Iconochasm
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Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1yr ago
So if your girlfriend's BFF says "If you break up with her, she'll kill herself. Also, if you don't empty your savings to take her on a fantasy vacation, she'll kill herself. Also, if you don’t post a glowing, thoughtful comment on every Instagram post, she'll kill herself." That's not a threat because it has an extra step? The BFF totally isn’t in on the social engineering, she's just making predictions, honest!
Sorry, doesn’t pass the smell test. If your BFF is that suicidal, you need to be getting them committed under suicide watch. You are very charitably assuming a level of sincerity and decoupled remove that I think is just utterly lacking in evidence. I believe the odds of any given TRA lying to manipulate people is incomparably higher than the odds of some trans person deciding to end it because they were misgendered in a reddit comment.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
Sorry, this all seems like orange and blue thinking to me. Do you not think people ought to be responsible for their own actions? Do you think the incentives we create matter at all? You mention social engineering, but don't seem to connect that the threat of self-harm is itself social engineering, and that my whole gripe is that its extremely susceptible to bad faith utility-monstering. You don’t give in to ultimatums in a relationship because doing so establishes that ultimatums are an effective weapon. Similarly, you should reject threats of self-harm in social engineering because doing otherwise increases the incentive for self-harm.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
It is a difference because the person has no control over the rest of the trans community. It's not a threat because they can't make it happen.
They're still enabling it, and treating it like a reasonable response.
"If you stop depressed patients getting treated, more of them might commit suicide"
I'm explicitly not talking about treatment. Transitioning is not hard anymore; if anything, it's easier than any remotely comparable type of treatment. How many men would love to be able to talk to a doctor for 10 minutes and walk out with an insurance-covered prescription for T and steroids based on nothing but "I feel like I want it"?
The "abusive" behavior is when that implied threat of suicide is lodged at everything. Find the idea of transgender kind of incoherent? GENOCIDE. Criticize this trans character? GENOCIDE. Don't want to use pronouns? GENOCIDE. Don't want to Brazilian wax this penis? GENOCIDE. Don't want to suck the girlcock? GENOCIDE.
If my failure to actively endorse your totally legal, easily permitted life choices increases the odds of you killing yourself, that's entirely your problem. Threatening me with the harm trans people might do to themselves because I decline to actively support them, or even argue that their whole deal is silly and incoherent and quite possibly harmful, is what crosses the line into "clearly abusive behavior".
And I'm sorry, but you are the only person I have ever seen do this decoupled "it's just about predicted consequences" routine. Whenever I see this stuff in the wild, it 100% redflags as textbook "shit abusers do to their victims, if you swapped the nouns and translated this into a relationship, virtually everyone would agree this was abusive behavior".
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
White and black Americans have comparable drug use rates, but the black ones are caught more.
Iirc, Scott looked into this at one point. The takeaway was that the "within the last year" rates were reported to be similar, but the "within the last week" rates showed a large discrepancy. And anecdotally similar to the "in public" point, when I encounter people out in the world who show signs of drug use, such as blatantly smelling like weed, they are almost always black, wildly in excess of any plausible discrepancy in use rates. I assume the real difference is how much people worry about being caught.
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1yr ago
I think this is a distinction without a difference, a fig leaf of an epicycle. The context in which the argument is made is always a hysterical, histrionic affair in which responsibility is viciously externalized. "Your epistemic skepticism is LITERALLY GENOCIDE!!1"
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1yr ago
So imperfect, even shoddy transitioning may be the best option actually available.
I'd be more amenable to that if it seemed like therapeutic solutions had actually been tried and found wanting. Instead, it seems like therapeutic solutions have been deemed mean and politically incorrect, and not tried. And I get the metaphor with bipolar, but bringing this back to the original point, I am not responsible for someone else's behavior. If Kanye West doesn't want to take his meds, then he gets to deal with the consequences of his unhinged behavior. If you really want to transition, go for it. If you want to surgically turn yourself into a cat, or an orc, have fun! But when you threaten self-harm if I don't buy into your delusional framework, you're either too ill to get to make those decisions for yourself (and need to be committed and treated for general suicidal ideation separate from your gender issues), or you're an abusive piece of shit.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
So, there is another kind of dysphoria that I think is probably a closer metaphor, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which people feel like they have too many limbs, and desire to cut one off. If someone presenting that dysphoria says "I want to cut off my arms, and you have to tell me it's a great idea and I'm stunning and brave, but also pretend forever that I never had any arms in the first place, or I will become so inconsolably distraught that I might kill myself"... would you go grab a hacksaw and fire up the gaslights? Or would you think that maybe this person shouldn't be allowed to make that kind of decision for themselves, and they need to be forced to get some regular therapy and evaluation by sane doctors?
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1yr ago
I'd be very interested to read your version of a definition of the far right...
I think it's difficult to give a coherent answer. The right/left dichotomy is an imprecise arrangement at the best of times, and the right side is harder to define than the left side, especially if we're defining the right as anything other than "not leftist". The article in question seems like an absolute dumpster fire written for partisan purposes, focusing narrowly on certain social topics. Compare it to the page for far-left politics, which exclusively mentions economic topics, and doesn't even pretend to explain anything about the ideology-space, while trying to flatter their image where it can. If you dig into the talk page, you can even see editors acknowledging that "far right" is a propaganda term in use by leftist academics, while there is no comparable "wiki appropriate" propaganda source for "far left".
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1yr ago
It's not an explicit report option, but we do have a catch-all rule against being "egregiously obnoxious". That post did lean a little hard into the sarcasm, so "antagonistic" might also have fit.
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1yr ago
Then it would follow that they can't be afforded 100% agency.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I have a few issues with this comparison. First, the thing we'd be treating is the depression, with medications and therapies designed to fix the undesirable internal state. Secondly, the state of depression treatment is, AIUI, not really where we'd like it to be in terms of scientific reliability, and that's still a much better situation that the fraught nightmare of running experiments on trans people. And third, my issue is not with "access to treatment and therapy" (for adults, at least), but with epistemic demands on other people. If a depressed person demands that we validate their belief that everyone hates them for being smarter than the rest of us, and if we fail to validate that belief they might kill themselves... that is toxic AF. That's emotional blackmail. That's either despicably insincere, or something to have that person committed over. The worst response would be enabling that person in their toxic, abusive behavior.
If someone is suicidal, there are ways to seek help that aren't virulently anti-social, and empathy is not a blank check.
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1yr ago
The libertarians are the same, so they are some kind of socialists?
There is no similarity there. Let me know if you ever find a self-professed libertarian group that wants to forcibly split children from their families to indoctrinate them into a new Year Zero totalizing ideology, so I can start repudiating them.
Racism and homophobia weren't particularly important in their politics. That is what matters.
That seems like a very isolated standard that I have never seen applied to anyone before, and doesn't hold besides. Guevara had gay men sent to camps to work the gay out of them; that seems like a much more central example of political ideology and power than waffling about gay marriage.
That is not my point, and that is certainly not the point of the wikipedia article either.
What did you think the point of the wiki article was, if not offering institutional support to a wildly expansive definition of "far right"?
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1yr ago
The trick is that when pressed, they say they're talking about suicide rates, and thus making a veiled threat to kill themselves. As a reminder, this is archetypal abuser behavior.
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1yr ago
It is also a fact that the nazis were far right
I'll dispute that. There's a reason PoliticalCompassMemes classes them as AuthCenter. Nazism is weird, and very clearly a mutation off of socialism. There is definitely a reasonable argument that they shed core elementals of socialist thought (like class abolition) during that mutation, but they kept others (like the framework of being a revolutionary ideology to remake all society in their own image), and that leaves in them a weird position compared to other types of "right-wing" ideologies. If just being racist and homophobic is enough, then Marx, Engels and Guevera are "far-right". If we're going to ignore the distinctions and categories enough to group Brandon Sanderson with the Nazis, then everyone to the left of Joe Manchin is Stalinist - and apparently it doesn't matter if they never sent anyone to the gulag.
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1yr ago
The Slytherins are an unmanly ethnogroup that uses their wealth and ownership of the media to secretly control the government. The "good ones" are a favor-trading backdealer whose redeeming value is that he's so fame and favor hungry that he is willing to dip into genuine meritocracy instead of raw nepotism, and a creepy villain who is "redeemed" by his pathetic unrequited lust for a pure Aryan Gryffindor redhead.
I mean, yeah, it's a silly stretch, but it's funny how far you can stretch it to fit.
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1yr ago
It's true that they're anti-racism to a degree, which was part of the appeal, but there are other aspects that would be very troubling to the left today. For example, government officials are mostly incompetent, petty tyrants. The wizard newspaper prints only fluff pieces and official propaganda. It's not a book with that supports the "trust the experts" style of government that's been a staple of leftism for a long time but has ramped up even more since 2016.
Nah, they went a decade+ without noticing it's a story about armed children in school fighting the government, or that the Slytherins are a better "Jewish conspiracy" stand-in than the goblins. Shallow thinking is endemic, and motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I wasn't even thinking about politics, so much as "tribe", and imagining the look on [Blue Tribe Harvard Grad]'s face when Bishop Robinson starts spitting facts about the differences between men and women.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
That seems like a bad example. I have never heard anyone refer to Trudeau as manly. He is "Prime Minister Bieber", the substance-free, effeminate pretty boy.
But even setting that aside, what you're saying seems like the sort of "do as I say, not as I do" intentional sabotage from Western elites. Maybe someone should slip esteogen and SSRIs into the water at Davos.
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1yr ago
The republicans have a weird mix of strip mall baptist church combined with oligarch wealth vibe to them.
There is a parallel here where Democrats blend Ivy Leage Blue Bloods with black Baptist churches. Trying to think of core differences in the dynamics between each party, I think the Democrats have their ethnic religious faction better silo'd. It might be an interesting tactic for the Republicans to use their platforms (such as exist) to just respectfully let the Bishops talk. It would highlight how much they fit with the "strip mall Baptist" crowd, and heighten the vast chasm with anyone who reads the NYT.
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1yr ago
Just going to note, for general knowledge, that all of the books for these games are trivially available in PDF format. 5E in particular has a nice, searchable database of all published material, 5e.tools. The actual page sucks, but there are a thousand mirrors that work excellently (same with 3.5; they can't ban them fast enough). You can pick up a singular players guide and a DMs guide to use as references for maybe 40 bucks second hand, if you just use Amazon and don't shop around, and then have everyone else just use the sites.
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1yr ago
GURPS writer Willian Stoddard once described the core thesis of all the WhiteWolf games as something like "You are a unique locus of suffering and drama, and from this you derive powers and abilities that affirm your special nature." Those games introduced a whole genre of personalities to TTRPGs, coming from music and theatre, and the gay kids came with them. I remember so many huffing sighs at the guys who couldn't remember their attack rolls, but had very strong opinions about how their character should look.
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1yr ago
Is it really likely that young gay kids were too busy playing football to have any interest in TTRPGs?
Some of them played. More were doing band, or theater, or hanging out in alternative subculture venues. D&D coded more STEMlord back then, and that faded slowly over decades as things like Vampire and LARP became popular.
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1yr ago
What did you think of some other serials from that era? Like that one with the narrative powers in an evil empire. Can't remember the name.
That is probably The Practical Guide to Evil, which is fantastic, finished, and really stuck the landing. Unfortunately, the author signed a publishing deal with some asinine company called Yonder that has an absurd microtransaction business plan. I believe it is still available for free on the WordPress site, but that will be ending at some point.
Iconochasm
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1yr ago
I've drafted up plans for a small bookshelf with hidden drawers
I am a huge fan of this sort of thing. Post pics when it's done.
So, there are 46.8 million black people in the US. That article says ~1/5th are immigrants, but 1.9 million are born in Africa, mostly coming recently. This suggests that 70-80% of black immigrants/children of immigrants are coming from other places, probably the Carribean, which matches my anecdotal experience. I meet many more people with Haitian or Jamaican accents than African accents.
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