WandererintheWilderness
No bio...
User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.
How do you square this with the top level comment's economic argument that on net, foreign students' tuition results in over half a million more domestic students enrolling than in the counterfactual?
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I think you misunderstood my post. I do not deny that there is a social spread of transgender. That's obvious. I object to the phrase "social contagion" because it implies that this spread is a bad thing we ought to stop, as opposed to a value-neutral - or even beneficial! - social trend like any other. I object to it for the same reason I might have objected, decades ago, to "there is a satanic plot to corrupt children into playing Dungeons & Dragons". Doubtless there were indeed marketing experts working very hard to convince more children to play Dungeons & Dragons! That is not in doubt! But playing Dungeons & Dragons isn't witchcraft and being transgender isn't a horrible disease, therefore the one is not satanic corruption and the other is not contagion. They're just neat activities propagating through populations that find them to be fun ways to spend their lives.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I don't necessarily mean that she thinks social transitioning minors should be against the law, or that she wants all adult trans people rounded up in the streets. But it seems pretty clear that she's, like, not in favor. All else being equal she would rather there be fewer trans people in the world; she wouldn't want any children of hers to transition; etc. I think it's fair to describe this as being "against" social transition & adult medical transition even if she's tolerant of them despite her disapproval.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
If gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then it's not a social contagion. But also: if gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then there's not really any good argument that insurance companies should be required to pay for treatment.
I think the conventional way to thread that needle is that you can be transgender without having gender dysphoria (ie you have no morbidly negative feelings about your current gender, you just get gender euphoria from a switch). Thus, the spread of transgender itself is not the spread of a contagious illness; gender dysphoria simply develops organically in people who had become trans in the positive sense beforehand. If smoking becomes popular in a given population, lung cancer will rise, but "lung cancer is a social contagion" would be a rather odd way to put it; ditto "bone fractures are a social contagion" for a population that's gotten really into mountain-climbing lately.
That being said, if push comes to shove I think we should just bite the bullet that gender dysphoria isn't an illness. We just pretend it is because the government has yet to implement a decent UBI, so we unconvincingly pretend a transition budget is a natural part of healthcare. Perhaps we could see about creating separate transition grants, decoupled from health insurance? This is all pretty far out of the Overton Window, so we're stuck with the kludge. Still, internally, the trans movement takes it as implicit that you understand that much - that "transgender is a mental illness" is a convenient fiction for browbeating the government into giving money it wouldn't otherwise give, and shouldn't be taken as axiomatic in any other context.
But if a male wants to put on some womanface and call himself Tina, Rowling seems happy to "yaass queen" him
Sorry to reverse-uno you, but I'd like a source on that. I've never, ever seen Rowling say it's good to let minors transition or refer to a MTF as a woman. My read is, she might be socially liberal enough, in the true sense of the word, to tolerate social transition as a "live and let live" kind of deal, but she is still clearly against it in the sense that it wouldn't exist in her concept of an ideal world and she'd be very put off if any friends of hers transitioned.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
You are, again, assuming the conclusion. I happen to think the world is considerably better for having trans people in it, and that most people are happier transitioning than they would have been in a counterfactual world where they didn't. (Not because it was written on their soul in golden ink from birth that they were the opposite gender; just because gender transition is a fun thing to do with your life and imbues the transitioner with a welcome sense of purpose and fulfillment, like any other arbitrary self-improvement project.) It's a memetic something but I reject the term "hazard". I think it's a boon to human flourishing, and it needs to spread harder, so long as we can decouple it from dangerous medical procedures. We're halfway there. "Transmedicalists" are already viewed with suspicion by mainstream gender theory; "you can be trans even if you don't get surgery or hormones" is a very widespread meme which is looked on approvingly. Push it all the way to "at least if you're a minor, it's better to be the non-medicalized kind of trans" and you're golden.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
"Their chosen gender" needn't be "traditional binary male or female". The point is that it's the social aspect they're primarily interested in, not really the surgery.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I contend that what they want is to be taken seriously as their chosen gender, and a lot of trans teens who currently seek medicalization do so because they think it will improve their chances of that. If the two were successfully decoupled, far fewer would want it.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Well, see my parenthetical. I think we should tell 90% of trans minors "great, go ahead and transition socially, but you'll have to wait until you're of age for medical transition", and only medicalize the minority who have proper "will claw at their growing breasts with their bare nails if not allowed to get rid of them" dysmorphia.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I dislike the phrase "social contagion", which assumes that being trans is a negative and it's bad for it to spread. This negative connotation is, I think, what causes people to deny the obvious when they might not if the question were phrased differently. Is dyeing your hair a "social contagion"? Tattoos? The latest slang, the latest fashion? People will trivially be more likely adopt all these things if they know they're on the table, and even more so if they're popular. "People will be more likely to develop a desire to change genders if they know it's a commonly-done thing" is common sense, and I don't think "the pro-trans tribe" would deny it if the name people used for it wasn't something which implies it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted.
(Mind you, I do think we use puberty blockers on minors too cavalierly. But Rowling is not a good champion for that narrow, sensible point when she is clearly against social transition, and all forms of adult transition, as well.)
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
workplace flirtation isn't what it used to be due to the potential massive ramifications of going too hard.
Notably, though, getting MeTooed for coming on too strong is rather less of a concern for women, and explaining why fewer women use dating apps is exactly what @Quantumfreakonomics wanted explained. If the workplace dating scene is hostile to men who are proactively looking for a partner, but less so to women who are doing the same thing, that fits pretty snugly with a lot more men than women turning to dating apps.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Is your belief that out of nowhere, for no reason at all, young people, around the planet, have chosen to 'stop trying', unlike every other generation that came before them?
"For no reason at all" is a strawman. Looking at the wide variety of hedonistic pleasures available to the 2020s twenty-something from the comfort of their own couch, it's not surprising that fewer and fewer people are "going out" - with each other or otherwise. Going outside, literally, has lost a lot of its appeal relative to other stuff you could be doing with your free time. It's hardly surprising that this applies to going out to meet girlfriends/boyfriends just as it applies to going out to meet platonic friends in-person. Logging into the groupchat has replaced meeting the lads at the bar. I'd never have met my first girlfriend if I hadn't been in the habit of meeting up with mixed friends, in person, outside, and that's happening less and less.
I think that the obvious missing bullet point here is "They date from their pool of IRL friends, coworkers and acquaintances, like normal people". (Church is only a special case of this.)
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
The obvious answer for a skeptic is "because they're all - to a man, young or old, dumb or brilliant - basically amoral nihilists maximizing their short-term gains, not selfless statesmen invested in the long-term advancement of Republican ideals". eg Vance isn't even trying to write an actually effective immigration bill because he needs immigration to still be a live issue in 2032 so he can use it to win the Presidency then.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
It's not the hill I'd die on, necessarily, but I think it's coherent to care more about overt corruption like Trump's than about covert corruption like the Clintons' and Bidens' - in other words, to prefer the government to gaslight people about the corruption that's happening, if we must have corruption at all. A President who's overtly corrupt is fouling up the institutions themselves and eroding public trust by making a spectacle of his lack of morals. Meanwhile, a President who gives in to temptation in private, but understands and cares about the fact that he shouldn't, and tries very hard not to let it get out, is just one fallible man.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I believe the way I found it was that he'd once linked to his pianist brother's YouTube channel in an early post, and that one's under his real name, so combine that with Scott saying on multiple occasions that "Scott" was his real first name and there you have it. But I think it was also possible to find it directly by trawling through his old LiveJournal.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I don't think it is misleading. A million deaths is a million deaths, even if it's Space Year 52,026 and the population is numbered in trillions. 9/11 had ~3000 casualties and mourning them is still A Thing. Scott's intuitive argument is that we should be equally scarred/freaked out about the fallen of COVID who were 3000 times as numerous, whatever percentage of the population they represented.
If they are doing it for reasons related to wanting attributes of the other sex, and admit it, then they are trying to be a woman after all, they are just trying to be one partially (…) The same people who object to people trying to change sex also object to crossdressing, for similar reasons, so this doesn't materially change the scenario.
I reject the validity of that framing. Sure, conservatives object to crossdressing as well - for separate reasons. At least if they have any sense. By way of analogy: no doubt telos-brained conservatives object to eccentric transhumanists who want to become actual flesh-and-blood anthros. And that can certainly be grounded in teleological thinking. But they will also typically object to women putting on Playboy bunny-girl costumes as a form of sexual foreplay. And they might have coherent, respectable reasons for doing so (ie "it encourages sinful lust and fornication")! But "it goes against a human's telos to try and become a rabbit" would be an outrageously stupid reason to be against sexy bunny costumes. That's just not what those are about. Good old-fashioned drag queens aren't trying to become women, falling short, and lying about what they want. They're just men who think it's fun to cosplay as women. And again you might have moral objections to sexually-motivated roleplay, but I don't see how you can object on teleological grounds unless you think all forms of disguise and pretend are immoral even if it's children playing dress-up at the playground, or indeed, in a school play.
From the linked post:
Suppose we accept the judges’ decision that COVID arose via zoonosis. Does that mean lab leak was a “conspiracy theory” and we should be embarrassed to have ever believed it? The term “conspiracy theory” is awkward here because there were definitely at least two conspiracies - one by China to hide the evidence, one by western virologists to convince everyone that lab leak was stupid and they shouldn’t think about it. Saar cited some leaked internal conversations among expert virologists. Back in the earliest stage of the pandemic, they said to each other that it seemed like COVID could have come from a lab leak - their specific odds were 50-50 - but that they should try to obfuscate this to prevent people from turning against them and their labs. So the best we can say here is that maybe the conspiracies got lucky on their 50-50 bet, and the thing they were trying to cover up wasn’t even true.
I don't know what more you'd want. He knows perfectly well that disingenuous actors in China and in the west conspired to cover up anything that could have pointed at a lab leak. Given the nature of the leaked evidence, however, he thinks the bad actors did this in case it turned out to be a lab leak, without themselves being certain.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Scott had an extraordinarily in-depth lab leak post in 2024, I'm not sure there was anything more for him to say on the topic unless he'd changed his mind about it. Naturally, saying "everyone knows that gain of function research caused this" is putting it way too strongly: Scott isn't convinced and neither am I. But I think about this very often -
(…) for the first time [this debate] made me see the coronavirus as one of God’s biggest and funniest jokes. Think about it. Either a zoonotic virus crossed over to humans fifteen miles from the biggest coronavirus laboratory in the Eastern Hemisphere. Or a lab leak virus first rose to public attention right near a raccoon-dog stall in a wet market. Either way is one of the century’s biggest coincidences, designed by some cosmic joker who wanted to keep the debate acrimonious for years to come.
…and it does follow that we should probably treat gain-of-function research as if it had caused COVID, because "we can't ever know for certain if it caused COVID, but the two hypotheses are neck-to-neck" is bad enough if we're talking about future caution.
To be merciful is to exceed justice, to give someone something more than they deserve. To be less merciful would not indicate moral deficiency on God's part.
I think we have different assumptions here. To me mercy and justness simply seem like different virtues, which a maximally moral individual would all exhibit. They don't trade off against each other or make up for each other - exceeding justice isn't unjust; mercy alone is not justice however plentiful. They're simply different axes.
Now, certainly, where there is justice, mercy is supererogatory in the context of treating morality as a yes-or-no question - a man who acts justly but without mercy is not behaving immorally. But I feel comfortable saying that a man who is both just and merciful is morally superior to one who is only ever just. And I could "judge the merciless man negatively" on moral grounds, though that judgement would not be the same thing as a condemnation.
That being said, my chief point here is that if mercy is indeed moral quality, then you are "judging" God if your praise of His merciful treatment of mankind constitutes a positive claim that it is present; if you can imagine a world where God was less, or was not, merciful, and in which consequently you would not be moved to compliment Him in this particular way. This seems to hold even if you think no negative judgement would be warranted in the absence of that mercy.
I also notice that the latter idea only works with "merciful", not "just". Justice is not supererogatory however you look at it. The absence of justice would be injustice. Therefore, under my model of praise, to praise God for being just ought to imply a counterfactual where you could, in principle, criticize Him for being unjust.
Ok, here. Dolphins are good. They also rape and murder other sea creatures. Explain to me in your example the significant difference between Orcus and Dolphins so I can understand what you think I would object to.
The difference is that Orcus, as a pseudo-Devil (though not a fallen angel), would be a scriptural figure and thus one priests had cause to talk about, whereas dolphins - to my knowledge - rarely come up at mass one way or the other.
My claim is that, if Orcus was a thing and came up in scripture, no one wearing a cassock would ever organically, spontaneously talk about Orcus's goodness the way they talk about God's goodness, any more than they'd speak about Satan's goodness, even though they would acknowledge that Orcus technically counts as "good" in the same sense as dolphins and scorpions should they be specifically asked. I believe this demonstrates that God's goodness gets brought up for other, specific reasons than that God satisfies the criteria for this technical sense of "goodness".
So in this prong of our discussion I've not been arguing about theology qua theology so much as accusing the Church of rampant muddling-of-the-waters on this issue, which might be regarded either as doublethink-like epistemological confusion on the apologists' part, or deliberate deception of the common-folk for the "greater good" of fostering naive faith.
(In both cases, I am working under the assumption that people are more inclined to worship God and follow His commandments if they vaguely believe that he's good in the sense of being a good person; and therefore that, if the Catholic God is officially, theologically not "good" in that sense, apologists have an interest in obscuring this point, at least until they've got prospected converts fully "hooked" and can roll out the spikier doctrines. The apologist and convert can literally be different people, or a single man who's wrestling with doubt and winds up engaging in a bit of self-deception by mentally equivocating between the two senses of "good".)
It is, I admit, a somewhat aggressive line of argument, and not a fault of which I'm accusing you personally, which is why I'd sort of left it behind upthread as we got lost in the weeds of the specific Orcus hypothetical.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Do you praise a sunset for being morally good? Do you praise a cat because purring nicely on your lap is morally good? What does praise have to do with this?
Sure, I don't praise sunsets for being morally good. But if I praise them, I am nevertheless expressing a judgement about them. If I praise a sunset for being beautiful, then I am claiming to have the ability to judge the sunset on aesthetic grounds. It follows that if I am to praise God, I am expressing a judgement about God. Not necessarily a moral judgement, but nevertheless, a judgement.
Giving praise is meaningless if I am not implicitly claiming the power to discern whether it's warranted or not. I could think of few greater backhanded insults. "Hey, man, you're great. And by that I don't mean I actually think you'e great. Maybe you're actually awful, I wouldn't know. I'm totally agnostic about whether you're great or not. I'm just saying 'you're great' because… well, just because, man."
Granted, perhaps you only meant that God is beyond humans' moral judgement, and that the praise owed to God is not moral praise? But if that's your claim… are you sure? A random website is worth what it's worth, but catholic.com claims in so many words that "we give praise first and foremost because it is right to praise God’s goodness". The rest of the paragraph making it clear that goodness is here meant to encompass qualities like God being merciful - which is to say, moral qualities, not just God's "goodness" in the abstract sense of Being The Supreme Being.
It certainly aligns with my limited experience of Catholic worship that God is routinely praised for being merciful and just, not simply for being mighty and impressive and whatever other non-moral qualities might warrant praise. What a strange form of worship that would be, that did not permit making any deeper claims about the supreme deity than can be made about a pretty sunset or a cuddly kitten!
If the question is then, "Can God create a creature for whom their good involves hurting other creatures?"
Not really. We've drifted a fair bit, but my original point was that "God is good" in everyday Catholic apologia contextually means something more than "Orcus the Babe-Slayer is good (because it fulfills his nature)". It is phrased so as to imply we ought to like, admire, and heed God; that we should intuitively look to Him as a source of morality. If Orcus existed, I maintain that Catholics would not routinely say "Orcus is good", even if the statement could be narrowly defended. Therefore the claim "The phrase 'God's goodness' means no more or less than 'Orcus's goodness', and refers to being a perfect fulfillment of His own nature" is a motte, and everyday discussion of God by Catholics is frolicking in a bailey where God's "goodness" encompasses positive moral qualities.
God is adorable, but He is definitely beyond human judgement. We can only adore him and praise him by analogy.
You didn't answer my question. Why should we praise Him, if we cannot actually come to any conclusions of our own about whether he's morally good or not?
You are assuming that malevolence is a presence instead of a lack
I'm assuming no such thing. I am asking you to picture an entity with abilities comparable to those ascribed to Satan, but which never used to be an angel; a being for whom it is instinctive to maim and torture and corrupt in the same way that it is instinctive for a scorpion to sting. If the existence of a creature which instinctively stings frogs is conceivable, so is that of a creature which instinctively flays infants, whether or not God did or would ever create one/allow one to be created. The metaphysical nature of evil doesn't enter into it. I maintain that by your logic, Orcus the Babe-Slayer would have to be deemed "good", to the same extent that a healthy poisonous scorpion is "good"; and that when sermons advise the faithful that "God is good", they are knowingly implying something rather more about God and how you ought to feel about Him than if they were saying "Orcus the Babe-Slayer is good" in this narrow technical sense.
And then you go on to say that the theology that is routinely mocked for arguing about friction-less thought experiments like "how many angels can fit on the head of a pin" isn't set up for friction-less thought experiments
I said it wasn't setup for frictionless thought experiments that assume away core tenets of dogma. I wasn't even saying it as a criticism.
Catholics do not believe saying "God is Good" is tantamount to saying "God is well-behaved."
I'm sure that isn't the motte, but I rather think it's the bailey. Or rather, the bailey is "God is Good and therefore, among other qualities, benevolent". And even doctrinally, while I take the point about God necessarily not being accountable to anyone in the way that a human being is accountable for his actions, it seems incoherent to conclude that God is beyond human judgement, while also asking man to sing His praises. Praise is by definition a value judgement. If God isn't an admirable being, then on what basis could the Church recommend that I praise Him, i.e. express admiration? What does it even mean to praise an entity whom I would not be allowed, counterfactually, to criticize?
(Fair enough on the Devil-as-fallen-angel angle. Still - supposing you substitute your preferred nonexistent deity whose nature is destructive and malevolent, then I don't think the logic of Catholic morality can sanely hold that human beings could make no moral judgement of that being if it existed. But I recognize that Catholic theology wasn't really developed to return sane results in frictionless thought experiments that abstract away core tenets of dogma, so maybe it's okay to bite that bullet and say it's irrelevant because that's not the world God made, so it's alright that if Baal existed it would be moral to worship Baal? Still seems off.)
I'll take a look at the Brian Davies book, though going off the title - unwise, I know - I do want to clarify that I'm not talking about the general Problem of Evil here. I'm not convinced it would be immoral for a human being with arbitrary magic powers to create a universe like ours that contained evil - so the conventional Problem of Evil is not necessarily a defeater to "God is morally good". The Catholic God, however, is asserted to have actively performed deeds which I would judge as immoral if performed by a human being of equal power in the same circumstances.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Oh, I make no claims as to the merits of the argument. I think publicizing and politicizing a teen's name like this would have been bad form even if we were talking about an unambiguous, garden-variety cheater (say, a kid who'd taken prohibited steroids). It's just not a responsible politician's place to name-and-shame a random minor like this, whether the kid did something actually wrong or not.
No it isn't. I read the essay long ago, and it is entirely congruent with my read of Rowling as willing to tolerate transition in certain narrow cases, but not actually in favor of it. Even assuming Rowling is telling the truth about this trans woman she "happens to know" (has she come forward and offered comment? I wonder if we're talking about a friend of many years as opposed to someone she's met once at a friend of a friend's baby shower), the essay only makes room for transition as a "solution for some gender dysphoric people", not a life choice people are free to make for any reason. She explicitly endorses the view that "candidates for sex reassignment" should go through "a long and rigorous process of evaluation", which is to say, that some adults who want to transition shouldn't be allowed to.
Moreover, she only seems to even care about medical transition. "A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law", she writes, as if that were inherently beyond the pale. I'm sorry but those just aren't the words of someone who approves of social transition for anyone, let alone for minors. Granted, it's possible to approve of social transition without thinking it should be recognized by law - but someone who held that idiosyncratic view still wouldn't start that sentence with "a man".
And again it's not that I want to crucify her for this or anything, she's entitled to her views. But it makes her a poor champion for the specific cause of "all else aside, puberty blockers are medically hazardous", a case which would be better made by someone who enthusiastically endorsed social transition, and indeed a theoretical risk-free perfectly-reversible sex-change procedure, while cautioning that we should be much more careful about the medical implications of the imperfect options that exist today.
More options
Context Copy link