WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
I can imagine a kind of internal logic that overlaps heavily with "men bad, women good" ideas. Anyone can change their identity and pronouns at will, but by choosing to do something heinous, they have switched their identity to male.
That's conceivable, but I'd hardly describe someone who believed that as non-zealous in their gender activism, they'd just be a very idiosyncratic zealot.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
Why should I indulge a murderer, though?
You needn't; but the non-murderous trans people you're interested in being nice to understandably perceive misgendering any trans person as an insult to them as a group. Similarly, you may not care about a black murderer's feelings, but you shouldn't call him the N-word in a newspaper article, because it would be hurtful to your non-murderous black readers.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
This is fair, but I don't think that Scott, if asked, would in fact defend ignoring a murderer's pronouns in the press on that basis. Not sure if he'd phrase his objection in terms of "misgendering anybody is hurtful to the sensibilities of the innocent trans people in your readership, so you should she-her the murderer to be nice to them", or in terms of "misgendering people is a mild but indecorous insult, and it's undignified for journalists to hurl indecorous insults at murderers; you shouldn't harp on about a dead murderer's biological sex any more than you should harp on about a dead murderer having had a small penis or an ugly wart, even if the claims are factually true", or something else I can't model.
WandererintheWilderness
4d ago
Lukewarm support for trans rights looks like "studiously use preferred pronouns but avoid materially contentious questions like kids, prisons, sports and bathrooms", not like "use preferred pronouns for nice people but not for murderers". I'm not actually sure if there's anyone in the world who does the latter, it would imply a very weird outlook where ability to change one's social gender is some sort of… revocable privilege? By and large, "anyone can change their pronouns" vs "no one can change their pronouns" is a binary debate, nuance vs zealotry is a question of what else someone in the former camp believes falls under the umbrella of inalienable trans rights.
I yearn to be a parent feels to me like it fits in the lack of hope box, rather than the don't want to box.
Perhaps, but the way you'd phrased it seemed to be focused on people who are doomers about the world as a whole, whereas I'm talking about people with self-confidence issues/therapy-culture-induced paranoia about their personal ability to do right by a child.
WandererintheWilderness
6d ago
I think "I don't like children." is covering a lot of ground between "I dislike being around children generally" and "I yearn to be a parent but am anxious about whether I'd be bad at it and ruin their childhoods so I won't risk it" (with mid-range options being things like "I like children fine, but there's so much more to life and they're such a time-sink - I'd rather be an uncle!").
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
'Gypsy' is now regarded as a slur
Confusingly, it's a slur in America but a reclaimed community term in the UK.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Surely it seems rather unlikely that even the kind of man who feels up young girls in the street would feel up young girls already carrying knives. There's poor impulse control, and there's Darwin Award-bait.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
Just look at NASA.
I don't think NASA is a good example; their mandate means they were always going to have much less friction surface with the general population than most of what we call "institutions".
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Well hold on, if Epstein didn't really know anything then wouldn't this remove the need to keep him quiet in the first place, and thus nullify the starting point of all this theorizing ie "that 'suicide' was sketchy, clearly some spooks took care of him to clean up after themselves"?
I would be happy with calling some of the BLM stuff terrorism, yes!
Not all of it, mind. I think blocking roads is fairly normal protest stuff that doesn't really serve to create a climate of terror in any straightforward sense - not sure how it could terrorize you, would honestly appreciate elaboration. Were the Canadian truckers terrorists? If anything, blocking roads looks to me it's a straightforward show of strength. The protesters demonstrate the ability to actually impede everyday life and the local economy on a meaningful scale if they don't get their way. That's not really the same kind of strategy as the archetypal terrorist attacks - small-scale acts of extreme violence which the terrorists couldn't scale up to a strategically meaningful extent, but which they leverage to frighten people into getting what they want anyway.
(Maybe 9/11 confuses the issue because it's intuitively "big"? But as I see it, what makes it a terrorist rather than merely military act is still the fact that the people who did it could not have repeated it enough times to actually defeat the US militarily. They merely hoped that taking out one or two high-profile targets would freak the enemy out to an irrational degree. Which, alas, it did.)
But certainly, a lot of it was terrorist in nature. Burning buildings is a very good example.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Ah, right. I think we were talking at slight cross purposes. When I said "because it's wrong", I meant that I wanted to designate "openly racially profiling minorities" as in itself "a bad thing", harm done to minorities as a class, as per the framework I outlined in my latest reply where living in a society that racially profiles imposes a significant psychological cost on any person who might be targeted by it, whether or not they actually are. (In contrast to how you seemed to consider the first-order effects of racial profiling itself to be neutral or negligible, and only look at outcomes, ie how many guilty vs innocent men get detained, how unpleasant it is to be briefly detained if innocent, etc.)
I did not mean "it's wrong because it's wrong" as some sort of completely abstract "if someone racially-profiles in the middle of a forest and no one hears it, Baby Jesus still cries" position, though I suppose I can see how you got that impression.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I think it’s very hard to describe something as both “wrong” and “true”.
I disagree. 24/7 totalitarian surveillance of all citizens at all times would also "work", far better than racial profiling. I am absolutely confident that it would drastically reduce the murder rate. But we still shouldn't do it. It'd be a bad thing in itself, an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on hundreds of millions of people 24/7 - in the same way that perpetually being looked on as possible criminals/rapists/illegal immigrants every day of their lives is an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on the tens of millions of non-white American citizens. (Similarly, parents should not be monitoring their children every second of their life beyond their toddler years, even if that does result in slightly more children who get run over crossing the street.)
In other words:
more young black men killed by black men, a TSA that pats down Asian girls, more expensive ICE operations, etc. how can you describe something as wrong if it reduces bad things in the world?
I think that the cost of normalizing racial profiling would in fact amount to more bad things than its implementation would prevent. Above I spoke of the distributed psychological harm done to all POCs from having to live in a society where it is normalized, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The horrors of slavery, segregation and lynchings are not so far behind us that we should laugh off the chance that reintroducing racial stereotypes into the Overton Window would allow for their return in force. Not in five years, but in fifty? A hundred? Slippery slopes exist. Give the ape brain's anti-outgroup bias an inch and it will take a mile, far in excess of what can be rationally justified.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Certainly that's a valid concern, and a key reason why I would strike "schools and child-care facilities" from the list at least. But even if you believe that it's being used as a Trojan horse for this less savory gambit, I do think the principle I describe is valid in itself, and should be implemented even if divested of the excessive add-ons.
and you don't care about immigration enforcement anyway?
Not the person you're replying to, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there. I care very much about the enforcement of anti-rape laws, for example, or indeed laws against cold-blooded murder; but even if some reliable statistics should show that in a Bayesian sense, the culprit is more likely to be black than white, I would still take the principled stand that the police should not be allowed to let that statistic enter into the identification of suspects.
Why not? Because it's wrong. Because it's wicked and counter to the fundamental dignity of Mankind. Because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes far out of proportion with the actual statistical fact, which if unchecked may be used to excuse vast-scale mistreatment of POCs as it was in the past. Because it is an insult to the memory of all black victims of slavery and segregation. A hundred reasons. I could talk about utilitarian concerns and the greater good, or I could talk about the moral necessity of making racist heuristics taboo for the sake of human dignity and civilization - I think these are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing from different paradigms.
At the end of the day, yes, we're "supposed to ignore" this "huge point of data" for the same kind of reason that the government isn't supposed to install telescreens in every home. Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong.
Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
Na, this isn't the middle ages, no sanctuary, sanctuary is in your home country.
I think that's rather misconstruing the point of the request. The idea is not to create Hunchback of Notre Dame-style sanctuary areas, but to prevent misuse of ICE as an authoritarian tool - to prevent "immigration enforcement" being used an excuse for the state to send armed goons wherever it pleases, and especially where they can intimidate political opponents. The list above does seem a bit over-expansive, but the principle is sound. Above all, in the current climate I would not want ICE anywhere near a polling station during an election, just as a question of principle - and surely you'll grant that in no plausible scenario could that particular restriction result in substantially hindering immigration enforcement.
(Do I actively believe Trump would order ICE agents to threaten people into voting Republican? No, not really. But blah blah Caesar's wife blah blah. And indeed, even if the agents behaved impeccably, doing this would open the Red Tribe up to endless accusations otherwise from the Blue Tribe, and be fertile soil for a whole new "stolen election" craze. You do not want to live in that world.)
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
To steelman in the point, in a Bayesian sense, the fact that in this case it turned out to be unjustified should update future officers away from shooting in similar situations with similar levels of uncertainty. That makes whether it was a "good shoot" or "bad shoot" in an absolute, hindsight-is-20/20 sense a meaningful, useful question, even if it doesn't impinge on the legality or morality of the event of Good's killing as it actually occurred.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Sure. But suppose you're a civilian bystander/activist/obstructionist and you've been subjected to unwarranted violence by one of four or five masked ICE guys - even if you can pinpoint which five guys were there at that time via subpoenaed records, you still have no way of pinpointing which actual guy did it should the five close ranks and go Spartacus. I'm sure there are ways out of this still, but it massively complicates the process of getting one's dues.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
More to the point, "terrorist" should be reserved for people who are actually trying to create a climate of terror in order to have an outsized effect relative to the amount of firepower they've got. That's what terrorism means. Random mayhem, however violent, is not terrorism if that is not its aim.
it revealed that the latter was merely instrumental, and they are actually perfectly willing to sacrifice fairness and meritocracy for equality.
I think you're failing to properly model DEI proponents' minds, here. They still want fairness and meritocracy, but they start from the unassailable premise that there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew, therefore showing that the outcome of a process is racially or gender-skewed proves that it wasn't actually fair and meritocratic. This is not sophistry, this is what a large amount of people actually believe.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Isn't the entire debate about what is and should be literally criminal?
Given the talk of "sets of norms" and "ostracizing", I thought this was about non-law-based norms.
Such an existence depends on the personal not being political, and the way that happens is exactly by the formation of "common decency", of a set of norms and rules and behaviors that people conform to without significant argument or complaint, with those who cannot conform being ostracized.
I don't think that follows, at least not trivially. A liberal's answer - this liberal's answer, for example - would be that, quite the opposite, the personal becomes political because society ie the body politic tries to screw around with people's personal lives. In fact, I rather think that for the personal not to be political, you would need a maximally liberated society, a society where the very idea of taking issue with another citizen's behavior would seem nonsensical, if that behavior is not literally criminal. Then, and only then, can all people live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own, without feeling that their happiness is under siege every waking moment.
I am not a full-on anarchist or libertarian in terms of the political systems that I think can produce good outcomes in the long term, but I do believe that "people can do what they want forever" is an essential component of the Good, and that government is good largely insofar as it gets us closer to that ideal (with the obvious epicycles about the government being empowered to infringe on freedoms in the interest of collective survival, as people need to be alive to be able to do what they want).
WandererintheWilderness
11d ago
In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.
But Asterix is far more sophisticated than 50s Marvel ever was. (Of course, that says more about 50s Marvel than anything else. I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period.)
I would think that the problem is self-compounding due to the absurdity heuristic. A woman waking up with sore genitals for the first time ever could conceivably put 2 and 2 together and go "oh God, have I been raped in my sleep"; but provided she otherwise trusted her husband, what kind of a mind does it take to go "I've been periodically waking up from sleep with sore genitals for years; it must be because I have been systematically raped every time"? The latter sounds insane. Even if the thought occurred to her, she might very well dismiss it as ridiculous paranoia. Human bodies are weird and full of little aches and itches, middle-aged women's bodies especially. I would guess that precisely because it was a somewhat regular occurrence, she just assumed these sensations must be some kind of natural most-menopausal ailment.
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