WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
11hr ago
There should really a better way to encapsulate the specific idea "people are trying to make there not be any Xs anymore" as distinct from just "people are systematically mistreating Xs"; many groups are persecuted without their enemies' aim being to extinguish the relevant identity altogether. Trivially, that UN definition you quote conceives of itself as applying to gender-based "persecution", and it would be… surprising for any government to set itself the goal of actually erasing women from the Earth (even in the non-murder-based sense of trying to forcibly transition all women into trans men), so they can't intend that "persecute" should be understood as implying an intent to destroy.
I dislike the "trans genocide" terminology, but I'm kind of stuck on a better word that doesn't minimize the concerns. Attempts to extinguish belief systems by any means necessary up to and including forced conversion and outlawing specific rites are a well-attested historical phenomenon which seems like it'd make a better analogy, but I don't believe that idea has a more specific name than the somewhat broader umbrella of "religious persecution".
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
A good half of these do seem to be talking about "socially constructed" constraints, which does lead me back to wondering how much the possibility of transitioning has taken the wind out of the sails of any push to relax or change the gender-role expectations of women
It's a common complaint and one I take seriously, but at the risk of sounding like the "we need more Stalins" guy, that failure mode seems to be the province of moderate trans activists, of normie Blues who sort of support the general idea of transition and mouth the right slogans, but are probably a couple of decades behind on the philosophy. In online spaces that skew younger and leftier, your Tumblrs and Blueskies, people love nothing more than to validate trans women's right to be masculine or trans men's right to be feminine. Real trans activists love themselves a MTF butch lesbian who rounds back to using he/him pronouns with three nested layers of irony, and accordingly, would strongly oppose the idea that a girl not conforming with gender norms must mean that she's secretly a trans boy.
WandererintheWilderness
12hr ago
He did not claim that there was no LGBT community that observed it; he claimed that he had never personally encountered a LGBT community that does. If I want to prove that leopards are not commonly kept as pets in America, that leopard-keeping is a fringe practice, I can say "I've never seen any American with a pet leopard". I'm sure if I Googled it I could find counterexamples, but that would be besides the point, which would be to use "have I organically encountered X in my day-to-day life" as a Bayesian proxy for "how common is X".
WandererintheWilderness
13hr ago
What does it preach? The worship of wealth and **sensory pleasures The flaunting of jewelry and clothes, insufferable bragging, and **the pathetic ridicule of the weak.
"I hate sexual hedonism and violent alphas punching down on the weak. This is why I'm going to start an armed anti-feminist revolution to guarantee every man's right to fuck, and if the hoes don't like it, tough."
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
I don't understand why you're now on round two of using any possible ambiguity in a statement to imagine a needlessly weaksauce implementation. The legislation could look like anything up to and including automatically granting American citizenship to any Israeli who asks for it, or indeed just granting all living Israelis American citizenship upfront. Is this likely to happen? No, but dr_analog was not trying to predict the future: the original post was simply "We should…".
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Personally, I have very little sympathy for the objective of keeping Iran away from nukes. "A Middle-Eastern country run by bloodthirsty, slightly genocidal religious nutjobs has nukes" is something we have survived before
Well, you can survive a decent number of rounds of Russian roulette, too. Which isn't to say I'm an Iran hawk, but "very little sympathy" seems extreme.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
If they would still be subject to U. S. immigration law
By "We should encourage" I assume dr_analog meant passing legislation that would explicitly make immigration from Israel easier, not just sending them postcards with a suggestion.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
nor is the situation in Lebanon a genocide
It isn't actually, but if we took "all of Lebanon must burn" at "face value", it plainly would be. It's concerning, and in the modern world, unusual, for war rhetoric to aspire to the literal obliteration of the enemy nation - I think it's fair to describe such claims as genocidal aspirations even if the actual war strategy is less insane. (And yes, Hezbollah and Hamas plainly harbor genocidal aspirations with regards to Israel.)
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
The part where he insists on wearing a fucking fedora to every interview, however, is pure contrarianism. That's not the sort of thing rational!Draco or rational!Quirrell would do.
I suspect his gambit may be "I know my limitations: I am incapable of seeming cool and normal. Better to deliberately play an Eccentric Character of my own choosing, than try to impersonate a conventionally charismatic, professional normie, and fall into the uncanny valley". The sheer stubbornness in the face of ridicule is still baffling, but at a guess, I think that's the 5D chess he thinks he's doing, anyway.
The UK already had hard-won religious freedom; it just didn't have meaningful representation of a religion whose commandments conflicted with a weapons ban, so the issue hadn't come up. It might very well have come up even with zero immigration, if a lot of white Englishmen had started converting to Sikhism out of some trend, in the same way that so many British hippies got into Buddhism.
And I guess I just don't see that big of a conflict there… I think "virtue" is a weird way to describe the weapons ban. I don't believe Brits think it's deontologically wrong or taboo to carry knives; I think they've adopted weapons bans as a technocratic, utilitarian policy. Whether religious freedom is to be thought of as a deontological line-in-the-sand or consequentialist utilmaxxing is perhaps more debatable, but in either case, this makes it sensible to trade one against the other depending on circumstances. Something like: "I believe that in a vacuum, it is good to minimize the amount of citizens permitted to carry knives, as doing so will reduce violent crime and I do not believe that people have an innate right to bear arms. However, I also believe that the state should rarely if ever ban religious practices. Therefore, the best way to maximize utility while respecting the constraints of respecting religious freedom is a weapons for ban for everyone except people whose religion mandates that they carry a ritual knife on their person at all times" is in no way incoherent or self-contradictory.
(Again, it seems isomorphic to other kinds of religious exemptions, i.e. "I do not believe that parents should have the right to pull their kids out of school whenever they like; but I believe it's important for the state to respect religious practices; therefore parents are allowed to let their kids skip school on their faith's recognized holy days, but not for any other reason". I don't think there's a "virtue" of respecting religious freedom, and a "virtue" of mandatory education, that are in conflict here in any problematic way, it's a very common-sensical status quo to end up with.)
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
If you give them a city and they make it rich it's still not your money to spend.
I mean, it is if you tax them and redistribute the money.
Apparently they have their own rituals we have to grant them religious exemptions for.
Although it doesn't actively proselytize as much as Christianity, Sikhism is not an ethnic religion; any person of any ethnicity can convert to it if they become convinced that its teachings hold the true answers about the Divine. Accordingly this is, as it says in the name, a religious, not ethnic, exemption. In other words, to not have it would infringe upon the religious freedom of Britons of any race by foreclosing the possibility for a white Englishman of converting to Sikhism if he wants to.
Now as an atheist, I'm not that big a fan of religious exemptions. But ultimately, they're a Chesterton's Fence whose origins are not very hard to dig up. Bad things happen if the government starts steamrolling over the faithful's objections with "there's not actually an angry sky man who will send you to Hell if you work on a Sunday/do indulgences/mix meat and dairies, get over it". Granted Sikhs are enough of a religious minority that pissing them off on their own wouldn't start a religious war, but it seems straightforwardly more principled for the state to say "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of any recognized religion" than "we withhold judgment about the truth-value of Christianity and Islam, but because there's so few of them we're going to functionally write it into law that you cannot simultaneously act in accordance with a belief in the divinely-inspired truth of the Guru Granth Sahib, and be a law-abiding citizen in our country".
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
You are, again, skipping crucial steps. It's not inevitable that a demographic change will lead to physical violence against the old majority. If, say, Belgians or Koreans moved to my town en masse I would not expect them to start stabbing the locals, whatever the scale of the migration. To believe otherwise would be sheer, paranoid xenophobia. It may very well be the case that if you replace my Belgians and Koreans with Pakistanis or Sikhs, the murder rate will in fact go up, but this is a specific claim about the cultural (or, if you must, genetic) dispositions of Pakistanis and Sikhs, which requires evidence to back it up; it's not the null hypothesis about any generic group of foreigners.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
I don't actually think it especially changes the trolley problem if the single person is a suicide attempt.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
Oh, I agree. I'm just saying that "(partly) responsible for his death" is a much lower bar than "guilty of murder".
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
And likewise if Digwa stabbed Nowak through the lung he's far more responsible for Nowak's death than the police officers who failed to get Nowak first aid, but responsibility still exists even if it isn't exclusive.
WandererintheWilderness
19d ago
And he explicitly voiced this specific concern in the speech itself:
Well, not exactly; this is concern that penalties for those guilty of out-and-out racial discrimination would get a lot harsher, which is not quite the same slippery slope as sanctions being extended to those only "guilty" of thoughtcrime. But as I said I do take the point.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
Well again I'm not actually convinced that he made that prediction. I still find it a more natural and coherent reading of the text that the strife he perceives in Britain's future is the political oppression of white racists by an electoral majority of brown anti-racists. I don't actually think there's any textual evidence that he was envisioning a plague of acts of personal brown-on-white violence like Digwa's. If that had been his point, I contend that his rhetoric would have been burying the lede to such outrageous degrees as to make the overall speech laughable, but I don't think it was his point.
(I think you actually have a much better case in the other sub-thread when linking his doomsaying, not to modern crime statistics, but to the rise of anti-free-speech legislation, which can legitimately be seen as a slippery slope from the concerns he voices. This doesn't wholly rehabilitate the speech in my eyes, because I still think that in fact a just society should not allow racial discrimination, and allowing it in the name of preventing a free-speech-destroying slippery slope is throwing the baby out with the bathwater; and also because he's still complaining about private responses to racist behavior i.e. the children chanting "racialist", not just institutional overreach, so his principled-libertarian cred is less than stellar; but it's a fair defense.)
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
As I said in my other reply, by saying Chauvin was responsible for his death, I am not necessarily saying that he acted wrongly. Prioritizing the safety of the innocent over that of the guilty can be the correct utilitarian choice in a fraught situation. But you're still responsible for pulling the trolley lever. Even if it wasn't you who tied the person you sacrifice to the trolley tracks, you still made that choice; you can justify your actions, but they are your actions.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
But again, FttG originally praised him as "a conservative voicing uncomfortable truths about immigration". Even if I we grant that he had those kinds of statistics in mind, he just comes across as a mealy-mouthed coward for not having the guts to explicitly discuss his most important claim or the evidence for that claim. He would be leaving the most important "uncomfortable truth" unspoken.
This is why I think "came for… and I did not speak out" has to mean something like "they got sent to Auschwitz, which no one ever should be for any reason, and I let it happen", rather than "I myself did something, anything, to oppose them". With the benefit of hindsight, the writer does not think he should have allowed the Nazis to do whatever they wanted to the communists; but I don't think it follows that he regrets ever criticizing communists in any way, and I don't think it even follows that he thinks no amount of police action against communist terrorists was ever justified.
Therefore I do not think "first they made laws preventing bigoted old ladies from renting rooms to Negroes…" is a valid application of the poem, because I am not a hyper-libertarian and I do not think that 'the power to forbid people to rent rooms to minorities based on personal prejudice' is an inherently immoral weapon for the government to wield. I am not turning a blind eye to unconscionable evil being done to my enemies. I can conscion outlawing discriminatory business practices, I can conscion it just fine. It's what I would have been campaigning for already, no ominous "they" required.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
I said "best practice for maximizing a fentanyl-overdose patient's chances of survival"; not "police best-practice for dealing with a drugged-out suspect who might be dying but might also still be a danger to others". It may very well be that keeping him restrained on the off-chance that if they'd relaxed the hold, he would have turned out to be faking enfeeblement and run off and harassed people, was a defensible gamble for public safety. But if, in a situation of Bayesian uncertainty, you choose to prioritize neutralizing the potential threat posed by an individual over that individual's own health, and it turns out he was in fact dying, then you're responsible for his death. That doesn't necessarily mean you made the wrong choice, but you did make a choice that led to his death and you need to own up to that.
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
Oh the 'rivers of blood' are purely metaphorical then? Same as this part, I suppose? (…) What is a whip used for again?
Either that, or he has smuggled in the implication that browns are inherently liable to be physically violent to whites without actually justifying it in any way whatsoever, which again makes his entire rhetoric founded on silently assuming the most crucial conclusion. Pick your poison, but he doesn't come out looking good in either case, intellectually speaking.
sigh Again, it depends on what you mean by "came for". I do not think that my outgroup should be oppressed or have their civil rights ignored. But this does not mean "you can't anything at all against your outgroup, ever". The poem was not intended as anarchist apologia that says you can never outlaw, or even oppose, any evil behavior whatsoever because "coming for" anybody in any way, ever, is too much of a slippery slope.
To put it another way, if you think "first they came" applies to "first they came for the people who refuse to rent rooms to Negroes, but I did not speak out, because I was against refusing to rent rooms to Negroes" then I do not see how you cannot extend it all the way to "first they came for the people who lynched Negroes in the streets, but I did not speak out, because I was against lynching Negroes in the streets", or "first they came for murderous paedophiles, but I did not speak out, because I was not a murderous paedophile", at which point it loses all meaning. I think clearly the poem only works if by "came for" you mean "sent to a gas chamber en masse"; if you mean enabling the government to do unconscionably awful things to your outgroup, things it should never be allowed to do to anybody for any reason. But no one was suggesting sending the racist old lady to a gas chamber in a cattle wagon.
Not exactly, but I do concede that it's a belief system - and as a liberal atheist I believe belief systems should get the same kinds of legal protection whether or not they're grounded in supernatural beliefs, as historical belief systems tended to be. Persecuting Daoists or Buddhists for their beliefs continues to be wrong even if we're simply talking about their moral or philosophical beliefs rather than anything properly theological. I feel the same logic should apply to Transgenderism - and Vegetarianism, and Effective Altruism, etc.
I wholeheartedly agree - about FGM, male circumcision, and medical transition for children. Physical alterations to children has always been the one point where I diverge from the progressive consensus re: trans issues, though it puts me into quite a lonely place politically - my belief is that in an ideal world, children should be allowed to socially transition, but barred from making permanent changes to their bodies just yet, and this is something both sides view as unacceptable from opposite directions.
(Now, mind, I do think that there's something of the isolated demand for rigor to the scrutiny applied to transitioning children. There are a lot of other alterations to children's bodies that are currently kosher, from getting a girl's ears pierced to so-called-"corrective" genital surgery on intersex infants. I tend not to find that much common ground with a lot of anti-child-transition campaigners due to them not caring about those things, never mind their views on adult transition, which are rarely congruent with mine. But I'm leaving this as a parenthetical here, insofar as given your stated position on circumcision I think you might actually be ideologically consistent on this kind of stuff.)
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