WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
So, if we're hearing about HBD less in a period of right-wing ascendancy, as compared with a period of left-wing ascendancy (e.g. when Black Lives Matter defined the discourse,) that strongly suggests the defensive explanation is true.
Does it? The anti-HBD side as you define it could just as well say that the pro-HBDers have gone quiet because their guy is already god-emperor, so they no longer need intellectual grounding to "construct systems of white supremacy" instead of getting on with oppressing non-whites directly.
(Of course, I don't believe either side of the meta-debate.)
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
This would, again, make a lot of other wars into genocides,
Yes, yes it would. A majority of historical wars were genocidal in intent; wanting to exterminate your enemies is in fact an extremely common motivation for warfare, and if it's not what you start out wanting, you sure want it once the bastards have butchered thousands of your lads on the battlefield.
A lot of the confusion about Israel-Palestine and Ukraine-Russia comes from the relevant countries and their advocates protesting that they're not engaging in Unprecedented Evil Behavior, just fighting wars like they've been fought for thousands of years. And in a way, they're right! But "the kind of wars our ancestors have been fighting since the Neolithic" is in fact what we've been trying to ban out of existence once and for all, because they sucked. There is an under-discussed gap between people who think of the modern notion of war crimes in terms of "the World Wars were anomalies, we need to ban the sort of thing that went on in WWII to ensure we only fight normal wars like we had before", and people who think of the modern notion of war crimes in terms of "the scale of the World Wars showed that we urgently need to ban a whole lot of things that had been rampant in practically every war until that point, but never made quite so starkly obvious in their horror than when they were implemented on an industrial scale".
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
But realistically we shouldn't weigh it against the total suffering that obesity creates; we should weigh it against the amount of obesity-caused suffering that shaming can alleviate. Shaming isn't completely ineffective, but it's not very effective.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
This is true if we're talking about a smart, tech-aware dictator. But your original post wasn't talking about people who expect a smart tech-driven dictatorship. It was talking about people who expect Trump to go President Joker and round up all his enemies in unmarked vans. I think the recent protestors' behavior follows a rational strategy within that framework - whose likelihood relative to "Trump continues to be more bark than bite" or "Trump becomes a smart dictator" is, of course, questionable, but that, again, wasn't the question.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Hence, under their definitions, "deals have not been kept in the past" is evidence of bad faith
It's evidence of bad faith on the part of the Dems of 40 years ago. I think @Chrisprattalpharaptr 's point re: "legislation from 40 years ago" is that the people at issue are dead (or at any rate no longer relevant), and you can't read the minds of people today based on dirty tricks pulled - consciously or otherwise - by their geriatric forebears half a century prior, even if the current scions are nominally waving the same flag.
I guess the question becomes whether you can meaningfully talk about "a movement" behaving in bad faith in the sense you describe. I guess you can gloss the internal turnover as just what it looks like when "the movement" "changes its mind", and still analogize to the bad Newcomb solution. But I don't think it creates much light to try to talk about "bad faith" when describing the external behavior of a movement without any reference to the conscious experiences of anybody in the movement, whether sincere or otherwise.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
Sensible, but that means no plain-clothes operations.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
they’re not only doing everything possible to make sure they’re on the list, but fighting back in ways that simply don’t make any sense
The goal is to make it impossible to enact the disappear-protesters step of the plan by having too many protesters on the list, most of whom are manifestly not worth the bother of disappearing. The harmlessness of the protests is the point, both in and of itself (in that it'll make a regime that tries to make them out to be dangerous rioters look ridiculous) and because it makes them an attractive position for more and more people to join.
WandererintheWilderness
15d ago
How, then, do you prevent the problem discussed elsewhere in this thread of random criminals impersonating ICE officers to cause mayhem with impunity?
WandererintheWilderness
20d ago
you’ve said something about Israel? — how dare you criticize every Jew in the world
No, your post had the opposite problem: you were criticizing a random Jew and acting as if that said something about Israel.
I don't think @gafpromise was necessarily disputing the "immigrant" part, so much as the "illegal". You can certainly look around any major city and see that most DoorDashers are non-white and probably immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. Bit harder to judge whether their papers are in order on sight. While the number may plausibly be high, I would be fairly surprised if >50% of immigrant DoorDashers were illegals, let alone 100%.
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
I mean it all comes back to his trans kid, doesn't it? Who came out in 2020.
WandererintheWilderness
27d ago
The real mistake was the left wing's decision to alienate Musk.
It's all a bit chicken and egg, but I rather think he alienated the left, not vice versa.
WandererintheWilderness
28d ago
How's it a sign of virility?
In the most literal sense: it's associated with high levels of male hormones ("Men with androgenic alopecia typically have higher 5α-reductase, higher total testosterone, higher unbound/free testosterone, and higher free androgens, including DHT"). TMU it's a completely different phenomenon from hair loss in the elderly. In many young men's case, balding at the apex of the skull occurs concurrently with facial hair and body hair growth - in a very real sense it's another side of the same coin. The fact that we've come to associate it with old age and feebleness is just one of those things where cultural beauty standards have diverged from the biological reality of the human phenotype, like women having body hair, and I just think it's a bit silly in principle.
WandererintheWilderness
29d ago
have the hair of a 70 year old
Wanting to keep all your hair is perfectly fair, as much as dyeing your hair, shaving, or any other aesthetic change to how you choose to style your hair. But I dislike this framing/phrase. Male pattern baldness is natural, and not a sign of aging or decrepitude - if anything it's a sign of virility and maturity.
WandererintheWilderness
29d ago
I was thinking of the kind of infrastructure sabotage/collapse you describe as part of the "literal bullets-flying civil war" umbrella. Trying to starve the other side out is basically just siege warfare - it's not a different category of action from just opening fire to begin with, it's simply a different strategy. And one would pretty inevitably escalate into the other.
I certainly don't believe this is the only battlefield on which the tribal conflict can play out. But I was jumping off of "If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict (…)", where "playing by the rules Blue Tribe plays by" clearly means nothing more than "blatantly, openly ignoring the spirit or even letter of the Constitution whenever convenient" and similar chicanery. The Blue Tribe has certainly not made the first move on trying to starve the other side into total surrender, or whatever equivalently hostile strategy they have the infrastructure to pull off. The Reds doing that wouldn't, by any stretch of language, constitute "playing by the Blue Tribe's rules".
Civil war in America's not impossible (though I think it's extremely unlikely to come to that before something else that turns the axis of the world happens, whether that's AGI or something else). But it's not what we were talking about.
WandererintheWilderness
29d ago
The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender
How, then, do you explain the existence of large numbers of asexual trans people? (I mean, you could argue it's still a particular configuration of a single "sex-and-gender" neural knot in the brain, rather than two unrelated phenomena. But when people say "trans isn't a sex thing" they mean "it isn't a kink pursued for sexual gratification". Brain wiring isn't really the point.)
WandererintheWilderness
30d ago
Gabby Giffords has never been President.
WandererintheWilderness
30d ago
If you mean to say that the Blue government have not passed a federal ban on all firearms
Yes, that is what I meant. The fact that they've only tried the thousand-papercuts tactic, instead of just going ahead and saying "no guns, ever", is exactly what the Constitution is buying you, and what you would lose if you tried to make it common knowledge that you can just ignore the Constitution.
WandererintheWilderness
30d ago
How dare they! Don't they understand that we have norms? Well, no, "We" don't, because those norms died here,
This is what I dispute. If we're talking about gun control - sure, the 2nd Am has been bent pretty badly to allow Blue states to effectively ban at least some arms that should clearly be protected. But no Blue government actually passed a federal ban on firearms. I guarantee you that in a world where everybody ignored the Constitution without a second thought, they would have tried at some point. The way I see it, your choice is between selective application of the second amendment, and it simply being torn down.
If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict, while our chances of surviving are excellent;
I don't actually believe that. The Blue Tribe has better liars, better loophole-finders, and above all else a much better social shaming apparatus. It has a nonzero ability to affect Red-aligned normies' worldview, while Red think-tanks are pretty useless at shifting Blue-aligned normies' Overton window. If everyone fights maximally dirty, then, all my personal opinions aside, I'm betting Blue.
(Of course, perhaps we're operating at different levels of metaphor, and you meant the Blues would lose a literal bullets-flying civil war? That's a very different conversation, and frankly one I'm not sure has very much to do with the issue at hand.)
What if the other side bends the niceties, but is still constrained by them to a point? You're better off with a devil who's compelled to keep up a facade of lawfulness than a devil who's acting completely unconstrained. Sure, it sucks to be stuck in this kind of asymmetrical equilibrium where you have to completely refrain from rule-breaking just because it compels your opponent to do less rule-breaking than he otherwise would. But you might still want to keep that equilibrium in place, if you have reason to believe the opponent has a sufficient advantage that a completely unconstrained version of them could squash you.
To put it another way, taking the blows is usually a better strategy than declaring all-out war. The fact that the other guy is feeling free to pummel you is a pretty good sign that they're confident in their ability to win (or at least ensure MAD) if you did, foolishly, fight back with lethal force.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I'm against it
I gathered. And again, that's your right. My point is: "puberty-blockers are dangerous means of transitioning and need to be used far less" is an entirely orthogonal opinion from "having the goal of transitioning is a mental illness/otherwise undesirable". If you think the health hazards of puberty blockers are a bigger problem than whatever ills might come out of social transition, and if (as I believe) trans activists would be willing to dial back the puberty blockers on health grounds iff they were assured this isn't the first salami-slice to a campaign against social transition, there is obvious common ground here that could be reached. But it can't be reached if the public face of the anti-puberty-blockers campaign is also strongly against social transition.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Gee who would have thought that raising a generation on this would result in every kid trying to indicate that "in fact I am a bisexual non-binary femme and not a cis straight girl, even though I've only dated guys and am married to one"
… so? Trans minors I can see the issue on, because of the health hazards etc. But who the fuck cares if girls are identifying as bi on a kind of flimsy basis? How does it have any effect on the world besides making it a little bit more colorful, a bit more fun to live in, a little bit freer? Imagine a world with a restrictive binary of registered Vegetarians and Meat-eaters, with a small minority of Omnivores. I think encouraging people to view being an Omnivore as cool, and register themselves as such in greater numbers, would be a generally good thing even if some of the new Omnivores still eat many more greens than meat. On the margins, it's encouraging them to experiment more, to feel free to try more things. They can still eat a mostly-veggie diet (ie date mostly men) if that's what they actually want.
Maybe you think "hurrah, a ten year old trans model!" (who is now thirteen) is an improvement for the world,
Not particularly, but frankly I'd hardly be less skeptical of any mother pushing a ten-year-old into a modeling career. The gender aspect seems very secondary to what's gone wrong here. And to the extent the mother might in this case have pushed the kid towards identifying a certain way, I'm not suddenly in favor of pushing people into a certain gender presentation just because you've flipped the polarity. I'm all about freedom. I'm against coercion whether it's enforcing birth sex or doing the exact opposite. The former is, I think you'll agree, a lot more common - there are many, many more mothers obsessively teaching their little girls to clean up nice and be pretty, than teaching the same thing to their hitherto-sons - but sure, to the extent the latter happens, I'm against it too.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
I'm sorry but "you don't need dysphoria to be trans" is an extremely mainstream position among leftists.
WandererintheWilderness
1mo ago
Disapprove of my attitudes, that's your right
And it's yours to disapprove of mine! But no one with your or Rowling's attitudes can be said to be in favor of transition, which is what I sought to prove. At best they are extremely narrow transmedicalists.
I did mention the "geriatric forebears"! Three out of these four people are in their 80s. The sole exception is a sprightly 74. These are no longer the people on whose trustworthiness the party's long- or even mid-term trustworthiness depends. They will be dead or in care homes long before they get the chance to recant on any deals made in the 2020s. This is what I meant by "no longer relevant".
Well, that doesn't follow. I wasn't talking about holding the son accountable for the sins of the father, but about the pragmatic question of whether the son is or isn't committing the same sins as his father today. The thread was discussing Republicans' ability to trust Democrats as a practical issue - that's not the same thing as granting that Democrats may be sincere today, but refusing to negotiate as punishment for past defections.
All of which said, yes, I do in fact believe there's no such things as group responsibility for the sins of past generations, and that "reparations" are a bad idea. (If some groups today are more disadvantaged than others, they should receive help proportionate to the extent to which they are disadvantaged. But there's no reason the distant descendants of their oppressors should be uniquely responsible for providing that help, and it shouldn't be regarded as something "owed" to the disadvantaged descendants of the oppressed, except insofar as all citizens are collectively responsible for the welfare of all other citizens - which applies just as well to someone whose family was ruined by a freak meteor crash twenty years ago as by slavery or segregation. I really dislike the justice-based/"punitive" framing.)
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