Crowstep
8d ago
People should be allowed to choose their gender, because more freedom is better than less freedom
Does that include the freedom to describe the world accurately, for example, by describing the Wachowski brothers as brothers?
Or the freedom for a woman to get undressed without a man watching?
The freedom for women to compete in sporting competitions amongst themselves without being outcompeted by physically superior men.
Transexuals were always allowed to describe themselves as the opposite sex, and to dress as the opposite sex if they wanted. It's the desire to force everyone else to play along that generated the pushback. There are genuine tradeoffs here, and if we're going to use 'more freedom' as the heuristic, surely we should weigh the freedom of the majority more than the freedom of a tiny, tiny minority?
Crowstep
8d ago
Defining the word "woman" based on biological sex is just redundant and makes it harder to discuss things
The words woman and man have always meant male and female adults. It's only in the past decade or so that trans-activists have tried to redefine them to be somehow unrelated to biology, for the sake of being able to force everyone to pretend that a man in a dress is actually a woman.
Things were easy to discuss before, transactivists made it harder by trying to forcibly uncouple the words man and woman from what they have always meant.
Crowstep
9d ago
That's pretty much the position of professional demographer and pronatalist Lyman Stone. Polygamy reduces fertility, because although a polygamous man has more children than otherwise, his wives (after no. 1) have fewer. Funnily enough that's what happened with Musk. He had six kids with his first wife, but 'only' four with his bottom bitch Shivon Zillis.
Of course, we can also consider quality rather than quantity. If Grimes had a baby with a rockstar, he probably wouldn't change the world. But a baby with a genius, maybe.
Crowstep
9d ago
I mean, the paper says that obesity isn't caused by a 'broken' lipostat but one that is set too high, which is what I meant by 'broken'. I assume they use 'broken' to refer to things like Prader-Willi Syndrome.
The lipostatic model not only explains why some people become obese whereas others do not, but also allows us to understand why energy-controlled diets do not work
That is precisely what I'm arguing. CICO (as in calorie controlled diet) doesn't work.
The 1970s also didn't see a novel virus or chemical triggering adverse reaction leading to "broken lipostat".
No, but it did see a stratospheric rise in the consumption of vegetable oil, which is what I think caused the obesity epidemic. Seed oils are definitely novel, as is a diet with 5-10x the amount of linoleic acid that humans need.
Crowstep
10d ago
Isn't that just moving the tautology up a level? Since CICO in its thermodynamic sense is just a description of weight loss, then giving the advice 'follow whatever scheme it takes to lower CI to be beneath CO' is the same as giving the advice 'follow whatever scheme leads to long-term weight loss' (which frustratingly doesn't include deliberate CICO).
Crowstep
10d ago
I'm not sure what the page you're referencing is referring to (can you link it?), because I'm referring to the consensus among obesity researchers for explaining the obesity epidemic:
But there’s a third model, not mentioned by Ludwig or Taubes, which is the one that predominates in my field. It acknowledges the fact that body weight is regulated, but the regulation happens in the brain, in response to signals from the body that indicate its energy status. Chief among these signals is the hormone leptin, but many others play a role (insulin, ghrelin, glucagon, CCK, GLP-1, glucose, amino acids, etc.)
Crowstep
10d ago
You misunderstand me. I'm arguing that successfully following CICO as diet advice is counter-productive. The Biggest Loser study showed that contestants who purposely decreased their CI (through having their food intake managed by the producers of the show) and massively increased their CO through exercise permanently reduced their metabolic rates, even after they regained the weight after the show was over. These people, who absolutely did follow CICO as advice ended up making things worse for themselves.
A person can choose to eat less. But eating less increases hunger (duh) and reduces metabolic rate. Homeostasis trumps willpower.
But obesity isn't caused by a lack of willpower (the whole world didn't get lazy in the 1970s for no reason). It's caused by a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers and it lines up with what we actually see. What caused the broken lipostat is still up for debate, I think it's vegetable oil but it could be something else.
As others pointed out, CICO cannot be debunked in so far that thermodynamics is immutably true. It's just different factors can contribute to these variables on either side.
The best way of thinking about it is that, CICO as an accounting tautology may be true, since it just describes weight loss/gain. But CICO as actionable dietary advice absolutely can (and has been) refuted. Simply deciding to eat fewer calories or exercise more (without doing something hacky like keto) doesn't work.
Crowstep
13d ago
Getting fired has nothing to do with free speech
This is a particularly American understanding of free speech, in that the US constitution prohibits the government from restricting speech.
But it isn't the be all and end all of the principle of free speech. When JS Mill was writing about free speech, he starts be assuming no government coercion whatsoever, instead talking about public opinion.
Let us suppose, therefore, that the government is entirely at one with the people, and never thinks of exerting any power of coercion unless in agreement with what it conceives to be their voice. But I deny the right of the people to exercise such coercion, either by themselves or by their government. The power itself is illegitimate. The best government has no more title to it than the worst. It is as noxious, or more noxious, when exerted in accordance with public opinion, than when in or opposition to it. If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
It seems pretty obvious to me that 'you can have any political opinions you want, except these ones. If you have these opinions you will get fired' is not meaningful freedom of speech, if applied more generally.
Crowstep
13d ago
He seems to be opposed to excessive government getting in the way of his growth agenda/state capacity, and has told his cabinet to stop hiding behind quangos.
Of course, Labour gonna Labour, so they're still setting up new quangos and implementing new rules about diversity and stuff, so we'll see how it shakes out.
Crowstep
14d ago
And one that could genuinely change in the UK. Starmer clearly doesn't like quangos dictating policy (e.g. the Sentencing Council deciding that everybody except white men should get reduced sentences) so I can't imagine he'd be sympathetic to an employment tribunal casually bankrupting the UK's second city.
Crowstep
14d ago
RFK Jr. endorses measles, mumps and rubella vaccine
Anti-vaxxer gets mugged by reality? Better late than never.
Crowstep
14d ago
That would surprise me. I have literally never seen a bin-woman in my life.
Although the Birmingham case got the same result as one involving the clothing retailer Next. In that case, the shop-floor staff were getting paid less than the staff in the warehouse. The funny thing is, for Next, women were a majority in both areas. However, since the female majority was smaller in the warehouse, the tribunal ruled there was a case to answer (while also admitting that there was no actual discrimination happening, and that the jobs weren't the same).
It baffles me that these tribunals have the power to just dictate what jobs should pay.
Crowstep
17d ago
The plus side of this is that the tax incidence will be borne almost entirely by the manufacturer rather than the consumer.
You can't tax one side of a transaction. If the US government taxes imported widgets by 20%, then the price for the consumer to buy those imported widgets will go up by 20% across the board, because all widget importers have had this cost added and the competitive pressures keeping prices down haven't changed.
Crowstep
22d ago
This is the best review I've seen of Adolescence.
It's culture war angle is really two-fold. Firstly, the idea that middle class native British boys from nice families end up stabbing their classmates, whereas in reality it's invariably second generation African boys (I mean, the show has a scene with a white boy mugging a black boy for his lunch money, come on!).
The social problems Starmer wishes to confront do exist, just not in a way that makes audiences feel comfortable. In the week that Adolescence was being watched by millions, a school in Elm Park on the London/Essex border held a party which was overrun by knife-wielding teenagers. That was close to where a real teenage girl was murdered by two real teenage boys in 2019. You’ll notice that none of the perpetrators resemble the star of Adolescence, because teenage knife crime in Britain is predominately a problem with young black men. This is testified by the fact that, according to Graham, who both wrote as well as acted, the show was inspired by the fatal stabbing of Elianne Andam by Hassan Sentamu, as well as other real-life cases. These are unpalatable realities, and audiences for drama don’t like them.
So too with Andrew Tate:
Even the baleful influence of Andrew Tate and ‘toxic misogyny’ is, again, disproportionately a problem among minorities, as Rakib Ehsan pointed out, and ‘there are several issues that may make young black men more likely to be drawn to Tate’s rantings’, the obvious one being fatherlessness: ‘Young black males are a group disproportionately impacted… This means young black men are the least likely group of young men to have a positive male role model living with them at home – a world away from Jamie’s nuclear family, as depicted in Adolescence, in which the boy is “radicalised” by online influencers.’
The second is that this could be caused by something called 'the manosphere':
Instead they’ve found new moral evils to focus on in the form of the manosphere or online hate, and the agents of the state even sympathetically view Jamie as subject to forces outside of his control. Misogyny is part of the pyramid of harm, that strangely gormless worldview in which tiny infringements of social codes are linked to far more serious problems (edgy banter at work > > > something something > > > the Holocaust). The boy’s father doesn’t have female friends and sometimes loses his temper; his son murdered a girl. Can’t you see the link there, between behaviour typical of perhaps 50-90 per cent of men and one characteristic of 0.001 per cent?
One reason that society now feels so uncomfortable with young men is because social norms have moved to a more feminine centre, focussed on empathy and harm-prevention, one major cause of the Great Awokening. It is a way of seeing the world, and of organising human relationships, which many males indeed find difficult to negotiate, but contrary to the fears about men suffering from smartphone use, the data shows that social media is disproportionately harming girls, ‘and is more likely to cause depression than radicalisation.’
Ed West concludes that the real reason for this kind of moral panic isn't that middle class British boys will become misogynists and murder their classmates. It's that those same boys are rejecting progressive politics.
Crowstep
23d ago
In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.
You may have noticed that the asylum system is broken in all of these countries, with millions of illegal immigrants cynically using it as a get out of jail free card that allows them to sneak into the first world and stay there indefinitely.
The only countries that don't have these issues (Australia, Denmark, Japan come to mind) grant approximately zero asylum claims.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Just to clarify, what do you think the average Ashkenazi IQ is? It's not really possible to have this conversation unless we're on the same page with that.
Crowstep
1mo ago
If you have evidence that universities are unfairly prioritising Jews, then present it. Insinuation isn't enough.
Meanwhile, we have actual concrete evidence and explicit admission by universities that they were favouring Africans and Latinos while penalising Asians (Euros are a wash, from what I recall). Asians were appearing less than their GPAs would suggest they should, while blacks and hispanics were appearing more than their GPAs suggested they should. Jews being particularly prevelant at some universities isn't shocking, because they are literally the most intelligent ethnic group on the planet.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Well no, you're well aware that they benefit from race discrimination in their favour.
You're also well aware that Jews are classified along with all other European ethnic groups as white. All that's happening is that the places being allocated to white students are being allocated to the most intelligent ones. This doesn't bother most people because most people don't hate Jews.
Crowstep
1mo ago
How did the people who founded these institutions get kicked out of them within a single generation?
They didn't get kicked out, they got outcompeted. The average European IQ is 100, the average Ashkenazi IQ is 114. In an institution that selects for IQ people, you shouldn't expect representation to match the census, any more than you should expect a room full of physicists to be 50% female.
Crowstep
1mo ago
The idea that a Spanish surname might disqualify someone from being American is kinda funny when the Americas looked like this in 1800
The Germans and French are ethnic groups. Americans are not. You could argue that Araujo isn't Anglo-American, but then neither are African Americans and they've been there since the beginning too.
Crowstep
1mo ago
Do any of these progressives believe in God or go to church?
Because I'd say that's the absolute bare minimum. Someone who doesn't believe in God isn't a Christian, and someone who doesn't go to church isn't a practicing Christian.
Christian isn't a synonym for 'virtuous' or 'progressive'. It's a religion.
It sounds like you mostly disagree with the transactivist agenda, which makes me wonder why you have bothered to swallow their (obviously motivated) definitions of sex and gender. But it sounds like we mostly agree, except for a few things.
Because if we don't single it out, then female sports literally cannot exist. Women are worse than men at every sport (including things that aren't really sports like chess). The only exception I'm aware of is ultramarathon. Without female-segregated sports, women cannot practically play sports competitively. Whether or not there is federal funding (remember that other countries exist) seems kind of immaterial to this fundamental issue.
You can view or define freedom however you want, but the reality is that real life always involves compromises, tradeoffs and zero-sum situations. We need a way to adjudicate these. Given your own limited definition of freedom cannot apply to most of them, how should they be adjudicated?
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