I'm not engaging in standard Trump apologetics. I'm trying to tell you why he doesn't lose the social credit, at least to someone like me. It's because I can't trust anyone when they say these things about him, because everything for the past 10 years has been an exaggerated character attack, even the things that don't remotely deserve it. Time and time again I hear "Trump is Hitler for having done x", and then I look at x and I see that if you squint at it the right way you can see that, or not. Repeat for 10 years (or even 1 year), and I get my own form of epistemic learned helplessness.
So fine, the mechanism by which Trump is punished is dead. Because leftists killed it.
haroldbkny
12d ago
mocked a disabled journalist
This is the sort of thing that makes me not take arguments like this seriously. It's been a long time since this supposed incident, but I recall it being pretty conclusive for anyone who spent more than thirty seconds listening to the outrage bait of the day, that he wasn't trying to mock a disabled journalist, and it was just the press once again seizing on an opportunity to claim Trump was the worst person ever. I don't recall the details, but it seemed clear (I thought at the time) that he was just doing one of his normal mannerisms. It's crying wolf and it makes me not take other claims seriously.
Well, that statement of mine is purposely simplistic, to kind of try to get at the point.
First, this is closer to what I actually believe (or naturally am inclined to jump to): I'd expand that statement to a belief in a general state of equilibrium when it comes to abusing the power of the government (especially by the Right), such that if actors go too far, then there will be a reaction against those actors whether by checks and balances in the law or by other means (though I'm glad that checks and balances do exist to help along the equilibrium, unlike in the social justice mob case). I definitely don't believe in the automatic axiomatic morality or infallibility of written laws.
Second, I know that overall my general high level belief in this equilibrium is a simplistic belief that probably doesn't hold true all of the time. This is just like my wife's simplistic belief that the power of social justice mobs will never go too far, because she believes in an equilibrium; that if they push the societal norms too far the societal backlash will correct it. Neither of us trusts the other's belief in the equilibrium, but we maintain analogous simplistic beliefs ourselves.
haroldbkny
13d ago
Honestly, though, you pretty much answer your own question in your opening paragraph;
Well, I can say I've paid about as much attention to Trump as I have to every other president, including Biden - which is not much. But it's taken significantly more effort to afford Trump the same level of indifference as I have for Biden and other presidents, and that's been true since 2015. I see that as indicative that information I shouldn't trust is being pushed my way, which reinforces my tendency to tune it out.
However, it's the fact that the Republican half of the government (and at least a third of the population) is either doing nothing to stop it, or even actively cheer it on, that really causes me to despair over the situation.
Your response hasn't given any consideration to the mirror image aspect of my original post. I encourage you to try to put aside your preconceptions and consider how the other side might have felt looking at the BLM situation of 2020-2021, and the power that mob mentality held at the time. Can you sympathize with someone else's fear of the lack of checks on that power, the same way you worry that the checks and balances in government won't be enough to stop Trump? Can you see how someone on the other side would have had similar reservations about those in power at the time doing nothing to curb that power, and to the contrary actually cheering it on?
I'm not asking you to agree that those concerns were valid or that the situations are equivalent - I'm asking whether you can see the structural similarity in how both sides experience fear when they perceive threats from power sources they believe lack adequate restraints. If you can only acknowledge that the other side had feelings while maintaining that your fears are categorically different or more legitimate, then you're missing the point about how these dynamics work. Your response kind of proves the point about us trusting different institutional mechanisms without engaging with it.
haroldbkny
13d ago
That's a fair point, but I think the pure contempt with which I remember people speaking about Bush, compared with the number of times I've heard similar people point to him as a surprisingly human decent dude in the past 10 years makes me really skeptical. If he was truly so awful back then, he wouldn't be forgiven and nostolgized so easily, even if someone worse came along, at least not by an intellectually honest person.
haroldbkny
14d ago
I've been thinking about why some people are terrified of Trump while others, like me, are more indifferent. I mostly tune out Trump news because I assume much of it involves scare tactics or misleading framing by his detractors. When my wife brings up concerns about his supposedly authoritarian actions, my general response is that if what he's doing is illegal, the governmental process will handle it - and if it's legal, then that's how the system is supposed to work. I have faith that our institutions have the checks and balances to deal with any presidential overreach appropriately.
This reminded me of a mirror situation during 2020-2021 with the BLM movement, where our positions were reversed. I was deeply concerned about social media mobs pressuring corporations, governments, and individuals to conform under threat of job loss, boycotts, and riots, while my wife thought these social pressures were justified and would naturally self-correct if they went too far. The key difference I see is that the government has built-in checks and balances designed to prevent abuse of power, while social movements and mob pressure operate without those same institutional restraints. It seems like we each trust different institutional mechanisms, but I can't help but think that formal governmental processes with built-in restraints are more reliable than grassroots social pressure that operates without those same safeguards. Furthermore, the media seems incentivized to amplify fear about Trump but not about grassroots social movements - Trump generates clicks and outrage regardless of which side you're on, while criticizing social movements risks alienating the platforms' own user base and advertiser-friendly demographics.
haroldbkny
16d ago
I just looked it up in the dictionary. It means "To conceal the source of money as by channeling it through an intermediary".
haroldbkny
16d ago
Yikes. For some reason, I end up getting more scared off by any refined palate, non-vanilla, porn stuff. Even simple things like foot fetish porn kinda weirds me out. Maybe because I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, resulting in my being unable to fuck my wife, and then go down in an ever accelerating spiral, ending with me dying like David Carradine.
haroldbkny
16d ago
Well I'm not too surprised that exists. But let's see if it catches on. I think there might have been a talk on the Motte a few years ago (I think) about how male sex toys will never achieve mainstream popularity, or even just sub-mainstream.
haroldbkny
17d ago
Actually, also, I just realized, I don't think that caffeine is a natural pesticide. I thought it was regarded as having evolved to attract bees, making them addicted to certain plants that produce it, thus acting like the opposite of a pesticide.
haroldbkny
17d ago
Haha. I have not tried an Oculus with VR porn, but just tried with using a mouse to scroll where the view is pointed. I don't really see the point of it. There's almost always only one view I want to see, which is the view where the entire woman is in the camera. I don't want to look off to the side. Maybe that'd work if the VR device had a way of simulating you, so it could feel like you're having sex while looking elsewhere, but for now I don't think we have that.
That's how my wife describes her knowledge of him as well, didn't know him, did know Turning Point. I personally had never heard of Turning Point, myself.
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