magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
No bio...
User ID: 1103
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
3hr ago
I'll offer that record as an example: very few right wingers happy to rail against TikTok at the time of the original comment are still upset over it, and even fewer will acknowledge out loud why they're no longer upset about it, and I doubt even a few will acknowledge the Gell-Mann amnesia implications of their favorite "heterodox" writers forgetting about TikTok once they paid off Trump.
I'll admit to being somewhat peeved about people here going "well, this particular accusation against TikTok is dubious, so banning the site is bad". But rightists aren't quite as monolithic as you think; there is a monolith behind Trump, certainly, but there are a bunch of others in the tent.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over. That would be the government and corporate bureaucracies that actually implement cancellations.
I think we're largely in agreement. I called it the high ground because it's relatively hard to conquer, because as the legible-qualification-providing institution it can fairly-effectively gatekeep a large number of professions with power (i.e. bureaucrats, middle managers, executives, lawyers, and less-directly schoolteachers), and because as the legible-fact-providing institution it's hard to stop listening to it without getting stuck in a whirlpool of insane delusion and losing effectiveness. It is, indeed, not the prize being fought over... but it's a mountain directly overlooking it. Cf. Moldbug: "Ideas check out of the university, but they hardly ever check in."
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7hr ago
· Edited 7hr ago
I'm not so sure, I kind of doubt Social Media's broader impact on the conversation, because the testimony to it always seems one sided.
As a sort of one-and-a-half-sided attempt (i.e. I am opposed to SJ, but this is something that anti-SJ did via social media), I think Musk buying Twitter and gutting Trust & Safety is the likely key component of Trump's election win based on the demographic breakdown showing the swing being extremely concentrated among the young (which I hypothesise to be from the breakdown of the false SJ consensus created by silencing everyone who didn't fit).
EDIT: I didn't realise this was so old when I posted, although I'll leave it up as an example of "new evidence".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8hr ago
· Edited 8hr ago
Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy. I'm not saying it definitely will make a comeback in the next few years - it's no longer got either stealth or an aura of inevitability, and that's a big deal - but it's premature to definitively say it's peaked; I'll believe it's decisively defeated when the SJ party here in Australia (the Greens) either falls below 10% of the vote or recants its hair-raising "let's ban politicians from taking anti-SJ positions" policy (relevant part's on page 5).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
Ukraine could build a crude nuclear bomb within months, similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped in Nagasaki, from spent plutonium
They could do it, but the description (what I can see of it before the paywall) undersells the difficulty. You can't just reprocess "spent" fuel and get weapons-grade plutonium; you get plutonium, but too much of it is 240Pu and 242Pu, which cause predetonation, and your bomb fizzles. You need "fresh" fuel that's only been in the reactor a few weeks. You also need a reprocessing plant; it appears Ukraine doesn't have one, and it's not like Zelensky can go to Western Europe and say "here's some fuel, please extract the weapons-grade plutonium and give it back to me" (the NPT specifically prohibits doing that, not that they would anyway), so they'd have to build one; "months" would be an optimistic estimate there (on the plus side for them, they can put in fresh fuel for weapons production right away, so there's no extra time lag from that), particularly since if the Russians notice such a plant being constructed it's going to eat All Of The Missiles.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2d ago
But some people's intense romantic fixations can lead them to behave in extremely unhealthy ways which violate the boundaries of the object of their affection: repeatedly texting them, calling them or buying them gifts when they've made it perfectly clear they aren't interested; following them; bothering them in public places; sending them hateful messages; and (much more rarely, of course) physically intimidating or assaulting the object of their affection, or their current romantic partner. We call such a person a "stalker", and much of the aforementioned behaviour is actually illegal (however difficult it is to enforce), and rightfully so. As sympathetic as I might be towards someone whose affections aren't reciprocated and is feeling sad about it, my sympathy ends when they engage in unacceptable behaviour like this.
I am a reactionary on this one: I think the stigmatisation of deep love and persistent suitors is something modern society has gotten badly wrong, and is a symptom of safetyism and inauthenticity. Threats and physical attacks of course have to be off-limits (though even then, there used to be far more sympathy than there is now; note that Romeo and Paris literally fight a duel to the death over Juliet, and neither's intended as an unsympathetic character), but most of the other stuff you mention in many cases is a non-issue blown up by hysterical fear and in other cases is a mild annoyance that can be trivially dealt with by blocking the stalker's number.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
Um, I think you might have linked the wrong case. Ames alleges that she was discriminated against for being straight, not for being white. I'm not even 100% sure she is white.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
as well as a recent, prominent NYT article that was critical of transing your children (unfortunately the google index seems very intent on not showing me links to the article, but has plenty of links to people talking about it.
The WaPo article you cite is from June last year, and the three NYT articles it discusses (all first result on Google for their titles) are from over two years ago.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4d ago
If you mildly irradiate some of the steel used to build the ships hull, maybe you could detect that radiation signature at the ports it has visited in order to get a better understanding of US ship movements, deployment schedules, and maintenance periods.
Radiation doesn't work that way.
Some stuff is radioactive; it emits (ionising) radiation. Exposing stuff to radiation is called "irradiating" it. Stuff that is irradiated does not itself become radioactive, with one exception I'll come back to. This is why people do things like irradiating drinking water and food to kill germs; the water/food is unchanged afterward except that all the germs are dead, and certainly isn't radioactive.
So, irradiating the steel would maybe damage the steel (which would be detectable), but the steel wouldn't then be emitting radiation. If you want steel that emits radiation, you have to mix radioactive stuff into it (ideally isotopes of the same elements the steel's supposed to be composed of; if you put plutonium in it or something, they might notice that your steel has plutonium in it when it shouldn't). And then that radioactive steel will irradiate the port, but that won't make the port radioactive; it might be detectable (though not necessarily from very far away), and it might hurt people working on the ship, but the port won't have some trace there unless the steel is corroding (which would also be detectable).
(I feel I should note that if you want data on US ship movements in peacetime, you don't need to go to this much trouble; ships other than submerged submarines are pretty easy to spot with spy satellites, and submerged submarines are radiation-shielded by the water so this plan won't work anyway. There's also the issue that because US ships usually are powered by nuclear reactors, some of the personnel will have radiation dosimeters, which will raise an alarm if the rest of the ship is radioactive for some reason.)
The exception is neutron radiation, which does cause things hit with it to become radioactive (though they don't generally then emit more neutron radiation; they emit beta and possibly gamma). The thing is, though, you generally need a lot of it to make something significantly radioactive - enough that it'll probably sicken people, because it's also highly dangerous to living beings. Sticking something in a nuclear reactor for a few days might make it noticeably radioactive, but sticking a person in a nuclear reactor for a few days (or a few minutes) will get you a corpse. Also, the only major sources of chronic neutron radiation are operating nuclear reactors and certain transplutonic elements (curium and californium) from spent nuclear fuel that undergo spontaneous fission; people will notice if you build an unshielded and undocumented nuclear reactor into a ship, and curium/californium have that issue where they are definitely not supposed to be in the steel so any chemical analysis (for e.g. QC purposes, or if it starts rusting strangely - they're both quite-reactive metals) will immediately turn up that "oh hey, some chucklehead mixed nuclear waste into the hull of our ship" (technically speaking, curium and californium are still viable fuel, but they're chucked out as waste in a lot of current reactors).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
5d ago
Here is a [reddit post of a full machine translation.]
I think you forgot to insert the link.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
· Edited 7d ago
Pepper ball guns, tazers, and lowest caliber pistols can be over-the-counter. Wilderness communities can get needs-based allocation for larger guns. And hobbyists would have to take demanding tests to qualify for the wider selection.
You know that the vast majority of gun crime is done with small-calibre pistols, right? I mean, maybe not lowest, IIRC most of it's 9mm Parabellum instead of .22LR, but generally criminals aren't looking for stopping power and range - they're looking for low noise, low cost, low recoil, and especially small size, because the use-case of career criminals is "I need this unarmoured guy 10 metres away to go away on zero notice, ideally without attracting attention" and that usually means hipfire from something that can be worn on the belt and wielded one-handed (and ideally hidden).
If you want to stay on the Pareto frontier, small-calibre pistols are the first thing to ban over-the-counter.
(Also, pistols are really convenient for suicides; longarms are less so, although not much less.)
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
7d ago
There's a very-clear argument in favour of requiring prescriptions for government-subsidised medicine, because the state has much more of an interest in people consuming appropriate medications than inappropriate ones. As it happens, I just got some drugs here in Oz that are over-the-counter legal but which are far-cheaper with a prescription.
There are some drugs that you probably don't want in the hands of the general population due to third-parties being harmed (methamphetamine because murders, plus all the various drugs to pacify people that can be abused for rape or slavery); requiring prescriptions for those appears pretty logical as well (obviously, if you buy into recreational-drug prohibition as a whole, requiring a prescription for medical use is necessary to enforce that).
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
As I said to @TokenTransGirl, this isn't really my cause area and I don't have sufficient trustworthy information to be able to opine on the big Ought questions of proper treatment. There certainly exists a population that will desist if not "supported", and there almost certainly exists a population that won't; trustworthy data on how big these two populations are and whether it's possible to distinguish between them is the key determinant of the correct answer, but it would seem extremely difficult to acquire and I certainly don't have it. Some of the experiments you'd want to run don't even seem like the experimental protocol could successfully be followed (e.g. the obvious and central "what percentage of people who want transition in current Western society will resolve positively if transition is denied long-term"; in current Western society, how are you going to stop them?), and the studies that can be (and are) done frequently have huge bias issues (in both directions, depending on the allegiance of the researchers).
On the smaller questions, I oppose pro-trans censorship (both in the academic publishing system and more generally in social spaces) and I oppose people who try to portray the anti-trans movement as being inherently senseless and hateful. No surprises there. My personal stance on pronouns is "I won't use a pronoun someone doesn't like in front of that person, but I won't intentionally use neopronouns or singular "they" under any circumstances and I occasionally won't use a he/she/it pronoun if I think it's inappropriate (e.g. if the person is clearly insane in other ways and I suspect it's just a phase/delusion); I am prepared to spam names if necessary to thread that needle" (as noted above, my position on other people using pronouns is "free speech lol"), and my stance on deadname-erasure (on e.g. Wikipedia) is "fuck off with this Orwellian shit" although I'm willing to use the new one going forward.
If you want something else, ask.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Testing.
30% vs. 90%. EDIT: backslashes don't work.
30% vs. 90%. EDIT: <plain> tags don't work. Okay, I'm stumped.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
· Edited 8d ago
Fairly-boring story TBH (which I have told elsewhere, but not IIRC anywhere that's not login-gated).
My mum's a misandrist (as in, she literally taught me the Y chromosome is a defect), she divorced my dad when I was 3 and got custody, and I'm effeminate in some ways. Fast-forward to puberty and she's accusing me of sexist abuse every time I turn around because now I start registering to her as "man" rather than "child". I developed dysphoria, wanted to transition.
Around this point, I ran away from Mum (who was not supportive of me transitioning; she was at the time a TERF although she's objected to transphobia since so I don't think she still is), because she confiscated my computer for a month and semi-starved me for a week, I ran amok and manhandled her (for the first and only time), and she called the police on me. Went on finasteride, got permission from a psychiatrist for cross-sex hormones, but procrastinated over the fertility problem long enough for the dysphoria to dissipate (and stopped taking the finasteride). Still probably qualify as "genderqueer" - I'm not exactly upset at having moobs from the finasteride - but the intense dysphoria, with phantom-limb and disgust at my penis, is gone. Hence, I qualify as ex-trans although not really a detransitioner.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
It's not an intentional strikethrough; it's ~ (tilde) symbols (meaning "approximately") before "30%" and "90%" being misinterpreted as a strikethrough by the software.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
Of him trying? Dunno, don't know his positions or conflict-comfort well enough.
Of him trying and it sticking? <10%, if nothing else he'd probably be impeached for that.
Thought about editing one of the above posts to note these but didn't get around to it.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
8d ago
I mean, you can say #1 about everything. We can never know the counterfactual of any decision we make. We still have to make decisions. And it's not like there aren't TONS of decisions out there that people DO regret.
The issue here is that one side of the trans debate controls the education system, which means that if they're right there's no systematic error here but if they're partially or wholly wrong there's a systematic error of kids underestimating desistance rates.
I'm not going to engage you on the studies; that's not really my area of expertise. I think @ArjinFerman and maybe @gattsuru might be more interesting to talk to on that one.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
By what mechanism do you think RFK would ban vaccines though?
Unless I'm misunderstanding something about the org chart, the Secretary of Health and Human Services is among other things in charge of the FDA and could order it to rescind approval, and unless I'm misunderstanding something about US law that would mean they couldn't be traded in or administered.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
I am not naturally sympathetic to criticizing policy or personnel decisions on the grounds that they "embolden" the wrong people, but I am going to make an exception here.
I think this is a much-longer bow than you need to draw to be opposed to RFK being in charge of vaccines. Because, y'know, he might defund or ban them, which would very directly suck.
Also, remember that Twitter replies will skew in favour of opposition, because there's a thumbs-up and no thumbs-down.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.
There are a few issues with convenience-sampling transfolk in trans-friendly spaces and claiming this to demonstrate effectiveness of the treatment.
- It is not clear that those kids have a correct picture of what the counterfactual actually looks like. If you have a mistaken impression of what the "no transition" picture looks like in the long run, you might be happy with the decision in spite of it being the wrong one from a god's-eye view. To quote Aslan, "no-one is ever told what would have happened".
- Selection bias: trans-friendly spaces tend to expel or repel ex-trans like myself (usually not as a deliberate choice, but as a consequence of these people usually wanting to avoid others following in their footsteps which trips the "transphobic" response); you'll tend to find them only in places like here that don't purge transphobes.
- Survivorship bias: remember that transsexuals who do transition still have a very high suicide rate; a decent chunk of the regretters just kill themselves and will be missed by even accurately sampling survivors, despite their large contributions to the utility calculation.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
9d ago
Your source says 2019-2023, not 2017-2023. The latter would only be two orders of magnitude bigger than "single digits annually".
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
10d ago
· Edited 10d ago
Notably, there is no reason for including men.
You can make an argument regarding "mother is unable to breastfeed because dead/mastectomy following breast cancer; father can't arrange a wet-nurse and thus tries to do it himself". It's a shaky argument, but it's an argument.
It is impossible for a man to give birth.
The consensus IIRC is that:
- you can implant an IVF embryo in a man's abdomen and it's capable of attaching to something (abdominal pregnancy - in women - and placenta percreta prove this);
- you can presumably take it out again via surgery, as with an abdominal pregnancy in a woman (and live babies from the latter are known).
The reasons nobody's done it are:
- nobody knows what the different blood chemistry of a man would do to the fetus;
- Placenta percreta and abdominal pregnancy are extremely dangerous due to massive bleeding and/or organ damage, and here you're talking about causing them on purpose
- post-WWII medical ethics are too restrictive to allow something with such extreme risks as this without medical necessity, and I don't see how this could plausibly be medically-necessary
- Mengele and Unit 731, who would totally have tried it anyway on Jews/Chinese, were out of the picture by the time IVF was actually achieved.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
11d ago
Well, okay then. Sorry for the confusion.
@Belisarius @jeroboam @Jiro @crushedoranges @FiveHourMarathon
I think the steelman of this argument (though a lot of steel's involved) looks something like this: select a Republican candidate who's not Donald Trump, because the backlash will be weaker and that has two major effects:
This is an argument I actually accept and have made here before. It still has some decision-theory issues, and it's Machiavellian, but this is a place where I'd be willing to compromise on that.
Now, of course, this has long since been water under the bridge. Neither Trump nor Harris was a good candidate for CW-temperature purposes, and certainly Harris would not have served conservatives' cultural purposes. I still vaguely preferred her due to Trump's advanced age, but then again I don't have to live in the 'States. But I just felt I should point out that there was at one point a version of this argument that didn't totally suck.
More options
Context Copy link