Jiro
15hr ago
I don't understand how you justify a different name and different clothing being a step towards a medical process (justifying parents being given third party info) on the one hand but being completely innocuous on the other hand when it comes to Goth/alt culture.
"A different name and clothing is a step towards a medical process" is an observation about how humans behave in the real world, not a conclusion which needs to be justified. Humans don't behave that way with respect to Goth culture. If they did, then teachers should have to tell parents about that too, but they don't.
The teachers don't have any special knowledge about what students are going to do in the future.
They don't have 100% certain knowledge. But they do have knowledge about what sort of things are likely and what sort of things aren't, which is enough.
Jiro
1d ago
ou (and most other people) are not complaining that all the English majors and all the physicists can't leave your kids alone, because (presumably) you agree with the majority of them.
The object level question actually matters here. English and physics usually aren't controversial, and to the extent that they are, parents are justified in complaining about them too.
There is a debatable correlation between wearing Goth clothing as an adolescent and going through troubled times, but teachers do not routinely make a habit of notifying parents of such things, and rightly so.
Secret social transitions are a problem because social transitions are a step towards a medical transition, so parents should have some say in that process. Schools don't need to notify parents about Goth clothing because it doesn't lead to anything (except maybe a piercing? I don't know how common that is).
Jiro
1d ago
To the extent that they are not pushier than straights, this is a problem that happens with straights too. To the extent that they are pushier than straights, it's a problem, but it's not a problem with being gay; pushiness is not part of the definition of gay.
Jiro
1d ago
I think there are plenty of trans people who are chill, but on both the left and the right people are motivated to elevate the obnoxious, deranged activist subset of trans people.
Yet I'm sure you can name groups for which this doesn't happen much. This isn't something that automatically happens with every group; some groups have more extremists and less control over extremists, than other groups.
Jiro
1d ago
Gay men generally don't want to do things that would have a different impact on other people based on whether they are gay. The trans do. There's also a lot of worry about trans children being encouraged into irreversible treatments, which isn't a problem for gay children.
Jiro
3d ago
You can see a distribution of some that pass better than others, and notice that it tails off towards the end of the distribution so the amount that completely pass is small.
Jiro
3d ago
The secrets to enjoyment:
That's like saying that you don't care about people in church saying that the Jews eat babies, because as a Jew you don't go to church anyway.
Social media power is a problem because it can affect things that happen off of social media.
Jiro
6d ago
You're moving the goalposts. The question was whether the school was making an active decision, not if the decision was good. I would agree that if the school "helps the kid" get chemo, the school is making an active decision there.
Jiro
8d ago
The idea that Taylor Swift’s endorsement was going to sway the election was always stupid. Anyone who would be swayed to vote for Kamala Harris because Taylor Swift told them to was already going to vote for Harris.
You could apply this reasoning to any individual instance of something meant to persuade. Advertising doesn't do any good, for instance; who's going to buy Coke instead of Pepsi because they heard an ad?
Each instance of persuasion affects some people at the margin, and pushes more people closer to the margin so they can be affected by the next thing that affects people at the margin. The fact that the number is small doesn't mean that it's zero or that a lot of such things can't be significant.
Jiro
9d ago
The key difference between a groomer targeting a child and a doctor performing a surgery is their interests; the latter is doing so based on what they believe to be in the best interests of the child based on medical/scientific literature, the former is doing so for personal reasons.
The groomer most likely believes that having sex with the child is mutually beneficial and while it serves his own interests, also serves the best interests of the child.
And in the case of trans surgeries, I can easily see the doctor as thinking the surgery is good for trans activism, as well as good for the child.
Jiro
9d ago
They said the school was transitioning them. The school is not the active party in this. The kid is. The kid is transitioning. The school is merely keeping that secret. That is a fairly important distinction.
The kid's decision doesn't mean the school isn't active, because the kid is a minor and the school is responsible for him at school.
Jiro
13d ago
It's not like the bet was unclear or something -- the sporting thing to do would be to chuckle and write a cheque.
If it turns out the other guy had lost instead of winning, would he have paid up?
Getting a lawyer and a contract isn't there as a form of rubber-stamping. It's there to make sure that both parties are cooperating. If the guy sent him a piece of paper without a lawyer, he is refusing to cooperate and Nate shouldn't treat it as a valid contract.
When we're talking about mental illnesses that make people unable to discern reality or care for themselves, we're talking about a population that, to put it bluntly, needs to be made to take their medication.
Remember that the people who are going to be forcing others to take their medication are human. They are quite capable of ignoring evidence, having preconceptions, etc. and that doesn't even consider the possibility of malice, either on the part of doctors, relatives, or the government.
Every time I see the homeless beggar on the corner who can't control his movements, I feel that we've done a great deal of wrong to him and to all of us by letting him live on the street like an ancient leper and not putting him in an institution that can guarantee him a warm bed and a set of pills.
This is a seen/unseen problem. Any problems that happen by forcing people to take medication will be out of sight, unlike the homeless beggar, and you won't easily be able to look at them and say "we gotta do something about this".
Jiro
16d ago
It got all the way to public release and nobody fixed it. I don't believe for a moment that this is just someone sneaking it through. Having it get that far requires that the entire chain of people involved be either too woke or too intimidated to object.
Jiro
17d ago
From that article:
"People here think the reorder is legit. 100% sure a few items on there are causing this huge increase by some 3rd party seller or discontinued item," they explained.
Jiro
17d ago
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."
Other companies have managed to produce AI that didn't produce the egregiously absurd results that Google's Gemini did.
Jiro
17d ago
They haven't lost it. They still control the same institutions as before, except for the actual presidency.
Jiro
18d ago
You might think so, but as far as I can tell, Trump did absolutely nothing to protect free speech or slow down cancel culture.
What he did was not deliberately try to make it worse which the Biden administration did. Merely doing nothing is an improvement over censoring Facebook.
Jiro
18d ago
Why not?
The answer, of course, is the deep state.
Also, "the institutions" includes mass media, social media, and large Internet companies like Google, and there's little that Trump could do about them. Yes, Musk got Twitter, but that's a single black swan event, and isn't repeatable.
Jiro
18d ago
It's going to take a huge amount of effort just to move directionally towards more fairness. Actually taking such good control of the institutions that they reach fairness, go beyond it, and tilt towards the other side is pretty much impossible.
Jiro
18d ago
Trump in office will give institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent.
Having a government which supports clamping down on dissent also gives those institutions the excuse they need to clamp down on dissent. And it's a much better excuse.
By your reasoning, voting for Trump is bad for Trump supporters because of the backlash, but also good for Democrats, and you should be recommending to all your Democratic friends that they vote for Trump because voting for Trump helps the Democrats.
Jiro
18d ago
The likely scenario with rigging is that whoever is doing it can rig a certain amount, but not an unlimited amount. The fact that the wrong side wins doesn't disprove rigging, although it does disprove infinite-capacity rigging. This isn't Venezuela.
Jiro
21d ago
The biggest failure mode is that any legible policy like "one student from each school" makes it harder to cook the books to admit affirmative action students.
Jiro
28d ago
If you're worried about wokeness, you should honestly be voting Democrat.
If something straightforwardly helps your opponent and harms you, any claims from him about the opposite are concern trolling or motivated reasoning. The straightforward effect of supporting a side that is more woke is to increase wokeness.
We can't run the world on 100% certainty. By your reasoning, the school shouldn't report the child doing any dangerous things that didn't have a 100% chance of harming the child.
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