Ecgtheow
10d ago
If you want to understand where high information normies Dems are at Pod Save America + Ezra Klein are the places to go. The people who knock on doors, who donate $27 to campaigns, are solidly progressive but not locked into hard left socialist stuff and are under 50 usually listen to PSA. The analysis is solidly a pro Democratic Party perspective because they are all former staffers connected to current staffers, but it's worth listening to if you want to understand how the Democratic Party functions.
Ezra Klein called for Biden to drop out in the Spring of 2024 (if I remember correctly) and the Pod Save Guys pushed back on him. Post first debate they immediately turned on Biden and were one of the first big stones to fall in the media avalanche against him.
I'll also never forget that post George Floyd they had guests lined up to push the 'Eight Can't Wait' program of police reforms that didn't catch on and they got totally swamped by the more radical and viral 'Defund the Police'. Conservatives often don't see the different factions within the left and reduce everything to monolith machinations of 'the Cathedral' so if you're on the right I think you can learn a lot about the internal battles within the party from the Pod Save bros.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
I for one think we should gene sequence and hormone test all athletes then do complex regressions to figure out who most overperforms expectations for their genetics, hormone profile, age, sex, socioeconomic upbringing etc.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
According to boxrec.com Khelif is 37-9 with 5 KO's. I would expect a fighter with full male testosterone to dominate the sport if they were a skilled fighter, or have an unusually high share of their wins come as KO's if they were an unskilled fighter who managed to occasionally land an exceptionally powerful shot. Khelif seems to be good but not great with an average KO rate. Contrast this with Caster Semenya who was setting records in the 800m no one had touched since Soviet women set them in the 80's.
It's possible Khelif has some sort of intersex condition and a testosterone many standard deviations above normal for a woman but not at male levels. She seems more like a tricky edge case about where the line should be set than a clear cut example of someone who should not be allowed under any circumstance to participate.
I don't know what her life has been like but I doubt being an intersex woman in Algeria is easy. She probably has experienced considerably more sex discrimination than your average western feminist trans inclusive or exclusive (unless her parents are incredibly rich and she was in some sort of bubble). Regardless of whether on not she should be permitted to compete I think there's something unseemly about declaring her a violent misogynistic man victimizing women as so many on twitter have done.
Ecgtheow
3mo ago
Khelif is 37-9 with 5KO's, 41 women have gone the distance with her and nine have beaten her. She doesn't win an unusual amount for a top boxer or seem to knock people out at an exceptional rate. Khelif has a 13% KO Rate, the last woman to beat her, Broadhurst, has a 14% KO Rate. The idea that there is some massive gulf in power between her and other top women's boxers is not born out by the numbers.
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
I used to be a token progressive on here but then I left because I took shrooms and decided hiking was a better use of my time than arguing on the internet.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They weren't trying to increase trans acceptance, they were trying to sell beer to LGBT people and Blair White is not popular with LGBT people.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
There's two ways to approach this, you can try to reduce capital's share of income or you can try to spread capital's share of income more evenly through society.
Spreading out capital's share of income is conceptually easy. Just have some sort of wealth/inheritance/income tax that puts money into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, every citizen gets a non-transferable share and receives a dividend. Over time the Sovereign Wealth Fund becomes a larger and larger share of total investment capital and most of the capital share of national income is spread evenly among the population. There are myriad political difficulties in funding the SWF and the population would have to resist the temptation to drain the fund rather than live on the dividends, but conceptually it's pretty simple.
Solving r>g seems harder. You can artificially reduce r with taxes but that discourages investment. You can try to ramp up g, and obviously more economic growth is good, but reliably producing new technological breakthroughs so that we return to 20th century rates of growth seems unlikely.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
This isn't made explicit in much of the coverage but Bowman pulled the fire alarm in the nearby Cannon House Office Building and not the Capitol Building. The NYT article says that the Office Building was evacuated as a result but doesn't say whether there was any disturbance in the Capitol Building as a result.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Then why do men struggle to find women who want to be homemakers?
My answer is people are status seeking and prefer to marry within their class. Middle and upper class women have unprecedented career opportunities in a society where status comes from career rather than family. The absolute standard of living for home makers has never been higher but the opportunity cost of motherhood is also at an all time high. Lower class women don't face the same opportunity costs but upper and middle class men don't want to marry lower class women and deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If you want to marry an educated woman with ~92% of your income potential and expect them to forgoe most of that income by raising your kids you have to accept worse terms than your grandfather did when he married someone with 60% of his income potential.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think the old concept of masculinity is less benevolent than you're construing it. If women are dependent on men to provide the necessities of life and physical protection then men hold substantial power over women. Without doing a massive cross cultural study I think it stands to reason that the physically stronger member of the relationship who provides the calories/income gets their preferences catered to more than the weaker member who in a pre-industrial world would be pregnant and physically dependent on their partner for prolonged periods of time. Cultural norms surrounding relationships evolved over centuries where men had substantially more power than women.
What's happened recently is that first industrialization and now the shift towards a service sector economy has largely equalized economic power. Guns and the modern state reduce the value of a husband's physical protection, and the gender wage gap is pretty minimal once you control for career choices. Feminism's defection from the old marriage bargain is only possible because the old marriage bargain was produced by a difference in economic power that no longer exists.
My read on this is that the masculinity influencers are pushing for a return to the old bargain under an individualist framework. Go out and make so much money and become so physically powerful that there will be something approximating the pre-industrial power differential and you can get a young wife who caters to your preferences. Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less. Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Probably. I don't know if the government should be playing as a commodity trader in general but price smoothing to blunt the pain of embargos seems like a legitimate foreign policy aim. Especially when the low cost producers are foreign and the high cost producers are domestic keeping a ceiling and a floor on oil prices doesn't seem like a bad idea.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
This analysis seems apt to me, with the exception of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve publicity stunts. Tapping the reserves to increase supply temporarily to help lower prices was nothing more than a headline generator, and was a poor decision strategically. It's selling cheap gas now to buy expensive gas in the future.
No it's the exact opposite, they sold when prices were high in order drive them down then bought when prices are low again. They made a cool $4 Billion on the deal.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I'm not sure corporate diversity officers are the ones burning down police stations.
Rasmussen does lean right but 538 has applied 'House effects' to various pollsters to deal with right/left bias for ages. The posture of 'banning' biased pollsters rather adjusting for bias is a bad omen.
I think this is an also an instance where actual expertise is expensive and replacement level biased writers are cheap. Part of the reason Nate Silver is out is because he had a big contract and 538 itself didn't make money it was purchased as a prestige booster for ABC news.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The Peterson work they picked to go underneath the eifel tower is not one of the violent ones. It's based on some 1400's Italian book where a lovers kiss wakes someone from eternal slumber. If you don't project ideas of racialized dominance on the stylized white and black figures it's a sort of romantic piece with people dancing around the central couple.
The violent ones are shown in galleries to precisely the sort of person likely to develop an overly intellectual view of art.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Twitter seems to be working adequately for me today where yesterday I got rate limited right away. Anyone else have similar experiences?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't understand the logic at all, it seems like it would cost a lot of ad revenue to throttle user engagement that much. But maybe ad revenue is so low that anything he can do to juice subscriptions is good? Though once you cut low follower engagement by demanding a subscription then it stops becoming a good promotional platform for power users and they use it less which it makes less attractive to subscribers and the death spiral starts.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style.
The New Yorker article says why they had to go with Lawrence & Garner
Since Bowers, no other test case had emerged in which someone was actually arrested for violating a state sodomy law. National gay-rights groups had been challenging state sodomy laws based on supposed harms to gay citizens, who were, litigators claimed, made to look like presumptive criminals. That strategy wasn’t working. After the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans (1996), struck down a Colorado initiative excluding gays from anti-discrimination protection, the time felt ripe for another challenge to sodomy statutes. But the gay-civil-rights groups needed to find plaintiffs who would not suffer custody losses or other collateral harms from admitting that they had violated criminal sodomy laws, which tended to rule out gay couples in a committed family relationship. As Carpenter puts it, civil-rights attorneys knew that they needed plaintiffs “with little to lose.” Garner and Lawrence fit that bill.
As to why 303 Creative didn't have any real gay clients demanding wedding websites:
Puzzlingly, before she actually filed the first suit in 2016, Smith had apparently never designed a wedding website.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think I disagree with most of the people here but they usually put a fair amount of effort into top level posts and I learn things by engaging with them. I think this falls short of the implicit standards, if not the official ones, for a top level post here because it asserts a bunch of non-novel opinions and doesn't really cite sources or provide examples. I think setting standards and expressing constructive criticism (I suggested how they could improve the post) is a small value add.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think you're wrong that the media is more favorable to affirmative action than the public but this post is a low effort restatement of what I suspect is a widely held opinion here and so doesn't add much value If you found a non-opinion article from a mainstream news source covering the opinion and demonstrated how the subconscious bias influenced their writing that would be a lot more interesting.
I don't think it's an issue of just humiliation. A trans woman who is on estrogen for a substantial amount of time and has developed breasts or had bottom surgery is likely to be at risk of sexual assault if she is forced to use a men's bathroom or a men's locker room. There's also the risk of regular non-sexual assault by transphobic men against someone who has had the hormone profile of a cis woman for years and has the accompanying muscle mass. I agree that bathroom assault risk is pretty low for each individual use, but a trans woman in a space where 99% of the other people are cis men has two orders of magnitude more encounters with potential assailants than a cis woman in a woman's room where 1% of the users are a trans women.
I have a trans friend, she passes pretty well now but a thing I witnessed happen a couple times when we were hanging out in bars earlier in her transition was men hitting on her without realizing she was trans, realizing she was trans as the encounter went on, and getting aggressive once they figured that out. I would fear deeply for her safety if that encounter was playing out in private in a men's room and not in a crowded bar where she had friends around. To say she's forced to use men's restrooms is to force her to take on a substantial risk of assault (sexual or otherwise) to exist in public, and frankly for some people I think that's the point, to exclude trans people from public life.
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