FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1d ago
Why are men and women all leaving these gains on the table to be monopolised by men?
Basically this. I presume Randall would be a bit uncomfortable about his argument being used in the context of gender politics, but it's exactly as applicable (likewise certain varieties of the "female underrepresentation in STEM is caused by misogyny" argument, as I noted here).
Because men are oppressing women? How is that possible if men and women are equally matched? They should be able to overpower men the same way they have been overpowered by men, or at least fight to a draw.
Not only is there nothing remotely feminist about the preposterous idea that women are just as strong as men, if such an idea were true, it would obviate feminism as a political movement. After all, the only reason feminism exists is in recognition of the fact that women, by virtue of their relative physical weakness, need protection from violent and rapacious men. But if women were just as strong as men, an appropriate response to women complaining about male violence and oppression would be "sounds like a you problem. Git gud."
FtttG
2d ago
I'm not sure how similar frisbee is to disc golf, but men have a massive competitive advantage in the latter: https://quillette.com/2022/09/28/is-this-the-lia-thomas-of-disc-golf/
FtttG
2d ago
Well the entire point I was making was that Western educated people are systematically politically biased in ways which give them a predictably inaccurate model of the world, and that this model of the world is systematically inaccurate in ways quite different from the model used by the modal uneducated person. Pretty hard to make my point without using specific political examples - it's a fundamentally political assertion.
FtttG
2d ago
While obviously the word "fair" is a normative word, my intuitive understanding is that the answer to the question "is it fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events?" is pretty much entirely determined by the size of the delta in athletic performance between males and females. No one argued that it was a category error to include "it is fair to allow male athletes to compete in female sporting events" under the heading of "factual delusion", they simply disputed that it was in fact a factual delusion. One person said that, rather than segregrating sports by sex, we should segregate sports according to the things for which sex is a proxy e.g. bone density, T-levels etc., which just sounds like a sex-segregated league with extra steps.
Right. Woke people in the UK are constantly appealing to the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix and the British film industry to improve "representation" for BAME (black, Asian and Middle Eastern) actors in British TV and film productions (see the perennial demands for the next James Bond to be played by Idris Elba). Then someone ran the numbers and found that BAME actors and LGBT actors are dramatically overrepresented in British TV compared to their respective shares of the population - nearly double, in fact.
If you watch a lot of TV and notice that about a quarter of characters are portrayed by BAME actors, you routinely read editorials about how the BBC and Netflix aren't doing enough to improve representation for BAME actors (the implication being that the current rate of representation isn't commensurate with UK demographics), it's perfectly reasonable to assume that more than 25% of the UK population is BAME, if you haven't yet learned that people sometimes go on the internet and tell lies.
Many experts serving on governing bodies for their respective sports support trans women competing in the female divisions.
FtttG
2d ago
In my local Slate Star Codex WhatsApp group, one guy recently advocated for technocracy over democracy, arguing that our society would function better if educated experts made all the decisions. I strongly disagreed, arguing that a) expertise in a given empirical field doesn't qualify you to make normative decisions - these are separate magisteria; and b) within their own narrow domain, educated experts may have a more accurate model of how the world works than the lay person, but educated experts are also disproportionately likely to endorse a range of deluded beliefs that most uneducated people do not suffer from. When pressed for examples of what deluded beliefs I was thinking of, the first I offered was "the idea that the delta in athletic performance between males and females is narrow enough that it can be fair for a trans woman to compete in a female sporting event".
Unsurprisingly, some people in the chat pushed back and insisted that there was no way this belief was a delusion, thereby proving my point.
where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
The apparently widespread belief among Palestinians that Israel could ever be defeated militarily (or indeed completely exterminated) suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Away on holiday from the 15th-18th, then sick as a dog from the 19th-22nd from which I haven't fully recovered even this morning. Girlfriend said it was the sickest she's seen me since we started going out, and she was right. No fault of mine I made essentially no progress on my NaNoWriMo project since this day last week.
FtttG
4d ago
More than halfway through Kiki de Montparnasse. It's okay. I don't like any of the characters though.
FtttG
4d ago
Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.
I described something similar here, a Straussian reading of a novel I haven't read and don't intend to.
FtttG
4d ago
The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.
I saw more than one meme claiming that Adolescence was Netflix's adaptation of the Southport stabbings, but assumed that couldn't possibly be the case given how recent it was. Good to know I was right.
FtttG
5d ago
By "playing the hits", I mean repeating the same talking points he made during his first campaign and his first term.
FtttG
6d ago
Sure. But on the other hand, Trump has a propensity to verbalise every stray thought that crosses his mind unrivalled in politics domestic and foreign. He suffers from terminal logorrhea. It's hardly an original insight to say that he's a showman first and a politician second, and every good showman knows you can't just play the hits over and over again - you have to spice up your act with new material. Maybe he never discussed this in his first term, but there were lots of things he talked about doing during his first term (and beforehand) that he never got around to. Lots of the things he's done have been outrageous, but I don't think you've presented a very convincing case for why it's likely that invading the US's neighbour will be one of them.
The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do
After a decade of Twitter mobs exploding at the main character du jour, we know how it plays out now. But in 2014, thousands of people suddenly coming out of the woodwork demanding that you fire employee X was a relatively new experience, and one they were obviously struggling to grapple with: there was an obvious fear that failing to capitulate could gut their brand reputation and share value. After a decade of these blow-ups, companies have started to cotton on to the fact that these mobs are ultimately impotent. The mobs can kick up a stink on Twitter, they can get journalists who use Twitter to publish sympathetic articles damning the company - but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large (except Bud Light, as noted by @FCfromSSC below - and even then, that wasn't a case of "one of this company's employees said something dubiously offensive in their private life, therefore we're boycotting the entire company").
FtttG
6d ago
I was halfway through the comment before I looked up at the username. He strikes again.
FtttG
6d ago
As we've seen in other areas, Trump 2 has already been radically different than Trump 1.
I think this proves too much. Just because Trump's second term is different from his first doesn't mean his past behaviour is of no use to us in predicting what he'll do next. If I said that I expected Trump to begin a massive campaign of carbon divestment starting in 2026, you said that nothing in his political career to date suggested that was likely to happen, I don't think you'd be very impressed if I countered with "well, Trump 2 is radically different from Trump 1".
I also notice that the argument directly contradicts point 5 of your post - why is Trump's past as a real estate developer of greater relevance to what he'll do next as POTUS than the last time he was POTUS?
A thing he did not do before, and especially not this much.
How many times has he publicly floated the idea of annexing Canada since assuming office?
Hypothetically, if Canada did become the 51st state, would I be right in saying it would be the largest state in the union by landmass by quite a huge margin? Or am I too Mercator-projection pilled?
Seems like a terrible idea from a Republican standpoint: adding ~30 million new voters to your electorate, 80%+ of whom can be assumed to be reliable Democrat voters.
Also worth pointing out that in his first term, Trump became the first POTUS in decades not to start any new wars, so his track record is pretty respectable on that front at least. Unless we're talking about peaceful annexation, whatever that might look like.
I got my swivel chair from JYSK (https://jysk.ie/). It was a model called Dalmose which appears to have been discontinued, although they have others that are similar. It only cost me €60. My girlfriend uses it more than I do as she's fully remote and she's always found it very comfortable. Mesh back like you requested.
FtttG
7d ago
Out of interest, why are you linking to an archived version of Scott's post? The article is still up on his old website.
FtttG
7d ago
This article by Richard Hanania is very relevant. He argues that when comparing net inward migration across the fifty states, Americans' revealed preferences consistently show that they would rather live in more economically libertarian states than not.
I'm not talking about individual men and women. I'm talking about how society is organised. Much of our modern society only makes sense when you understand that there is a broad societal-wide recognition of the fact that women, as a class, are systematically weaker and more fragile than men, and as a result extra resources must be invested into protecting them. There are hundreds if not thousands of NGOs dedicated to combatting "violence against women"; the idea of founding an NGO dedicated to combatting "violence against men" (without qualification) would have caused people to look at you like you'd two heads until maybe five minutes ago. (This is not me making an MRA argument.)
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