naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1d ago
I’m not sure to what extent can it even be called a culture war topic.
...
It’s like when Blue Tribers today think that...
Well, at least to that extent, right?
CW thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2d ago
...I think the case against male circumcision has been overstated by advocates and adopted by guys who were circumcized as infants and wouldn't know the difference.
It is certainly my belief that most, maybe all advocates are in the business of overstating their case, whether to make it seem more urgent, or to demand X in hopes of at minimum securing something less than X as a "compromise." In this particular case, botched circumcisions are sufficiently horrifying that the severity is difficult to overstate--but the incident rate is probably not.
This isn't directly on point...
Still, it's relevant. "Preventing children from having their properly functioning bodies interfered with, even when the adults in their lives are totally cool with it," is one of those things I think the law--judicial, legislative, and executive all--must be empowered to do, if it is empowered to do anything at all. If the law cannot protect the bodily integrity of minors, even against their own expressed wishes, much less the wishes of their parents, it's hard for me to imagine how the law can be permitted to paternalistically protect minors from anything at all.
And maybe that's the right answer, certainly I know some anarcho-libertarians who would bite that bullet. But despite the occasional temptation I have never really been able to get excited about governance quite that small.
How do you gatekeep medical procedures against the well resourced?
Well, first, you can't. But second, who cares?
I don't mean that in a dismissive way--I mean, has "but that law seems difficult to enforce" ever been a legible reason for striking down (or refusing to adopt) a law against something dangerous? There are countless laws against illicit drug use. Many of them are, at least arguably, stupid, but their stupidity is a political question, not a question for the courts. (At least until an activist court decides to get fancy with "arbitrariness," I suppose...) People use drugs, and it's bad for them, and explicit government disapproval of their activity does seem to actually reduce those harms (see: Oregon) even when it can't be said that the relevant harm can be eliminated entirely.
Ultimately, if enough people are down with transing the kids, the kids are gonna get transed. The threshold of "enough" is simply a question of power: if you've got a lot of money, then just knowing one willing (or venal) doctor will probably suffice. But if you're a middle class parent hoping to engage in a little light Munchausen's by Proxy for internet karma and GoFundMe credit, you're going to need some extra assistance via e.g. insurance, tax subsidies, and maybe some government bullying of recalcitrant health professionals. Conversely, simply making a law against transing the kids will suffice for 99% of the population, just like all the other laws that rich people so often find themselves free to disregard.
At best we can rely on professional ethics, but, you know, lol. What's the strategy here?
Sending a message. Having a government that doesn't directly contribute to harming children based on dubious pop culture trends and the elevation of mental illness to a virtue. Protecting children from abusive parents. "But they don't think it's abuse!" Fucking tough; I'm happy to outlaw genital mutilation (including male circumcision), too, because my conception of child abuse is unmoved by appeals to moral relativism. If states can't outlaw transing kids, then they can't outlaw the genital mutilation of infants, either--not in any principled way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
What I'm curious about is how committed you all are to the rules-based order.
The commitment is to the foundation:
This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases.
The rules are crafted in service of that, moderation is conducted with it mind, and where the rules and the foundation might seem to conflict, the foundation trumps.
So far, between me and the Jew-posters, you seem to be committed to banishing assholes more than having legible principles.
I mean, one of the very first rules is "be kind," so banishing assholes is definitely also rules-based. Of course the rules are not self-enforcing and the mod team is not a calculator, we aren't always perfectly predictable and we aren't always right. But the vast majority of our users seem to get on just fine. In general if it looks like you're even trying to follow the rules, you'll be fine. It's the people that go looking for just how far they can go without getting banned, who tend to be the biggest problem.
In principle, it's fine to ask questions about the rules, and discuss them when it seems warranted to do so. But in practice, the vast majority of the time I get questions about the rules, it is from people who are looking for ways around the foundation itself, rather than ways to understand and follow the rules better. (Weirdly, it's also almost always from people who are obsessed with Jews for some reason, including one particularly persistent troll who has rolled literally dozens of alts at this point--like, think of the good such a person could do if they directed their efforts toward literally anything else! But this just seems to be an all-too-predictable symptom of the age.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
Unkind, unnecessarily antagonistic, not writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion, egregiously obnoxious, and multiple user reports.
I banned you for breaking the rules, so yeah, the decision to ban you came after identifying the rules you were breaking. But the case was, as you can see, wildly overdetermined. Coming back to open a rules lawyering session (as your aim appears to be here) is not going to benefit this account's longevity, though.
Great post (as always--you're a great contributor, which I think you know, but which bears repeating).
Young Mormon men seem to have no issue marrying chaste(ish) pretty blondes who will vote for Romney and deliver 3-4 children, because that’s their milieu. Too often some chubby suburban secular engineer whose primary hobbies are video games and online political discussion thinks he deserves the same.
To further elaborate on this point--young Mormon men also seem to have no issue marrying a reasonable match. Some years ago a Mormon colleague invited me to his son's wedding reception. The bride was obese; the groom, a NEET. The groom's father said "she's a nice girl. I wouldn't say she's a great catch but let's be honest, neither is he." But he had done a Mormon mission trip and she had the right social attitudes. Now they've been married maybe 15 years, no kids (fertility issues). Neither ever completed college, they both do gig work to scrape by with the help of their parents (they're in their 40s now!). They have dreams and goals they're unlikely to ever achieve, but they have a common social milieu, and they're clearly better off supporting one another than they would be as atomized incels.
It's not a life I'd want, but I have to remind myself--it's the kind of life most people get. Most people don't even get a bachelor's degree. Most people aren't particularly attractive. If we reserve the "good life" for "high value" people, things are going to get real bleak, real quick. But without the social support structures encouraging men and women to accept a good match, rather than always "marrying up," that's where we're headed.
naraburns
nihil supernum
14d ago
The Friday Fun thread is not for culture war discussions; post removed.
naraburns
nihil supernum
15d ago
Women hate men. Always have, always will.
When possible, write about specific groups rather than general ones. Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how inflammatory your claims are. Don't attempt to build consensus.
The sociology of sex is interesting and worth discussing, but like everything else we talk about here, the relevant conflicts need to be discussed--not waged.
naraburns
nihil supernum
15d ago
I'm not a good man.
Well, this certainly isn't a good comment. Banned for a day.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Thanks, I've edited the link.
The "context" thing has been a weird issue since the site's inception, I think it is ultimately related to code stuff that is above my pay grade. I know Zorba has been working on it for a while.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Interesting that I think a few of those posts are bad or just not special.
So write something better.
An AAQC need not be Pulitzer material; it requires no expertise; it needn't even be correct, though all of those things could count toward an AAQC. I have approved many, many AAQCs that I'm confident were just objectively wrong. AAQCs are not an endorsement of brilliance or accuracy; they are a way of noticing and rewarding people who make positive contributions to the community through their engagement. What's a "positive contribution?" That's a qualitative question answered substantially by the user nomination and review process. Hundreds of posts are nominated every month, most of them quite plausibly AAQCs; the main reason I winnow them at all is that we do like to keep the list to a manageable size. If someone else were curating the list, it would probably be a little different--but less than you might think.
So like... it's okay that you think a few, or even many, of these posts are not the sort of thing you want to see. But there's exactly one thing you could do about that: write something better.
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
Sorry about that--there's apparently some weird technical issue with it. It's still visible on Gaashk's profile page, fortunately, and I will also reproduce it here:
Grew up in a very trad wife centric Christian homeschool subculture. It mostly didn't work out. Mostly, we had to get jobs. It isn't trivially easy to find a man who's prepared to be a husband, father, and primary earner fairly young, willing to ask girls out, often at venues like church functions, and interested in those girls. There are some, sure, and some families were formed that way. But now in our late 30s, I'm hearing about even some of the women who did marry a traditional head of household man divorcing, because he's pushy, unpleasant, domineering, and re-training as a nurse or something, now with several children.
Marriages don't have to rise to the level of beating to be worse than working a lower middle class female job. If my now husband hadn't kept inviting me on romantic dates at ancient castles, I would still be basically content with being single, because being a single woman in the modern world is really just fine, with a long educated Anglophone tradition full of slightly lonely but basically fine governesses and nuns. Even at the standards of a century ago, I would certainly rather be a nun than marry a man I didn't like, of whom people said "well at least he doesn't beat you, just have more grit."
I am not a feminist by current standards. My grandmothers and great grandmothers went to teaching colleges, and followed their husbands around the world while they translated Mayan carvings or something, and returned to teaching when their children where older. They kept copies of Virginia Woolf in their houses. There are great grandmothers I don't know much about, because their children ran away from home (and first marriages, I think?) and met up on a Pacific island, and then went on to have those 3-4 kids together, and raise them while teaching. I don't know how to evaluate the alternate universe where everyone had more grit, sticking out their first marriage on some frozen windswept cattle ranch.
Much is made of the state of family formation in Asia lately. Chinese great grandmothers probably had too much grit, breaking their daughters' feet to help their marriage prospects. I don't know how things were for the great grandmothers of the current generation of South Korean women -- the educational issues there sound like an excess of grit -- everyone could just not cram that extra hour, and things would likely be just the same, but slightly more pleasant. It sounds very zero sum after a pretty baseline educational level and some research skills.
Anyway, I'm pregnant with a third baby because I don't think being not particularly successful in America is that bad, actually. Probably none of my kids will go to an unusually excellent college or have an unusually excellent job or win at a high level competition, and that's alright. Someone came in to my classroom today to say that she's pleased that her daughter is shift manager at a Starbucks and leading literacy tutoring over the summer. This is good! People should be able to be pleased with their children living normal, functional lives!
naraburns
nihil supernum
28d ago
I think you are incorrectly framing this as though the ability to make inconsistent arguments is a unique power held by prosecutors.
No, I've definitely never said that--I've just only talked about prosecution in this thread. You are correct that defendants may also make arguments in the alternative.
The difference is that the defendants (usually!) only have to successfully defend themselves once. Whatever the jury decides, that's the account of the facts that will (usually!) be relied upon through the appeals process for that defendant.
The prosecution, though, is the same party (figuratively, as the state; literally, in some cases, the same person) across multiple cases, and in theory the party being held to a higher standard--because the power of the state is presumably extremely vast, we place a variety of hobbles on it (Bill of Rights, e.g.). Elsewhere in this thread I linked a law review article arguing that cross-case prosecutorial consistency ought to be regarded as part of Procedural Due Process. I find myself amendable to that position.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
I mean, it’s totally possible that these two… nut jobs is probably the best term here… fed off of each other and were both manipulating and masterminds. That seems like an occasional nut dynamic.
This seems like the most plausible explanation to me as well.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
As I understand it, prosecutors are allowed to make inconsistent arguments so long as they're in separate cases — that they claimed "X" in one trial is no bar to claiming "not X" in another trial.
There are many contexts in which the prosecution is allowed to make inconsistent arguments in the same case--for example, stating claims "in the alternative." The American court system is basically structured under the assumption that prosecutors are interested in truth and justice, rather than in winning their cases and clearing their dockets (see also: prosecutorial discretion). Honestly, I think it works out that way more often than not. But there is nevertheless an awful lot of prosecutorial fuckery.
naraburns
nihil supernum
29d ago
Yep! There is of course a law review article (PDF warning) about it. Totally normal and well within the rules, even though it seems painfully obvious (at least to me, and the author of that article) that it shouldn't be.
Amidst the Trump verdict and the SCOTUS drops, it might be easy to miss a smaller verdict this week: Chad Daybell guilty of murder.
If this doesn't ring any bells, you can watch a whole damn documentary about it, should you feel so inclined. Or read a book about it. Or just a timeline. Go ahead! It's okay. I'll wait.
Anyway, this is perhaps the second-least surprising verdict of the week. Absent literal video of the murders, the evidence that Daybell took part in these killings is about as ironclad as it comes. So the trial, really, was about which part. This is often a challenge when "conspiracy" comes into play. If you have two good suspects, and you think they worked together, but each points a finger at the other, what do you do?
Lori Vallow was sentenced last year to life in prison for killing two of her children and conspiring in the murder of Chad Daybell's first wife. In arguing that case, prosecutors were tasked in part with establishing both that Vallow was mentally competent to stand trail, and that she was not entitled to mitigation on grounds that she was being manipulated by Chad. In fact the prosecution went further, asserting that Vallow was the one manipulating Daybell "through emotional and sexual control." Vallow was convicted on that account of events.
CW angle: quite naturally, that was a big part of Daybell's defense. "The state already proved that I was being manipulated by Vallow!" Indeed. In no time at all, a journalist (and author of the book linked above) was ready to call that defense "misogynistic."
Reporter Leah Sottile, whose book When the Moon Turns to Blood details how Daybell and Vallow fell into a twisted belief system of their own making, was in attendance at court. Sottile tweeted that Prior’s strategy of deflecting blame to the already convicted and sentenced Vallow was “misogynistic” and an attempt to convince members of the jury that Daybell had been “overtaken by a Jezebel figure like Vallow — a woman of failed marriages, irresistible sexuality.” She also noted the irony of this alongside Prior’s argument that Tammy was primarily responsible for her husband’s publishing business: “a man from a very patriarchal faith saying the women around him controlled him.”
Returning to today, Daybell was convicted on three charges of first degree murder as well as three charges of conspiracy to commit murder (plus some irrelevant lesser charges). While Vallow was given multiple life sentences (reportedly, the death penalty was taken off the table due to the prosecution making a late discovery submission), Daybell's day in court isn't over: prosecution is pushing for the death penalty.
Overall, this seems like a case where police investigation basically functioned as intended. The "doomsday cult" stuff makes for sensational reading/viewing, and there were indeed a number of plots to untangle--a fact which took law enforcement a little time to pick up on. Aside from Chad's sentencing (and the inevitable appeals), one loose thread remains: Vallow has been extradited to Arizona, to stand trial for conspiring to murder her fourth husband and planning the attempted murder of her niece's ex-husband (her now-deceased brother was the one with the gun).
So I don't feel like there's a lot of reason to pick at the CW bits, it looks like justice is broadly being done. It's a bit of a mental splinter to me that the prosecution never had to really get its story straight, and that Chad and Lori have both been convicted, in part, on the theory that they masterminded the whole thing and the other party was merely a catspaw. Perhaps the Arizona trial will give us a clearer picture--Alex Cox, Lori's deceased brother, appears to have also been a bit of a Daybell disciple. Before his death he reportedly expressed concern that he might become Lori and Chad's fall guy.
Perhaps all that remains is some inescapable head-scratching over the relationship between mental illness, religious zeal, and romantic entanglements. I would colloquially and informally call these people crazy. As far as I can tell, Chad's wife was murdered because he wanted out of a marriage without the hassle (or "sin?") of divorce, and Lori's children were murdered because they were interfering with her living her best life with husband number five. (I assume that Daybell and Vallow were not actually perceiving demons, which appears to be how they justified the killings to themselves, and only perceived "darkness" possessing others as a post hoc excuse for hating those who disagreed with them or otherwise interfered with their aims.) Competence to stand trial does not require a person to be in perfect mental health, they just need the ability to have a rational and factual understanding of what the judges and lawyers tell them. Vallow and Daybell appear to meet that standard, so why the state's song-and-dance of insisting that each of them, separately, was psychologically dominating the other? Why not just tell the most likely story--that these were mutually unstable people who fed one another's delusions?
The practical answer, I suspect, is just that the state did not want either jury to perceive the slightest possibility of mitigation. To prevent the obviously guilty from getting off light, the state focused not on the (perfectly adequate!) truth in a logically consistent way, but on the most compelling available narrative in any given moment. Given that I have no sympathy for Vallow or Daybell, I'd say "and nothing of value was lost," but I value the truth too much to dismiss even this slight disregard for consistency across claims as "of no value."
I leave you with this small excerpt from C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters:
If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that “Love” is both irresistible and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, “noble”, romantic, tragic adulteries, ending, if all goes well, in murders and suicides.
If the Israelis had never invaded Mandatory Palestine in the first place, there'd be no Israel, and there'd be no fighting.
Er... no? Mandatory Palestine begins in, what, 1920? After the Roman expulsion and the slaughter of the Crusades, Jews began to re-establish their homeland again no later than the 13th century. The Mizrahim migrated back in the 18th century, and no small number of Ashkenazim in the 19th. These were as involved in the fight against the Ottomans as the Muslim Arabs; both groups were angling for political control of the area, which partly informs the establishment of Mandatory Palestine in the first place.
That is to say, you started this, no?
The idea that any single group "started this" is absurd. The Jews, Alexander, the Romans, the Byzantines, the Muslims, the Crusaders, if I believed a particular plot of land could be cursed I would certainly wonder about Israel. Who is tunnel visioned, exactly?
The Israeli prime minister is making speeches in the Knesset about how you're waging a holy war of eradication against the Biblical Amalekites. Does that not classify as 'ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription'?
This assertion genuinely surprised me, and it is something I would want to condemn if it were true. But it isn't, unless one is being deliberately and maximally uncharitable for whatever reason, so... no, that particular comment does not appear to classify, despite your perplexing and pointless effort to tart it up.
And the IRA wanted Northern Ireland to be part of the Republic of Ireland. And this you may note has not happened. What the goal of an organization is and what they can be persuaded or forced to accept can be very different things.
The IRA wasn't the catspaw of multiple Muslim countries populated by people with a millennium-old grudge against any non-Muslim living within the boundaries of the fullest historical extent of the caliphate.
I really think the only long term solution is going to require Israel to be willing to absorb attacks, even though morally they are under no real requirement to do so.
I mean--genocide either way would also be a long term solution, and it is the one to which the Palestinians have repeatedly returned despite the number of times Israel has unilaterally assumed the cost of de-escalation.
The IRA comparison is misleading at best, because Muslim extremists are a totally different kettle of fish. I simply cannot take seriously any analysis of what Israel should or should not do that does not 100% foreground the deep religious commitment of these people to the specific proposition that the Jews should die:
Kill them wherever you encounter them, and drive them out from where they drove you out, for persecution is more serious than killing. Do not fight them at the Sacred Mosque unless they fight you there. If they do fight you, kill them--this is what such disbelievers deserve. (Surah Al-
The IRA wanted a certain political outcome, and weren't much bothered by the idea of killing to make that happen. But "independent Palestine" is not really the goal; it is at best instrumental to the goal of removing unbelievers from holy lands by any means. Persuading them to accept a different goal means fundamentally altering their religious convictions--not something Britain really had to achieve with the IRA.
My credence on the possible success of your proposed plan is less than 20%. Pre-October, I might have given you even odds, but murdering a thousand people in a single night, raping women, kidnapping hundreds of civilian hostages, that's way past IRA shit.
naraburns
nihil supernum
30d ago
No, the steelman is, they were there first
They weren't there first. Why isn't your reaction to the (re)creation of Israel, "what fucking savages" but "they kinda have a point" as well? Because 2000 years is longer than 400? Or 50? My whole point is that it doesn't matter if the Palestinians "kinda have a point" about being told by their government, "sorry guys, time to move." What matters is what they do about that; what they have repeatedly chosen to do about it is not to pursue peaceful solutions, but to pursue the solution "murder as many Jews as we can, say we're sorry so the international community suppresses Israel's response, then prepare for the next opportunity to murder as many Jews as we can."
You have assiduously avoided addressing this angle, at all, in your responses. This is, at best, a botched "steelman" grounded in simply omitting relevant facts. What it feels like is just completely dishonest engagement.
Just because they didn't have a flag doesn't mean it didn't exist.
Ah. Well, if stand up comedy is the level at which you engage with history, that would explain a lot of what you've written here.
The Palestinian Declaration of Independence was written in 1988. Prior to that, both Arab and Jewish nationalists in the 20th century helped to overthrow the Ottoman Turks in hopes of creating their own nation, but Britain and France did not follow through on those expectations. The region has been ruled from afar for just about all of recorded history, albeit mostly by Jews, then Muslims, and occasionally Christians. Although many Jews were driven from the region by Hadrian (and others), there were always some who remained. By the early 19th century, many had begun to return.
But once more (since you're apparently ignoring it every time I write it anyway): it doesn't ultimately matter who has or had a flag, or whose ancestors were from where (though don't think I don't notice the rhetorical trick of making conveniently inconsistent claims about what counts as being somewhere "first"). What matters is that there is a group of terrorists pretending to be a "nation" for the express purpose of killing as many Jews as possible, and that this is (contra to your bizarre claims) in no way "symmetrical" to a democratically elected government doing what it can to respond to the mass murder and rape of its people by Muslim Arab terrorists pretending to be a "nation."
naraburns
nihil supernum
30d ago
But any attempt to take a view of the whole situation is impossible without trying to steelman the positions, and I was trying to do this with respect to the Palestinians.
I don't think it's a "steelman" to soften their actual beliefs, though. They want all the Jews to either leave Israel or die. They are quite explicit about this. They literally make children's shows teaching this. To steelman that view requires you to elaborate reasons why, all things considered, this is a reasonable view to hold. Your response appears to be something like "there's no meaningful difference between Israel's government and Hamas, so their positions are just equally bad." That's not a steelman, that's ignoring inconvenient facts in hopes of strengthening an objectively outrageous position.
The question is whether Palestinians should be empowered to exterminate Israel, and aided by the world in their mission to do so. The answer is "no."
Why not? After all, we're letting Israel do the same.
Bullshit. In the first place, there never was a "Palestine" to exterminate. Furthermore, the Israelis have repeatedly demonstrated their ability, if they so chose, to militarily conquer not only Israel itself but much of the neighboring territory as well. Israel has treated the Palestinians with kid gloves for decades.
Letting Israel control where the Palestinians are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on is symmetrical to letting the Palestinians control where the Israelis are allowed to live, what they are allowed to do and so on.
More bullshit. There's nothing symmetrical here; the Palestinians wish to kill all the Jews. Do you seriously not understand this? If Israel's goals were "symmetrical" to those of the Palestinians, all the Palestinians would already be dead. You are not steelmanning anything, you are literally making shit up.
Yes, Palestine would be a much worse place to live in than Israel, but that's not a meaningful way to decide which side to support.
How the fuck is that not meaningful? That is often, perhaps always how nations decide "which side" to support (though nations are also at times wrong about what will make something a "worse place," in the end).
But never mind that; we have an absolute laundry list of economic and political reasons to support a productive and educated first-world democracy over a couple of terrorist cells whose aspirations toward theocracy are often not only explicitly anti-Israel, but explicitly anti-American. To say nothing of the events of October 7, which are independently sufficient evidence that every civilized person everywhere should regard Palestine as, if it is a state at all, only a terrorist state.
After all, there are lots of mismanaged countries, but we no longer let the Netherlands take over and manage them.
Palestine is not a country in any particularly meaningful way, and it never has been. It is two separate terrorist groups living on the largess of other nations within the borders of Israel, actively oppressing their own supporters for theological reasons. Writing as though we were dealing with an oppressive colonial nation-state and its equal-but-opposite conquered territory demonstrates either ignorance, or willful ignorance.
The only answer I can think of is "for the same reasons Biden isn't dropping out."
Newsom seems to view high political office as his manifest destiny. At that level of politics, maybe most of them view things that way; you'd almost have to, I think, to run in the first place. If Biden and his handlers were even halfway humane, he would have retired years ago (same goes for Trump). There is something deeply narcissistic about believing that you, and you alone, can effectively steer the community/state/nation at this particular time--but if you didn't believe that, why would you run for office? I'd love to hear "a keen sense of civic duty responding to the insistence of one's fellow-citizens regarding one's merits as a leader" but I know that kind of idealism just gets me laughed out of the room.
It's really something to imagine Newsom or DeSantis in place of Biden or Trump at the CNN fiasco. This year's presidential race is a textbook-crafted thought experiment on inadequate equilibria in political contexts, brought to painful life.
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