aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1mo ago
I fully don't even think it is bad. Agnostic on good. People stress testing your information diet is a kindness and a service a perfectly rational person might pay for in a red teaming sense. Hoaxes, as long as they ar published are unambiguously good.
aqouta
1mo ago
A trans person is a natal male or female that identifies with the opposite sex and seeks to undergo treatment to approximate the experience of the opposite sex as close as possible. An intersex person is someone who is born with a rare but identifiable physical ailment that complicates the standard XX/XY binary options that naturally describe male and female people. I'm very sympathetic to annoyance that the various authorities haven't clarified the situation but as far as I know no one who has looked into it seriously thinks this is a trans person.
aqouta
1mo ago
The suspicion is that those facts are being weaponized
Fighting the facts is just never a good look. When you start out saying something that isn't true you pretty immediately lose the persuadable audience. It's not good strategically and more importantly to me, it's not good epistemics. Keeping these things straight matters.
You can't make arguments for years on end that rely on conflating "trans" and "intersex" and then get all huffy and indignant when people confuse the two in a way that you don't find politically convenient.
They weren't doing this though, or at least not the more serious people. Certainly intersex people come up in discussions of exactly where to draw lines on defining what it is to be a man or a woman because they're exactly the kind of edge case bullet people need to bite if they want to rigorously define "woman" and people arguing for expanding the definition will naturally make you bite those bullets. The claim wasn't that trans women and people who were born with a vagina and womb but have an odd genetic disorder are exactly the same thing, just that they're both category errors(or at least the trans advocate will try to claim that trans identification ought to make them a category error, I find this argument dubious).
They're obviously quite different for many reasons, most important to me because intersex is a very objective kind of thing, we can run tests and know what is going on. For this reason we're not at high risk of mistakenly giving someone, especially a kid, inappropriate life altering treatment. We have no risk of a social contagion of intersex diagnoses. Because of this I think we can and should calmly sit down and determine what should be done about these cases where nature is the only party at fault. I do still think in that calmly sitting down, if we avoid invoking the trans culture war mind killing, the natural outcome would be banning intersex cases that provide advantage from serious competition. And invoking trans people in this discussion is not helping.
aqouta
1mo ago
This is silly, it's important to actually get the facts straight and one shouldn't respond as if attacked when corrected on the facts. The question of how to categorize people with rare genetic defects and whether to rule them in or out of sports competitions are entirely different to the same questions applied to natal males or natal females who identify with the opposite sex and undergo treatment to approximate as much as possible the body and experience of the opposite sex. One can come to the same conclusion on both, and I broadly do, but we must actually keep our thinking straight here.
aqouta
1mo ago
justified in excluding black women, on the grounds they would be too dominant
If there was some racial group of women that somehow had man equivalent strength then I think and argument could be made. I'd imagine such a thing would have a lot of trouble practically because racial lines have a bad history of being drawn with malicious intent but in the hypothetical space I don't have a fundamental issue with it. Natal women is a naturally category and drawing it there rather than a genderless weight class has obvious winners in losers, natal women win, very light natal men lose and this is fine.
aqouta
1mo ago
The answer to this question just goes back to the reason women's leagues were made in the first place. I personally don't really care that much what women do with their league, include or exclude trans people, none of my business. But the reason these leagues exist at all is because women want to be able to compete and know that in an open league none of them would rise to the top because men at just much stronger. If it's true that trans women being introduced into these leagues would make it so that women can not make it to the top then it's perfectly reasonable to draw the line such that women are on one side and trans women are on the other.
aqouta
1mo ago
I'm not going to say the crass blowjob imagery is how I'd go about it if I didn't prefer her to win over the alternative, but I object to claims that it appeared to be much more than transactional when someone younger than I am now is sleeping with someone older than my father and getting political appointments out of it. That's wild and I'm not sexist for finding it distasteful.
aqouta
1mo ago
You're leaving out the pretty important detail that he was twice her age at the time, 30 years her senior.
aqouta
1mo ago
wo particular and factual points. Recent polling indicates that in his "home region" which includes significant battleground states (that's Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), CNN pegged him at -16 net favorability, which is dramatic. Especially considering that usually VP picks are chosen specifically for their help in swing states! That he's hurting them there instead is notable.
I'm not really sure I'd call Illinois and Indiana battleground states. ohio and michigan, sure. But Illinois and Indiana aren't particularly competitive.
aqouta
1mo ago
Scott's criticism, that toughness alone can't solve the problem without an actual actionable plan, is both true and uninteresting because it doesn't engage with the critiques of the current establishment and just says a truism. It's an important truism because many people do actually just have no real alternative to the status quo, especially true when discussing critiques of capitalism that amount to basically "capitalism hasn't brought about utopia yet".
However being more tough becomes a more interesting critique when you believe that the problem we have with handling the homeless that I'd call hyper-empathy. if hypo-empathy is not being able to take another's perspective, usually implied because of lack of care or interest, and empathy is having a good understanding of another's perspective and needs hyper-empathy is the mirror of hypo-empathy where you are charitable and caring beyond reason. Hyper-empathy might be characterized by letting a bad actor brutalize you and your family because it would be mean to interfere and maybe they have a good reason to do so, maybe you've contributed to a general environment and they're the product of blah blah blah.
If you think the problem with our treatment of the homeless population[1] is hyper-empathy by the NGOs that basically run all homeless programs then being tougher makes sense. We need to either axe this hyper-empathetic orgs or staff them with people who are willing to be tough. Scott says the reason we can't solve the homeless problem is a lack of state capacity. Well what actually is state capacity and why don't we have it? What's actually stopping us from doing the things he scoffs at like building asylums and throwing people into them? I think part of the equation is a general lack of will or "toughness" among the people making decisions on this topic. The money is there, a desire for a solution is there. I'm an outside observer, I can't go into a step by step explanation for how to build asylums and set up laws so that we can populate them, that's an incredible burden, but I do know that the people that we entrusted billions of dollars and many years to have utterly failed to deliver improvements and they all seem to be manically hyper-empathetic so toughness might be just what is needed.
1 - by homeless population I mean the people in tents long term that make no effort to reintegrate back into society rather than people who live in their car for a little while or even temporarily rough it while trying to reintegrate for whom we do have good services and tools that I advocate for even being quite generous with.
aqouta
1mo ago
Not exactly what you're asking but we have a blood on the motte tower discord server that occasionally has some discussion on the other games chat. DM me if you want an invite. It's been thoroughly colonized by dramanaughts but of the more manageable sort.
aqouta
2mo ago
A lot of the current mess dems are in could be traced to them trying to stop Bernie twice.
this reasoning is just straight forwardly poor. Bernie only looked like he had a chance because the centrist lane was crowded. When it became uncrowded he had no chance. This isn't "trying to stop Bernie". This is a group of 20 friends, 2 of which want to eat at the same slop house and the remaining 18 of them each preferring a different steak house deciding on a particular steak house that was only one guy's first choice rather than take a vote at the restaurant level and end up at a coordinated minority's preference.
A tremendous amount of people came out of that primary thinking that they should have been allowed to win because other candidates were obligated to keep splitting the ticket 8 ways in order to give him an opening. It's ridiculous.
aqouta
2mo ago
He is for sure not innocent. You can certainly argue that it was a politically motivated prosecution of the 10 felonies a day type but Trump really did commit a crime.
aqouta
2mo ago
I get we're in a frenzy right now, but this is one of my least favorite styles of post. If you want to dunk on people for making poor predictions please do the leg work and link the predictions.
aqouta
2mo ago
So this was definitely a failed assassination, whoever did it.
I mean of course, this isn't the kind of thing you survive after doing. Listening to the audio I suspect the culprit is already dead.
I think Trump is now sure to win. From the audio I'm now also pretty sure there's a dead body somewhere and I'm intensely interested in who that corpse was before it made a very bad decision. What's the protocol for the media here? Avoid publicizing it to prevent copy cats? This is a very bad thing for our democracy.
aqouta
2mo ago
We're a razors edge away from arguing about definitions but at the risk of that. My air conditioner is responsible for keeping my house cool in the summer, a responsibility it failed at recently, and yet as far as I know it possesses no free will. The person who rear ended me has a responsibility to not rear end me and has failed much like my air conditioner. It's not as if the person chose with anything like free will to rear end me, very few people would ever choose to do such a thing.
aqouta
2mo ago
Do you treat yourself and other people as being responsible for their actions? Say someone rear ends you at a stoplight because they were looking at their cellphone while driving. Do you think they are to blame? Do you get angry at them? Do you pursue an insurance claim against them?
Yes, responsibility isn't a function of free will. In a cosmic sense they were always going to rear end me and we've built up systems around responsibility to handle this that provide incentives that influence behavior ect. ect. I'm entitled to insurance whether or not it could have actually ever been different. You can built up all of society without the need for free will and I don't really see why anyone would act differently depending on whether they believe in it.
aqouta
2mo ago
The only out here is some form of argument against free will, but people who argue the choice to eat the whole pie isn't actually a choice never live the rest of their lives like they don't have free will. It's pure cope.
I'd personally bite that bullet and say that libertarian free will does not exist. I'm not sure what you think I should do differently, or in my framing must do differently, given that belief.
aqouta
2mo ago
when he was the beneficiary of an elite attack on Sanders and RFK and Dean Phillips
Do the elites now include random middle class people in the mid west who don't like the anti-vaxx guy who had a worm starve to death on his brain or an avowed socialist? If the elite defended him against some of these people it's because of how incredibly embarrassing they are.
aqouta
2mo ago
I think the consensus view here is that people should be treated specially for the sole reason of being white instead of any personal qualifications.
This is just consensus building in reverse. No, these positions are not the consensus, no I'm not going to prove a negative that there is some other consensus. We don't have a consensus, we are a collection of individuals with wildly different beliefs.
aqouta
2mo ago
Over thinking patterns without any actual way to determine truth is at the center of my trouble with the whole trans thing. I think it's well known that at least one strand of the trans person is stereotypically a very good programmer, perhaps you hadn't encountered that meme. But it's so well known that I pretty much guessed where this story was going at this point
Anyway, at some point I noticed Mark never came in anymore
It's precisely the keen analytical mind that notices they feel a disconnection(A better word eludes me) and searches for a reason. Maybe they find god, maybe they find community in some niche, maybe they discover the concept of gender identity and ascribe their not fitting in to being the wrong gender. All these answers have a kind of new equilibrium to them and I can't confidently say they're wrong. But I do know the appeal. Landing on belief in one's trans identity to explain your dislocation has this feature that even after transition you have any number of handy explanations for why you don't quite feel right. The important thing isn't alleviating the disconnection, it's finding an explanation for it, not having an explanation it what was really eating them up. They can handle anything so long as they can put a label on it and gain that little bit of control.
You're just describing conflict theory from the inside view. The essence of conflict theory is saying things you don't believe as means to an end rather than to reach understanding. You can think conflict theory is good and normal, it is, but there is no way to describe knowingly saying wrong things on purpose as mistake theory.
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