That might work if the organization was sovereign. It almost certainly isn't.
The government has a huge say in how things like sexual harassment is dealt with because it determines if the organization has taken all reasonable steps to avoid a hostile environment. If Obama says that sexual harassment is a violation of rights of female students and creates a hostile environment you have a strong incentive to take all claims seriously.
It will not look good come the lawsuit if you've been firing the very sorts of people who will be zealous about preventing said harassment and assault, even at the cost of a few good people.
Tanista
1d ago
The steelman of their theory of the case is that people like AOC combine both economic leftism with the identity politics.
So it's more the idea that the other wing of the party uses idpol cynically to appear more left-wing because it's not economically populist enough("will breaking up the big banks end racism?") to win. AOC meanwhile will deliver on the bread and butter issues people care about while soothing the idpol wing of the Democrats.
This theory might have made sense for Hillary. But Biden did subscribe to everything bagel liberalism and failed in spite (or because) of his economic populism.
Ultimately I think it's an attempt by Democrats to have their cake and eat it too. They have no real way to untangle themselves from their identity politics. It's the belief system of too many educated, politically engaged liberals. Bernie bent to it because you can't run a campaign if the Voxs of the world are attacking you for being anti-immigrant because you think they lower blue-collar wages and all of the people who volunteer, who donate and call in all have the same politics.
So the theory is to simply bypass the problem: if Democrats provide healthcare, housing and jobs they won't have to choose and can just drag the working class along with them. The culture war is a "distraction", in the sense that their views should not be compromised on but that the opposing views are obviously not as important to their opponents as material conditions.
Obvious problems are that this is assuming that their cultural beliefs don't hurt their ability to deliver (@johnfabian has pointed out the issues in left-wing urbanism which simply needs to resolve its issue with things like endless vetos and crime to go anywhere). And that their very refusal to bend on these issues gives the lie to the idea that it's all just ephemera. If they won't bend despite the incentives to do so, why should their opponents?
It's some cargo cult attempt to recreate an FDR coalition in an age of identity politics with pseudo-Marxist handwaves that no one actually consistently holds to.
I doubt Genghis Khan's inner circle had highly rigorous intellectual standards, and that didn't stop him. So long as you have power…
The power of a military leader and a priesthood both exist but they aren't the same.
The power of the intellectual elite comes from the perception that they fulfill some essential, moral role in society. They're a priesthood that cannot even claim to have been invested with their power by a god.
This might be why they've collapsed so readily into endless moralism.
But that is also a weakness. It depends on the deference of the people.
The style of discouse you describe, in which a party is described as irredeemably evil due to an excessively right-wing position, is usually directed at third parties.
Funny, I was just listening The Young Turks, as left-wing as it gets, fire a former contributor for doing this to their CEO.. Cenk Uygur is in no way an outsider.
Yes, a lot of the uncharitable and unprofessional things she said were about Cenk and told to allied leftists. But it doesn't change that she basically lost an ally by talking crazy about them with other leftists because he only wanted trans athletes to compete up to the high school level or thought Democrats should go on Charlie Kirk.
It only strengthens in-group bonds if a) your asks are reasonable enough that most in-group members see no need to defect and b) you're perceived as a winner.
In reality, TYT is one of the older and larger progressive media channels. Losing them (this isn't the first time an employee has declared them rightists and detached) doesn't strengthen the tribe at all. I think some people's faces are just stuck like this now. They're used to talking like this about their enemies and they simply can't help but slip into it when they see traitors pulling away as their influence recedes after a loss.
With maybe bad incentives due to social media. A smaller figure thinks they gain from punching up at an insufficiently doctrinaire one, and never consider the downsides.
Even if literally all you watched was blue-coded, scripted media where they used the same camera tricks used to make people like RDJ and Tom Cruise look taller, you can't avoid noticing the difference in stature/physical expectations for people who are cast to look like the top physical specimens for their sex.
Society isn't actually a monolithic entity (I'm not claiming that you're saying this, you appear to appreciate nuance). It's made of individuals, and some of them, like medical professionals or regulators, have disproportionate influence.
As a matter of such longstanding custom or clear law that it can easily be said to be "society's" position.
If we lived in a libertarian world where people were expected to take on all of the costs of a procedure and balance the risks themselves I think your personal take would be coherent for society to adopt.
In practice, neither of those things may be the case. Society collectively pays for a bunch of services and we insist on rigorous epistemic and ethical standards even when people might willingly take the risk. Even the people arguing for the specific case we're discussing pay deference to that expectation.
I think this status quo has a lot to recommend it but, even if I could be convinced it should change, I'd like to know why this topic (given how I feel about the object-level issue) should motivate that change.
tl;dr: They can have it when I have the same easy access to steroids.
Young teens make many life changing decisions with uncertain payoffs. Opting for a less conventional field of scholarship might be one.
The consequences of majoring in programming right now with AI is unclear. The consequences of lopping of your limb are.
We seem to think that matters, which is why one involves far more ethical requirements.
The issue is that the people you're trying to look out for vehemently disagree on what counts as human flourishing. They certainly don't appreciate your attempts to dictate what they should choose, even if you good intentions.
I'm not sure they actually do though?
The argument for gender affirming care has always been that it will reduce things like suicide rates and suicide ideation and the comorbidities associated with trans identification and thus it functions as medicine, as it's commonly understood. The controversy is about whether gender affirming care achieves some broad definition of human flourishing but the general goal it should be achieving if it is effective medicine (and a brief, heroin-like moment of bliss doesn't count) doesn't seem to be controversial.
The whole emotional blackmail line of "dead son or live daughter" has this assumption built in.
If it turns out that the evidence isn't good for this then their case falls apart by its own standards.
Nothing about this entrenched ignorance seems accidental. Some seed was planted that caused him to recoil from any confounding evidence.
Yeah, I suppose it's more noble to blame your neurodivergence and a hermetically sealed bubble but, speaking from personal experience, it really is just this. People treat disconfirming evidence on certain subjects like touching the proverbial poo. There's really no profit in doing so and plenty of social risk.
There was nothing magically convincing about new atheists or biblical scholars when I was 18 rather than 15. In one case, I simply counted myself amongst the religious and didn't approach the fence or ask myself obvious questions (like why the sports were sex-segregated in the first place) and, in the other, I was more independent and chose to do so.
Now, I may be wrong now but I can't blame my past position on ignorance just happening to me. I knew what I was doing when I simply refused to read certain things.
I don't think it is a huge problem for the idea that society can put us in a place to believe false things since people will do this semi-reliably with a little prompting. Though I suppose it may be embarrassing for a rationalist.
but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs
It's honestly hard to tell because the goalposts move at lightning speed whenever a new form of buffoonishness is unleashed.
Tanista
3d ago
Common sense is a poor guide because both sides think they have the common sense. Personally I will accept either outcome as to its usefulness, but I use the cheat of "we actively have zero idea because of poor research quality." However when most people talk about this they let question two bleed in, and that includes "what just makes the most sense?" The idea of gender identity problems is very poorly understood, including its natural history and pathophysiology (in large part because of willful blindness by advocates). It should be weird enough and unknown enough that "what makes sense" rarely applies.
I mean, if we have zero idea then it's still a scandal anyway.
Tanista
3d ago
I did stress that I'm playing Devil's Advocate Doctor.
I know. You just run into places in these discussions where you're clearly in need of a common touchstone, even if we can't get back.
Even mild exposure to different cultures and their associated values will tell you that beyond a small core (often contentious itself) there's no "common understanding of virtue".
True. But, practically, internal dissension seems more relevant than the inability to get the entire human race to agree. Nobody in America is overly bothered by the fact that Saudis have a different moral code.
Although the balance has shifted with how connected we are.
Anyone who has convinced themselves that there's objective grounding to their morality, well, I don't want to have what they're smoking.
This is the majority of philosophers btw. I personally don't take a strong stance on metaethics (another way to put it is that I'm too lazy to read enough to formulate one and always puts it off) but that always gives me pause here. What many people find very unintuitive is the consensus position.
Quite a few gynecologists and many endocrinologists would be out of a job if the outcome of human hormones acting as they would always had the desired outcome.
It doesn't disprove the "narrow is the path and few find it" argument if even otherwise healthy people have issues that require correction imo. Seems like it does the opposite.
On the other hand, constraining thinking to only that which is known to be possible is... a choice.
You might have gotten away with it a thousand years back, when the lives you and your grandpa lived were nigh interchangeable. That's not the case today, we're living in a scifi novel with reality's rather lax attitude towards plausibility.
- Our nature hasn't changed as much as some people imply with statements like this. And that's had benefits and downsides.
- Consider how I view the object level issue: I think the things said about the state of the science are bad (outrageous really), the transformation experimental and not particularly good and the consequences of humoring some of the extreme activists' claims awful. I do not treat all forms of "progress" this way and I don't think it's a contradiction.
And it might not. The rate of desistance with puberty is not 100%. A non-zero number of people will find themselves still wanting to transition, and face even greater hardship for even less change.
The standard for any treatment (or social convention for that matter) has never been that it's 100% successful.
I actually think that's part of the problem: society is constantly being overturned in the name of smaller and smaller minorities until we hit one where the tradeoffs for doing so are actually serious and visible.
The situation before the general pullback, where public cachet was redistributed to a small number of people who would likely be even smaller given healthy puberty, combined with credulous diagnosing and taboos against "conversion therapy" seems totally backwards.
I do not hold happiness as the only terminal value, nor do most people. If they disagree, then they're welcome to start a fent habit.
I meant it in the broader sense. I suppose what the Greeks would call eudaimonia and now philosophers translate as "human flourishing", to avoid exactly these problems.
Death, be it ours, or that of the universe, doesn't mean temporary endeavors are worthless. At least not to me.
And I suppose that's a coherent personal position. However, society clearly has certain standards for medical treatment.
Yes, it would be better if everyone was given accurate information on blockers. But that's not the only medical ethic. It seems like we have some pretty high standards for things like amputations which is precisely why exuberant claims were made about the necessity of transition to save a child's life. Even my opponents have implicitly yielded the point: the goal is not short-term gender euphoria in exchange for things we know tend to give people meaning like the ability to experience sexual pleasure and have children or not suffer side-effects from cross-sex hormones.
It's to literally save lives and improve human flourishing. It is not like your own personal decision to spend $3 on a lottery ticket (which costs you almost nothing and doesn't require any medical professional to be complicit).
Sometimes, you're shit out of luck. Sometimes you can make something just as good. Sometimes you pick the lesser evil out of available options while working on making better ones.
Maybe that's what I see myself as doing, but for society.
The arguments against a lot of TRA claims and medical practices to help them are usually on pragmatic grounds.
But they do exist. Whether or not we accept their claimed identity as "valid" categorically has no bearing on whether or not a group called "trans adults" exists.
It has some bearing on whether they meaningfully exist. It's a normative claim: trans adults do not exist in the same way that what we've termed "cis" adults exist, so their judgments about puberty should not be treated the same.
If a news article writes a story about groups in America and it says "Black adults, Asian adults, gay adults, trans adults" you're able to understand this as a group that exists.
If a news article talked about the "AAPI" ethnicity, do you also feel like there's no context in which one can question whether that ethnicity is meaningful?
I certainly don't think of "AAPI" the same way I think of African-Americans.
Why should we so strongly privilege puberty because it's "natural"? Many things are natural, such as dying of a heart attack at 50 or getting prostate cancer by 80.
It's because it's both natural and we have a long track record of that path working.
It's a very difficult problem to come up with an alternative pathway that leads to physically and mentally healthy humans at our current level of tech. Unconstrained thinking is probably not a good idea when it comes to complex biological and psychological changes.
It becomes even more absurd to even attempt this in the name of people with disordered relations to their own body, when puberty itself may help resolve that disordered relationship.
Then I see no reason to declare that they're making a mistake. By the values they hold, it's the right decision.
Maybe people's intuitions that living their values will make them happy are just wrong. Maybe this is especially true for a group that is prone to a bunch of other mental disorders.
She said the assessments would address what she called "diagnostic overshadowing" - when patients' other healthcare issues were overlooked in cases of patients questioning their gender.
...
"What's unfortunately happened for these young people is that because of the toxicity of the debate, they've often been bypassed by local services who've been really nervous about seeing them," Dr Cass said.
"So rather than doing the things that they would do for other young people with depression, or anxiety, or perhaps undiagnosed autistic spectrum disorder, they've tended to pass them straight on to the Gid service."
We can't exactly take it for granted that mentally ill people are holding values that will actually make them happy , or that they have a reasonable understanding of the risk they're taking on (especially when faced with dubious information from medical practitioners)or have reasonable expectations for these treatments.
Or hell, that their stated euphoria and relief will be lasting.
We're forced to deal with a messy world that doesn't always readily cough up pathways to our desired when we ask. I'm all for overcoming biology, and I think that people who understand what they're getting into are entitled to ask for even imperfect solutions.
Society is entitled to say no. My doctor won't give me SARMs for some reason.
Discussions like this make you feel the void left by any natural law or common understanding of virtue.
Again you can disagree with them from a categorical perspective. But the fact still remains that people are doing it.
You're making a normative claim that understanding the trans position on the "wrong" puberty strengthens the activist case.
You cannot now pull back to the empirical fact that trans people exist when someone challenges that.
I don't think @Southkraut's point has anything to do with "like". I can like drag queens and not grant that drag queens exist in any sort of sense that places them in a similar place as the category of women.
The question is whether it makes any sense for society to place the interests of a few people who want to avoid the otherwise normal healthy developmental pathway with the rest of the human race as if they're equivalent.
If you're not a transhumanist and "trans" is not a mirror of "cis" and is instead just a compassionate term for people who identify with the opposite sex for whatever reason it simply doesn't mean anything to you that puberty is also irreversible.
What of it? Puberty is the normal pathway.
Going after the woke =/= going after them for being anti-Israel .
I see the appeal from a Trump/anti-woke perspective, all the enemies lined up behind an unpopular position they probably can beat universities into punishing relatively easily. I'm wondering where this goes afterwards.
I can't tell if pro-Palestinianism already had its moment of immoderate greatness or if philosemitism is having its own.
From a purely cynical perspective, it seems like it would be easier to tamp down on certain attitudes about Jews if there's a general woke regime that reacts horrifically to any perceived attack against any victim of history, the more the merrier.
Having an administration or people hellbent on dismantling that entire system (and whose main talent is exacerbating negative polarization)make exceptions for one group seems suboptimal in comparison. This is how normal people get ideas.
Danielle Smith is not CPC nor federal, nor is her provincial party named the same way. Canadian politics work a little differently.
I mean, if you're concerned with Canadian unity, it's arguably more alarming that the premier of Alberta is doing this.
PP will understandably be tossed out if he should lose this election and the CPC will likely overcorrect. Any tensions with Smith or the (continued) perception of diverging interests between Alberta and other provinces can't be erased or fixed so easily.
If there was an indie Hollywood studio head that worked for a company that had a track record of producing franchises
lost two of those in a visible, controversial way in quick succession and is in the middle of taking the mother of all swings and then stepped down as "god-king" before seeing it through I would wonder if there was a connection.
And that's basically the sort of company they're aiming to be.
Trouble in conservative media? While the left has been catastrophizing over losing the war for attention, a major conservative outlet seem to be stacking a few Ls.
Daily Wire Co-Founder Jeremy Boreing To Step Into New Role Focusing On Entertainment
Boreing, who founded the company in 2015 alongside Ben Shapiro and Caleb Robinson, said that he is turning his “full attention to creative and entertainment ventures for the company.” Robinson will step in as full-time CEO and assume the day-to-day operations of the company.
“When Ben, Caleb, and I founded The Daily Wire in 2015, we set out to build an institution. I’m enormously proud of our team, of our many battles, and of the successes we’ve achieved together over the last decade. And we’re just getting started,” Boreing said. “To get us to the heights we know we can achieve, we have brought in a world-class executive team that I am confident will thrive in taking us to the next level under Caleb’s ongoing leadership while I turn my full attention to creative
My first thought was "did October 7 kill the Daily Wire?". Candace Owens was one of their big stars but they lost her over antisemitism (she's promptly become even more unhinged). Maybe this took more of a bite out of their base than I assumed at the time. The general split in the Republican party between traditional views on supporting allies and the allegedly anti-war segment that questions spending money on foreign partners ,especially (((those allies))) , could create problems for a company like DW.
And then, not long after that, they lost Brett Cooper as well for still-undisclosed reasons and utterly failed to replace her in a way that seemed to only destroy her former show and made Cooper more popular. Matt Walsh is doing great but can he and Shapiro really cover the company's costs, especially given its ambitions in media?
Which, at least, the Bulwark is suggesting is part of the problem: Boreing decided to adapt the Pendragon Cycle and may have bitten off more than he could chew. It's an action fantasy series is a far cry from a Matt Walsh documentary or sports comedy. The Bulwark is not a neutral source but it is a risk we've previously talked about here when discussing attempts to create an alternative to Hollywood.
Combine that with a bit of a downturn and dubious personnel decisions like treating modern influencers like interchangeable cogs and...someone had to take the fall.
Tanista
8d ago
Next Dem president likely to let 20M in next round, at this rate…
Maybe they think this is a battered wife approach to politics and are just tired of it.
The fallacy in the pro-immigration-for-all argument is thinking that geographic change (transplanting people from poor countries to rich ones) will solve what is fundamentally a social problem (poor countries are poor and remain so because they have poor-quality people).
It's also not self-evidently more just even if it were true.
A lot of the criticisms of hardline immigration positions on the grounds of geographic luck count just as much against most migrants themselves.
Why do central Americans have a disproportionate right to see their living standards improved, even if we agree borders are unjust? There are poorer people who couldn't even conceive of making journey. Clearly, nothing about de facto not enforcing the law eliminates the problem either.
Tanista
9d ago
Hows that working out for you?
Where does the British public stand on transgender rights in 2024/25?
Tanista
10d ago
Only those who (erroneously) claim that they have found a solution and predicate their support for various trans policies on transwomen being women in something other than a spurious sense right?
When we say 'woman', sometimes we're gesturing at features which don't include trans women - ability to bear children, say - and sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.
Is this supposed to be a descriptive claim about how people are using these words?
How do you deal with both naive and committed essentialists?
A person could respond that he doesn't mean the same thing when he calls a man a woman, as in a bitch, compared to if he calls them a mother. In the latter case, he may happily be corrected with a birth certificate and brush it off as irrelevant in the former case. He may also not see any contradiction between gesturing to feminine behaviors that women are assumed to generally possess without ever granting that a person is a woman if they possess those traits but lack certain other, more specific characteristics.
How do you avoid the charge that you're helping such people along to a conclusion they don't actually share?
Which show was this?
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