naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
Why would I have a problem with it?
I don't know, because you aren't speaking plainly.
I am a pronatalist, eugenics-supporting, 4chan-brained guy with "Alt" in my flair.
That doesn't have any particular bearing on why you were moderated, which is that you were not speaking plainly, and appeared to be weakmanning.
I am you, the difference is I can see Winters for what she is rather than what I want her to be.
You're certainly not me, and before your post I had never heard of Winters. It's still not clear to me why I should care who she is at all, or why you care who she is at all. Because you have yet to speak plainly.
The story featured a woman in a Right-wing space assumed by its denizens to be liberal, who by the end realized she wasn't.
This does not appear to have any particular bearing on my moderation of the post.
Almost as if there's an analogy there.
Speak plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10d ago
At eight user reports (seven of them negative) and meta-moderation landing on "bad" (but with low confidence), I feel obligated to actually say something about this post. Unfortunately, that meant I had to read the post, which I was unable to power through last night, I simply did not have the stamina for it.
While I appreciate the apparent effort that went into this post, I think it ultimately fails both "speak plainly" and "do not weakman." If you wanted to criticize Winters, specifically, or fisk the interview, that would be fine. But removing quotes from their original context to insert into a work of parody (or is it satire?) doesn't really meet the appropriate threshold, especially when your apparent intention is to smear "“BASED” subculture," which does not sound like an appropriately specific group.
I am getting the idea that you are very interested in criticizing (or mocking) certain very broad groups of people, most particularly anyone who is to your political right. I understand that is what most social media is used to do today. However, that is not really the purpose of this space. If you have a problem with the idea that some women think acting the part of a "girl boss" is stupid and exhausting, ideally you should talk about that idea, or charitably engage with the ideas of some specific person who said it. If you think that person is stupid or misguided, you can say that, provided you can explain why beyond just the fact of your disagreement. If there is some specific group that teaches the idea to which you object, you can complain about that, too!
The fact that 38% of liberal women aged 18-29 identify as LGBT is interesting and specific and warrants more than a throwaway line. The claim that "we shouldn't vaccinate children" is open to all kinds of thoughtful criticism. You have plenty of material here to plainly state your own views, and to criticize (with evidence!) the views of some specific people with whom you disagree.
But nakedly asserting that "'BASED' subculture is not Khan, it's Winters" doesn't get you anywhere. At best, you're just trying to shame people away from certain ideological influences, instead of persuading them. You've got the right level of effort! You just need to lose the disdain.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11d ago
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off.
This does not seem clear to me at all.
In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong.
He's a partisan. I trust his unguarded opinion about someone whose status was in the moment unimportant to his tribe, above anything he said later in public when he was likely to be speaking more to save face or engage in "yay ingroup." I'm applying something like a Bayesian version of the "statements against interest" rule, I guess.
As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question,
Sorry--looks like I dropped a word ("was") from that sentence, mea culpa. You are correct; she was asked "what is a woman" and her answer was "I'm not a biologist," which is a stupid answer even assuming she is a hardened partisan. Someone who believes "woman" means what trans advocates want it to mean ("a person who identifies as a woman"), should have answered in a way that would not imply that the answer was grounded in biology at all. Her answer wasn't just a pointless dodge, it was a bad dodge. If you think it would be more charitable to characterize her answer as a lie than as stupidity, like... okay? But that's not actually clear to me. (I also disagree that the question was a "gotcha." It's not a "gotcha" to ask someone a question that requires them to either admit to the force of biological reality, or speak lies and prevarications in service of one's ideological paymasters. But that is a different discussion I think.)
Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Two people can be idiots at the same time!
it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity
I am opposed (and increasingly opposed every passing year) to the deference shown the judiciary by lawyers, journalists, and the public. Specifically, you are probably familiar with attorneys being disciplined and sanctioned for impugning judicial integrity in court proceedings; I regard that as a blatant violation of the First Amendment. My experience with law practice and legal academia is that there is a prevalent attitude of deference to the judiciary, not only to its supposed impartiality, but to its competence. I think that is both mistaken and a little bit disgusting, especially as the judiciary has become increasingly professionalized. One does not "rise" to the rank of Supreme Court Justice, because these people are not above anyone. Especially when they are explicitly affirmative action selections. Even the brightest SCOTUS justices are approximately comparable to your typical tenured professor in an R1 university (except that university professors do more real, actual work than appellate justices, but again--different discussion). SCOTUS justices just are not that special--and even then, Jackson would not be a SCOTUS justice if she were a white man. Probably she would not even have been admitted to Harvard Law, though we don't know for sure because apparently it's "racist" to ask about her LSAT scores--even though legislatures often demand such information from judicial appointees. (Seriously, have you ever listened to a state legislator who graduated from Fly By Night Law with a 2.1 GPA harangue an appointee over going to State Law with a 160 LSAT? The chutzpah of elected officials really is something else!)
Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
I think it's important to be able to discuss people's intelligence, not just in absolute terms but relative to the intelligence of others. I am not a blank slatist. Apparently you're not the one making them, but I know I have seen posts here discussing Trump's intelligence and mental functioning, and in the past those conversations were also had about Biden. "Trump seems to be showing himself less intelligent than past U.S. Presidents, and here is why..." is an argument I would identify as within bounds, provided the rest of the post were sufficiently backstopped, not needlessly inflammatory, etc.
Now--very importantly--generalizing that to the intellect of "his supporters, almost without exception" or to "conservatives" generally, would be out of bounds. Why? Because of the rule about focusing on specific individuals or groups rather than general ones. Arguing that a person is stupid, and providing evidence for why that is the best explanation of what they said or did (in particular, explaining how you are not using "stupid" as a stand-in for mere disagreement), is a very different thing than characterizing an entire group (especially, an ideological group) as stupid.
despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons
I also am of the view that Trump is not very smart (though he does sometimes seem to possess remarkable cunning). You're welcome to say it, when it seems relevant, and I doubt you'll get many reports for doing so (though I couldn't say for sure). Frankly, if you brought real evidence that "Trump supporters are generally all morons" that might be an interesting post! But it would require you to actually bring such evidence, and it would have to be pretty strong to counterbalance the "bring evidence in proportion" rule, and frankly "Trump supporters" are a sufficiently diverse group that you would be on very thin ice. But hey, we've had Jew-obsessed posters manage to get away with quite a lot of bullshit by adhering to the letter of the law; if you wanted to become a raving anti-Semite but with MAGA instead of Jews, that could be novel and interesting. (With apologies to my fellow mods for even suggesting such a thing.) Just notice that most of the raving anti-Semites here do eventually get themselves banned over it. Very few manage to keep the touch sufficiently light.
So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with.
Those aren't the only grounds, those were just the easiest and most obvious grounds. Other posters have fleshed out other relevant concerns.
Now, having laid all of that out--I could have written that post better. Your concern is valid, and I will try to adjust accordingly. For whatever it is worth, I regarded my mention of the low-IQ wing as a bit of throwaway flavor text expressing my respect for Kagan (despite disagreeing with her). I really do have no respect at all for the intellects of Sotomayor or Jackson, based on many hours of reading and listening to their words, and I think that they are excellent examples of how the "affirmative action" approach to political appointments genuinely harms real institutions. But as that was not the point of my post, I probably should not have included it as a throwaway line, at minimum because it apparently created significant distraction from the actual substance of my post.
you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future
I... think that's a typo? Maybe? If not, you'll have to tell me what IW is. Assuming you mean IQ--I have seen many people on the Left criticize Thomas as an affirmative action appointment, and maybe that is true; partly I have a less firm opinion of him because he stayed quiet in oral arguments for so many years. But Alito is quite sharp, this just would not be a plausible criticism of him. If you wanted to plausibly identify a "low-IQ wing" on the right it would need to be, like, Kavanaugh and Thomas, and off the top of my head I can't think of any cases where they went in together against the rest of the conservatives.
The far-right (which includes most people on this website)
I'm gonna go one step further than Amadan on this and actually give you a (mild) warning here: bring evidence in proportion with your partisanship, but be particularly careful about how you characterize "this site," as doing so tends to fall into the problem of consensus building.
It has been a while since we had a thorough demographic poll, and "far-right" is probably a moving target, but the mainstream meaning is something like "identitarian right" or "authoritarian right"--white nationalists, especially, though probably not exclusively. I do think there are some white nationalists who post here, but they are a small minority. All the demographic information available to me suggests that the site 's userbase has a "grey tribe" plurality, which is tough to classify but most often shows up in approximately "centrist libertarian" land over on /r/politicalcompassmemes.
It's possible that you have fallen into the same trap that many blue tribe institutions have fallen into, basically using "far-right" as a sloppy shorthand (or outright smear) for literally anything to their right, or even just anything that they don't like. I don't know whether you have used the term purposefully, or incorrectly, or sloppily, which is why you should consider this a mild warning, but in general you're better off just not characterizing the userbase here at all: address individual arguments, then individuals, then specific groups if necessary, then general groups only with extreme care and much evidence. "This site" 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.
Presumably the reason they're low-IQ is because you disagree with their reasoning
I often disagree with Kagan, but she's clearly not an idiot. Sotomayor and Jackson appear to actually be of noticeably below average intelligence within the profession, and certainly among appellate justices. Jackson in particular told us everything we needed to know about her intelligence when she [EDIT: was] asked, "what is a woman?" Tribe's characterization of Sotomayor (linked in this thread) as "not nearly as smart as she seems to think she is" is also widely shared by people who "have access to information that hasn't been made public," as you put it.
To be quite clear: this is not, at all, about substantive disagreement (I also regard Kavanaugh as of sub-par intelligence for a SCOTUS justice). I don't say they're low-IQ to boo-outgroup them; Kagan is definitely my outgroup. Sotomayor and Jackson are dim bulbs. I'm not evaluating their politics, I'm evaluating their apparent intelligence, and I find it noticeably and objectionably lacking.
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
I agree with @gattsuru and @ArjinFerman here. This is not a major victory for the red tribe, or a major loss for the blue. It's probably valuable, politically, for Republican politicians to be able to say to their base both that this is a win for "state's rights" and a win against "the trans agenda." I expect red states to increasingly adopt anti-hormone and anti-puberty-blocker legislation, and blue states to explicitly protect it, and probably we will also start seeing "trans your kids by mail" services not unlike what we have with abortion. So the victory will be mostly symbolic (which may count for something, but may not).
It's worth noting that Kagan, though she agreed on heightened scrutiny, declined to join the Court's low-IQ wing to assert that also the law failed under heightened scrutiny. Once again she shows herself to be, by a wide margin, the most competent jurist on the Court's left wing.
It's also worth noting that this is not quite correct regarding intermediate scrutiny:
laws containing sex-based classifications to intermediate scrutiny
Intermediate scrutiny applies to laws that discriminate on the basis of sex. Merely containing classifications is not sufficient. What's the difference? Well, the minority tries to claim that there's no difference; the law mentions sex, therefore the law is about sex, therefore intermediate scrutiny. But the majority points out that there are many laws obviously dealing with sex, that do not warrant intermediate scrutiny. The most obvious, of course, is any law dealing with pregnancy. Only women (sexually mature human females) can get pregnant. Every law dealing with the classification of "pregnant" contains a sex-based classification. But the discrimination in such laws is grounded in a medical status (pregnancy) rather than in sex. In this case, the discrimination is based on age (the state is denying both minor males and minor females cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers) and medical status.
Incidentally, this is why the late Justice Kennedy's opinion in Obergefell is and has always been such a mess. Laws denying males the right to marry males don't discriminate on the basis of sex because everyone has the right to marry someone of the opposite sex. No one was being denied the right to marry on the basis of sex (any gay person could legally marry someone of the opposite sex...), but on the status of not being part of a consenting heterosexual dyad. What the left wanted out of that case was for intermediate (or even strict!) scrutiny to be applied to sexuality, which is obviously a different status than sex. But Kennedy didn't write the opinion that way (he didn't use "scrutiny" analysis at all, instead using history-and-tradition, which is transparently nonsense). Even post-Bostock, sexuality still hasn't been formally adopted by the Supreme Court as a "suspect class."
Despite the utterly bizarre attempt by Biden and Harris to declare the "Equal Rights Amendment" passed (how was he not called an attempted dictator for that?), the fact is that even "heightened scrutiny" on sex is utterly without grounding in the Constitution of the United States. Which brings us back to Skrmetti: a real win for conservatives here would have been a majority declaration that sex and gender are not suspect classifications at all, that sex and gender relevant regulation all belongs in the "rational basis" bin.
Never going to happen, I know. But that's what an unqualified victory would look like, here. This decision ain't it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
Harris is definitely a "Boomer," culturally, even if it might sometimes be more helpful to call her a "cusper." (One of my students this past year referred to Obama as our first "Gen X President" and I was like... uh... no, but I can understand why you might think that.)
Remember that Harris made her childhood participation in the civil rights movement the centerpiece of her political identity, to the shocking degree of actually endorsing race-based busing not only in the past but also in the present. The civil rights movement was a, maybe the signature Boomer movement. GenX is as close to race-blind as an American generation ever got; Millennials manifested the pendulum swinging back toward identitarianism.
naraburns
nihil supernum
12d ago
The good argument is that serious attempts to enforce such a law involve criminal investigations of miscarriages to see if they were induced deliberately
I'm not actually sure whether this is a nitpick or not, but when a baby dies after more than 20 weeks of gestation, it's no longer a "miscarriage," but a "stillbirth." By definition, you can't have a "criminal investigation" into a miscarriage after 20 weeks. You could still, in theory, have a criminal investigation into a stillbirth--hence possible nitpick--but the distinction is important in part because miscarriages, especially early miscarriages, are both physically and emotionally distinct from stillbirth, not only for pregnant women but also in public perception.
naraburns
nihil supernum
13d ago
Earlier today I was looking for a particular high resolution image. I don't know when Google removed resolution information from the results it returned, but I had to use DuckDuckGo and then TinEye to actually find what I was looking for--and even then, the level of linkrot I encountered was astonishing. A few weeks ago, I was looking for the source of a specific text string, but Google kept ignoring the way I put the string into quotation marks.
The enshittification of Google has been underway for a while now, but I feel like over the past few years it has accelerated precipitously, and AI is just the tip of that iceberg. Google search no longer exists to return useful results (even if that was not its main purpose to begin with, I at least got results as an acceptable tradeoff for having my privacy sold). Google search now exists exclusively to sell me things, or to sell my attention, so increasingly it gets to do neither.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17d ago
So I ask again- why bother? Is the time for talking over?
Well... it isn't 100% on point, given the different context, but I would invite you to read what I wrote to Kulak's exit and imagine how the substance of my post might apply to you.
naraburns
nihil supernum
17d ago
It appears that this forum is filled with city slickers in fancy German cars.
Really? I feel like last time someone asked for car buying advice, the answers were all Hondas and Toyotas. Although even with those, "expensive" is relative. I regard Hondas as "expensive" in that they cost more than a similarly-sized Ford or Subaru or the like. But in my experience it's difficult to go wrong with a Honda daily driver. Though my household currently hasn't got a single vehicle less than a decade old, so it's possible my impressions are out of date.
I would like to have an electric car for commuting, but I need the all-in price on a gently used electric car to be much closer to $15,000 than $50,000 before that can happen. Ten years ago, I really had hoped to have a full self-driving car by 2025. But as near as I can tell, for the foreseeable future I will be driving a standard transmission Honda.
I have driven the following cars.
This is a fascinating list because it is so short. I can't even tell you the models of all the cars I have driven, much less the years--too many rentals to count! I would be hard pressed to remember with accuracy the year of every car I have personally owned. I will say that the overall "feel" or "comfort" of consumer-model cars mostly scales linearly with price, but whether you're willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for "oh wow they really got those knob clicks dialed in, didn't they, and this steering wheel feels amazing" naturally depends a lot on how many dollars you have. And the linear comfort scaling does not apply to sports cars; cars built to go very fast are often quite uncomfortable to drive.
If I had infinity dollars right now, I would probably buy a Tesla S and keep a gas-fed Honda parked alongside it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
Are you saying that to live a valuable life you need to only do what is "reasonable" as in the bare minimum of not harming others? Or "reasonable" as in "make the world a better place but you can spend moderate/reasonable costs and don't have to spend severe/unreasonable costs"?
More like the latter. Contractualism is the view that we should never violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject as a basis for informed, unforced, general agreement. In practice, we want to be able to justify our actions to others within our moral community. A principle like "always act to make the world a better place" seems reasonably rejectable; not only will I rarely have any idea which of my actions will "make the world a better place," even if I have a very good idea that it would actually make the world a better place to torture a certain innocent child, I have compelling reasons to not do that. In particular, innocent children have a weighty interest--a right--to not be tortured, and making the world a little or even a lot better for millions of people is not sufficient to overcome such interests.
Of course most choices are not so stark. There is often value in doing more than is strictly required of you, but even so it's very important to notice the difference between what is optimal and what is obligatory. If morality required us to always do the optimal thing, it would be impossibly demanding. Very likely no one would ever actually do the "right" thing, on such a view--there are simply too many unknowns. It is much more reasonable to expect people to act in ways they can justify to others. Deliberately making the world a worse place is not generally something we can justify to others. But it's not hard to justify to others, say, spending some time chatting about politics on the Internet, provided your other immediate obligations have been met and you find this sort of activity interesting or relaxing or fun. Is it the optimal way to spend your time? Perhaps not! But you are not actually under a moral obligation to spend your time optimally. So long as posting on Internet forums does not violate a principle of action that no one could reasonably reject, it's permissible.
Thanks for sharing your experience (and welcome to the Motte!). There were always similar concerns in my household (my children are all adults now)--I would like to have had more children (like you, I come from a large family) but then I talk to people who were lucky to have one kid, or who struggled with infertility for years and never had any, and it makes me feel like an ungrateful whiner.
My main reaction to your post is "you don't owe a baby to the world!" You aren't overstating the magnitude of the risks--even today, though the risks of pregnancy and childbirth are much less than they were even a hundred years ago, they remain real. At the extremes, women still die in the process. Even the temporary stuff, like sciatica and morning sickness, is still genuine suffering.
But pro-natalism has arisen almost exclusively as a reaction to the rise of philosophical anti-natalism. And one of the central arguments in anti-natalism is an incongruency in ethics: there often seem to be morally compelling reasons to not have children (e.g. you know you are unable to care for a child, and know that no one else will), but (outside extreme cases of authoritarianism) essentially no one thinks anyone should be compelled to bear children (even pro-life people who think it is wrong to terminate a pregnancy don't believe it would be right to force a pregnancy on an unwilling woman). Anti-natalists inflate the arguments against childbearing toward an all-encompassing edict: humanity should voluntarily work toward its own orderly extinction.
Because I am not a utilitarian, I do not find such arguments compelling. When I say you don't owe a baby to the world, what I mean is this: it is morally permissible for you to have another child, if that is what you decide to do, despite the risks. Whether the risks are worthy to be undertaken is open to you to decide, but you are not under any utilitarian obligation to have another child even if that child would be of tremendous benefit to the world. Something that I think most ethical systems really miss is the range of permissibility; utiltiarians and deontologists frequently run into the assertion that there is always and only one truly right thing to do (the "best" thing) in any situation. It's very constraining! As a contractualist, I think that there is actually a wide range of things it is morally permissible to do, and that having children is often one of those things.
But if you do, you should do it because you want to, and because the risks are acceptable to you; or, you should not do it, because you don't want to, or on reflection you find the risks too great. Whatever you choose, it's not on you to make the world a better place. It's only on you to do what is reasonable. That's all it means, to live a life of choice and value. It's wonderful that you already have three children, and I wish you luck with that endeavor. Whether or not you continue to grow your family, I thank you for your existing contributions to the rest of the world, which we did not earn, were never owed, and can receive from you only as a welcome gift--never, ever as the fulfillment of a moral obligation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
Not in any detail. I just googled him and he's still got a profile page at the same law firm he was at 20 years ago.
naraburns
nihil supernum
25d ago
You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group.
I don't think I've ever specifically had this thought! I usually say something like "the lefts think I'm too far right, the rights think I'm too far left, and the centrists think I'm way too political" but "I'm just in everyone's far-group" has a ring of truth to it... most of the time, anyway. Every once in a while I get picked to be someone's nemesis; fortunately, it rarely seems to last.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Any chance you could drop a couple lines about him? It's an odd setup.
Sure--let's call him Dylan. Dylan is the son of a colleague, who I met briefly when he was in town visiting his parents. Long, sun-bleached hair, deeply tanned skin, very "beach bum" aesthetic. But not in a "manic homeless" way--he was clean and taciturn. I asked him what he does, and he said he picks pineapples in Hawaii. I asked if that was a year-round thing, he said "kinda." So I asked him what he does when he's not picking pineapples, and he said "play games I guess." Any games in particular? "Older stuff, my laptop is pretty slow." RTS, FPS, RPG? "Some RPGs, yeah. I play Starcraft, too." Well, I game, I played Starcraft (more than a quarter century ago, now...), so the rest of our discussion was about Starcraft. He never gave me the impression that I was getting the brush-off, or that he was especially reluctant to talk--just that he didn't have a lot to say. He seemed nice!
His parents later told me that, after finishing high school, Dylan enlisted with the army. He'd only been in for a couple of months when another soldier assaulted him, put him in the hospital. Dylan says the guy just had some unreasonable beef; whether that was Mom being cagey, or Dylan just never explaining events in detail, I don't know. The assailant faced charges, Dylan got an early discharge. Moved back in with his parents, got a job as a night clerk at a gas station. Soon after got a girlfriend, moved in with her. Split his time between working at the gas station, and getting high with his girlfriend--marijuana at first, harder drugs later. They have a scare and decide to get clean together. Six months later, six months clean, he comes home from work--she's had some old friends over. They brought drugs. She died of an overdose--some time in the early 00s.
Dylan moves back home, largely refuses to leave his room for months. Parents start talking about getting a diagnosis, maybe disability. Then one day, he says he's going to Hawaii. What's he going to do? "Pick pineapples." Where's he going to live? "They've got dorms and stuff." He takes nothing but a duffel stuffed with clothing and some personal tech.
His parents went out to visit him once, and as far as they could determine he was at that time living in a hammock strung between some palm trees. He doesn't date. He doesn't socialize. He doesn't use the Internet. He plays video games on an old laptop, which he charges whenever it's convenient. He doesn't read, or surf. He must hike, at least sometimes, because that is the activity he took his parents out to do. He'll come stateside to visit, occasionally, if his parents buy him a plane ticket. While glad he's independent, they can't help but feel a perpetual simmering concern. As long as he's not starving or doing hard drugs, they don't want to press the issue. "He's been through a lot."
I was fascinated by the story, because on one hand, it kind of sounds to me like drugs and tragedy just fried this guy--that he's a walking husk with no ambition, no particular concern for his own well-being, just barely functioning enough to earn enough money as a laborer to keep himself alive. On the other hand, I can also imagine him a sage of stoicism, someone who has so thoroughly embraced minimalism and detachment that he has transcended the weight of social expectations entirely. No wife, no children, itinerant labor, apparently homeless, but not entirely without places to go. I poked around the Internet a bit and all the references I could find to pineapple picker dormitories are dated to the 20th century; I also learned that pineapple picking in Hawaii is a much smaller industry than it has been in the past. This tempted me toward wild speculations--is this all a ruse? Is Dylan involved in secret government operations, or organized criminal activity? His parents seem confident that his girlfriend's overdose put him off drugs extremely decisively--he only, they claim, ever used with her. But maybe they are kidding themselves?
Then I remind myself--just because I have trouble imagining the life of an itinerant laborer, does not mean they don't exist. Just because a life sounds mind-numbingly dull to me, doesn't mean it's not someone's life. But he's been at it for nearly two decades, and it seems unlikely that he has been saving for retirement. He can't pick pineapples (or whatever) in Hawaii forever. Can he?
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
I think there might be a Berkson's paradox going on.
Very possibly, but I feel like just saying that employs Berkson's paradox as a thought-terminating cliche, rather than as a careful consideration of the observed clustered phenomena. Which correlation do you suspect might be spurious?
When I suggested that Lana is not just a person, but a personality, I meant it. Her post on the suicide forum made her a particularly extreme example of the type, but I know many women, including members of my family, who very much fit the type, though they haven't imploded their lives to quite the same spectacular degree. Some stay married (but often publicly declare their bisexuality), some get neopronouns, some keep their hair a natural color... but the commitment to wide-band political leftism combined with a willingness to excommunicate dissenters from their lives makes a pretty consistent through-line. Those things seem pretty obviously connected with the clustered phenomena--political leftism incentivizes sex and gender exploration, for example, and willingness to excommunicate others can extend to an unpersuaded spouse. Sociology is hard, but I'm not sure it's so hard that I should be willing to accept "nothing ever happens" as a refutation of the observations in this thread.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with Trump...
That is why I said "It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband." I assume Obergefell was also not the actual inciting incident of her divorce--but yes, in retrospect, I definitely see those as coincidences in the most literal sense of the term, unrelated stage-setting events that would become relevant as the story unfolded.
It seems pretty clear to me that Lana's personal problems have nothing to do with . . . the culture war in general.
Of course I can't refute this with great certainty. I can report on what I saw myself, filling in some gaps with what was reported to me by others, and if you don't find the correlations compelling, what more can I say? I agree with you, strongly, about the results of cutting people off, for whatever reason; humans do not generally thrive under that condition.
But I know why I was cut off, in this particular story. And I know whose politics correlate more strongly with cutting people off for political reasons. The culture war in general may or may not have been the beating heart of Lana's problems (depending on one's thoughts concerning the possible psychological hazards of generic 90s feminism), but the idea that her problems had nothing to do with the culture war in general strikes me as... unlikely.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Would you tell a penis-less cismale without phantom penis sensation "it appears you are not actually male?"
This is a non-sequitur. My point is that phantom sensations do not appear to tell us anything about the way the world is, and so cannot tell us anything about someone's "real" gender, which is what you appeared to be offering the example to do.
I don't claim there's definitive proof an individual claiming to be transgender can be proven to have the neurologic features of their self-identified gender (bailey), but rather that the known-unknowns of neurology don't allow us to disregard their claims (motte).
Yes, so far it does appear that your actual claim is "well they're self-reporting their feelings, who are we to disregard their internal experiences?" And my answer has been, and continues to be, that we make reasonable judgments about people's internal experiences all the time. You are just holding transsexuals to a lower standard on this metric than you appear willing to hold, well, apparently everyone else.
getting sexual reassignment surgery seems like compelling evidence of a sincere belief
So does murdering your children because God told you to do so. Delusional people are generally excruciatingly sincere in their beliefs.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
I doubt the effect exists if one balanced for that first.
Maybe! There are certainly confounders galore. There have been a variety of attempts to do as you've suggested, or make other, similar adjustments. The most recent one I'm aware of is here. From the abstract:
First, we examine whether the conservative-liberal divide in self-assessments of mental health remains once we control for a wide variety of demographics, socioeconomic factors, and recent life experiences. We find that accounting for these alternative explanations reduces the gap by about 40%, but that ideology remains a strong predictor of mental health self-reports. Second, we conducted an experiment where we randomly assigned whether people were asked to evaluate their mental health or their overall mood. While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives. One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term. Another possibility is that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others.
I just can't help but notice that studies along these lines keep showing up, and keep generating the same kind of response. The 2023 study showing greater depressive affect in leftist teenagers, for example, generated dozens of think-pieces explaining that this was probably just a result of differences in self-reporting, or level of political engagement, or "hey maybe these kids should be depressed, if they're even remotely aware of how terrible things are." But as one of the more thorough essays (archive link to an American Affairs article) I've found on the matter suggests:
The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well. Consequently, satisfying explanations of the gaps in reported well-being between liberals and conservatives would have to generalize beyond the present moment, beyond isolated cultural or geographic contexts, and beyond specific demographic group
...
[But the] implications and applications of these realities remain wide open to interpretation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
Yeah, I have no idea either way, though I certainly have my suspicions.
I have seen therapy work for people, including genuinely saving the marriage of a close family member, but... mostly not.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
History telling Fukuyama "We're done when I say we're done."
This is the most chillingly beautiful phrase I've read this week.
naraburns
nihil supernum
26d ago
You seem to suggest a radicalization -> divorce pipeline, but I wonder if the reverse is more true? People ruin their relationships and this leads them to a political radicalization as a way to find their true family / identity
This strikes me as related to @urquan's question about religious identity. I saw events happen in a particular sequence, but it's entirely possible that the consequences of personal change manifested in a different order than the actual causes of that personal change. This researcher has done a fair bit of work on how people's perception of their own race can change in response to their politics (most research on race and politics assumes the reverse, treating race as an immutable characteristic). So yeah, I'm certainly open to the possibility that we're talking about, essentially, a two-way (multi-way!) street.
I'm always a little arrested by this observation, particularly when it is offered as if in refutation of something. Have you seen a lifestyle that does always work out? If not, then surely this is no objection at all!
It seems rather to me that the trick is accepting that whatever your problems are, they are your problems, not someone else's--and are substantially the result of your own actions. Whether your own actions are, in turn, the result of some biological or cultural impetus, is a purely academic question. You can't just opt to take the good parts of trad life while never facing any possible negative results.
(Alain de Botton's Atheism 2.0 TED talk is a benighted classic for this very reason; he thinks we should find a way to incorporate all the good bits of religion into our lives, while keeping all the ridiculous nonsense at bay. It's not a terrible thought, but not only has that not worked out, I would argue that Wokism accomplished exactly the opposite--incorporating some of the worst ridiculousness of religion, without bringing along any of the tangible benefits.)
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