SnapDragon

SnapDragon 2d ago

Wow. This has shades of Trump's speech where he explicitly said he "condemned totally" the neo-Nazis ... only to have journalists spread the meme that he called them "very fine people". Normally he's very sloppy in his speech, but even in cases where he's uncharacteristically precise, he'll get widely misquoted anyway. So where's the incentive for him to clean up his language?

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SnapDragon 4d ago

Yeah, my circle of friends is certainly similar. But consider that we probably don't generally hang out with the median voter. :)

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SnapDragon 4d ago

No party's "flank" is ever "secure". If you move leftward, you're inevitably going to lose some people to the other side. That's just the nature of aggregating millions of different opinions. Now, I agree that the Democrats seem to believe what you just said, and that's why we ended up with Trump twice.

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SnapDragon 4d ago

Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.

Disagree. All either party, donkey or elephant, actually needs to do to win elections is to be normal enough to win the center. The far left and far right are both small minorities, and they'll probably hold their noses and vote for their party anyway to prevent the "nazis"/"commies" from winning. (See: Christians voting for Trump.)

Unfortunately, you appear to be right when it comes to winning nominations. It's a really broken system - it's gotten so bad that the incredibly strong incentive of winning elections isn't enough to keep the parties sane.

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SnapDragon 10d ago

Where does that happen? Let's look at Wikipedia specifically. The articles for Caitlyn Jenner and Elliot Page have their former names right there in the first sentence.

So, I hate to do this because (unlike @rae) I just think you're just being disingenuous, but this should be a place where people admit fault. This is a simple, verifiable fact, and you're right and I was wrong. I overreached when talking about "deadnaming". The leftist spaces I'm in still treat it as akin to putting people in ovens, but it looks like Wikipedia does actually acknowledge that a person called Ellen Page existed once. It's very very VERY grudging - if you visit the pages for any movies Ellen Page was in, her credit is buried at the literal bottom of each one in a tiny note. (It's almost comedic, frankly.) For Juno, her breakout film, the note literally just reads "credited as Ellen Page", as if the producers typoed her name. But the text does exist. And describing reality, however shoddily and unwillingly, is still better than I gave them credit for. Mea culpa.

If that's your concern, talk about that instead of claiming that all trans people are perverts, rapists, misogynists, etc., and none of them should be treated as their preferred gender.

Where the hell did THAT come from?

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SnapDragon 11d ago

FWIW I don't think anyone should be allowed to transition in the same sense I believe nobody should be allowed to get an amputation of a healthy functional limb. There is a basic principle that physicians shouldn't facilitate self-harm by mentally ill people. Physicians are licensed and regulated by the State and it's reasonable (in my opinion) for the state to impose restrictions on the kinds of medical procedures physicians can do.

Realistically, though, this is always going to be a subjective judgement call. If you go to the extremes on this, then tattoos or even ear piercing should be illegal! Cutting off an arm is clearly a much worse (and more irreversible) level of harm than surgery on your genitals. Yes, the latter squicks me out, but given my libertarian leanings, I want the government to have a really compelling, almost-universally-accepted reason to outright ban something. Which amputation satisfies, but transition surgery does not.

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SnapDragon 11d ago

I think A better analogy would be if people with serious skin conditions were given access to special resources, for example more convenient parking spaces during the summer months so that they wouldn't have to spend as much time walking outdoors. And if a person with perfectly healthy skin was permitted to identify as having a skin condition and take advantage of this special access. And if anyone who complained about the situation (or who didn't go along with pretending that the person had a skin condition) were ostracized.

Indeed. Another real-world analogy would be "service animals" vs "pets". Nobody disputes that there are people who genuinely need the help of animals to get by (even if your definition is narrow enough to only include guide dogs). But a sensible policy of allowing exemptions for them very quickly escalated to an extreme level of abuse.

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SnapDragon 12d ago

Note that I said "rewriting history and Wikipedia". There is absolutely compulsion involved here. In the happy event that the Wikimedia Foundation decided tomorrow that they would like to return to the ideal of a crowd-sourced encyclopedia, and unlocked all the trans-adjacent pages to allow mainstream views, they would be attacked and sued. And anyone else who publishes information that includes "deadnames" is declared as anti-trans and will, in some countries, be in serious trouble. (Not the US - yet - but not for lack of trying! I'm grateful that the US has the strongest free-speech protections in the world.)

This is 100% Orwellian. "We have always been at war with Eastasia." "Elliot Page has always been a man."

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SnapDragon 12d ago

What we're all is trying to drill into you is that the absurd things we describe are not strawmen. They are official policy and actual law in many places.

Guess I’m as bad as a TERF then. If you make no attempt to present as a woman before going to the woman’s bathroom or locker room, obviously you might make people uncomfortable and they wouldn’t be out of bounds in asking you to leave.

Yes! This makes you as bad as a TERF! Your common sense here is - and I want to emphasize that this is not hyperbole or exaggeration - against the law in California. You cannot ask a man not to use the women's shower, as this constitutes discrimination against their self-declared gender. The relevant law is the Unruh Civil Rights Act, which includes "gender identity and gender expression" as protected categories.

Here is one attempt to fix this with legislation. The site Trans Legislation Tracker declares that this is an anti-trans bill. Their own hostile summary includes this: "The Legislature finds and declares [...] Gender identity is fluid, and there is no ability for a commercial enterprise to determine if an individual's claim of a gender identity is sincere or is a pretext to obtain access to the opposite sex's intimate spaces." Which is absolutely correct! Just the acknowledgement that bad actors exist is treated as anti-trans!

You need to get your head out of the sand. Trans-aligned politics is absolutely bonkers. The vast majority of us allegedly "anti-trans" folks aren't being bigots; we're just trying to restore a measure of normalcy.

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SnapDragon 12d ago

If you can tell that someone's biological sex is partially or entirely mismatched to their gender, you should keep that to yourself unless they bring it up first, just as you would if they had an embarrassing skin condition or a missing limb.

Again, that's perfectly reasonable up to the point where they make false claims to access resources they shouldn't have access to. The analogy fails because people with embarassing skin conditions or missing limbs don't generally claim to have flawless complexions or complete bodies.

Also, the euphemistic "should" in "should keep that to yourself" is playing the part of a motte. I have no problem with the idea that it's just as impolite to point out that a transwoman looks ridiculous as it is to call attention to somebody's missing arm (although I would hope the transwoman had someone in their life who was honest with them). The actual bailey is "you MUST keep that to yourself, or you are a declared Enemy and we will publicly advocate for doxxing you, getting you fired, and (in the UK, at least) jailing you".

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SnapDragon 12d ago

This stance does not, incidentally, actually determine whether people should be banned from transition. Not least, transition is sufficiently difficult to define as to make that hard.

I don't disagree with anything you said, but OP was addressing imaginary people who say "no one should be allowed to transition". It doesn't sound like you fit that mould. Of course, the pro-trans media will throw people who don't want kids to transition, or who don't want to be forced to pay for others transitioning, into that category. But that's politics for you; and you shouldn't do their work for them by self-identifying as such.

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SnapDragon 12d ago

I highly doubt you're arguing in good faith here.

Obviously if you believe all trans people are delusional and object to transition and treating people as their stated gender regardless of the effect on their mental health, this does not apply to you. But in that case the study isn't an argument you can use.

Not sure who you're talking to, but that isn't the modal "anti-trans" view, and I doubt anyone has that strawman view on this forum. Sure, many trans people are delusional (the ones who merely declare they want to be treated as the other sex aren't, but the modern line that they are and always have been another sex is just obviously false). But adults are free to pursue happiness in their own way, including transitioning, and it's no big deal for me to be polite and play along with their preferences most of the time.

I suspect you know that most people's main objection is to forcing the rest of society to play along. That includes:

rewriting history and Wikipedia to avoid "deadnames" in a very Stalinesque/Orwellian way
policing of pronoun usage, with penalties ranging from loss of employment to jail
being forced to loudly affirm that trans people and ideologies are the bestest ever, with penalties ranging from loss of employment to jail
destroying the categories of "male" and "female" in all discourse
having no willingness to rein in (or even acknowledge) bad actors who are feigning transness as a way to invade women's spaces and sports

yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now

This is a hilariously absurd take. You're just shit-stirring.

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SnapDragon 14d ago

Thanks for the article. There does seem to be good evidence that Ukraine did it. But this topic was discussing US-Europe relations, and again, there's nothing in the article that suggests that the US was involved. (Your link mentions the Seymour Hersh article that @peanutgallery linked, but only as a half-baked conspiracy theory.)

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SnapDragon 15d ago

Did some amazing new investigation happen that I missed? We don't definitively know who bombed Nord Stream. Even on Wikipedia there's not a hint of evidence that the US was involved (and Wikipedia will never miss the chance to skew an article against America). Don't try to sneak propaganda through by presenting it as common knowledge.

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SnapDragon 16d ago

Good to hear! So people and tools are getting better at building the scaffolding that lets LLMs maintain a coherent plot, I assume? I'm an uncultured loser who reads plenty of random LitRPGs, so I'm probably in the target audience. Contra @Amadan, I'd say it's still very much an open question just how large of a capability gap there is between writing middle-of-the-road LitRPG slop and reaching the pinnacle of "pop-culture trash" like DCC. Maybe it's just a few model releases away, maybe it'll take a decade. We'll see!

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SnapDragon 17d ago

Ulysses is almost the worst possible comparison to use here, as I suspect the mental process that produced it is not dissimilar to an LLM with its temperature set too high. Sure, some people claim it's a masterwork of literature, but whether this reflects some true ineffable artistic vision or not, I doubt I could tell the difference between one of its pages and some random junk spit out by an LLM that's past its context window.

More relevant to me is that LLMs are not going to produce the next Dungeon Crawler Carl anytime soon. And that's a shame!

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

SnapDragon 20d ago

I'm a Dennett fan, but I can agree it's a hard problem; the hard problem, even. But even so, there are answers which are clearly incorrect. I'd argue all forms of dualism fall into that category, but the story puts forward a particularly nonsensical variant in which there is a soul... but it doesn't do anything. It thinks it does -- the story talks a lot about putting on a performance of what the characters would have done if they couldn't perceive the future -- but it in fact does not, because every last atom in their bodies behaves identically to how it otherwise would. The soul has no causal or explanatory role on any observation except the subjective experience of perceiving the future. Why would it work like this? Obviously such a thing would never evolve -- it can't provide any fitness benefit since it doesn't do anything. Why would god or whoever make people this way? It's not like the soul is responsible for the body's actions: those were set in stone when the universe was created, and, anyway, that would require the soul to do something, which it never does.

Dualism is very sneaky. Like you said, it makes very little logical sense; it almost certainly doesn't describe anything real. But it's so hard to get over our instinctive belief in it. It can show up in many ways, some of them quite subtle.

My personal bugbear is the Doomsday Argument, which many rationalists believe, including Scott. But for a statistical argument like this one to work, there has to be some actual selection process, not metaphorical, not a clever turn of phrase, but a really truly actually real random lottery. And such a process requires the absurd form of dualism that you've mentioned. Your soul has to be presented with the deterministic universe as a whole, with all the humans that will ever live already set in stone, and will then "find itself" (the obscuring language Wikipedia uses) in one of the humans. And which one you inhabit can't have a physical effect on anything, because otherwise how could future humans have been available as a choice?

In an experiment where you create a simulated universe in your basement, flip a coin to determine whether it will simulate 2 entities or 20, and then ask entity #2 what it thinks the coin flip was, of course it should say 50/50. Repeating the experiment will show it's miscalibrated if it says anything else. Now, if duality holds, then perhaps some soul came along and is "surprised" to be inhabiting entity #2 in a universe that could have up to 20, and maybe that soul is subjectively correct to believe in the Doomsday Argument. But like the main character of Story of Your Life, that realization can't be shared with anyone else. When you ask the entity what it thinks, it can't give a different response based on whether this time it's souled or a p-zombie. So it has to give the averaged answer: 50/50.

Despite the resultant absurdity, the idea of "finding yourself" as a particular human - that your awareness is separable from the body you inhabit - still survives in a Wikipedia article. And in Scott's writings. It's embarrassing that rationalism isn't enough to conquer this trope.

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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 8, 2026

SnapDragon 20d ago

Let's hope that wishing the torment nexus on a sentient being isn't disincentivized by being put in the torment nexus. If so, well, at least you'll have aeons to think about what you did.

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SnapDragon 1mo ago

I agree there can be some limits to acceptable expression, but they must be specific and have very good reason. I can't find a good reason against anything fictional, even fictional pedophilia.

In fact, don't people who are anti-pornography say that it harms society because men use it as a low-effort substitute for going out and finding a real woman? In the case of pedo porn, this is exactly what we want to happen.

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SnapDragon 1mo ago

Now that I've slept on it, can I just extend a bit of an olive branch here? I do appreciate your willingness to keep calmly engaging in a fairly unfriendly thread. While I think you're uncharitably wrong about me, you're not completely wrong. I probably am unduly influenced by the "ick" factor, and have blown some negative experiences out of proportion. Anyway, others in the thread have done an excellent job of arguing my side; I don't have anything more to add.

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SnapDragon 1mo ago

Sigh. @Amadan summed things up perfectly, but for the record:

Having to walk on eggshells all the time (and seeing bad things happen to people who didn't, like the event organizers, among others) is the dreadful experience I was referring to. If you think that isn't dreadful, well, that's just, like, your opinion, man. And if you think I'm not actually at risk, then you're flat-out wrong.
I said I have an issue with trans activists. There are indeed some trans people who just go about quietly living their life, don't insert their transness into every chat, don't dress/act in intentionally provocative ways, and don't threaten heretics. They're not the ones making me miserable. So now please stop putting words in my mouth.

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SnapDragon 1mo ago

Yes, I do find it extremely uncomfortable dealing with people who make everything about their sexuality (especially very weird sexuality). This used to be considered normal. And now I am not allowed to voice this preference, lest people like you call me a bigot. (You very clearly did mean it as an insult.) But I don't think you read "the rest of my post", because I clearly mentioned that I will lose access to my hobby if I ever inadvertently expose my true feelings. That's a rather different kind of dreadful than "gosh I sure hate that these people exist".

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SnapDragon 1mo ago

I'm in the same position. I would love to just wait for the trans fad to blow over (as long as we minimize the long-term harm to kids - THAT'S something I truly can't ignore). Unfortunately I'm a shut-in whose only socialization comes from various online videogame and puzzle and rationalist circles... and they are absolutely rampant with trans activists (and far-left activists in general). My experience with them has been dreadful.

There's a giant yearly puzzle event that's run at MIT, and I used to be on a particular team. I didn't have a lot in common with them, except that we all liked math. Actually, most of them came from a math club whose emeriti included, um, Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison (cough). But this was enough to unite us. ...Until around 7-8 years ago when the social contagion factor really kicked in, and now 40% of them are trans and another 30% various other flavours of sexual activist. And one year we were doing the puzzle event, and the people running it made the mistake of making one of the events a funny riff on a gender-reveal party. Long story short, it ended in the organizers - who were volunteers who had spent a year of their life working hard to bring us this free event - visiting and tearfully (yes, literally) apologizing to us for their thoughtcrime. It felt almost like a struggle session. I was absolutely disgusted with our team, and I never felt comfortable around them since.

Even though I've since switched teams, the problem is endemic almost everywhere I go. Want to watch people solve sudokus on Twitch? You're 50% likely to hit a stream plastered with LGBT and trans and various other sexual tags (and they're all talking to each other, so you'd better not inform the guy with a male voice and a big-breasted avatar that he looks ridiculous). There are puzzle Discords that I'm on that I rely on to find good puzzles, but Discord servers are closed, controlled, ephemeral communities - the opposite of the old ideal of the Internet - and I will lose this access if I ever let a hint out of my actual centrist politics. (I'm actually a little surprised it hasn't happened already; at some point maybe people will connect my Motte posts with me, it's not like my identity is disguised.)

People often think of "The Emperor's New Clothes" as an inspirational fable, where the innocent child saves everyone from their plight. But in real life, it would not end well for the child. I try to be a genuine rationalist. I want to be able to say things that are true. And I'm simply not able to in any of my social interactions. It eats away at my soul.

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