Corvos
10d ago
Having sold your soul to BigCorp, I imagine. Though I haven’t heard the term before.
Corvos
10d ago
Huh. Is it a coincidence that it looks like stereotypical Jamaican pidgin? Or is it a relict?
Corvos
10d ago
Was chemical castration carried out beyond Australia? That’s surprisingly hardcore for a modern democracy.
Corvos
11d ago
Most of the droids we see in Star Wars are pretty rickety and often not humanoid - maybe they don’t have droids that can perform manual labour at the appropriate price point?
Corvos
11d ago
Ed Davey is famous for doing or saying anything to get on camera. The Lib Dens are currently irrelevant so any publicity is good publicity.
Corvos
11d ago
I really meant longer term. People fixate on revolutions but even tyrants have children. And those children make friends, and they get fed up of living in a shithole and being patronised by foreigners and maybe they don’t shoot the fellow with bright ideas about policing right away. Britain hasn’t had regime change since 1700 but government has changed hugely.
Corvos
11d ago
No, it’s saying that change tends to arise from the efforts of frustrated, resourceful people. Those people are (understandably) deporting themselves from the countries that need them.
Corvos
12d ago
I agree with all of this, although I really meant ‘anyone on American would be considered a citizen whilst in America).
I’m not giving this as a serious proposal. My point is that deporting people is very very difficult and that this means that you have to be very careful about who you let into your society to start with. But people avoid thinking about that because there’s supposed to be a system for dealing with such cases even though everyone secretly knows it doesn’t work. Being open and blatant about the true stare of affairs might make people more willing to play hardball when denying entry.
There’s an industrial AC unit outside an acquaintance’s apartment. I can barely hear it but it absolutely enraged him, to the point of multi-year legal battles. Notably the original installation was dubiously legal.
I think ‘noise + injustice’ has something to do with it. Personally I can’t stand hearing political discussion I don’t agree with - I literally can’t concentrate until it goes away, even if it’s just on the radio. Maybe not the same thing. Notably text is basically okay.
I don’t think it’s just related to noise. My little brother was very hyper and could only pass the time on long journeys by teasing me. I didn’t like being touched in general but I HATED being touched by my brother. So of course he would lean on me in the back of the car, or put his hand just a bit too far over the handrest, or whatever. It got to the point where I went berserk when he so much as twitched.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if a business isn’t getting the employees it needs in the numbers it wants them, then the business isn’t paying high enough wages. ‘Reasonable’ is something that potential employees decide collectively through the market.
Whether the meat industry can survive paying true market wages for meat packing jobs is another matter. But importing millions of indentured labourers every generation is not going to work as a long term solution.
Corvos
12d ago
Right, but a multiplicity of individuals makes a group. I’m sympathetic to their case but emigration is acting as a release valve for the kind of pressure that formed first world countries to begin with.
Corvos
12d ago
Pretty much this exact scenario plays out in
Presumably, the CDU also conspired against all of its own voters who believed the CDU’s rhetoric. A democracy simply cannot work if parties gain votes by promising to do A and then do -A when in power.
The lack of faith and interest in democracy corresponds directly to this tendency.
”You see, there's an implicit pact offered to every Minister by his senior officials. If the Minister will help us to implement the opposite policies to the one that he is pledged to, we will help him to pretend that he is in fact what he was going to do in his Manifesto.”
Yes, Minister
I opposed ID twenty years ago in the UK when it was about being modern and in some nebulous way preventing terrorism.
I’m not, on balance, keen on it now.
I just recognise that we need universal ID to achieve goals that I care about more (immigration control).
Corvos
13d ago
If there’s anything we’ve learned over the last few years, it’s that it’s almost impossible for a democratic society to physically move people from position A to position B against their will. Especially when position B is not on American soil or under American political control.
In a Swiftian spirit, I’m tempted to propose instead that from this day forward we give permanent citizenship to every person who touches American soil. Might focus people’s minds a bit.
Corvos
13d ago
Fair point, well made. I'm not sure if I agree or not but I'll think on it.
The problem with 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women' and in turn with defining sex by cluster-of-traits is that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. This means that:
- There is a single, clear differentiating characteristic that distinguishes between and creates men and women in a causal way (XX vs XY).*
- That genetic difference is causal for a massive number of physical and psychological differences.
- Therefore it is very difficult to find a cluster of traits that includes genetic XX and trans XY but not cis XY. XY traits cluster and XX traits cluster.
This is why progressives don't usually go for sex-as-cluster-of-traits: you then have to start defining those traits. Upper body strength, height, testosterone, estrogen, propensity for violence, propensity for nurturing, thing-person preferences, womb, penis, voice pitch, clothing, OCEAN scores, pronouns, leadership styles, intellectual interests, hobbies, sexuality, etc.
Many of these traits are obviously relevant to the real world, especially the physical ones and the ones related to desiring women, which is why the biggest battlegrounds have been sports, prisons and shelters for battered women. Many others of these traits are directly observable, which is why people resent being forced to affirm in public that the tiny person with breasts and a high-pitched voice is a man and the big, bearded sysadmin with an anime body pillow is a woman.
So far, progressives have been unable to put together a convincing cluster of traits that doesn't look cherry-picked, doesn't sound conservative and doesn't exclude things that the majority of people think are relevant. This is how you end up with Keir Starmer's famous claim that "99.9% of women don't have a penis".
*I'm not going to cover intersex because there aren't enough of them to matter and they don't disprove the general case. A chicken born with a deformed leg doesn't mean that chickens don't have two legs.
Corvos
14d ago
And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)
What's being achieved here? You've proposed to turn 'woman' into an obviously useless appellation that doesn't capture any of the information people actually care about, and then when they pivot to different words you say, 'no, you can't do that'. What you seem to want to say is, 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women outside a very small number of very specific contexts so it doesn't matter who wants to be what gender' but you know perfectly well that loads of people disagree with you on what these contexts are and how many of them there are. Which is how you end up litigating 'trans women' in female prisons and 'trans women' in female sports.
Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.
I get into a lot of niche fan/SF/fantasy stuff, so I read a decent amount written by trans people to an audience of (assumed) trans people. This is not how they think. They want to opt out of maleness and into femaleness, they want to be 'one of the girls'. They are very definitely not happy if you call them 'women' as an appellation but otherwise treat them as male.
Corvos
14d ago
You can do this, but it doesn’t satisfy either side. The conservatives shrug and say, ‘fine, but we care about whether you’re a biological male so that’s how we’ll treat you’ and the progressives get furious that you haven’t defended a non-trivial interpretation of their femaleness. It just progresses the euphemism treadmill.
Corvos
14d ago
If the rise of Social Justice had not been halted, we could one day have lived in a utopia where the rich and powerful could just go to some island to hold secret blackface parties, instead of having to diddle kids.
Thus, Trudeau.
Corvos
14d ago
Having gone to an expensive private boys' boarding school, the rumours are greatly exaggerated. There was much to dislike about them but the kind of thing that CS Lewis wrote about isn't common.
Corvos
14d ago
Depends on the political system perhaps. In general I think killing politicians would trickle down to the ordinary citizens via higher stakes for anything political. More cheating, more violence, more social pressure.
The same can also happen in reverse (bottom to top) and arguably is here. You are more able to contemplate the killing of (enemy?) politicians with broad equinamity because citizen-level politics has become more fraught.
This is the hard core of the debate. It's the same with treaties: on the one hand, how do you make a binding commitment when your government potentially switches between factions every four years? On the other hand, how do you make democracy work if you permit governments to bind the hands of their successors?
How fair is it that Biden or Starmer or Boris Johnson can import 600k immigrants in a program that has a guaranteed citizenship at the end of it and then say, "Har har, it benefits the nation that we can make binding commitments about permanent residence, suck it."
Don't get me wrong, your point is legitimate, which is what makes it complicated. I will go so far to say that I think it is a genuine flaw in democracy as a system, which only survived as long as it did because power was firmly reserved to an elite who tended to agree, and who were careful about issues of genuine contention.
More options
Context Copy link