GaBeRockKing
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User ID: 3255
GaBeRockKing
2d ago
The anti-vaxx portion of the base is very vocal and they won’t hesitate to primary a senator blocking RFK from the FDA.
Honestly, I think Trump's election is actually going to pacify that part of the base to the point where they become much less decisive in primaries. The tea party people activated out of dissatisfaction with the ruling party-- at the time, obama. But Trump is going to claim the economy is good, the immigrants are out, and the woke agenda has been destroyed... and they're going to believe him, regardless of any of the facts on the ground. The traditional midterm apathy is going to favor opponents of trump, disgruntled with the status quo.
GaBeRockKing
2d ago
Or, hear me out, Gemini was trained on RLHF, and the individual biases of the humans involved were hard to spot because AI models are opaque and fallible humans can't possibly anticipate every failure mode in advance. (Which is, incidentally, exactly what AI doomers have been warning about for ages.)
Anyways, if you think Gemini is evidence of a antiwhite consensus at google then tay tweets is equivalent evidence of an anti-every-else consensus at microsoft and everything balances out.
GaBeRockKing
2d ago
Brown identitarianism
Naw. Even if there was some great conspiracy to brown america, intermarriage rates have been getting higher for decades. The endpoint is just brazil. where even people with visible african and amerindian admixture just identify as "white" and have the same culture as everyone else in their city anyways. America's assimilative power is just too great.
GaBeRockKing
2d ago
I understand your point better now-- you're talking about global (across the internet) rather than local (on twitter) consensus. I still disagree with it, but that's because I don't think a consensus ever existed. facebook and whatsapp have been notorious for right-wing behavior for a while, and of course reddit and twitter got trump elected in 2016. Andrew Tate and the manosphere have been popular on youtube for quite a while too.
or TikTok, but lol TikTok's a Chinese op and will push whatever's most destructive
This is true.
GaBeRockKing
2d ago
Well if your only means to do that is by using language to communicate status rather than factual information, it clearly doesn't work.
That's why I enmesh myself in communities where status is a factor of conveying useful, factual information. It's much more efficient than handicapping strategies like sticking to a counterproductive party line as a high-cost signal of commitment to ingroup values.
GaBeRockKing
2d ago
Google also managed to produce AI that didn't produce those same absurd results. I just tried the "tell me a joke about X people" test and now it's too sensitive to tell jokes about white people too. You could make the argument that whoever performed the RLHF was racist, but it's obvious that google itself clamps down on those people when it notices them.
GaBeRockKing
2d ago
On the contrary, definitions shouldn't be put the in service of a particular goal, they're basic building-blocks of sense-making.
That is a particular goal you're putting your definitions in service of. If defining something changes how you sense the world around you, then how you define things becomes a question of how to optimally sense the world... which is downstream from other goals and priorities you have.
Also, I think this pretty much vindicates my earlier prediction that your definition effectively means you think men can be women.
Either that statement uses my definition of "man" and "woman," in which case it's false, or it's using your own, in which case it completely fails to communicate any information.
No, I don't. Their actions regarding policies are just a verification mechanism for whether or not I met them where they are.
What?
Secondly, actually according to your approach to definitions, trying to decouple definitions from personal and social ends (i.e.: "object-level policy preferences") is pointless, because definitions are put them in order to reach a particular end to begin with. You literally say that in the following sentence.
Policies are a means to an end, not an end in and of themselves. Obviously once you decide on an end, then it makes sense to talk about policies, but until then it's pointless. Your experience of talking with gender-ideology advocates differs from mine because you insist on talking policy without understanding goals, and the glib little propaganda piece you linked falls into the exact same failure state.
That's not how I approach these conversations at all. I can argue for my position even after tabooing all those words
Okay, let's do that. My position is:
I believe God created humans with various differences in their biology so that they might each carry out their piece of the divine plan. Acting to serve the diving plan, and encouraging others to do so, is virtuous. The terrestrial authority on said plan is the Catholic Church, so we should behave ourselves and organize society in accordance with the church's decrees, in particular by promoting or discouraging certain behaviors based on the presence and function of reproductive biology.
... and way downstream of all that, you get to specific policy prescriptions about, for example, what clothing is modest and immodest based on someone's biological sex. But you also get a mix of prescriptions and glaring-lack-of-prescriptions for how exactly a government should or shouldn't interfere with the business of enforcing morality. And I don't think a non-catholic government has the correct moral authority to legislate what sports teams do to make money or who's allowed in which bathrooms based off a non-catholic, non-consensus over gender and what the purpose of defining it is.
What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind, and end up believing that my description of how progressives think is more accurate?
I'm not sure, because doing that requires us to exchange actual information first. I think we're arguing on completely different levels because we can't agree on terminology.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
narrative alternative in opposition to MAGA, particularly Vance who seem like the future of the Republicans.
I'm surprised to hear this because to me, Vance seems like a truly different kind of politician than trump... and one I like a lot better. He's from a separate part of the republican coalition that's coterminous with, for example, mitt romney. Religiously influence, conservative-trending-dominionist social views, isolationist FOPO views, and a faith in capitalism that's balanced by a paternalistic personal morality. MAGA hats, meanwhile, have more of a "1980's New York Liberal" personality... there's a lot they disapprove of (including the blacks, mexicans, and gays), but they'll accept don't-ask-tell compromises instead of government meddling, The isolationist FOPO views are the same, but economics-wise, it's pure, populist, retail politics.
Anyways, secular shared norms would be great... but I think the era of trump proves that it's more efficient to just find an enemy that 51% of voters can hate.
calls for the race and gender stuff
I broadly agree, but "which races" and "what framing" is an important choice. Republicans, for example, have successfully split off the cubans as a clade distinct from the rest of the hispanics. I think the democrats might cede some ground on the traditional "races", but in exchange make a greater effort to isolate local and regional groups. I'm personally a midwestern supremacist, and I think there are fracture points the democrats could target to sever the alliance with the southerners and in particular the gulf-coasters. (Why should iowan farmers pay for flood insurance in florida!? Stop building your houses on sand! Salt water rots your brain!)
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
Well, that's just plain nuts.
Yeah, she's smart but also kind of naive. Honestly I think it's cute, and ironical male cynic + female idealist is a very functional set of traditional gender roles.
Why not? It bans tattoos for kids and FGM. Preventing child abuse is one legitimate government functions under minarchism, so if government is to exist at all it should do that.
Parents have the justifiable authority to restrict rights, not to violate them. People have the right to, say, cut off their thumbs as a political protest. Parents should justifiably be empowered to prevent their kids from doing so. Parents do no have the right to cut off their child's thumbs as a political protest. Parents can assent to their kid wanting to cut off their own thumbs-- but in cases like this, where it's unlikely that the average child would actually ever want their thumbs cut off, it would be justifiable for the government to introduce intermediaries (child psychologists, judges) to mediate whether the child had genuinely come to desire that of their own volition and with an understanding of the costs and benefits.
With regards to cutting-off-thumbs specifically I suspect the intermediaries would almost always find against letting the child cut off their thumbs, and additionally find evidence of child abuse... but for less clear-cut (hah!) scenarios, like administering hormone blockers, tattoos, and sweet-sixteen double eyelid surgery, I could see the intermediaries allowing the procedure in many cases.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
Really a lot of Trump's next term is going to depend on whether he has finally managed to be able to tell friend from foe and won't just fire anyone that doesn't tell him what he wants while hiring every brown noser.
He's 78. I'd put my bet on the "old dogs" aphorism.
my definition of "man" and "woman" stays exactly the same
Then you have confused the map for the territory. There's no point litigating what a "man" and a "woman" is just to change an entry in a dictionary. A definition is a tool, constructed to serve some particular personal or social end. If your definitions do not change when your goals and understanding of the world do, they are useless. If your definitions do not influence how you think and act, they are useless. Definitions do not exist in an abstract void-- they are the cognitive tools with which we understand and classify the world, so we can come to particular decisions and conclusions.
I don't see how my conception of this exchange means I'm not meeting them where they are. Even the most unpopular policies from your list are currently in place and active all throughout the west, which means where the liberals currently are has little relevance on the rules imposed on us. That is determined by their political establishment, not by them. What's more, once they realize their views don't conform to their establishments, like I said, they will either drop off from the conversation, or turn on a dime, and endorse the establishment view.
It looks like you still think, "meeting them were they are" means discussing the same object-level policy preference. (In this case, things like, "should transgender women be allowed in women's sports.) But that's way above the level of discussion I'm talking about! Before you can have a productive conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about what a "man" and a "woman" are... and before you can have a conversation about that, you need to have a conversation about why you would want to define the terms "man and woman" in the first place, and what goals we're trying to achieve by creating these definitions. That is to say, you need to have to conversation we're having right now.
If you just come at it from the level of, "men can't be women," and then try to have a discussion about the bathroom question, of course it's going to be unproductive. You say, "the political consensus you support wants trans women in bathrooms, but you don't," and think you're pointing out a contradiction between what they believe and what the establishment believes about the nature of men and women. But instead, they're just going to assume that they share the same fundamental values with their establishment, and consequently that said establishment (that they trust more than you) must have some information they don't about how allowing trans women in bathrooms actually serves that shared fundamental value better. No wonder you walk away frustrated!
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
Show the high-engagement Progressive accounts being banned from X through arbitrary application of platform rules.
I'm sure that regardless of whether censorship is actually happening, I could do that. It wouldn't be proof either way, because anecdotes aren't data-- and similarly, any proof of twitter's previous institutional leftist bent is subject to the same fuzziness. That's why I'm referring to mechanisms and incentives. The actual, technological infrastructure of the site either does or doesn't allow for systematically influencing public opinion. The owner of the site either is or isn't incentivised to use it for that purpose-- and either is or isn't empowered to incentivise their subordinates to do the same. Everything else is downstream of that. Either twitter has always been and still is pushing a particular viewpoint, or it never was and still isn't.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
Most recently, they were hiding Rogan's interview with Trump.
I saw clips of that in my "youtube recommended" feed and I'm not in the right-wing filter bubble at all. I agree that tech employees lean democratic, but elon (and to a lesser extent zuck and bezos) prove that it's not like companies need to hide their political affiliation if they have one.
As for the LLM thing... c'mon. Their AI is designed to remove legal liability as much as possible. That's not the same thing as being "racist."
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
they'd been seeing a false SJ consensus created by banning everyone who spoke out, but now they see something closer to reality
This statement seems crazy to me. If there was an SJW consensus prior to Elon, all the same mechanisms and all the same incentives exist to create an equally false right-wing consensus. If your response is going to be, "well, my side is actually right!" then you're isomorphic to an SJW.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
the unholy alliance of left-aligned big tech
What "big tech" is still left-aligned? tumblr? Elon and thiel alone are a pretty good cross section of heavy manufacturing, social media, finance, and artificial intelligence and they're the most notably political tech people.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
This is false. My definition of "man" and "woman" has nothing to do with duties and privileges a society should afford to members of each sex,
Unless you want society to treat men and women exactly the same, then yes, it does. Alternatively, if you do want perfect egalitarianism, why do you care how "man" and "woman" are defined? They become just arbitrary streams of phonemes used to categorize different fuzzy phenomena, like arguing over whether a virus is "life" or "nonlife."
I'm a Roman Catholic. I care about the definition of "man" and "woman" because I believe men and women have different divinely-ordained privileges and duties. So as a society, it's important for us to define the meaning of those terms correctly so we can effectively promote said privileges and duties. But it would be ridiculous to expect, say, a Jain, to have the same idea of what those privileges and duties are, even if they concede that they exist in the first place. Their fundamental beliefs about the nature of god are wrong, and what I hope to change. But until I do, their derived beliefs are presumably self-consistent and therefore unassailable ... unless I can convince them that within their own moral framework, they should alter their behavior.
The same logic applies to convincing people who believe in gender self-identification*. You're making some claim that it's futile to meet them where they are because doing so doesn't shift them from supporting a particular political establishment... and you substantiate that claim by pointing to personal experience of debating people who support gender self-identification. But it's clear that you haven't been meeting them where they are, by the very fact that you're conceiving of this as a duel between opposing political establishments. There's a wide variety of underlying views about sex, gender, and culture which people negotiate in different ways. For just the bathroom-debate and sports-debate alone, you can come up with three different pro-transgender combinations that must necessarily derive from completely different worldviews. And since those three worldviews are part of the same political establishment, they're all fighting each other, all the time, on the inside of their filter bubbles. They each have some idea of what the "party line" is, and probably they all think it's wrong and they're right.
* I was using "leftist" and "liberal" as a shorthand for this, though I admit the groups don't all map onto each other.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
You're trying to fix the debate around your particular framing, but if you are actually correct that's wholly unnecessary.
And anyways, convincing people to have a "traditional" views about what a man and women are doesn't even prevent kids being sterilized or being abducted from their parents. So it's doubly useless to argue from a position of privileging your own moral framework. You not only fail to convince people to adopt said framework, you also fail to make progress on the object level issue.
Here's an example: I was arguing with my girlfriend about transgender people in women's sports. She's "pro," I'm a muddled sort of "anti."* I eventually discovered she held her position because she genuinely didn't believe that men had any advantage over women besides height and weight-- and that existing sex segregation was actually the result of discrimination against women. She actually thought women would do fine in men's sports, if they weren't excluded from tryouts, or something. So none of my appeals to fairness, or justice, or even entertainment value were working on her, because they were all made from a framing that she viewed as essentially incoherent. I eventually got her to concede that, were we to have true co-ed competitions at an elite level, and men consistently won, then it would make sense to keep males, including transgender ones, out of women's sports.
That's what it took to get the object-level issue resolved, and in the process I saw that currently-intransversible gap between our frameworks. Before I can even get her to care about the higher male genetic propensity for sexual assault, I'd need to convince her it was genetic in the first place, rather than culturally mediated. And in particular, to someone who believes most observed differences between sexes are due to cultural factors rather than genetic, it would seem trivially obvious that changing their cultural presentation of gender is changing their gender, because gender is all culture in the first place.
Anyways, altering your body is a natural right, in that it has no external victims and requires active government intervention to stop. Natural rights can be exercised poorly, but that doesn't stop us from having them. Parents have a justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their children, but the government doesn't have that right on their behalf. By the same token, government doesn't have leave to interfere with a parent's justifiable authority to restrict the rights of their child. So the hypothetical people you're arguing with are wrong, but you are too.
* I don't think "transgender women are women," but also I'm not really in favor of women's sports? So it's like, whatever to me. I don't judge sporting organizations for just doing whatever is going to get them the most viewers and therefore the most money.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
Presuming the election shakes out as forecasted - will there be any life left in this proposal?
Yes. There's no difference between 268 and 0 EVs (barring faithless electors, which mattered exactly once). But there's a big difference between the winner of the popular vote winning or not winning the general election. Especially since the electoral college structurally favors voters from less-populous states, and also encourages catering to the whims of voters that live in specifically swing states. It's no mystery why MI-NC-NV haven't passed it.
Republican states naturally won't sign onto it while they still have the structural EC advantage that gave them Dubya's and Trump's first terms, but I could see texas and maybe even florida eventually signing on if the presidential meta remains "cater as hard as possible to midwestern suburbanites."
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
I won't claim that this vindictive glee is in line with my deepest ethical principles, but... c'mon. Bad things happening to good people is tragedy. Bad things happening to bad people is justice. Bad things happening to idiots is hilarious.
Zero chance those happen. Trump can't claim the election as a whole was rigged if he wins it, but he can't quietly abandon his claims of rigging either. He'll pivot to claiming some of the elections were rigged-- but that his victory was "too big to rig" and the nefarious efforts of the democratic party only succeeded in reducing his margins. And consequently, that policies to "ensure election integrity" should be put into place (where, coincidentally, those measures would have the net effect of making it harder to vote in densely populated areas, particularly in purple and red states).
I will give a mea culpa if that doesn't come to pass, so if within a hundred days of trump's inauguration it doesn't happen anyone can hold me to account and I'll research and write a 500 word essay about good things the trump admin accomplished between his first and second term.
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
oops, yeah lol.
So assuming harris loses, how do you guys think the democratic party will realign for 2026 and 2028? (And don't give me terrible, bad faith answers like, "they won't." They demonstrably have been-- sliding in trump's populist direction since at least 2020).
My predictions are that they'll moderate on cultural issues but head in a strongly left-populist direction on economic issues.
So regarding culture war issues, they won't drop abortion as a platform plank, but if trump fails to restrict it nationally the furor over it will just naturally reduce. Regarding gay, transgender, and minority rights, they'll probably just head in a more libertarian direction... continuing to enforce the same consensus culturally, but switching to a stance of resisting rather than promoting government interventions regarding those groups. The big exception will be immigration... Trump is going to take some sort of action against immigrants, and regardless of how effective those actions are, for the sake of his own ego he'll have to claim that they were successful. And regardless of whether he is, since immigration is mostly a perception issue that will naturally reduce its salience for his base. But on the flip side, democrats will be free to blame anything and everything they want on anti-immigration policies. Police violence, economic stagnation, loss in global standing, etcetera. And they'll be in the enviable position of being able to promise rosy outcomes without having to worry about actual policy, as the republicans are now.
Regarding economic issues... If Trump passes tax cuts (highly likely) they will raise the deficit and interest rates. If he passes tariffs (likely, though probably not to the degree he promised) they will raise the CPI. If he passes immigration restrictions/successfully kicks out illegal immigrants (likely), the price of housing will temporarily stall (likely) or fall (unlikely)-- though the effect here is proportional to the economic damage elsewhere, and in particular the rise in the cost of services. The net effect of all this will be to the benefit of, ironically, well-educated urban professionals with the financial resources to buy (or to already have bought) a house in the near term, and to do their electronics shopping in foreign countries. But in turn, poor people-- and especially poor people in locations that already had cheap housing-- will see a reduction in their buying power, without a commensurate increase in their salaries. If trump cuts welfare too that will in particular activate them. So I forsee a muscular resurgence of Bernie-and-Yang type "free gibs" promises tied to calls to tax "the rich" in a more explicitly redistributive framework. That might not sound too different from what the democratic party currently does, but it is-- current democratic policies are more tailored towards rewarding specific interest groups ("forgivable low interest loans for black male business owners" type beat) and feature complex taxation schemes designed by think tanks to extract exactly enough taxes to pay for them (as assessed by said think tank.) But by 2028, I think we'll see more maximalist proposals that start with a target enemy and a round number and elide specific details about distribution. Think, "10% wealth tax on billionaries and everyone gets their fair share!" They'll learn not to promise X thousand dollars per month, or any nerdy-glasses-emoji policy wonkery bullshit... they'll just rely on people thinking, "wow, bilionaires are mega rich, so if we make them even a little less mega rich everyone can be just regular rich!"
GaBeRockKing
3d ago
Always votes for the oldest candidate in the election.
Re: 1, immigration, I agree that non-racism explanations are enough to explain the bulk of the opposition. (Though of course, I would very surprised to hear about any racist that's in favor of it.) But it's worth remembering that Harris also campaigned quite a bit on border security, and the actual party line is more "people have a right to apply for asylum and parents shouldn't be separated from children" than "open borders," (sadly.) You do remember the bipartisan immigration bill, right? But it's definitely true that Trump and the republicans were more successful at credibly presenting themselves as people who would be actually successful at halting illegal immigration, and additionally being more hostile to legal immigration as well. The former was smart politics, but the latter, I think, will prove to be a liability when the effects of restricting immigration turn out to be exactly what the economists said they would be.
Re: 2, trans issues, I'm definitely getting the same vibe.
I'm seeing the usual liberal "ritual apology to rural voters" and usual leftist "liberals will always betray the revolution!" sentiments. Ultimately I think economics will be decisive, though. If Trump's economy does well, contrary to my expectations, a lot of leftists will deradicalize into liberals. If it does poorly, the democratic party will shift left to contrast, pleasing leftists by satisfying their concerns.
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