GaBeRockKing 3d ago · Edited 1d ago

I’ve decided to stop spaghetti posting because it’s making it miserable to respond in a coherent fashion. If in the process I fail to address what you consider a major point, please bring it back up again.

Part 1 - definitions, perceptions

You accuse me, first, of hypocrisy-- of not understanding how you create definitions, even as I accuse you of not understanding the gender-ideologist’s position. I would instead characterize that as disagreement. I think either we are using the same word (‘definition’) to point at two separate topics, or your definition of ‘definition’ rests on an incoherent theory of mind and therefore incomplete self-understanding.

Let me try to describe your position as best as possible:

The words we use to describe concepts are arbitrary, but concepts themselves have a fixed, platonic nature-- at least, on a personal level. There is an objective standard for ‘car’, ‘blue’, and ‘man’, regardless of what words you use to describe them. Even if you were magically transported into a society where there was no distinction between road and sidewalk, and therefore no need to designate “bike lanes” and “car lanes”, you would still perceive the existence of ‘cars’ and ‘pedestrians’-- you would still classify the respective groups accordingly-- and you would still want to use the terms ‘car’ and ‘bike’ or some sort of uniquely-identifying equivalent, even if you were speaking in another language. Therefore, the definition of ‘car’ is whatever you perceive to be a ‘car’, and it makes absolutely no sense to talk about changing definitions.

Now, let me describe mine;

The human brain is a supervised classifier at the level of neurotransmitter feedback that ties together sense-impressions into useful behaviors. Seeing the letters C-A-R, hearing the sound /kɑɹ/, passing your hand over smooth metal, observing a precise number of wheels, hearing the rumble of an engine-- all of those things exist on an independent and more fundamental level than the concept we call ‘car’. But through repetition, our minds group those things together, such that when the network for “four wheels” fires, the networks for “engine rumble” and “C-A-R” also fire. And in particular, we discover that the same process happens to the people we talk to-- if we say “car” they’re also likely to bring up wheels and engines and metal because they’ve also pattern-matched to the same stimuli.

Except for some reason, people keep riding their bicycles on the highway and claiming they’re riding their cars. You try to explain to them the importance of the four wheels, and the metal, and the engine. They rebut with nonsense about training wheels, and bamboo and the flintstones. You challenge them to coherently define “car” and they mumble something about how any vehicle can be a car if they want it to be-- and for that matter, a car can be any other type of vehicle, too. They call you a reactionary for wanting to keep cars off of sidewalks, and in turn you come away from the experience thinking these people are indoctrinated idiots spewing the propaganda of their shadowy windmill-loving political elite.

In the end, nothing serves to change your grouping of related concepts-- your ‘definition.’ in its most fundamental sense. You come away from the experience thinking your definition is immutable.

Except it’s not! The brain is a flexible thing. If you committed to using the word ‘car’ to apply to every vehicle on the highway, and ‘bike’ to apply to every vehicle on the sidewalk, you could easily shuffle your groupings around. You’d still want to refer to your original concepts occasionally… for example, if you’re talking to a mechanic, you need to specify whether you’re having problems with your two-wheeled-pedal-vehicle or your four-wheeled-engine-vehicle. But it would be entirely doable to change your definitions.

Except… why would you want to?

Even if you concede that cars can drive on sidewalks and bikes on the highway, why would you want them to trigger the same networks in your brain? Wouldn’t you prefer to keep them separate, so that when the “car” network triggers the “danger” network is appropriately stimulated, rather than being offset by association with less-dangerous vehicles?

You can concede that your definition is not necessarily immutable, but at the very least it must be immutable to be functional. And additionally, you can only explain these people with apparently non-functional definitions by pointing to either malice or stupidity. And for that, you support your position by pointing to their insane policy prescriptions-- requiring a driver’s license to ride a bike??? Ridiculous! So definitions (whether a bike is a car), policy (whether a car can drive on the sidewalk), and goals (being stupid/evil) become inextricable.

But the reason I’m so insistent about separating definition-policy-goals is because the conclusion you’re drawing rests on unfounded assumptions about their goals. You’re assessing bad-definition bad-policy by comparing them to your goals.

Imagine if you wanted a society with wider sidewalks, narrower roads, and harsh speed limits on both. In such a society, there might still be different prescriptions of how the people in each environment might drive. For example, road-bound vehicles might be expected to always go in a predictable direction and speed, while sidewalk-bound vehicles are afforded the right to start and stop at leisure. But it becomes wholly conceivable for a vehicle to move on and off the sidewalk at its owner’s leisure, so long as it follows the applicable laws and customs in both locations.

Or alternatively, imagine wishing for a society with a wide gradation between roads and sidewalks, each with their own idiosyncratic rules, such that any individual vehicle-user has a variety of choices for how they want to drive at any given point.

Either of those goals might lead you to adopt definitions of ‘bikes’ and ‘cars’ that allow bikes to be cars, and vica-versa, because it’s more useful for you think in terms of, “is this vehicle following highway or sidewalk customs?” than in terms of “does this vehicle have four wheels and a motor?” Either of those goals could lead you to controversial policy prescriptions about where cars and bikes are allowed to go. But they’re still very different goals-- and in any case, trying to talk to someone that has those goals about how “obviously things would be safer for bikes if cars weren’t allowed on sidewalks” is just going to be mutually frustrating. They’ll say something to the effect of, “of course it’s dangerous to have a self-identified car on the sidewalk… but I don’t see why self-identified bikes are obviously perfectly welcome.” You call them an idiot, they call you a bigot, everyone walks away mad. I smugly nod, having correctly assessed your mutual incomprehensibility.

Except… maybe they really are stupid and/or evil. Maybe you really were addressing their actual goals. I admit that the end result would still look the same-- mutual disgust, and an end to discussion. So I can’t claim, prima facie, that your inability to productively talk to cyclists-- I mean, gender-ideologists, is evidence of your beliefs about them being wrong. If we were having the same discussion about, say, flat-earthers, I’d accept that the other group really is too dumb to talk too. Why disagree here?

Well, the short answer is… personal experience. The gender-ideologists I’ve talked to just aren’t like that. Speaking just of the people I’ve met in person-- the trans people I meet tend to be troubled, but decent people. The progressives get a little hysterical sometimes, but otherwise they’re pretty OK. I admit that I don’t really expect too much from them anyways because they’re atheists/heretics anyways, but in terms of personal virtual they’re really not very far from the catholics I know. And speaking of the people I’ve met online-- and here I’m referring mostly to /r/slatestarcodex and some very interesting discussions I had on my alt-account at PurplePillDebate--the egalitarian-feminists I talked to argued from coherent principles and goals that I could tell incidentally lead to their view of gender ideology. (We weren’t actually talking about transgenderism, by-the-by, which was what made the discussion particularly interesting as a look into the substrate on which transgenderism could be reasonable derived from. I think the substrate was wrong of course, but that’s because I believe in God.)

There’s no doubt in my mind that plenty of gender-ideologists are stupid and malicious. The same is true of people who support traditional gender roles! I might share my definition of “man and women” with viking-obsessed neo-pagan neo-nazi, and even agree on a number of policy prescriptions, but our goals are very much distinct.

So seeing reasonable people in the gender-ideologist camp and unreasonable people in the traditionalist camp… I’m just inclined to believe in my null hypothesis. That being: that they’re just people like everyone else. That their intelligence/morality bell curves largely reflect the bell curves of the general population. That their goals, while alien to mine, are not some evil monolith designed to squash me flat.

So with reference to your original question-- “What would the world have to look like for you to change your mind” I suppose statistical evidence of lower intelligence + higher criminality correlating to increased support for gender-ideologists views would cause me to update my views.

Part 2 - Government Intervention

I’ll start by characterizing myself as a neoliberal, rather than a libertarian. It’s true that I don’t take a full, “no steppy snake” position… I’m pro-having-a-government even though I accept that governments are basically just machines that turn the violation of natural rights into security. People have a right to bear arms, but I still want to make any weapon small enough to concealed-carry too ludicrously expensive for the average person to own. (People should be able to own missiles, not pistols. An AR-15 is enough to defend your home, and a tank is enough to overthrow your government.) People have a right to property, and taxation is theft, but I’m still pro-theft when that money is spent on maintaining my roads.

But in general, I still believe in the aphorism that a person’s right to swing their fist ends where another person’s nose begins-- and I believe the justified role of the government is to prevent nose-hitting, not fist-swinging. It’s often impossible to do one without the other, but I just don’t see how that applies to transgender procedures and medicines? If you choose to hurt yourself… okay? It’s not like taking drugs, where by hurting yourself, you become more likely to hurt other people too. Well, I guess taking testosterone specifically is a little like that, but also we just allow men to walk around with high test levels anyways so it doesn’t seem like an issue. Regarding sports-- you implicitly agree to a level of danger by participating in a sporting event, mediated by the rules. Whether female athletes want to agree to the dangers of male involvement is up to them. Whether sporting organizations want to set the danger level at a particular point is up to market incentives. Either way, there’s no place for the government to intervene… unless it’s funding the sport for some reason, which it shouldn’t be doing anyways. (I voted against a recent stadium tax in my municipal elections.)

It’s reasonable for the government to set up guardrails when it comes to medicine. And verifying that patients (and if applicable, the parents) are giving informed consent and that the drug or procedure given will be successful at giving it to them is extremely non-trivial. I suspect a “perfect” implementation of the system would result in a lot fewer minors ultimately getting medically transitioned. But I don’t think the government should prevent people from inflicting what I would consider to be harm on themselves. People should have a right to cut off their limbs if they can prove they really, truly want to. (They shouldn’t have a right to accept disability payments after but that’s a separate discussion.)

And yes, it’s true that you and I were able to discuss this issue without reference to the definitions of “man” and “woman”, but that’s because we more-or-less agree on those definitions in the first place, and additionally agree that it would be personally immoral to crossdress and go into women’s bathrooms. Therefore our disagreement probably hinges on the definition of “government” and “intervention” and “right” instead, and we will almost certainly go around in circles if we aren’t careful about making sure we’re talking about the same things.

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GaBeRockKing 5d ago

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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GaBeRockKing 5d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 5d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 5d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 5d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 5d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 5d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 5d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d ago · Edited 6d ago

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!)

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d ago · Edited 6d ago

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!

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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."

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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."

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GaBeRockKing 6d 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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d ago · Edited 6d ago

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.

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GaBeRockKing 6d ago

oops, yeah lol.

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GaBeRockKing 6d ago · Edited 6d ago

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!"

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GaBeRockKing

Part 1 - definitions, perceptions

Part 2 - Government Intervention