07mk
9d ago
no matter how far left they move, they won't lose people to the Republicans, because it's simply socially unacceptable for people who have gone Democratic to ever vote for Republicans.
Even if it's socially unacceptable, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen (I'd guess it happened pretty significantly in 2024). And things that are socially unacceptable are socially unacceptable until they're not. Depending on just what a DSA takeover of the Democratic party is like, I could see that changing pretty quickly. I just hope it doesn't get to that point; people are naturally very excited/depressed right after a particular election result, but I'm hopeful that this doesn't portend a trend.
07mk
9d ago
I think you just have a misread of what is meant by "suffering," considering you seem to pair it with "pleasure" as if they're particularly related. "Suffering" isn't an antonym to "pleasure," not is it a synonym to "pain." "Suffering" just means "getting a less desirable consequence than some alternative." It's intrinsically tied to consequentialism, because getting a consequence one dislikes is intrinsically suffering, and consequentialism has to do with determining ethics based on the consequences that they produce.
A paperclip maximizer, to whatever extent it can "believe" things or experience qualia or whatever, is "suffering" if it's not maximizing paperclips, definitionally.
07mk
9d ago
That's neither here nor there to my point, though. My point is that, for our claim of lack of fraud to be credible, we ought to be so welcoming to checks like this that the people who want to do them actually find it easier to do the checks than not (since we'd be carrying the weight for them). For that, I'd say that any claims of difficulty or obstacles in checks ought to be welcomed and encouraged, rather than minimized or even dismissed, especially when our own biased judgment tells us that they're frivolous.
07mk
9d ago
I'm not sure where you're getting that in my comment, as I mentioned nothing about gross hedonic product, which is certainly not an antonym of "suffering" or synonym of "positive... effects" which are the terms I used.
07mk
9d ago
I think that's as strong evidence that leftists care about opposing pedophilia as Republicans' calling out voter fraud in recent elections they lost is evidence that they care about opposing voter fraud. These are just easy weapons lying around to pick up and throw at enemies, nothing more, nothing less. That's even before getting into the fact that, almost certainly, Epstein and his ilk account for less than 0.1% of all pedophilic crime that happened during the time period when they were (are?) active and are almost certainly dwarfed by activities done by much lower class people that those same people conspicuously try to ignore or downplay.
07mk
9d ago
All of these weaknesses of fraud against easy checks like this only means anything if we can be confident that the checking process can and will be done properly without people being impeded. This is why I've said since at least the 2020 election that, as a Democrat, once Trump and his cronies started throwing out (IMHO highly frivolous and malicious) accusations of voter fraud (I think 2020 wasn't the first time they did this, but it wasn't as much of an issue for 2016 due to them actually winning) that I'd want Democrats to go along with and encourage the fraud investigations with so much enthusiasm that even the most die-hard of the MAGAs would be embarrassed and call for backing things up a bit. Without something approaching that level of rooting out fraud in situations that ended up in one's side's favor, lack of fraud can't really be credibly claimed.
07mk
9d ago
He doesn't actually care about wealth taxes as a policy one way or another, except insofar as they help or hinder his way to the White House. But his current strategy balances the competing stories he's selling to donors and primary voters in a reasonable way.
All accounts of Newsom I've heard from Democrats who would be close enough to him to know - which isn't many, to be fair - has him pegged as an empty suit with no beliefs of his own that will say whatever is necessary to gain power. This was criticism levied against prior Democratic POTUS candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, neither of whom succeeded in their runs. Presuming that these accounts about Newsom are true, surely Newsom himself knows the relatively low recent success rate of Democratic POTUS candidates with this kind of personality. So I'm left wondering what his play for the POTUS is, since it's been considered essentially common knowledge that he would run in 2028 since at least 2024 (the oft-repeated claim that Trump's election in 2024 means the end of democracy in America notwithstanding). Perhaps he will shock the world and just not run in 2028 and is playing 4D chess to set himself up for a successful 2032 or 2036 run?
07mk
9d ago
This sounds just like the debate between deontology vs consequentialism in ethics. For people who prefer the former, then it doesn't matter what consequences following ethical rules results in; even if it causes maximal suffering for everyone in every situation all the time, with no positive side-effects, as long as the ethics were followed properly, that is better than if the ethics weren't followed properly and resulted in prosperity and less suffering, with no negative side-effects. For people who prefer the latter, then the truthiness of some set of ethics is contingent upon the consequences that follow from people following those ethics and, as such, ethics that lead to maximal suffering for everyone all the time with no positive side-effects is just bad ethics that ought to be scrapped.
This has nothing to do with whether some set of ethics would require some sort of sacrifice sometimes, which is orthogonal to the issue. The original comment seems to be not about some sort of sacrifice for the sake of ethics, but rather a set of ethics that, when followed, just results in negative consequences and hence, from a certain point of view, is just bad ethics.
07mk
9d ago
It's just another variation of "injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere" applied absolutely and with minimal thinking. Exact same phenomenon as anthropogenic global warming - i.e. "climate justice" - activists being virulently pro-Palestine, to the extent that Greta Thunberg, the biggest celebrity to come out of the anti-AGW movement, is now more in the news for her anti-colonialization-by-Israel activism these days.
07mk
10d ago
The version I've encountered IRL is pointing to the center of one's forehead versus tapping one's palm against one's open mouth, right before saying "Indian," usually with "not" and then the other variation followed immediately after. I think that went out of style in the 2000s in Massachusetts, though.
07mk
10d ago
What is interesting to me, and I'm not sure if this is a coincidence, is that so many trans women start off looking like nerdy and loser guys -- these guys seem like they would be vulnerable to becoming incel in the first place. Likewise, a lot of nonbinary girls start off with an unattractive face shape and are probably fat.
"Transmaxxing" or the "incel-to-trans pipeline" has been joked about for as long as incel was a commonly used term. I've seen at least a couple of memes that take on some form of "which way, autistic man?" with 2 diverging paths towards "trans" and "incel" or the like. My pet theory is that nerdiness/near-autism tends to make young men extremely unattractive to women (citation needed), which pushes them to becoming incels, which leads some of them towards "transmaxxing" for cultural reasons.
07mk
10d ago
This is just word games around what "attractive" means, though. If you mean "someone that I am sexually attracted to," as in, "imagine a very attractive young woman" means "imagine a young woman that you are very sexually attracted to," then yes, obviously it's a scene where it's a woman for whom I have some knowledge of her genitals and all that (likely personality too). But that's rarely what people mean when they say someone is "attractive," which is really just short-hand for referring to those "gender expression" characteristics, since most interaction with most people happen on surface-level, and often has little to do with "am I sexually attracted to them?" I find Hanry Cavill an "attractive" man, but I'd find sex with Oprah Winfrey - whom I find "not attractive" - to be more appealing than with him.
Obviously, those are two different things. Again, your thought experiment perfectly demonstrates the opposite: that a straight man is unlikely to be "attracted" to trans males, even if they might find their superficial characteristics to be "attractive."
Also, I would prefer if you did not engage in Bulverism.
07mk
10d ago
One intuition pump for you is (assuming you are a normal straight guy): imagine a very attractive young woman, and then imagine learning later she has a penis. You probably don't want anything to do with her anymore. That's fine! But it is proof you can be attracted to trans people.
I don't understand how this wouldn't be a demonstration of the exact opposite: that a transwoman being a transwoman (i.e. male) is exactly what makes them unattractive to a straight man, overriding how they appear superficially.
07mk
11d ago
So I don't think state legislature calling for the school board to make a list of required books is a great idea, though I'm also not sure that I'm right on that, either. Both the school board and the local individual teachers can be corrupt so easily, that I'm not sure which one should have that sort of power, or how to regulate the corruption properly.
If we take for granted that the school board must compile such a list for public schools to follow, it occurs to me that having Bible stories in it actually strengthens the separation between church and state instead of the other way around, because it's treating Bible stories as equivalent to any other literature, rather than placing the Bible on a special pedestal as having status that's different from any other significant piece of writing. But I don't think anyone could have the confidence that individual teachers - perhaps especially in Texas - wouldn't teach these works of literature strictly as works of literature. In the private secular high school I went to, I was made to read Genesis in English class, and our teacher was very clear about this, but teachers and students in such environments are filtered so heavily that I'm skeptical that we can count on the same phenomenon repeating all across the public schools in any given state.
I'm not sure how to adjudicate this other than just letting someone sue and having the Supreme Court eventually make the call. It could ultimately rest on an empirical question of how real schoolteachers actually teach real students.
It's been pointed out, of course, that we already allow religious proselytization in schools by schoolteachers and administrators directed towards students in the form of social justice ideology, and so this is a "good for the goose, good for the gander" situation even if this led to the Bible being pushed as anything more than literature in schools. But I think the solution to that would be to find a way to declare such ideologies as religious in nature, which I'm not sure how would be done in a legal perspective, even if they clearly are in a logical and fact perspective.
07mk
11d ago
Christianity's influence is mostly historical, like how mammals in the time of the dinosaurs were mostly tiny mouse creatures. They had tremendous influence in a certain sense. We are descended from tiny mouse creatures. There are still tiny mouse creatures around. But the tiny mouse creatures around today are not really influential and we are not really tiny mice. Even if most of our DNA is mouse there are important distinctions.
This one paragraph seems to completely override any point made earlier on in this post. The bible and stories therein aren't the tiny mouse creatures that are still around; the evangelical Christians and Catholics and such of today are the ones that are still around. The parts of our DNA that are mouse DNA (which in this hypothetical is most of our DNA) is the bible. Which means that it has tremendous influence.
07mk
11d ago
A common argument is to ask the person you're arguing with, "If you woke up this morning and found you had been transformed into a stereotypical example of the opposite gender, how would you feel about that?"
If you would prefer that to your current body, this means that you are transgender.
This is a terrible argument, though. I would personally prefer it, but that doesn't mean that I'm transgender, it's just an indication of my autogynephilia. Or perhaps my assessment of gender roles in society. All this argument proves is that different people can have different preferences about hypothetical fantasy scenarios, and then maps it onto "gender" which is fine as it is, but is also trivial and tautological.
07mk
11d ago
Like, even if you accepted a "maximalist" supernatural trans position, and said that souls are real, and trans people are acts of the Abrahamic God putting souls in bodies of the opposite sex, nothing about that would imply anything about how we should treat such individuals as a matter of law or custom.
I agree with this. However, many people seem to disagree with this, and they insist on making sure that people who think like you or me must behave like we think like them.
My personal preference is that trans people are free to metaphysically perceive their transness in whatever way they want and also to prefer that society at large respect that perception. I think the conflict comes from the ones who seem to believe that "respect" is a synonym for "submit to" and demand the latter under the guise of the former. IMHO, a trans person should be exactly as free to have the preference that others treat them like their felt gender to the same extent that everyone else should be free to treat the trans person like the gender that the treater perceives the trans person as.
07mk
12d ago
I also think there's a strange way in which a lot of the trans debate is primarily a linguistic debate. I've said this before, but I think well-informed pro- and anti-trans people are generally in agreement on empirical questions like, "Can trans women get pregnant?", or "What chromosomes do an overwhelming majority of trans men have?"
I don't think much of the trans debate is a linguistics debate, actually, though some of it certainly is; it's primarily a coercion debate. That is, e.g. whether trans women are women is somewhat a linguistic debate, but it's more about coercion, of whether people who don't think that trans women are women ought to be coerced away from being able to refer to them as men or with male pronouns or to deadname them or etc. Of course, a strong argument is that private organizations ought to be able to coerce their members in this matter, but an equally strong argument is that people ought to be free from such coercion from private organizations, such as existing rules and norms against discriminating on the basis of race in certain circumstances. But that's where I see the real debate taking place, and the specific meanings of words are merely tools by which to put forward arguments around that.
07mk
12d ago
I don't think that sexuality can be partially a product of one's culture or coercive environment has much to do with the initial notion of how, e.g. a lesbian who doesn't find sex with a male who self-identifies as a woman is being transphobic, where we're using "transphobic" to mean something to be judged as irrational or morally negative or. If you ran an experiment of sticking one lesbian in prison with a bunch of trans women, I'm sure on at least a few of the trials, the lesbian would find sex with the trans women to be fine or even desirable, but the situation in real life that we're dealing with is where lesbians aren't so limited in their choice of partners.
07mk
13d ago
FWIW, Kalshi is showing about 20% chance that Take Two announces more than 5 million preorders before July 4. There's the factor of the odds that Rockstar announces this before July 4 that's multiplied by the odds that they get that many preorders, so it's hard to figure out what the odds of the actual preorder count being that are. But I'd personally bet against it being 50 million as of today.
07mk
13d ago
To take the most charitable interpretation possible, Trump should understand, based on how he's been treated over the past decade+ in politics, that everything he does will be attacked and subverted in the dirtiest way possible. As such, not successfully hardening the defenses of the pool against predictable vandalism indicates incompetence on his part.
Of course, had he done that, that would likely open him up to other attacks of incompetence or corruption or other negative qualities.
07mk
13d ago
It's hard to say, but my perception of those folks is that, for whatever reason, they prefer to see themselves in a video game as the protagonist, rather than to see sexy female protagonists who appeal to their male gaze. Could be cultural, could be psychological, could be just random chance, or could be nothing.
With how "melting pot" has been deemed Nazi-adjacent in the past decade, in favor of "salad bowl" or "mosaic," I'm skeptical that repeating history in this way is likely. With immigrants and their children being actively discouraged against assimilating, it's going to be hard for them to "Irishify," even before you get to the superficial differences. Arguably we're seeing some of the fruits of that change in attitude towards immigrant assimilation today, with the strong anti-Jewish push happening on the left.
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