Here in Europe, populists like Geert Wilders were often warning about how too many moslem immigrants would threaten liberal values but they've been supplanted by a newer generation of populists that appear to increasingly take a page out of America's right-wing playbook by uniting with moslems against the LGBT crowd.
I can think of no better term to encapsulate this phenomenon than the paradox of tolerance. Anyone who knows even a little bit about Islam can tell you that moslems aren't exactly friendly with gays, i.e. they are intolerant of the LGBT crowd. So what happens when you tolerate people who are intolerant of gays? You end up with the intolerance of gays, exactly as predicted.
Many of these immigrants rarely had much in common with them on social issues. They just voted left because of economic interests and the fact that the white left is more likely to let their entire family back home settle in the West.
And liberals mistake this for some sort of solidarity, when in reality, it's ludicrous to expect people with a vastly different culture and a vastly different set of values to ally with you. The only justification I've seen for why they would want to "join" them was that they were a minority in the same vein as blacks, trans people, etc. which is simply not how it works and has never worked that way.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
There is, however, violence involved here. The arms race making vehicles larger and taller means that every life saved by an SUV costs four lives outside of the vehicle. Pedestrian deaths are steeply rising after falling for decades. I think that's worth caring about as well.
I don't care what your noble goal is. This is not a valid legal or moral justification for vandalism and deflating people's tires.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
It's not about the subreddits going private, it's the thorough demonstration of power that the admins have shown. The admins have always had the ability to remove moderators at will and instate their own loyalists, and they're using it to break up the protest.
TheMotte went off of Reddit for the very same reason that the admins are very willing to wield their power to achieve their own interests.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
He says he'll have time in a few weeks or so to get it back up on clearnet.
The main issue is that a certain transgender woman (along with an assistant) has been calling up the wives of ISP executives and harassing them to deny him service, in an attempt to scrub the internet clean of both of their histories of "consent accidents". Dealing with insane people like that requires an entirely new strategy.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Generally the purpose of pointing out these individuals is to counter the notion that there is some Particular Trait that neatly and unambiguously divides humans into a sexual binary.
I mean, sure, it does that. But that doesn't necessarily mean the definition is wrong and needs to be tossed out. Oftentimes I see these edge cases pointed out by trans activists to argue in favor of a definition by self-identification (which is arguably even more wrong than "penis = man, vagina = woman").
If your understanding of sex or gender is more of a cluster structure that people can in-principle move between by altering sufficient traits I think that already makes you much closer to the pro-trans position than most anti-trans people.
I think most anti-trans people are in-principle like this too. If we lived in a magical transhumanist future where a man could genuinely become a woman, 99.99% of the time an anti-trans person today would see her as a woman and the question wouldn't even cross their mind as to what sex she is because she's unambiguously a woman. There'd only be a few nutcases who'd care too much about her past history as a man and would be very principled about that, but the case for trans people would be exponentially stronger than it is today if actual transition actually existed. Most anti-trans people don't have all this figured out though and when they see a trans woman, it just looks like a man to them, therefore their argument is that the trans woman's sex-based traits are immutable (which, today, is completely correct).
I feel like a lot of trans debates is obscured by a refusal to acknowledge that transition today with current medical technology is actually, really shockingly primitive.
In general I am a fan of "I will use my judgement to decide how to act with respect to X" but there are some situations (legal ones especially) where people being able to understand in advance how they will be treated is important.
Sure, we can carve out edge cases in the law for those people too. But the general definition should still remain.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I don't really see how the pro-trans crowds goal is to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Indeed, it seems a central feature of their (our) arguments that there is a meaningful category called "women" and that it includes trans women. The anti-trans crowd clearly does not like this fact but it seems obvious to me the pro-trans crowd is not anti-categorization in some general way. We just want more complete and accurate categorizations for the purposes we think they should be put towards.
This was a misspeak on @aqouta's part, they meant discrediting the concept of certain categories, i.e. the ones that would place "trans women" in the "women" category.
I do agree with them that there is a certain game that's always played (and is a bit tiresome) where people attack a definition by pointing out edge cases. It's like, you say that men are born with a penis and women are born with a vagina, and then they point out the existence of intersex people who may be born with an amalgamation of both or neither.
Well, so, what if those people exist? Does that mean that it's wrong to use the category of "men" and "women"? I personally find no problem with using those categories as-is and going about my daily life with much bigger concerns to deal with than where I should properly place intersex people in my mind.
And besides, if I really end up needing to properly place a given intersex person (either in "men", "women", or some third category), maybe because I personally know them, this doesn't (and shouldn't) affect my original definitions of "men" and "women" - it was an edge case, so I dealt with it like an edge case, not by tossing everything out and starting completely from scratch.
The reality is, you can't expect people to give a tight, locked-down definition of anything, much less what a man and woman are. All they can do is give a general overview by a common case, maybe describe a few exceptions here and there, but certainly nothing that would stand up to infinite philosophical scrutiny.
And really, it's pointless, because the trans skeptical are simply not going to categorize "trans women" as "women", even though trans women share more attributes of women than most men share attributes of women. The reason for this is simple: They still simply share too many attributes with men, and we are not at an advanced level of technology yet to completely patch them out.
A trans woman has a penis - well, okay, so then they get gender reassignment surgery. But now a trans woman has a hole in their groin that must be kept open by dilation. Sure, a trans woman wears a dress or a skirt, maybe did some voice training to talk more feminine, grew out their hair, is interested in girl things. But a trans woman still has a male bone structure, male bone density, male facial features, male puberty (no, you cannot just "choose your puberty", that's a whole other rabbit hole that's just wrong), etc.
A trans woman has a whole host of very male-like things that can't be faked or changed as easily as their social characteristics.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...
It's a symptom of a broader failure to be creative in entertainment nowadays. Studios are too scared to take risks with a new IP that might fail, so they (mistakenly) believe that the best course of action is to remake what already exists because "it should be a safe bet".
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Reminds me of how much violence done to black people is perpetuated by black people themselves.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I'm far more inclined to believe it was a typical teenage row that got out of hand in which the victim incidentally happened to be trans, as opposed to a hate crime.
This is most likely correct. One of the attackers was trans too.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The MTA is chronically mismanaged. Even if they make the decision to roll out the cameras, there's always going to be some little thing preventing the project from actually being completed. At best, it will be completed within several years.
Any analysis of how something feasible is should not assume the best or even reasonable humans will be implementing it. It needs to take into account the actual humans who will do it. And the actual humans here are far, far below anyone's standards.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
AI risk seems like another religion or pseudoscience. I remember similar hype from the early 2000s about nanotechnology destroying the world
To the best of my understanding, Yudkowsky's current risk model involves AI using nanotechnology to destroy the world.
Induced demand is an argument against expansions because reducing congestion is a common argument in favor.
So... ignoring externalities, it's okay to widen roads as long as it's for the right reason? (e.g. not to reduce congestion, but to be able to let more people go where they want to go)
And again, I see proposals all the time for demolishing roads, or road diets, based off of induced demand too. It's not just an argument against expansion, it's an argument in favor of de-expansion. (But of course they also bring up externalities to argue for de-expansion too, not just induced demand.)
I'm not sure if you just haven't ever looked up the actual capacity of different methods or what, but a slower method being less congested doesn't make sense. Their made advantage is that they take up vastly less space per person, space being extremely valuable and limited in more populated areas.
Interesting infographic, but what's the actual usage of those modes? If you're going to make the argument that they take up less space per person, you need to take into account actual usage, and not just theoretical capacity. (And for a true apples-to-apples comparison, you also need to make sure you're comparing trips with origins and destinations in the same places.) For example, for buses, the space taken up often ends up being higher than cars if there's low ridership and the buses are bigger than necessary.
And - assuming they do take up less space per person - so what? They just don't get congested from magically induced demand if they take up less space? I still don't understand why demand doesn't just magically get induced to the point that the trains are overcrowded like they are in Mumbai. They may take up less space... but then doesn't that just mean more people will be crammed in? If a highway had only motorcycle traffic and was completely congested, then gets widened and the demand gets magically induced, wouldn't the highway be once again congested with motorcycle traffic, even though motorcycles take up less space than cars?
(Also, transit naturally lends itself to congestion pricing--if major roads had toll roads with congestion pricing, that would substantially reduce congestion!).
So you would be okay with widening roads if the roads were tolled with congestion pricing?
It's not the same, because you can fit vastly more capacity into less space.
Sure, but the cost of bulldozing is likely still the same, depending on the way the buildings next to the tracks were built. (You can't just demolish only half a building.)
Trains also often go underground, although I don't think most US cities need that.
To build trains underground (such as a subway system), you would need to first knock down the buildings, then build the tunnels, then re-build the buildings. Which ends up being even worse than just knocking down the buildings and not re-building them, instead just building the new tracks on the surface.
What is the point of a 7 billion dollar, multi-year project that will be obsolete in less time than it took to complete?
A lot of the cost (including time) is from general cost disease, which sadly plagues American public transit too (e.g. Paris's transit budget is lower than NYC's but they get more stuff done). But again, it's only obsolete if you only care about reducing congestion and not about providing more people the ability to travel through the highway.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Who is saying this?
Induced demand is often the justification for opposing road widening projects, or even supporting demolishing roads (a "road diet"). I'm not sure what else the conclusion would be, if you not only legitimately believed the version where roads always fill up immediately once you build them, but also that demand would just magically decrease if you took away roads.
I know that it's also used in the reverse direction to justify building buses, bike lanes, etc. Apparently for those modes, the demand that's been "induced" doesn't end up stressing the network to the point of congestion like it would for cars and roads (not sure why; maybe it's just because they're always fundamentally slower than driving?). Regardless, I still think it's justified to describe induced demand as an anti-YIMBY/pro-NIMBY/anti-building/pro-demolishing sentiment, as most of the time, it's invoked as an argument against car infrastructure. If I were making an argument for building bike infrastructure, I would rather argue that the demand is already there, just suppressed.
That wouldn't stop the existing residents from using the infrastructure more.
For what reason would existing residents start using the infrastructure more? Sure, you might see an increase from latent demand, but latent demand is the exact thing that's going to be suppressed when congestion is too high. If it was just latent demand, then the highway wouldn't end up being congested again. It would at worst only reach the point just before travel times significantly start slowing down.
And would be a terrible solution for other reasons.
I can think of a few reasons (and this was just me coming up with a third alternative), but let me put it this way: When you have a lot of people in an area, it ends up placing a huge demand on transportation infrastructure. For example, you can look at photo after photo of overcrowded train in Mumbai, India. Is the solution to build more trains? Well, where are you gonna put the trains and tracks? You'll end up having to demolish apartment blocks to do so, but that's introducing the same negative externalities of many road widening projects.
it's almost certainly net negative to double the width of I-35 through downtown Austin
I know Quantumfreakonomics was proposing to double the width, but personally, I believe it would be more reasonable to only add 1 or 2 lanes instead (it looks like there's enough space for it on many parts of the freeway that are at grade with the surface).
You also seem to be missing that a lot of people do expect congestion to be reduced.
In the first few years before population growth catches up, yes. Similar situation with the Katy freeway widening.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
It's not a meme; it's basic economics which is also backed up by fairly overwhelming empirical evidence.
No, it isn't. Here's a good video by an economist covering it.
I guess if the induced demand argument was rephrased to "in places that already see infrastructure being used, it is likely that people will, eventually, fill the new capacity once new capacity is built" it would be less objectionable. But then it doesn't mean that the solution is automatically "just don't build anything, ever". It may as very well just be to limit the flow of immigration to this area.
You can also make the more subtle argument that, in specific cases, the costs of widening a road are not worth the benefits compared with the alternatives, but I don't buy that as a fully-general argument for all roads everywhere.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
A lot of these assertions come from Strong Towns, an organization ran by Charles Marohn that frequently makes up just-so stories about how suburbs will eventually crumble, based on fradulent "analysis", if you can even call it a coherent analysis.
One example is the claim that replacing parking spots at a restaurant with restaurant patios increases revenue, but this compares revenue from the parking fees of the parking spots to the revenue of the new restaurant tables, which is a blatant apples-to-oranges comparison that goes away if you actually compare the revenue of the restaurant as a whole before and after.
This claim is oft repeated by other urbanists like Not Just Bikes. I've yet to see NJB or even ST retract these faulty claims.
It's not just that it's a place about a deep blue city on a deep blue site, it's that the site routinely censors opinions contrary to the mainstream. I am genuinely surprised that Reddit is allowing opinions in favor of Penny and hasn't banned them under the guise of, say, encouraging violence. If you had asked me to predict /r/NYC's reaction beforehand, I would have 100% failed.
Meanwhile, the left-leaning person who would normally be the dissident in this case, Freddie deBoer, has come out strongly against Penny, saying:
The first thing I want to say about Jordan Neely is that his killing was a terrible crime and I hope his assailant is arrested and indicted. I don’t know what the right charges are, I don’t know what the right punishment is, but you can’t just choke someone to death like that.
It's almost like opposite day.
Whatever the cause, it almost gives me hope that at least the very people living in dense urban areas (whoever's left and hasn't moved out, anyway) are willing to address the problem of not just crime, but also harassment, filth, and general unpleasantness that plagues public transit, where urbanists don't want to or don't even acknowledge the problem.
Almost. The pessimistic side of me says that it's too little, too late, and support on Reddit won't change the outcome of Penny's trial, nor the broader institutional failures that even led to this situation happening in the first place.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Yet somehow, it doesn't seem to have affected his reach much. He's one of the biggest urbanist voices online, if not the biggest, with almost a million subscribers on YouTube. Maybe he got his reach in part precisely because he is so opinionated, and not necessarily correct on many things. Controversy and emotions draw clicks and views.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I think he just doesn't know how bad it is in a big city today. From my understanding, he's lived in many places around the world including Houston and Los Angeles, but permanently moved to Amsterdam several years ago due to how horrific and car-dependent North America was. (Well, not only that, but because everywhere else was bad too, and the Netherlands was the best - or rather, the least worst, since he still says it's not perfect but better than everything else.) And he's only visited places to either film videos or visit his family back in Ontario, Canada.
Maybe a decade or so ago, the crime was somewhat bad, but he got out of North America then and in the intervening years the crime has only gotten worse. So yeah, he's probably never seen muzzle flashes in the park across the street from his front window. In fact, I think there's a pretty big disconnect between him and the average person in America. From his employment history, he seems to have only ever had jobs being some sort of product management or consultant for tech companies, and never had to, say, work a trade where he needed his own private vehicle. He could easily do his job from home, so even if he moved back to a hotspot of crime in North America, he wouldn't have had to go outside to commute to work and thus potentially risk being shot.
I applaud them all the same and wish the best with their efforts to restore law and order to cities. Unfortunately, urbanism - while ostensibly being politically neutral - does have a left-wing bent to it. This is seen most clearly when people who are against public transit because it will bring crime are dismissed as saying a "racist dogwhistle" only said by thinly-veiled racists who just really want to say the n-word.
The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.
I've noticed this attitude too. One of the usual responses always seems to be to point out that, statistically, cars kill more people, so like you should just take transit anyway. This ignores aspects like the feeling of control you have in a car and that humans aren't perfectly rational who abide by statistics all the time (otherwise we would all have been signed up for cryonics by now), but also, pointing out something is worse doesn't make that thing better (whataboutism).
And it's just frustrating to me, because one of the reasons why transit is so much better in, say, Japan, is that anti-social behavior isn't tolerated on it. The worst they have is women being groped when people are packed tightly together, and that only happens because other people can't see who's doing the groping. Meanwhile in North America you have, well, murders taking place on it (despite all the "eyes on the street"). I've never really seen urbanists acknowledge this point.
Edit: It looks like Not Just Bikes acknowledges crime enough to the point where he acknowledges that he deliberately doesn't acknowledge it. Oh well.
The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling.
This seems to be a common theme. All the police bodycam footage I watch nowadays has descriptions like "...the suspect had 5 warrants out for him after being released on $500 bond". All that has to be done here is to simply keep the guy in jail until he's convicted (or exonerated; this country abides by innocent until proven guilty), but there's been a wave of soft-on-crime policies that make people think it's too harsh to keep the guy incarcerated. Of course, prisons being near max capacity hasn't helped matters either.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Wow! Didn't expect to get not only one, but two AAQCs this month. I'm up to three now!
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Do those suburbs still have e.g. laws banning building anything other than single family homes?
No. I believe zoning laws are likely not necessary because the free market can easily decide between good and bad.
Are you worried that if we make even moderate reforms, suddenly all cars will be banned?
No. But the biggest problem with the urbanist movement is this sort of mixed and unclear messaging going on that makes people want to run away from them as fast as possible. If I was an urbanist, I'd focus more on championing alternatives (like Road Guy Rob) instead of enumerating the nth problem with cars. I'd explicitly tell people, hey, you can get to keep your cars if you want, but we just need to make walking and biking safer. (Or find some other way to get my message across because even what I just said has been used as the motte for a bailey that people are starting to catch on to.)
To compare and contrast with a different movement (which, admittedly, affects people less directly than urbanism, but still has a substantial amount of discourse online about), it'd be like if I was a right-to-repair advocate but spent a not insignificant amount of my time complaining about how proprietary software/hardware is ruining the world and everything should be open-sourced. I may believe that open-sourcing everything would legitimately make the world better after accounting for all the negative effects and second-order effects - I may even be completely fine with not getting this implemented and only having schematics, parts, and diagnostics made available (the moderate/mainline position) - but I should recognize that to most people, open-sourcing everything and gutting intellectual property rights is a radical position to take, and if they think I hold it they'll be turned off; therefore my time would be better spent on pushing the more reasonable points (e.g. it is absurd that after repairing a tractor, you need the blessing of a John Deere repairman to come down and "calibrate" it when it would literally work fine without it). And in fact right-to-repair has been weakmanned over this open-source (and intellectual property) point by anti-repair lobbyists.
Interesting, and not something I've considered before. Is there an article or blog post that I can link to the next time someone brings up the progressive misinterpretation of the paradox of tolerance?
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