vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
2d ago
No, for. My position is that freedom sometimes makes people worse off, but in the vast majority of such cases we should still let people be free and have the bad outcome.
To tie it back to the trans issue. I would be okay with the government banning kids from transitioning, but against the government preventing adults from transitioning - even if reliable information emerged that medical transition lead to worse outcomes than the alternative. People should be allowed to sterilize themselves, allowed to cut off their breasts, and be prepared to face all consequences of it.
This is also why I favor tattoos and piercing being legal, even if I personally dislike them and suspect they have long term effects on employability and life outcomes.
In some ways, I kind of want to reject the idea that all of our social policies should be aimed at minimizing female deaths like an autistic actuary.
As a simple example from another domain, I kind of don't care if the facts on the ground are maximally unfavorable to me in, say, the gun control debate because I am pro-liberty and am willing to bite the bullet on this. Even if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets that showed with 100% certainty that we could reliably remove, say, all ~40,000 gun deaths per year in the United States by repealling the 2nd Amendment (and the vast majority won't convert to knife deaths or whatever), I would still say we should prefer 40,000 annual deaths to the infringement of liberty that would involve.
I don't want to empower the government to enforce any kind of bathroom policy, and so I'm willing to put up with a few women falling victim to men and ex-men in the name of liberty. My opinion wouldn't change if an angel came down and gave me divinely inspired tablets showing that such a policy reliably leads to X female victims of violence each year.
I feel the same way about casual sex with strangers, and a number of other issues. I'm willing to bite the bullet on the idea that freedom often comes with negative consequences for part of the population. I still think the government should enforce contracts that turned out to have been bad bets (which is why I was angry when Scarlett Johansson was succesfully able to cow Disney during the pandemic when they shifted movies to streaming where she got a worse deal - she made a bet, and it turned out to be a bad bet. If Disney wants to smooth things over with her, they can do that outside of the context of a contract dispute as a show of good will, but in an ideal world Scarlett Johansson should have been forced to live with the original bad deal, because that's what contracts are for.)
I doubt very much that she would be consoled if said male person yelled out "don't worry, I'm not a rapist!"
As an aside, you reminded me of a lecture I once listened to about the brilliance of Odysseus' first words to Nausicaa after washing up on the beach naked.
He's an older male addressing a young girl, and he can't say something like, "Don't worry, I won't rape you," since that will just make her more worried by bringing the possibility out in the open. So instead he says, "I beseech thee, O queen,—a goddess art thou, or art thou mortal? If thou art a goddess, one of those who hold broad heaven, to Artemis, the daughter of great Zeus, do I liken thee most nearly in comeliness and in stature and in form."
This immediately does a few things:
- It puts him in a subservient position, as he is speaking respectfully to a superior.
- Comparing her to a goddess is a compliment, but comparing her to Artemis, a virgin goddess with stories of punishing men who try to see her naked, puts Nausicaa more at ease without having to say that he won't rape her directly.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
My preferred standard is based on legal status, not mere identification. That's what stops your "just long enough self-ID" hypothetical scenario.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Fair enough, my mental model was not that trans women are perfect little angels who never do anything wrong ever. (Though investigating one of your second link's cases at random showed that the assailant, Hannah Tubbs, hadn't transitioned until after the assault. So it's not exactly a central case of what I argue for - which is legal sex seggregation, not self-ID or biological sex.)
I'm also not convinced that the fig leaf of "(bio)sex seggregating" bathrooms makes much of a difference here. A quick Google search was able to show there are some cases of cis men sexually assaulting women in bathrooms without the need of cross dressing. The problem seems to be more a function of having a semi-private space, than anything involving society leaving specific openings. I would be against turning every bathroom into a Panopticon, even if it would make people safer, and I would be against banning fathers from using changing tables in the women's restroom if they need to. Why would I be against trans women in women's bathrooms?
I don't think it nudges women's safety much in either direction.
vorpa-glavo
3d ago
Why do you think we even have "man" and "woman" as a legal category? I never got the impression they're a permission to perform masculinity / femininity the way a driver's license is a permission to drive, or an arbitrary badge of honor like knighthood in the UK.
I think we do it for similar reasons to why we track whether people are married, whether they've adopted a child, etc. Because it gives the otherwise blind goverment a way to see what's happening with its citizens.
I also just don't take the bathroom argument too seriously. The best case I've seen people come up with is that one high school bathroom assault, and that involved a couple who had met up for consensual trysts several times in the same bathroom. To put it bluntly, no woman who is afraid of this sort of thing seriously fears that it will be someone they knowingly meet up with for sex that will assault them when they change their mind and say "no" this time.
I'm about as okay with trans women using the women's restroom, as I am with fathers using the women's restroom to change their baby's diaper when there is only a changing table in the women's bathroom. Both cases involve biological men in women's restrooms, and both have plausible ways they could be abused (men using realistic baby dolls, or men cross-dressing), but I don't think any of that kind of thinking is necessary. If women are vulnerable in restrooms, then men will use whatever attack vector society leaves open. On the marigin, I don't think anti-trans bathroom bills make women safer.
And besides, the object level question in this case is "should congresswoman Sarah McBride be allowed to use the women's restroom?", and I think it is reasonable to answer, "She should have the same right that an XY androgen-insensitve cis woman should have to use the restroom, based on the government's tracking of her as a woman." Certainly, I don't think anyone's fears that Sarah McBride would sexually assault someone in the bathroom are super justified.
This argument worked great.... right up until the point that the issue gained more prominence and people got a good look at what trans men actually look like, rather than when they're photographed or filmed from flattering angles and favorable lighting. The majority look like manlets, have a funny voice, and distinctly feminine mannerisms, they might pass as a gay man on a good day.
To your question - unironically yes, even with non-zero amount of transmen passing convincingly IRL, I think fewer women would end up uncomfortable with trans men in women's bathroom, than with trans women in women's bathrooms. Especially when everyone is aware the law only allows females to use them, and a male would be penalized for trying to slip in, if caught.
I just don't see it. We're talking about the kind of hysterical women who would answer "bear" to the infamous "Would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods?" I think even a manlet would trigger such women. Or do you think their answers would change if the questions was changed to, "Would you rather meet a 5' 4'' man or a bear in the woods?"
I think there is also the problem that there are far more "mannish" biological women than there are either trans men or trans women. I don't pretend to have any way to independently verify it, but this is an example of a story about a butch lesbian getting negative confrontations from her use of the women's toilet. I'm not sure how policing bathrooms in this way doesn't end up harming "ugly" women and non-gender conforming women, which seems to go against the stated goal of helping women.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them? While I certainly could imagine a standard that looks like:
- Bathroom 1: For men, trans women, trans men, and any iffy dykes who freak the chicks out.
- Bathroom 2: For feminine women
I can't see how you could actually write or enforce the laws and social norms around that in a consistent way that actually works out in pratice. The only two reasonable standards are "biological" or "legal documents" in my opinion. Either standard will involve some women sharing a bathroom with some people that they might read as "men", so that can't be the deciding factor.
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
How far are you willing to take this? Should we systematically look at how certain rooms are used, and if it would ever be the case that there's a woman alone in the room with a man, should we relocate activities or force the man to stand outside or something? Should we have far more women's only spaces than we currently do in society? What rooms besides bathrooms should we be sex-seggregating?
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
While their language could have been more clear, I read OP as using "stupid" as a gloss for "without college degree." Obviously there are the kinds of people Taleb calls "intellectuals yet idiots", but I don't think that's who OP had in mind.
vorpa-glavo
13d ago
I mean, they are capable of "solving" novel problems not in their initial data. The problems just have to have the same "shape" as problems already in their training data.
And certain kinds of "language" type problems can be solved purely on the basis of the LLM's "knowledge" of English. Those problems aren't necessarily super hard for a human to do, but could save time on tasks like that.
vorpa-glavo
28d ago
I mean, Homer rambled.
Did he? I've only read him in translation, but he's never seemed particularly rambly to me.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
Could someone point me to good resources to better familiarize myself with the facts around the Israel Palestine conflict?
What are the best arguments on the side of those who are pro- and anti-Israel?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The justification is simple: sticks and stones may break your bones but words can never hurt you. To which the standard reply is: "but words can hurt too". To which my reply is: "no it can't, because to hurt is to cause pain, and pain is purely a physical sensation.
Okay, but do you believe the opposite of this is true as well?
"Bricks and stones may make our homes, but words will never help me."
Usually, people justify free speech not just on the fact that speech doesn't do harm, but because free speech produces some tangible good in the world through the sharing of information.
But if you don't believe words can cause pain, do you also believe that words cannot produce the opposite of pain - pleasure?
Because if words can't affect bodily pain or pleasure for better or worse in your view, wouldn't it be the same whether the government banned speech or allowed it?
But if words can cause pleasure/produce benefits, then how can you maintain that they cannot ever produce harms?
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
Where do you fall on fraud?
And do you consider copyright violation or trademark infringement to be a form of "mere speech", or does it count as something else?
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I could get behind 1, but I don't know if I agree that institutionalization's biggest problems aren't inherent to the system. Sure, we can make very nice madhouses with blackjack and hookers, but at the end of the day there's always going to be people who straddle the fuzzy line of "too crazy for society" and "able to safely exist in society", and if those people are forcibly robbed of their liberty, they'll often be able to mount a justifiable case against any system that exists, no matter how nice.
We can always ignore such voices of course, but enough sob stories will almost certainly end at them being shut down again, no matter how nice they are. People don't like being stuck in a cage, gilded or otherwise.
With regards for 2 - surely you'd only want to set a high cash bail for violent crimes with a chance of recidivism or something? A crime of passion that's unlikely to have a follow up probably doesn't need a $1 million dollar bail.
As for 3, I'd certainly be open to letting communities police themselves. I was interested in the proposal someone put forward here about a neighborhood all chipping in for private security to supplement what the state provides, and I find that an interesting idea as well.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
This is incorrect and a vile form of genocidal propaganda that i will not let go unchallenged*.
Look, on my dad's side I am 14th generation American with ancestors that were on the Mayflower. By your definition, I'd qualify as an ethnic "American."
I think it's okay to be proud you had ancestors who fought in the Revolution or whatever, but I don't think your categories make a lick of sense. At the very least, I think most people would say that a white person who grew up in America from birth is basically "as American" as an "(Anglo) American." I have friends who were 100% ethnically German, and who grew up speaking English and no German and they're about as American as you can be. They're definitely not German.
I guess in principle, I'm not against the idea of calling out specific subethnicities like "Anglo American", "German American, "French American", but people just don't do that for white people, and it seems likely that we'll see a new ethnogenesis of "White Americans" if it hasn't happened already. And to be fair, I think the Anglo Americans played a large role in the ethnogenesis of White Americans.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
Do you believe there are ever any circumstances where it is okay to attack the US congress? Do you believe that there are any actions that the US congress could commit that would ever make violence against them acceptable?
I think the difficulty I have is that we in the United States aren't a nation. The United States isn't and has never been defined by being a single ethnic group sharing a common birth. We are a civic state, defined by our ideals and institutions. (This is the reason American conservatives are so different than "blood and soil" European conservatives. By and large, even the conservatives are classical liberals in the United States.) Because we got our start in a bloody revolution justifying itself based on a conception of natural rights, it must be the case that there are circumstances where it is alright to attack a government and its representatives. But despite this being a core part of the ideology under-girding the United States, I'm dissatisfied that the vast majority of people seem to think that it is never okay to rebel or engage in violence against the state and its actors.
If one of the justifications of the 2nd Amendment is that capacity of violence against the state needs to be preserved to lessen oppression and tyranny, why is it that in practice the set of "tyrannical acts that would justify violence against the state" seem to always be an empty set? Is it because America truly is the freest country ever conceived with no hints of tyranny and oppression anywhere in its 200+ year history? When is violence against the state ever justified?
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
(Because that's when we can start talking about the ACTUAL cause of violence, aside from guns)
What's your theory of the case? What, say, three interventions do you believe would have the largest effect on societal violence and crime, and be implementable within a little-l liberal constitutional republic under the rule of law?
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I suppose I didn't make myself clear. I am somewhat sympathetic to motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists of 1954, and I don't have a great argument for why they should have seen political violence as beyond the pale given their island's relationship to the United States. The ordinary means of political redress were denied to the Puerto Ricans, and violence seems reasonable enough under those circumstances, even if I prefer if Congress would not be attacked by people for the sake of stability.
While I don't think January 6 posed all that great a risk to the country given how badly executed it was, I tend to be less sympathetic to the January 6 rioters. A big part of this is because I don't think the thing they were angry about - stolen elections - were a "legitimate" complaint, if we don't engage in a motte and bailley about what we mean by a "stolen election."
However, what makes one "acceptable" and one "unacceptable"? I would prefer if there were easy and widely accepted principles for when political violence was considered acceptable, but the mainstream answer seems to "never, except in retrospect."
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
The point of criminal laws is not to ensure that a thing never happens. We outlaw murder, but there will always be murders. The point of laws is threefold: 1) to discourage other criminals from committing the crime in question, 2) to reform the criminal so they never commit the crime again, and 3) if 2 is impossible, to safely contain a criminal away from the rest of society so that everyone else is safe.
My guess is that the number of gun-related assassination attempts in Japan over the last 50 years is probably going to be less than the equivalent number per capita in the United States. Now, if all-cause assassinations per capita were the same between the two countries (all else being equal), that would be evidence that gun control is unlikely to play much of a role in preventing assassination attempts.
If you live in a civilized country, you should have little trouble trusting your neighbors with weapons.
I mean, in my civilized country, a rando tried to assassinate the candidate of one of the two major political parties, so my trust is being strained.
My basic problem is that I can't say whether a rando trying to assasinate a political candidate is the 2nd Amendment working as intended (since it puts the power to decide when to overthrow tyrants in the hands of individuals), or if there is some principled way to criticize some acts of political violence as outside of the intended scope of gun rights?
I mean, you can own a car and it can't be taken from you by the government without due process and such (literally the fifth amendment), whereas operating one on private property is explicitly a 'privilege.' So no, there is no explicit right, but there's still an inherent protection in there.
The relevant comparison is whether it would be constitutionally possible for a Federal or State ban on cars to be enacted. I very much doubt if such a thing would ever happen, but I don't think it would be unconstitutional.
Wow, maybe there's certain advantages to owning guns that THE SECOND AMENDMENT WAS MEANT TO PRESERVE?
I GUESS THE SECOND AMENDMENT IS GOOD FOR SOMETHING AFTER ALL.
/sarcasm
I agree that there are advantages to owning guns, but the 2nd Amendment is about more than an "advantage" it is about a supposedly inalienable right. I would imagine that we should hold rights to higher standards than merely being "advantageous", as there are plenty of advantageous things that aren't rights. Cars are advantageous, for example, but there is no recognized right to car ownership or operation.
I'm weakly pro-gun rights, because I think that gun ownership is one of the more likely ways for minorities to protect themselves against right violations by the majority (i.e. a black man during segregation, or the Black Panthers following cop cars in the 70's), but I honestly have trouble mapping the limits of acceptable political violence within that framework. What is the dividing line between the 1954 attack on the United States capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists and the January 6th riots? What is the dividing line between trying to assassinate Hitler or Pol Pot and trying to assassinate Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? If cops are a representative of the force and will of the state, who gets to decide when cops have crossed the line into tyranny and it is thus morally justified to kill them?
Because I am pro-civilization and anti-violence, I have trouble with my tepid support of gun rights. It seems great to be able to defend against a tyrannical majority in the abstract, but how do we balance that against the fact that any state (tyrannical or not) is going to defend itself and attempt to delegitimize resistance by the oppressed? Why do we consider the Revolutionary War and the Founding Fathers good, but the Whiskey Rebellion or the Civil War bad and illegitimate?
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
My point is that there is no "they" you're negotiating with, though. "Democrats" do not speak with a single voice. Even if you look at majorities, that Pew survey I linked indicates that a majority of Republicans agree with preventing people with mental illnesses from owning guns, raising the minimum age to buy a fire arm to 21, and oppose allowing people to carry a concealed fire arm without a permit. Put that way, there is no party that is universally against gun rights or for gun rights.
The Democrat blob is not a monolith, and neither is the Republican blob.
If you're trying to make a point that Democrats who won't pass their preferred gun control policy (but limited to registered Democrats only as a compromise) are being hypocritical, I'm not sure the argument straightforwardly gets off the ground. First, I don't think the vast majority of gun rights advocates would be in favor of such a compromise, so you're not putting forward a live proposal that is really worthy of consideration. And second, there's reasons for wanting to oppose such a proposal apart from believing in gun rights. It's stupid to unilaterally disarm yourself, in a society where 40% of your "enemy" is legally armed.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
You're painting with too broad a brush. 20% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents own guns compared to 45% Republican and Republican-leaning. Even if a majority of people in the Democratic-coalition believe that the Second Amendment should be appealed and gun rights seriously impaired (which I'm not sure is the case - there's a big difference between "I want background checks, mandatory gun safety classes, and for convicted perpetrators of domestic abuse and other violent crimes to have their guns confiscated" and "I don't think anyone anywhere should have any guns under any circumstances") - I don't think you could defend this policy as a serious proposal, since it isn't actually the case that the group of people doesn't recognize themselves as having the right.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I agree that women voting is not an essential part of democracy, though I support women's suffrage.
I'm partial to the empirical arguments from Garrett Jones' "10% Less Democracy", which argues that if you look at indexes of democracy and compare them to a variety of measures of well-being, it is not the case that the most democratic countries have the best outcomes. There's some floor of democratic-ness above which outcomes tend to rise, and some ceiling above which outcomes become bad again.
I think fiddling with secret ballots probably isn't worth it, as long as you're empirically above the floor of democratic-ness with all of the other policies you adopt.
While I think this is true to an extent, I have also noticed the people just seem to be defensive when they meet someone who doesn't engage in the same "vices" as them. I don't drink alcohol, and I'm not pushy about it. But I've had several encounters where someone offers me a drink, I politely decline, and then the tone of the interaction completely changes. I think there's something about seeing someone who is "pure" that makes some people act a little crazy in the moment, though I've never understood it - especially since I try very hard not to be santimonious about my temperance.
It has happend to me often enough that I've always wondered if half of the "pushy vegan" stories aren't just ordinary vegans who get read as "pushy" because of the emotions a person goes through meeting such a person. (My theory for the other half is that I think highly scrupulous people are probably neurodivergant in some way, and are more likely to be vegan/etc. Neurodivergant people aren't always known for their social graces, so I think those people might be clumsily pushy vegans as a result.)
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