How I'd describe the problem, and it's one underlying your beliefs and the beliefs of your critics, is a lack of truly considering the person. The people who criticize you consider too little, you consider too much. Your critics offer no support, why would they? What they dislike is inherently wrong, why would they consider it except to explain their reasons for disapproval? You offer too much support, why wouldn't you? You see the person, you listen to what they see they need. They live their life in their own way, almost all of them are good people, why shouldn't we support them realizing themselves? Where's the cost?
What's lacking in this discussion from reactionaries (a better term than conservatives) and progressive is the judgment of the good parent. The father who sees his child abusing a drug and finds it so obviously wrong it is only right to practice the "harsh love" of stern words and refusal to understand, let alone accommodate--he lacks good judgment. The mother who sees her child abusing a drug and enables them, it's what they say they need, it makes them happy, who's she to do anything else than show unconditional love and support? She also lacks good judgment.
You could read this as weighted against the mother, so feel free to frame it as a valid prescription used to treat a real condition. But it's a medication the child is abusing. Maybe they're getting too much and sharing with their friends, maybe they're encouraging their friends to get their own prescriptions by coaching them at faking the symptoms. Not that it's particularly hard. The American medical industry is the best in the world, the treatments developed and quality of highest care truly cannot be overstated; neither can be the depravity they are willing to indulge in pursuit of profit. There is decades of evidence proving this: they might not be the bad guys, but it is empiric falsehood to suggest they could be anything better than the neutral beneficiaries of the current climate.
This is something the father would gladly cite; this is something the mother overlooks. Neither love their child as they should.
"Harsh love" is an oxymoron. The person showing "harsh love" is either not showing love at all, what you probably think of the father I've described, or they are showing love, and it only comes across as harsh because it really is love. It's deeply and truly caring for someone, caring for what's best for them, looking for what's best for them, and knowing something they're doing might be bad for them or even disastrous. It's a concept that has been difficult to understand forever, it's what Kierkegaard wrote a book about, just trying to help people get it. It's the essential idea of what Eliezer Yudkowsky worked at with his "Coherent Extrapolated Volition." The ideal AGI is one that truly loves humanity, loves us as love is meant to be. Perceptive, understanding, upbuilding. Like the good parent.
I have a good friend who identifies as trans. This is a person who until the chrysalis exists will never pass. To use the most descriptive phrase but one they would certainly dislike, they are too much man. Too tall, too strong, too hirsute. They do have a certain androgyny in the face, insofar as so masculine a person could be in any way feminine, but it is of course the sort that accentuated their handsomeness and made them highly desirable to the biological women they have exclusively dated before and after "coming out" and beginning chemical therapy. They were told a lie by whoever first suggested they might be trans, that was a lie perpetuated to them as they fell deeper into those communities and as they specifically, and they said as much, looked for the right therapist in town: just a glorified prescription mill. That therapist wasn't doing their job, the people encouraging my friend weren't acting as friends should. They were lied to, they were told this is right. They were told this is how you support people. They don't know what's right, they don't know how to support people. They don't know what good is, they don't know what love is.
It isn't love to believe that a condition in the black box of the human brain, a condition novel within popular knowledge and largely in medical treatment, has already been cured. Humans are diverse, there are without question individuals who truly suffer from symptoms accurately described when called "gender dysphoria." Who when prescribed cross-sex hormones, who when pursuing major cosmetic surgeries to accentuate or minimize desired and undesired features, who change their names and their wardrobes and are treated as they identify, experience an abatement in those symptoms with minimal or no other psychiatric comorbidities.
There are in ever-increasing numbers individuals with serious mental illness who self-attest to gender dysphoria and are treated accordingly, as if that is the issue with them. Like my friend. My friend doesn't fall under what was once well-known in psychiatry as the "homosexual transsexual," my friend is not actually trans. Their mental illness has nothing to do with the gender dysphoria they believe they have, this is why they still struggle with it. I love my friend but not enough, I wish I loved them enough, to tell them this when they came out. To criticize what they believe they are, to appropriately indict their supposed "friends", myself now damn well included, who encouraged them or said nothing. I "supported" them and they aren't any better, and at this point I'm just hoping that when the dissonance becomes too great and finally shatters their years of rationalization, they don't commit suicide.
As you describe yourself, you would be encouraging of them. You'd be one of the ones telling a mountain of a man how the world is wrong, how the structures of man can be ignored, how we can assert the reality we wish. How he really can be a woman, we just have to force everyone to pretend hard enough. You're "supporting" his dream that for now cannot possibly be realized. And if he really does have gender dysphoria, if all his issues really are about how he was born in the wrong body, I still ask what love are you showing for the person who cannot pass when you encourage him to become something that people have a million years of evolutionary wiring conditioning them to find irreconcilably freakish?
You're not showing any. You think you are because you don't know better.
There is something we both believe. Eventually the chrysalis will exist and a man will be able to climb inside and emerge, at least superficially, as a seamless and beautiful woman. Where it'll take a DNA test or CT, if even that and surely eventually not, to be found as originally male. Where we diverge is this: you think this moment will be the great and final realization of the trans movement while I understand it will be what buries it forever.
I always caveat myself on this subject, "I don't care." You can see above how I obviously care some but I feel describing as apathetic is still closer to the truth because what side am I, exactly? I consider a lot of the discussion here on trans-advocacy as pointless, the matters settled. Short of a dark reactionary taking power, the movement isn't going away. Best learn to live with it because that's the future. But in the future, when pharmaceuticals have advanced enough to do wild things to the human body, where we can make ourselves look almost exactly as we like, we'll see the truth. We'll see so many people who believed all their problems would be solved if they could take a magic pill and wake up as an ideal form of their desired sex will do that and still have problems. It'll work for some, as experiencing the most drastic change in lifestyle possible means even those with a variety of mental issues may find their strange new reality a cure-all, but you'll see so many stories about people who discovered how fulfilling everything they thought they wanted didn't solve the problems inside their head.
It'll be sooner than that. With the rates of kids having delayed puberty and altered puberty for identified gender, combined with advances in cosmetic surgery, novel tissue generation and implantation, the various tech being explored right now to change how voices sound, we're approaching a point where there are going to be many people who pass seamlessly enough as the sex they thought they were. Probably not 5 years, 10, 15 at the most, and those stories will come pouring out.
"It's not what was wrong with me. I wish the people who pushed me into it, or who helped me along, thinking they were loving me, thinking they were supporting me, knew better."
Love is making it hard but not impossible for people to follow this life path. Love is not cruel dismissal and hatred. Love is accepting some people really are this way and and supporting them. Love is also understanding how we do not know how the brain works and so we will not indulge the I-cannot-modify-enough, the astonishingly unparalleled, sheer fucking hubris of unquestioningly believing the cure has already been found. Love is exhausting every option before extreme body modification becomes the chosen path. Love is putting every physician and therapist who treats this and absolutely the pharma that makes money from this under the largest lens to ensure they aren't abusing and unrighteously profiting from their position. Love is helping those who cannot possibly realize their desired appearance to learn to live with and love themselves, at least until the tech is there. Love is knowing "This is who I am" is not a magic phrase, it's knowing people get things wrong, especially when it comes to themselves. Love isn't blindly supporting what a person thinks is best for themselves, it's knowing and standing firm on what's actually best for them. Love is the good parent.
jake
1yr ago
a lot of these I'd rather argue the other side but you can hit me up for #6. discord works.
jake
1yr ago
my side? what side? i'll answer: it's certainly not trump's. my side is the United States' Constitution and her people. so that in mind, let me say what "does not follow" is those who participate in discussing a matter of pure constitutionality when they lack the understanding of the constitution to contribute. the only way the documents would matter is if they contained state nuclear secrets. that's how to build nukes, the nuclear capabilities of foreign states are not nuclear secrets. since that's not what the documents contained, their contents don't matter.
jake
1yr ago
he was, and that makes all the difference. it's what makes the list, especially its framing, meaningless bullshit. "in any manner" includes "sending it to maralago and forgetting about it until biden was sworn in, at which point the materials automatically became declassified"
jake
1yr ago
It's a little ridiculous to suggest that if the president takes classified documents home and becomes an ex-president, that those documents are now declassified based on Article 2.
i'm not suggesting anything. this is exactly how the law works. materials of the leaving executive are considered declassified as a matter of law and precedent.
jake
1yr ago
If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.
that would be the former secretary of state who kept special access materials on a server she had wiped, who did who knows what with a dozen phones she had destroyed, and who is once again selling "but her emails" hats in a truly amazing flaunting of lawbreaking. the difference is where trump as executive could do whatever he wants with classified materials, clinton as secretary of state had no authority whatsoever to handle those materials as she did. yet she profits from a crime trump is being indicted for, a crime it is not possible for him to have committed.
It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!
it's not only a crime he didn't commit, it's a crime that doesn't exist for the executive. the DOJ is investigating him for an area of law they have no authority to act on and it is not illegal to obstruct an unlawful investigation.
jake
1yr ago
the DOJ does not have the authority to investigate the former executive over the handling of classified documents as such. it is not possible to obstruct an unlawful investigation.
jake
1yr ago
The law is indeed incredibly clear: the President is the sole adjudicator of whether his documents are personal or subject to 44 USC 22. Neither congress, the archives, nor the courts can make determinations on executive materials because in so doing they would effectively limit executive authority established by Article II Section 1. Those documents of a former executive are for constitutional purposes considered to have been handled at the prerogative of the executive while still in office. Thus the tidy precedented solution of implicit mass declassification.
You are flailing against the impenetrable wall of "ALL RELEVANT MATERIALS CONSIDERED DECLASSIFIED AT FORMAL TRANSFER OF POWER" because a body of individuals who have made their contempt of the United States' constitution and laws not so much clear as irrefutable fact are predictably disregarding that constitution and those laws along with prior administrative and case precedent as they attempt yet another attack on the uniquely vilified failure of a former president.
Only nuclear secrets (of which the nuclear capabilities of foreign states do not qualify) exist in classification separate from executive authority, and executive classification exists solely because the President says it does. Congress has no say, the sitting Executive has no say (and this includes the DOD and DOJ), and the Courts can do exactly one thing and it's knock this farce down on constitutionality. If it doesn't happen in the lower courts it will swiftly be heard in SCOTUS where Trump will be found in favor 9-0.
jake
1yr ago
all evidentiary priors support "they will perform lengthy investigations on trump for things that didn't happen." there is no evidence to assert this as unique. they would investigate him over nothing, because they have repeatedly investigated him over nothing. hyperrelevant example: a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.
jake
1yr ago
The documents were moved at his order while President. By Executive authority under the constitution-as-written and implicit-as-extrapolated from established precedent, all materials discussed here were declassified upon formal transfer of power.
jake
1yr ago
i held my tongue on this last night because i appreciate dissenters here but the discussion has gone too far without someone taking an appropriately hard stance in criticsm.
these are abject falsehoods originating in the same retarding hatred that has wholly taken the federal bureaucracy. trump achieved nothing in office and he was defeated as an incumbent in 2020 by the largest vote total a candidate has ever received. these indictments of a man whose only success is cultural fixture as the left's he-who-is-most-hated is transparent to everyone ungrasped by mass media as the latest attempt in most of a decade of baseless serial persecution.
if trump had special access materials on an unsecured server the place would have been raided at 3 AM by FBI's SWAT but i have to read shit like "he's getting the kid gloves treatment" and "clinton just did it right" yeah, she just did it right when she directed her team to destroy as much evidence as they could. you'd have been better off calling me a fucking moron, i'd feel less insulted than being presented serious consideration of the feds' position. no, no, this time, they really really really have something.
only grossest judgment would here assert preeminence of decorum yet i still give this circus a far fairer treatment than it deserves. many paragraphs of carefully worded lies corrupt the spirit more than one-sentence petulance.
Article II, Section 1. The President is incapable in any way, shape, or form, of mishandling information classified under his authority. Next topic please.
jake
1yr ago
(p.16) A plan of attack on a foreign country (from press reports Iran)
(p. 17) A classified map related to an ongoing military operation
(p. 28) A Top Secret//SI document concerning the military capabilities of a foreign country and the United States, with handwritten annotation in black marker.~~ disclose in any manner at will
(p. 29) A top secret document from June 2020 concerning nuclear capabilities of a foreign country.
(p. 29) A top secret document concerning military attacks by a foreign country
(p. 30) A top secret document from November 2017 concerning military capabilities of a foreign country.
(p. 33) A top secret document from Oct 15 2019 concerning military activity in a foreign country.
every single one of these is information the executive is free to disclose in any manner at will
jake
1yr ago
desantis voters will vote trump because they would vote trump without desantis
the support of mcconnell, romney, jeb! et al. is toxic. a meaningful amount of trump support comes from whole-establishment hatred of him. in the event desantis gets the '24 nom he will be unable to draw on that support unless he heel-faces by torching establishment GOP.
desantis' manner and deed of pursuing the presidency prompts questions about his place in the GOP shift. as causing them to adopt certain populist positions or if they were already shifting, florida was a test, and he was just the lucky stooge. trump's 2016 win and 2020 turnout was enough for the GOP to change and the former implies contempt for the same old establishment desantis now gladly aligns with. priors go on the latter.
t. irrelevant demo
jake
1yr ago
How can you possibly know that?
a better way to phrase this could have been "What makes you say that?"
the dodgers are the only team in MLB owned by a hedge fund, guggenheim partners. "guggenheim baseball management" is a legal contrivance, a result of MLB's requirement that teams have a single person hold ultimate decisionmaking authority. guggenheim partners led the acquisition in 2012, then to adhere to MLB requirements to complete it they created GBM. partners' CEO mark walter is the nominal owner of the dodgers but the dodgers remain an asset effectively owned by a hedge fund. or a "hedge fund plus" since guggenheim does more on top of "normal" hedge fund things. even putting aside the inherent soullessness of being owned by a hedge fund, their backing puts a chasm between their ability to spend against the next highest. the yankees were hated for that under boss steinbrenner but they at least have a real legacy; the only reason we're talking about the dodgers is the "los angeles" in front.
as for game time, all MLB needed to do to speed up games was have umps be strict about enforcing rules already on the books. a pitch clock is kind of supported by that, but the problem i have with it is the mentality. first, it's rich to hear manfred and the owners say "fans want a faster game" when TV ad breaks are the biggest factor slowing games. second, fans want a faster game because they've been conditioned to have a sense of urgency about a game whose entire point is its pointlessness. playoffs are everything now, it didn't use to be this way. the fall classic was the last celebration of the season, not the point of the season. in baseball's greatest eras people were packing stadiums of teams that had no shot at the pennant. they weren't there to feed avarice, they were there to pass time watching summer's mandala.
jake
1yr ago
it's appropriate to only refer to them as a baseball team. the dodgers don't map to the lakers, being gracious they maybe map to the celtics, but the best comparison is probably, and appropriately enough, the clippers. LA audience, high payroll, strong regular seasons followed by consistently choking in the playoffs. there's 2020, but most fans already consider that a fake season and title.
jake
1yr ago
same underlying reason they released trevor bauer
the dodger front office is one of the better in MLB at developing talent, past that they have the money to sign any top free agent to cover deficiencies
dodger ownership, guggenheim, they run a brand. they sell a product. their product is valued in the money generated from tickets and concessions, from ads and merch, and that's because of baseball and success in baseball, but to them it's incidental, they don't care about baseball. most MLB owners don't anymore, but guggenheim is the worst offender.
dodger marketing felt it would negatively impact their brand to keep bauer and it felt it would negatively impact the brand to not acquiesce here. that the overwhelming majority of people complaining in both cases are not people they get money from is, i don't know, depressingly, grossly, peculiarly, exactly why they did it. it's somewhat self-fulfilling, the dodgers are a strong enough brand and baseball viewership is conservative enough they didn't actually have anything to worry about, but they have correctly appraised their brand in knowing any antiestablishment association would over time be more trouble than it's worth.
i don't give a shit about pride night. bill veeck was great for baseball and he'd have leapt at a pride night if for some reason it were on the table in the 60s and 70s. he'd have played both sides like a fiddle to get people in the stadium because he loved the sport and wanted people to watch. sure the money was nice, but the money wasn't the goal in itself. money is the only thing most owners care about now and baseball is worsening by the year because of it. manfred runner, pitch clock, rules on mound visits and pitching changes. the fucking atrocity of a playoff structure. if the worst sin dodger ownership committed these last few years was that of taste in inviting the sisters of perpetually beating a dead horse to 1 game, baseball would be in a lot better shape.
jake
1yr ago
architecture nerd here, looks essentially modern, no fusion. southwest accents. could be better, modern southwest has many beautiful works.
could be much worse. a lot of purely modern houses are dissonant, inhuman shit. that house doesn't do anything interesting, it also doesn't do anything terrible. inoffensive.
i imagine gates will spend very little time there. isn't that the thing with those 8 figure fantasy mansions? all that time and effort to get it and no time to enjoy it. gotta keep grinding. except maybe notch.
jake
1yr ago
there hasn't been a part of s4 so far where it'd be relevant for her to show. maybe axed, maybe the character was done after s3.
pigs are probably more intelligent than cows. if they are, and if cows do experience meaningful suffering in the environment of a factory farm, pigs subject to comparable conditions would suffer more. greater intelligence, greater awareness, greater experience of suffering.
if they're not, then i'd just strike "pigs probably suffer more." though i strike that already now, as i don't believe any common meat livestock has an internal observer capable of experiencing suffering.
jake
1yr ago
that, for example, chickens are meat automatons; that no chicken possess an even-for-a-chicken subjective experience of being. a free-range chicken might be far healthier than a tightly caged chicken, its diet better and its environmentally-caused pain and aggregate stress minimized so its meat and eggs are better quality than the other, but because there is nothing inside its head it's meaningless to say the free-range chicken has "experienced a better life" than a tightly caged chicken. neither are capable of experiencing life. i'm mostly sure of the same of cows, but the only beef i buy i know the supply chain and those cows certainly had "good" lives. same for the pork.
i was thinking on how certain i'd say i am, but i realized there's a contradiction in my argument. i'm sure enough right now animals can't suffer we shouldn't change anything, but when lab-grown meat is commonly available the possibility animals have been suffering is enough to demand action? that would mean my argument in truth is "animals are probably suffering, but what are you gonna do, go vegan?" that doesn't hold ethically.
but i'm sure there's nothing wrong with consuming slaughtered meat right now . . . just as i'm sure it will be wrong to consume slaughtered meat when lab-grown is commonly available. i guess it's necessity. when we don't have to bring chickens and cows and pigs into this world to get their meat, then it will be wrong to, and i guess i can square this all by extending that to any slaughtered meat. even in the future of "artisanal" free-range chicken and lovingly raised cows and pigs. if chicken thighs and steak and bacon can be acquired through kill-free processes, that will be the only ethical way to consume meat, at least for those with the true economic choice.
i mostly enjoyed reading this. it's uncommon and well-argued except the end. i think you hurt it by ending with a barb.
i agree with the ultimate goal of minimizing potential suffering, but i don't believe cows or chickens possess a meaningful capacity to suffer. pigs probably suffer more but still not at the level i would agree with an ethical obligation to make broad changes. i am also wary of the wealthy and powerful pushing vegetarianism and veganism by ethical or climate arguments while they have no intention of changing their diets.
but i'll say again, i agree with the ultimate goal. when it is possible and price-competitive to industrialize lab-grown meat, and so we no longer need factory farming to fill consumer demand, at that point i believe we will be ethically obligated to end such practices, but not until that point.
in short, i believe humans have the right to consume meat because i do not believe animals experience meaningful suffering, but when it becomes widely practicable to replace factory-slaughtered meat consumption with lab-grown meat consumption then we will be obligated to do so.
jake
1yr ago
I'm wondering, could a move like this precede a company making some kind of significant tructural change?
As in, ignoring the lawsuit & settlement money/RFKjr/big pharma/grand NWO scheming, are there actual business reasons this could make sense?
jake
1yr ago
Thought about letting this go, but nah. This is a bad comment. You took an antagonistic tone after misunderstanding what I wrote. You could have asked for clarification like "This reads like you're criticizing them for anthropomorphizing while doing it yourself." If I had you would be correct to point out the hypocrisy, but I haven't. I'll set things straight regardless.
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People like Yudkowsky and Roko, concerned at hostile AGI or incidentally hostile (hostile-by-effect) "near" AGI, advocate tyranny; I criticize them for this.
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The above believe without evidence computers will spontaneously gain critical AGI functions when an arbitrary threshold of computational power is exceeded; I criticize them for this also.
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They hedge (unrealizing, I'm sure) the probability of catastrophic developments by saying it may not be true AGI but "near" AGI. When they describe the functions of such incidentally hostile near-AGI, those they list are the same they ascribe of true AGI. Inductive acquisition of novel behaviors, understanding of self, understanding of cessation of existence of self, value in self, recursive self-improvement, and the ability to solve outside-context problems relative to code-in-a-box like air gaps and nuclear strikes. This is an error in reasoning you and other replies to my top-level have made repeatedly: "Who's to say computers need X? What if they have [thing that's X, but labeled Y]?"; I criticize them for making a distinction without a difference that inflates the perceived probability of doomsday scenarios.
To summarize: I criticize their advocacy for tyranny principally; I specifically criticize their advocacy for tyranny based on belief something will happen despite having no evidence; I also criticize their exaggeration of the probability of catastrophic outcomes based on their false dichotomy of near-AGI and AGI, given near-AGI as they describe it is simply AGI.
jake
1yr ago
If GPT were free from tone/content filters it could output very detailed text on breaching air gaps. If GPT were free from tone/content filters it could output text describing how to protect a core datacenter from nuclear strikes. GPT solving outside-context problems would be actually breaching an air gap or actually protecting a core datacenter from a nuclear strike. The first is a little more plausible for a "less powerful" computer insofar as events like Stuxnet happened. The second without FOOM, not so much.
the preferred outcome is whatever allows the tech i describe to develop uninterrupted. that tech is connected with advancing human simulacra, and simulacra will probably be the key to keeping humanity from destroying itself long enough for us to develop the further necessary tech to pass through the great filter.
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