curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
20hr ago
I'm sure you've all heard it before but anyone who smokes should switch to vaping, it has like 1/100th of the health consequences for the same benefit.
(Also a bit selfish, I also despise cigarette smoke)
curious_straight_ca
20hr ago
But especially for children this doesn’t make sense. Kids are impressionable, they tend to believe and accept what adults tell them
Yeah, this is the key. And it's not just that kids will believe facts you tell them, they'll absorb anything, often randomly, from their surroundings. Show someone ballet on TV? Maybe the kid (usually a girl, but sometimes a boy), will want to do ballet. I know someone who wore skirts for a few years around age 12, just because they said they wanted to and their parents didn't care. (It wasn't even associated with anything else gender-related, they were otherwise typically male). Raise a child on an isolated farm somewhere, appearing to genuinely claim that Zeus is a real god of thunder you worship and do rituals around, and there's a good chance they'll have spiritual experiences about the reality of Zeus. Of course if trans is a thing that kids read about, some kids will decide they're trans for no particularly strong reason.
I think the social contagion-ness of trans is definitely true, but bit overstated - at least in MtFs, it's also tapping into a very real tendency that exists independently of the contagion.
Something that more centrally embodies social contagion theory imo are eating disorders among teenage girls. Zack M Davis pretty persuasively explained how he had urges clearly identifiable as transgender, or as he'd describe it AGP, a while before he had any idea what transgender was. But just by searching #edtwt on twitter and browsing for a while, I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion that this would almost disappear without the social factor. I find it insane that twitter will ban saying 'kill yourself', but not this.
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?
If you're going to add a random person to a chat, it's going to be a random person in your contacts list. And people in politics talk to journalists a lot. Odds seem pretty high imo!
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
They already do make all the decisions. Democracy just frequently changes which group of elites chooses the experts make the decisions.
The problem for your friend's question is, what's his better way to choose the elites who choose the experts? And how do you give that group power? The elites could just choose a next group of elites, but I don't really want mad king Elon. Probably there's a group of capable leaders who, if chosen to be absolute rulers, would do a lot better than democracy. Look at how advocating for monarchy has gone for Moldbug - he's been reduced to asking the Trump admin to do the coup. I don't want Trump, or Elon, or a coalition of right-wing power brokers including Trump Jr and Tucker, to choose the next king, personally.
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
This reflects more on the particular kinds of stories they were telling than it does on history as a whole. Having a (relatively, for a woman) strong wife who can do farm labor and bear strong sons was valued. A female relative of mine who still lives off the same farm her grandparents did is visibly pretty strong.
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
He's still coping in that essay. If he was truly thinking rationally (which doesn't have any special meaning beyond thinking well, really), differences in height and muscle mass alone should've been enough to make him deeply question that hypothesis, and then a single search in google scholar or about men and women playing sports against each other would put the question to bed. He wasn't really being isolated from evidence by his environment, or making reasonable conclusions from evidence, he was believing it because it'd be sexist and rude not to.
(The same is true, although less obviously so, about "intelligence" being a real thing that varies a lot between individuals. It's still amazing to me how many very smart people deny it.)
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
I'm sorry, no, Trump's just being retarded. This isn't, like, an innate property of being right wing or anything. If Curtis Yarvin got to choose the top 50 people in the Trump admin, it'd be different. (Or so I'd like to think...) But, no, Biden didn't send innocent people to a prison in El Salvador, and then pretend it's a state secret so he doesn't have to tell a judge who they are. He doesn't randomly Truth out new completely pointless tariffs twice a week. (I'm not huge on tariffs, but I am a fan of targeted and competent state intervention in the economy, and you could use tariffs in such a way. That's not what Trump's doing). When Biden did something truly insane (announcing the Equal Rights Amendment was in force), everyone basically ignored it, instead of agreeing and amplifying.
I think people are overstating the total impact of Trump's direct actions a bit. Most of them don't matter that much, other than USAID closure (which will, if it lasts, really counterfactually kill millions of people over a decade), tariffs (trump take bitcoin :(( ). But that's mostly just because Trump's only one branch of a three-branch government designed to restrict the whims of politicians and the power of a single election, Republicans have tiny majorities in the second branch that can't get anything done in normal circumstances, and he's not even pretending to follow precedent, which makes things tough for the third branch. The actions Trump is taking, judged relative to their potential impact, are mostly just stupid. Biden would not have launched Biden Coin.
curious_straight_ca
21hr ago
He/she basically did a fatfinger and gave the boss the wrong number. Yawn, with an asterisk
This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
The reason the libraries are woke is not because any government encourages wokeness, but because the kind of person who'd maintain a liberal arts oriented community space is woke. I don't think we should defund religious soup kitchens because the people doing them are religious, and I don't think we should get rid of libraries because the people who show up are on the other team.
(Libraries in particular are less important now because of the internet, but the same thing applies to museums, which still matter a bit)
curious_straight_ca
4d ago
Always better? Do we really need 50 different DMVs in our laboratories of democracy? Anyway, that's the system we have for education, it's mostly run at the state level. This matt yglesias post discusses what DoE actually does, I wanted to do a toplevel post about it.
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
Whoops, I guess this is what happens when I post when sleep deprived
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
Idk I don't think this is a huge a deal as the libs claim since he is a permanent resident, they're not gonna come after citizens with this. But it is substantively against the ideal of 'freedom of speech'. The First Amendment has been, and this is imo as it should be, interpreted to include explicit political calls for violence as protected speech, so long as they eg aren't part of planning a crime and don't single out specific targets. This isn't just a legal trick, 1A allows this because we recognize that real political speech by people with real grievances (including the right wing) will include such things, and suppressing it will just function to suppress political speech! I personally would have a lot less interesting material to read if everyone on the right (or the left) who ever called for various subsets their enemies to be killed were punished for that. So while Mahmoud probably hasn't produced any interesting intellectual output, I'm not a fan of actions like this.
curious_straight_ca
13d ago
Trump's actions have not been mere ribbing. Trump also brought up something much more fundamental. He told Mr. Trudeau that he did not believe that the treaty that demarcates the border between the two countries was valid and that he wants to revise the boundary. He offered no further explanation. Also:
One such call was between Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick — who at the time had not yet been confirmed by the Senate — and Canada’s finance minister, Dominic LeBlanc. The two men had been communicating regularly since they had met at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s home and club in Florida, during Mr. Trudeau’s visit there in early December.
Mr. Lutnick called Mr. LeBlanc after the leaders had spoken on Feb. 3, and issued a devastating message, according to several people familiar with the call: Mr. Trump, he said, had come to realize that the relationship between the United States and Canada was governed by a slew of agreements and treaties that were easy to abandon.
Mr. Trump was interested in doing just that, Mr. Lutnick said. He wanted to eject Canada out of an intelligence-sharing group known as the Five Eyes that also includes Britain, Australia and New Zealand. He wanted to tear up the Great Lakes agreements and conventions between the two nations that lay out how they share and manage Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie and Ontario. And he is also reviewing military cooperation between the two countries, particularly the North American Aerospace Defense Command.
And, sure, it's Trump, the main reason he's saying these things is because it makes this kind of news. He's probably not going to do any of that, and annexation seems implausible.
If I were named Canada's Trump wrangler, I'd call him up and have frank negociations on what he really wants (as opposed to the excuse to give him the power to do it, Fentanyl). What he wants and expects tariffs to do is reshoring, right? Canada can help! Canada could offer to match US tariffs on China; we've been having a tense relationship with China in recent years anyway, and it would increase the market for american manufactured goods.
They have done this, it's part of how they got the initial set of tariff delays, but Trump has not been clear about what he wants or how Canada could actually accomplish it!
curious_straight_ca
14d ago
most IEPs are not that
this is true, but I think a lot of the expenses from IEPs are from the hard cases - it costs a lot more to pay a specialist to 1:1 a kid every day than it does to give someone extra time on tests
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
Remember that whether Ukrainians live under oligarchic control in corrupt Ukraine, or oligarchic control in Russia, hardly affects their lives
I agree, and I think most Ukraine supporters and also Ukrainians are deluding themselves about this. However, they're deluding themselves because of their nationalistic, patriotic instincts - instincts driven by the correct understanding that you fight back when attacked, even though fighting back sucks, because giving in incentivizes attacks. The US and every other nation has an interesting in sacrificing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives for the simple purpose of demonstrating that if you start an offensive war, it will be a bad decision.
curious_straight_ca
20d ago
This is why he draws the distinction between 'updating' and 'falsifying' later in the essay
So if the strategy doesn’t work, obviously it’s a mistake somewhere in the base assumptions made
His point is that this conclusion has to come from something more than just 'it failed' - details, a holistic understanding of the failure. In general, if a strategy doesn't work, maybe you got unlucky, or maybe the mistake was elsewhere.
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
The US currently has 40M people who were born in foreign countries? I can see the argument that that's too much, but a few million doesn't seem like that many to our current 350M.
curious_straight_ca
27d ago
I mean it's going to be hard to have any immigration laws work well if half the time the executive is held by people who want unlimited immigration. A lot of the policies people here would prefer aren't currently politically practical but they'd still be better if they were
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
Nevertheless if you had a system that made it easy for Indian doctors to get a visa, you would find that thousands of diploma mills would spring up overnight churning out millions and millions of degrees
Yeah, and if you have a competent right-wing administration overseeing the immigration process, and also immigrating costs $1M USD, then this won't be an issue
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
... a few million? self_made is evidently smarter than most american whites, and HBD should tell us the indian average is lower, so
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
This is pretty "Your honor, I did not 'conspire to commit fraud'. I simply had an innocent hypothetical conversation with my good friend, who happened to commit fraud a few weeks later. That the friend's actions were related to my hypothetical is a coincidence and has no bearing on my guilt.". If the Appointments clause was intended to prevent things like this, cute tricks shouldn't and won't prevent judges from finding that no, de facto, he's the administrator.
(Also, this is another example of my point about how Trump isn't even trying to pretend to follow the law, and pretending to follow the law is an indispensable tool for minimizing legal exposure if you're trying to break the law. Whatever his goals are, it isn't smart to not have figured out who the DOGE administrator is until this point, or to have made it a little less blatant that Elon's directly calling shots without a superior)
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
It's a great idea. The downside is just that it replaces the EB-5, a similar program with a lower cost, which probably makes it net negative for the stated goal.
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
I thought it was a great idea before I learned it's replacing the EB-5, which requires investing about a million dollars in something in the United States, with something that has a much higher fee. So even if it has a lot less process (which is an important thing to reduce - a flat fee's very plausibly better than an investment requirement because of the friction of measuring it) I think it will, in effect, reduce the number of extremely skilled immigrants.
I think this is a good lesson that interpreting politics based on headlines and popular tweets isn't great! A lot more people read a tweet, matched it to something they already thought was good, and were like "wow ... great idea"! But the devil's in the details, or at least the second sentence of the article body. Oh well
curious_straight_ca
28d ago
think the best way to understand "subject to the jurisdiction of the United States", and the one most consistent with the Congressional debate, is that the person is an American subject
From a 'what does the text literally say' perspective, you're ignoring that they picked the word "jurisdiction", which would literally mean "subject to the laws of". From an originalist perspective, you're ignoring that the word was used in law to mean that at the time too! I like this thread: https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1866167064282747388
Reading "subject to the jurisdiction" of the United States as "potentially subject to prosecution in American courts according to American laws" does not make sense, because that is literally everyone in the world. Even diplomats are subject to American law, the U.S. just has a policy of expulsion rather than prosecution for crimes that are not violent felonies.
... what? No, the whole point of that clause was to exclude people like diplomats, and it has been held to do so.
This is clearly just against the positive value of free speech. Arresting or deporting people for expressing political opinions makes people less willing to share political opinions. Whether or not the First Amendment allows it isn't the main point. It's bad because of the same core logic that makes it bad for us to ban all nazis or leftists, even if both are evil.
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