Goodguy
23hr ago
I feel like I want to underline the "probably" in what you wrote by giving an example of an exception: my first girlfriend was a very smart philosophy major whose personality, while not being exceptionally feminine, was also not masculine or tomboyish, and she didn't show any signs of neurodivergence.
Goodguy
23hr ago
Yeah, many people might not realize that Clav did the DIY stuff because of limited medical options and the fact that he used to have no money, not because he has anything against the idea of going to professionals.
Goodguy
23hr ago
I always thought people like Clavicular are bad because they teach their (often young and impressionable) viewers to lead a lifestyle that is fundamentally unhealthy whilst avoiding things that would actually be good for them.
That's another big reason why people think he is bad. I just didn't mention it.
Part of the explanation is this: Clavicular explicitly says that he does looksmaxxing to gain social and sexual status. Trans advocates, on the other hand, usually say that trans people transition to feel more comfortable with themselves, because they have intense dysphoria, etc.
Putting aside the question of whether the trans advocates' claim is accurate or not, cause that's a different topic... still, part of what is happening here is just that people tend to respond more positively to the "I am doing this because I am suffering psychologically" presentation than to the "I am doing this to for sex and money" presentation.
Of course, the reality is that Clavicular's story is that he too, as he freely admits, was suffering psychologically when he was younger. Suffering psychologically from being a nobody, from not getting girls. Not only that, but he is still suffering psychologically, as he freely admits, because his underlying personality is still that of a socially anxious introvert. He uses psychotropic drugs and the motivation of getting money to get himself to constantly go out and make influencer content.
But male desires for sex, money, and social status are widely seen as being somehow inherently wrong and disgusting. Not just on the left, but even by many people on the right. People tend to associate these pretty natural and understandable desires with the worst examples of what happens when psychologically disturbed people pursue them: rapists, social climbing sociopaths, sleazy business sharks, and so on.
A man wanting to become a woman, on the other hand, does not activate these associations. Becoming a woman might conceivably get a particularly sexually unsuccessful man more sex than he would have had otherwise, but becoming a woman is popularly conceived (whether accurately or not) as something that would make the sex that the person gives to others less dominant and aggressive. Becoming a woman is also not popularly thought of as something that would give the man more social status. Yes, there are cases of trans activists using trans issues as a way to status climb, but it is popularly understood that men on average have more social status than women and that most of the world's most powerful people are men. In reality, the average young woman probably has more social status than the average young man, but that might be a point that is too subtle for the average observer to grasp.
Another point is that: Yes, Clavicular in a sense is doing gender-affirming medical treatments just like some trans people do gender-affirming medical treatments. But he is going beyond gender-affirming treatments and doing gender-maxxing. So the trans equivalent to Clav isn't just a man who does some relatively light gender-affirming treatments to reduce the presentation of masculinity. It's a man who tries to turn himself into a female bimbo stereotype, with fake lashes, large fake breasts, and so on.
Personally, I find nothing wrong with that, whether it's the trans person doing it or Clavicular doing it. But I think that many people are weirded out by the monomaniacal maximalism and "trying to turn yourself into a superficial stereotype" aspects of it, similar as to how many people are weirded out by extreme bodybuilders.
It is gratifying, though unsurprising, that Kirk's death did not kick off a wave of revenge killings and mass violence, as fedposters fervently predicted.
After the 2020 election, it became crystal clear to me that 99% of the grumblings about civil war are not serious. Something like half of Republicans claim to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. Republicans are a heavily armed demographic. Yet there were almost no violent incidents in response to the supposed election theft.
The violence-promoting subset of the left is equally unserious. Hence the famous Twitter post: "People on twitter will really be like 'you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart' and then not firebomb a Walmart."" Yes, there are occasional incidents of left-wing violence, but given how many people there are in the US and how easy it is to get guns in the US, these incidents are actually extremely uncommon.
Which is not to say that civil war or uprising is impossible, but it gives one a sense for how away we probably are from it that even a widespread belief or professed belief that the election was literally stolen from millions of people's preferred Presidential candidate led to almost no violence.
Goodguy
1d ago
Is there really that much of a double standard? If Hasan Piker was shot to death by a lone gunman tomorrow, I would expect the same thing that happened with Charlie Kirk, just with the tribes flipped: many people on the right would cheer and make memes, many people on the left would act outraged and try to cancel the right-wingers, people would murmur darkly about civil war, etc.
Goodguy
1d ago
I think that "bomb the datacenters" is a silly idea for various reasons, such as: 1) WW3 isn't much better than ASI apocalypse, 2) it would just delay ASI.
That said, I don't think it's intrinsically un-libertarian. I think all but the most extreme fringe libertarians would agree that, for example, it's ok to use heavy government control to fight off an alien invasion.
A genuinely rational libertarianism would argue that yes, in some situations a giant authoritarian government is actually the best solution.
Goodguy
12d ago
It's worth noting that even the San Francisco subreddit mostly thinks that harassing Wiener like that was a bad thing.
The people who genuinely think that this harassment was a good thing are a small minority in the overall "leftist" coalition.
Goodguy
12d ago
Yes, but independents, undecideds, and casual voters might decide to abstain from voting or vote for Republicans instead of voting for Democrats if the Democrats move further toward cultural and/or economic leftists.
Goodguy
12d ago
I question the idea that progressives and socialists are the Democratic Party's base. The last three Democratic Party Presidential candidates have been Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris - definitely not socialists, and also not real progressives in the modern sense of the term "progressive". Progressives and socialists are loud online, but they don't seem to make up a dominant fraction of the Democratic Party's voters. The Party needs their votes - well, it needs as many votes as possible - but that doesn't necessarily mean it would gain more votes by shifting "left" than it would lose by shifting "left". It might or it might not.
Goodguy
12d ago
But why should the author's opinion matter, if the opinion is not explicitly written into the text of the actual Amendment? That would open a whole can of worms. If that is what the author meant, why did he not write it into the Amendment? After all, it seems to have not been completely obvious, since he felt the need to comment on it.
I think that literal interpretations of the Constitution don't work in practice though, because it almost unambiguously says that the government can't stop me from having nuclear weapons. I'm pretty sure that "arms" back then just referred to weapons in general. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
And if that's the case, we have had a very weird situation for a long time now where the 2nd Amendment has been interpreted in a very limited way even though the clear reading allows all weapons.
It could be argued that this is what the amendment procedure is for, though. I wonder if it would actually be possible for an amendment that limits the 2nd Amendment to certain types of weapons to be ratified in today's political climate. There would be obvious slippery slope concerns from many people.
Goodguy
17d ago
My sympathies lean toward the side of "a grid of pixels shouldn't be illegal", but with CSAM there is a problem: it is easy to make CSAM in third-world countries, so there is no way for the US government to actually shut down production short of using international law enforcement or military force.
That said, this is the same US government that kept military forces in Afghanistan for many years, spending huge sums of taxpayer money, without eradicating child sexual abuse in the country. So it would be somewhat hypocritical of it to go really hard after the already-produced CSAM based on such a justification as I gave above, given that this government had a chance to stop child sexual abuse in Afghanistan and didn't do it.
I said "my sympathies lean", and I should clarify: I am generally extremely pro free speech, but I can definitely imagine exceptions: the fabled nuclear codes, a recipe to create a bioweapon that would kill 99% of the world population Stephen King style, etc.
Goodguy
22d ago
I think the typical incel would reject prostitution because it doesn't provide the ego boost, and indeed actually for an incel has a high chance of being bad for the ego. But the typical incel would jump on the opportunity to have a get laid and leave every week kind of deal. It's better than what the incel currently has.
Goodguy
22d ago
That would be an extremely pyrrhic victory for Israel because it would result in the governments and populations of the West ostracizing Israel vastly more than they do now and would probably also massively intensify the split between more liberal, more peacenik Jews and hawk Jews.
Goodguy
23d ago
The sex. They still do genuinely want sex, or at least they think they do (in the case of those who have never had sex yet). And they still would get the ego boost from secret sex. So the only thing missing would be the approval from peers.
Goodguy
23d ago
Sexual access dominates a huge portion of the mindshare of men, especially young men.
It does. I wonder, though, how much of it is actually a desire for sex and how much of it is a desire for the good ego feelings and positive feedback from one's peers that having a lot of sex with attractive women brings. I think the main reason why male incels suffer is not because they lack sex, it is because they feel like losers and failed men.
Goodguy
24d ago
I have many issues with how our economy is set up, and I have some issues with things like marriage law that seem give women priority rather than equality, but when it comes to some other things I am very happy with the last 100 years of changes in norms and laws. I am happy that here in the US, there is effectively no military conscription. I am happy about the sexual revolution, that I am free to be sexual in whatever way I want to be. I don't feel that I would have any difficulty in finding a wife if I wanted one. I am also happy that I am not being pressured by society to find a romantic partner or a wife, if I don't want one. Maybe I'm an outlier when it comes to men, and granted I am a bit older than "young". I'm not so sure though. It's hard to say what fraction of young men who are having trouble finding partners are actually having the trouble because of changes in social norms. Certainly many of them are mainly being held back from meeting women by shyness rather than by lack of opportunity. And certainly many of them are freely choosing to avoid marriage, rather than being held back from marriage by the state of society.
One difference, though, is that having nukes means that it's very unlikely that you will have other countries try to assassinate you. Whereas being able to shut down the Strait of Hormuz and blow up Gulf Arab infrastructure is very nice, but does not deter assassination to anywhere near the same degree.
Having nukes also protects you from other countries trying to invade and overthrow you in a way that conventional deterrence does not. And, while a regime-change invasion by the US seems very unlikely right now, the possibility does hang over the heads of the Iranian leadership. If the US developed the political will to do a regime-change invasion, Iran's government would not be able to do anything to resist it other than put a few speedbumps in its way. The ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and blow up Gulf Arab infrastructure is not a major deterrent to an invasion by the US, since such an invasion would probably succeed rapidly enough that the economic damage would be fairly limited.
Goodguy
29d ago
Battles like this are a good test of AI's power, since if and when AI ever became sufficiently intelligent and powerful, one could tell it "{model name}, I would like you to run a campaign to politically destroy {list of politician names}. Assume that you have {number} dollars of budget and the ability to delegate tasks to humans." and have a reasonable hope of success, at least assuming that those politicians weren't running their own AI to keep themselves in power.
Goodguy
1mo ago
The American involvement was predictable risk of being at war with the UK. Hitler rejected the UK's ultimatum to cancel the invasion of Poland anyway and after he did that the UK declared war, as did France.
Even if American non-involvement could have somehow been guaranteed, going to war with the UK and France was a very risky move. In the real timeline, most things went well for Germany in the first 3 years of the war. However, the UK and France together with their colonial holdings were economically stronger than the Axis powers and because of the English Channel and the power of the UK's air force and navy, Germany had no way of knocking the UK out of the war. It's possible that if a few things had gone differently, if the French had made some better decisions, Germany would have gotten bogged down when trying to invade France rather than gaining a swift victory. And there was always the Soviet Union looming in the background.
Basically, Hitler's foreign policy failed to honor the "only go to war when success is reasonably likely" maxim and should be evaluated as a massive failure despite Germany's successes in the pre-war period and in the first 3 years of the war. If he had stopped after Czechoslovakia and then managed to attain a durable peace with the other relevant great powers, then one could evaluate his foreign policy as a massive success. But he didn't stop.
As for democracy, I agree that it is not a panacea and that its successes are partly correlated with having good human capital. I prefer living in a democracy, though. I don't want to live in Pinochet's Chile, Saudi Arabia, or Hitler's Germany. I'd prefer not facing the possibility of imprisonment, torture, state murder, and so on for expressing my political ideas, for example.
Goodguy
1mo ago
Got it. Yeah, I just asked because I sometimes call myself a centrist but I don't make those kinds of arguments. It's certainly possible that the majority of centrists would make such arguments, though.
A few thoughts I had after reading over your posts in this thread:
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