ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626

If we end up with a qualified labour shortage because everyone went AI-Doomer, I will be laughing for some time.
Something he was expressly authorised to do by Congress
Congress had no right to authorize it either.
federalism and nondelegation grounds, not on fundamental rights grounds
You have to forgive me for not caring for SCTOUS' justifications from this era, they had a few doozies too. In any case, look if you want to judge this particular transgression as less bad than what Trump's doing, I suppose I can see where you're coming from. But if you want to take the cumulative total of all the ways liberals were breaking the constitution, I don't know if it's going to be so clear who comes up on top (or bottom as it were).
Anyway, are you taking that bet on Trump running again or not?
Common usage of the term "centre-right" is shorthand for "pro-establishment right".
I'd say it's a shorthand for "moderate right", but if that's how you're using the term, no further objections I guess. But in that case, what do you think is the point of Trace's project of building bridges with Bill Kristol and Liz Chaney, or whatever? I figured this sort bridge-building is due to ideological closeness, not for the purpose preserving the power of specific elites.
I'd say way it's too early to tell if this really is the case, and there's plenty of people in the circles I frequent who are highly skeptical, viewing Trump as "containment" by the establishment, and all of his "victories" as just an empty show for the rubes.
Apologies if I'm being rude, but what exactly is your power level?
The MAGA base support administrative detention legal immigrants with the wrong tattoos - in peacetime, which makes this worse than FDR.
Sure, if we're going to pretend FDR's excesses began and ended with the Japanese internment, that it may seem that way. FDR had people arrested for selling goods too cheap - in peacetime, I hardly see how it's any better than detaining them for the wrong tattoo.
Trump is already running for a third term in plain sight
Are you taking any bets on this?
His abuses of power didn't start with WW2, so "we should never have another FDR" after he reshaped the entire country, setting the tone for next century, is awfully convenient.
Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.
Oh please. Yeah, I heard his origin story of being a Mitt Romney republican, but there's nothing conservative about him. His entire posting history here indicates his goal boils down to 'tard-wrangling the hardcore progressives so they stop scaring away the hoes normies.
I'm also struggling to charitably respond to the assertion that a center-right no longer exists. The neocons don't get to define the center-right, and disagreeing with them doesn't mean you're "far-right".
This effectively means that liberals don't care for America having a president, not a king. They love having a king as long he's a man of "exceptional virtue" (steamrolls checks and balances to implement liberal policies).
You can take a kind of functionalist position and say that Democratic politicians are what they do, and so in 2020 they were radical trans ideologues. Sure. But it doesn't give much insight into how they will respond to changing circumstances.
The direct implication of this is that we don't know if they won't come right back to sending trans women to women's sports and prisons the moment they win.
but feels like it's 6 years old.
Months, maybe. No backpedaling was happening until Trump won again, and I'm still not convinced it's happening.
The problem is that the people who are extreme are uniformly Democrats, and that gets projected on to the rest of the party. It doesn't help that these people tend to, by their nature, be the most motivated, loudest, and most likely to get signal-boosted by their political opponents.
I'd say the biggest problem is that they get appointed to be the Secretary of the Public Health Service, where they hatch conspiracies to abolish age limits on "gender affirming procedures".
I want to believe true things. This isn’t the first time you’ve convinced me that my reflexive reaction was wrong. I really appreciate that.
P.S.: I forgot to mention, I in turn appreciate you being a sport here. It takes me waaaay longer than that, on average, to grant that someone might have had a point, if what they're saying goes against my reflexive reaction.
What's the idea behind this kind of discourse? It seems so alien to any kind of strategic understanding of politics and campaigning to me, especially now when the liberal order is more vulnerable than ever
It's because they are more vulnerable than ever that they have to tighten the screws. All that tolerance, discourse, and "the marketplace of ideas" were just a flex, like a boxer sticking his neck out knowing the other fighter doesn't have the skills to land a punch. It also seems like a straight-forwardly correct move in the short term to alienate a few powerless people and keep an iron grip on the institutions, than risk losing them for the sake of being reasonable.
I partiallly agree, and partially disagree (or still misunderstand). I think you're right that science doesn't matter in the sense that this is, to a large extent, a conflict of values. I wrote about it in the past, how I thought the discussion is centered around science, and how to best treat the condition called gender dysphoria, or whether such a condition actually exists rather than being an artifact of another psychological issue, and how it turned out that the pro-trans side admitted that it doesn't care, that it was using the "medicalized narrative" strategically to build acceptance for their true goal - patient autonomy, and the pursuit of authenticity through body modification.
You might be right that this is symmetrical, in that it's merely convenient for the anti-trans side that the diagnosis of gender dysphoria is dubious, and that there are all these scientific, medical, and health concerns about the treatment, and if all of these concerns were shown to be moot by advances in technology, they'd still be against letting people modify their bodies to such a radical extent, but you're wrong about the science-based arguments being useless. The Science™ is the framework for resolving disagreements that our society has agreed upon, given conflicting values. This is the battleground that was picked, so this is where we have to fight. Also, trivially - if they were useless, the pro-trans side wouldn't be using them so much, even as they knew they can't be backed by evidence.
To that end, despite my personal objections, I tend to bristle at state legislatures that seek to make the decision themselves rather than allow parents and doctors to make it together.
Why? This is business as usual, we get between parents and doctors all the time, sometimes about the very same drugs (and arguably about the very same condition) that we're discussing right now, and no one bats an eye. Is it somehow worse because it's the legislature doing it, instead of the medical licensing board?
I think they were doing it with boxing. At least what I vaguely remember is some setup where some ripped-as-fuck dude, and a pretty-ripped woman take turns throwing punches at a ripped-as-fuck-dude-wearing-a-blindfold, who then proclaims that ackshully the woman hit a little harder, or something like that.
I remember some pop-sci Discovery Channel shows acting like "technique" rather that sheer size / strength is what gives you the advantage in combat sports, and that women's technique is just as good as men's.
Not exactly "experts" but it was advertised as an accurate portrayal of reality.
Still intermittently sick, and had guests over last week, so small incremental changes only, unworthy of mentioning.
How are you doing @Southkraut?
I don't really see the issue, don't we already say that about cancer treatments? "We have to chemically castrate you to fight your cancer" sounds like a concise way of describing the costs and benefits of the treatment.
They have superficial similarities. Both sides are usually less than pleased with their current bodies and wish to remedy that.
I get that you don't care for all the talk about identities and validity, but I don't think the similarity is superficial, and I think transhumanism tends to go far beyond remedying the lack of satisfaction one has with one's body. With the examples you gave, you've expanded transhumanism to include all humans, and at this point I have to ask what's so "trans" about it? I mean, hell, arguably you even included several non-human species. Are crows fashioning a wire into a hook to get to a snack trapped in a bottle transcrowists? Are beavers building dams transbeaverists, and ants building anthills transantists?
If we insist that all these things are trans*ism, what do we call people who are ok with using tools and body modification to restore original function, but are against modifications that go beyond that? That seems to be the major similarity between between transhumanists and transgenderists. Are you just trying to redefine the word that describes you, so that it includes everyone, in order to claim that this means everyone must agree with you? (That might be another similarity to the transgender movement)
Were there a way to mad science up some reproductive capacity without requiring puberty, would opting out then become acceptable?
Although some transhumanists shriek in horror at the mere implication, there are factions in both pro- and anti-trans movements who believe the transgender debate is actually a transhumanism debate. Your answer to this will depend on your answer to that question vs Natural Law. I'm a Natural Law guy, much like I believe Yudkovskian schemes of uploading your body and freezing your brain, or whatever, is suicide with extra steps, unrolling these kind of body modifications throughout the human species effectively means extinction.
I might be ok with letting the willing do it, but not in a multicultural framework, where they get to advertise their ideas to the naive and impressionable.
feel like that’s what the average trans debate demands: condemning my friends wholesale on the basis of the craziest nut someone can pick.
You avoided that entirely
And for my part, I'm very happy I came off that way.
This happened more in the past, but I noticed people tended to assume I must have some problem with trans people, when they don't even make it on my target list. There's trope in anti-trans activism that goes "if I was growing up these days, I'd probably get transed". It's a bit of a controversial take, from what I understand detrans people don't love hearing it, some say it's just projection / typical minding, but for whatever it's worth I actually have lots of sympathy for them, and I'm mostly parsing the entire situation as "my people" being sniped out of the gene pool by a bunch of doctor Mengeles. I also have plenty of criticism for the ideology / philosophy around the concept of gender identity, but this is an issue with ideas, not with people.
This is your brain on Substack, kids. Like I said, don't do Substack, or at least stay connected to neiche pseudonymous internet forums where your friends will make fun of you when you get too full of yourself.
Elite teenage wrestling / gymnastics (and possibly other sports). Sure, I'd be in favor of that. The benefit of sports is that it gets you off your ass, teaches you discipline, possibly team work, how to git gud, how to deal with failure, etc. etc., If kids are practicing sports to the point of predictable long-term health consequences, then things have gotten rather retarded.
It feels like the original chemical castration usage must have arisen as a way to square the demands to castrate sex offenders with a means to backtrack in the face of appeals or wrongful convictions and preserve human rights: We'll castrate them [permanently] and any objections are moot because if we get it wrong it's totally reversible [and not really castration].
(...) What if you carefully constructed a definition that captures the trans youth movement but leaves clinically depressed fans of Lemmy Kilmister unaffected? Well then it just looks like you're playing your own version of the "things are what they are because I said so" game.
Even if you're right about the origins of the term, it is a simple fact that the term was used in academic / law-enforcement literature, and no one seemed to object. I'm merely asking if puberty blockers fit into that previously-used-without-objection definition. My conclusion is: yes. Do you disagree?
If you think puberty blockers are bad because they have irreversible negative effects on fertility and sexual function then you can make that argument without the need for hyperbole.
I'm using the term in the exact same way it was used before puberty blockers entered public discourse, and even allowing for some stricter criteria that would stem from the discrepancy between the technical and colloquial terms. If this is hyperbole, every academic who has ever used the term was being hyperbolic.
Do you think the science of treating autists with Lupron just needed reform, or is it better that it was axed?
Funny you say that, because this is exactly what trans medicine has been so far.
More options
Context Copy link