Felagund
4d ago
Thank you!
Given that you have more experience than most, then, what do your opinions look like on trans-related issues?
Felagund
4d ago
Everyone who brings up the suicide discourse to score a point is contributing to the problem. We know that suicide, like many other things, spreads socially; that's why newspapers try not to cover suicides too much. But for some reason, we decide to convince teenagers that the proper way to spite people who won't give them the gender treatment that they want is by suicide. No wonder suicide rates are astronomical.
Felagund
4d ago
Oh, woah, I hadn't realized that you were ex-trans. Have you given a description of what things were like for you somewhere? Your life history? (If so, where? If not, I'd be interested.)
Felagund
4d ago
"I believe that the vast vast majority of doctors providing gender affirming care through therapy, puberty blockers, and in very rare cases surgery, are doing so with the best interests of the child in mind, which was not the case for castrati historically as I understand it."
While I'm sure that a great many of the people in the process have good intentions, I do not think that they are often acting with good judgment. In your example, killing is murder unless you kill the right person in the right context. But it does not merely suffice that you think that what you're doing is the right situation ("they really had it coming"), but that it actually be that.
I don't really have a good sense of what things were like for castrati. I think they (or at least, those who were successful) were not infrequently of fairly high social status, but I'm not at all sure of that.
Felagund
4d ago
How sane is bluesky? Because I imagine interacting with far-out people wouldn't be great for depolarization. I'd think the best place would be moderate lefties, perhaps?
Felagund
4d ago
Yeah, I imagine there's some level of selection in who you end up interacting with.
Regarding 1: I don't know that I'm convinced by this. Suppose someone is the candidate of the "End Democracy Party." Someone who is pro-democracy could understandably be disappointed with their election. Of course, that would still be the democratic result, so their complaint is really with the populace that they have, that it is not a suitable one to attempt to maintain a democracy in.
Similarly, one could be disappointed with a decrease in the effectiveness in democratic governance. I think this was closer to what they were complaining about: that this indicates the need to win the "stupid vote," pointing to tangible harms wrought by people finding the wrong things appealing. "Democracy makes us listen to and appeal to the people with the bad opinions" is a valid critique of democracy, and so saying that that seems to be more the case than they once thought is an entirely reasonable sentiment.
2 is false. Vaccine skepticism in general has definitely risen since 2020 (the people putting in place mandates should really have considered the second order effects).
I'll in large part grant 3, though.
Felagund
4d ago
Why is Tetanus less relevant in the first world? Are we less likely to get dirty cuts?
Felagund
6d ago
Sure, I definitely think that people were manipulating the public in this way, and that there's a decently high chance that that could have been the difference.
Felagund
6d ago
I assume the question here has an intended answer (there wasn't much fraud).
Anyway, asking anyone who does think the 2020 election was stolen, do you have any examples of things that seem like obvious problems or evidence of substantial fraud? I'm currently inclined to think that there wasn't anything of that sort, but a lot of people seem really firmly convinced, so I'd be interested in seeing the evidence.
Felagund
10d ago
But surely corroboration from across the mediterranean should be treated as evidence?
Felagund
10d ago
I'm inclined to believe the Carthaginian infant sacrifice stories, as we see it complained about in the bible, and Tyre and Sidon etc. were right by Israel.
Felagund
17d ago
Yes. He was unmodded on reddit. (I was never on reddit myself) He was banned here a couple months ago for deficits in etiquette, despite being warned. (And I think I remember something about him not accepting that people can recognize racial differences in the aggregate without being white nationalists.) It was something of a shame, in my book, since having additional perspectives is nice.
Felagund
17d ago
We won't escape it. Duverger's law. What third party votes actually do is signal that there's a body of people who have a different set of preferences (with some very vague gesture as to what those might be) whose votes might be worth attempting to appeal to in future elections.
Felagund
17d ago
But, I think, bitcoin seems mostly secure, right?
I'm not familiar enough with the mechanics, but would crypto elections be pretty riggable? Could you pay miners to only include transactions that had votes for your candidate in their blocks? There are probably ways to avoid that if you design things right, though.
I can't remember where I heard it, I think it was EconTalk, maybe in their discussion of crony capitalism, but right now, when someone gives money to a politician's campaign, it's important to them that the politician knows that they, specifically, gave that money to the politician's campaign. If the politician couldn't tell who gave money to his campaign, he could be corrupt in many ways, but at least he couldn't act corruptly in the specific way of just looking to the people who gave the most money to his campaign and doing the things they tell him to do.
You can make it pretty clear that you're the one who gave the money if you tell them you're going to give them $648,355.27, and then, lo and behold, someone makes a donation the next day of exactly that amount.
Felagund
17d ago
Not sure. I know the Mises caucus of the libertarian party wasn't in favor of him.
Felagund
18d ago
what makes me useful is that I am willing to actually and consistently do it
And, sincerely, thank you for doing so. It sounds like a lot of work, and it provides a lot of value.
Felagund
20d ago
Are you in Wisconsin? That's the only one that had that list match exactly. It looks like their only write-in candidate available is Peter Sonski, of the American Solidarity Party.
I imagine De la Cruz is too extreme with you, wanting to abolish capitalism. I couldn't find identifiable policies for Terry.
If by "quantitative approaches to existential threats" you mean, not shutting down everything over climate change, while still caring about it, I imagine that rules out West and Stein. They're also just generally more extreme.
Of the remaining:
Oliver likes to handle things by just having the government leave the matter. He wants to let everyone in on immigration. He wants to help the climate only by stopping government actions that make things worse.
Trump's probably more anti-trade than you'd like, and cares less about the environment than you'd prefer (though he agrees that clean air and water are important).
RFK's now only listing things that he can agree with Trump on, which makes him hard for me to evaluate.
Sonski's not really a YIMBY, and wants to keep allowing in refugees.
I'd say, if you want to choose someone with a chance, definitely go Trump. Otherwise, your closest match is probably one of those last four, but I'm not sure which.
Felagund
20d ago
Yes, somehow Grants Pass was the most striking for me as well from this last term, in that it seemed the most tenuous and absurd. I was thinking the whole time, how did that position manage to attract three votes, when it was so transparently not what the 8th amendment is saying?
In practice, though, disparate impact is often used not only for concealed racism, but for any policies that does not produce the desired ratios, where desired means "at least as many nonwhites as the population that we're drawing from." But that can mean that simple hiring based on competence means that people can fall below the definitely-not-quotas, and so they would be legally vulnerable.
In theory, it's a nice feature to capture concealed racism. In practice, it's a generic cudgel that can be used to punish ordinary behavior, should you get out of line. And legally (assuming we're talking about Title VI here), it's a complete fabrication, and is used to make people break the text of the law itself.
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