quiet_NaN
9hr ago
There are certainly complaints about Trump which boil down to him not behaving like someone of the upper middle or upper class.
If I express disgust at the way he decorates the White House with gold, that is a mere complaint about aesthetics.
If I complain that he is a narcissistic con man, you can certainly claim that I am mostly complaining about the fact that his cons are not targeted at my class.
Still, I think that Trump/MAGA is different in important ways from the traditional DC swamp. With previous administrations, the corruption was mostly in the zone of deniability. Hunter Biden being on some Ukrainian board of directors, senators earning lucrative consulting positions in the companies they were previously regulating, the usual. This was bad, but not maximally bad. Presumably, many corrupt deals did not take place not because the politician was honest nor because nobody wanted to bribe them, but simply because there was no good way to do the transaction while maintaining deniability. For example, a rich scammer currently under investigation by the DoJ did not have a good way to bribe GWB or Obama. Even if they were interested, unless he was a billionaire, it would simply not have been worth the political capital for them to meddle with some investigation.
With Donald Trump, there is no fig leaf of deniability. Nobody is under any illusion that he is honest any more than anyone is under any illusion that he is Christian. This means that he has a much easier time coordinating with people wanting to bribe him, to the point where other scammers can just buy his shitcoins to make their DoJ problems disappear.
Likewise, his attitude to truth. Politicians have always lied on occasion. I remember GWB and Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Still, typically politicians tried to avoid outright lies because their voters might vote for someone else if they feel fooled.
With Trump, the lies are priced in since his advent with birtherism. There is still some limited distrust, it seems unlikely that he would have claimed to have captured Maduro if he had not done so, but any lie which will still be believed by 10% of the electorate despite counter-evidence is still worthwhile for him to peddle.
More generally, politicians have to manage both perceptions and the real world. With MAGA, there is very little in the way of acknowledgement that there exists a real world at all, that we are not free to decide what is causing autism. If Trump tweets about the hundreds of wars he has ended and how he deserves the Nobel more than anyone, that feels to me like he is trying to convince the universe itself to start believing his story. Likewise him trying to win the Iran war just by claiming victor, and the universe and Iran somehow just not getting his memos.
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
hunger and gatherer communities
This seems a slightly uncharitable phrasing.
For what it's worth, I think most of the populations which are growing very fast are depending on agriculture.
Also, the objection that giving food to the poor will cause them to multiply so you will need to give them more food in the future lest they starve is not exactly new. Any EA intervention will think about unintentional side effects, and I expect that USAID is little difference.
Fortunately, there are a lot more interventions than just changing how much grain we ship to Africa.
quiet_NaN
22hr ago
That seems like at least strong evidence that some vandalism happened, and nontrivial evidence that the vandalism had a larger effect, which quite a lot of media voices are minimizing as a conspiracy theory, just to support claims of incompetence. Which doesn't make Trump's claims correct or the vandalism responsible for the broader problems; it just shows that the NYT's arguments aren't consistent with its own evidence.
I would not call that photo strong evidence. If you want to convince me that the coating is failing in many places due to vandalism, a photo of a person kneeling next to the pool with a backpack and what may very charitably be a knife is not going to cut it.
I think what happened was that Trump made one of his big announcements on how the pool would be the Best Pool Ever, longer than the height of the tallest buildings, painted in American Flag Blue, a monument which will last for centuries. Then his pool guy did a shitty job and the paint came peeling off after a few weeks. Once it became common knowledge that the coating is coming off, of course people wanted to get their own piece of coating, and likely helped the process along a bit.
His reaction was then to blame these people. My pool would have lasted forever but these hateful liberals are destroying it, or some variant. Importantly, we should not update on Trump claiming vandalism. There is no world in which he would say oops, my pool guy did a subpar job, my bad, I will take full responsibility and try to fix the damage.
I agree that the algae bloom is probably more about phosphate levels than it is about the failing coating. Charitably, I do not want to rule out that someone deliberately emptied a sack of fertilizer into the pool just to spite Trump, but I seriously doubt that this is happening every time they change the water. I find it unlikely that before Trump made his announcement, he discussed the matter carefully with aquatic biologist experts (i.e. PMCs) and took their advice on mitigating bloom.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Where is no analogy with secular world is that the ordinations are illicit but valid.
This is interesting. It seems like as far as validity is concerned, bishops can self-replicate.
Now I am wondering about the possibility of some bishop (SSPX or mainline) due to some weird circumstance making some pink-haired lesbian a bishop, who then proceeds to consecrate every consenting christened person she runs across a bishop, and so forth. Think of all the mayhem they could wreck -- working in a bakery and randomly transsubstiating rolls in secret (or tetrapacks of supermarket wine), marrying ONS-havers for shits and giggles, baptizing frozen embryos, offering OnlyFans channels with the confession of the sin of lust included (like flights with carbon offset), and so forth.
I mean, as an atheist I am automatically (latae sententiae) excommunicated, but trying to catch the rest of the conditions would be a fun quest. (Personally, I would not throw a shoe at the pope, but all of the rest seem achievable as an illicit but valid priest.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think your intuition of the ick of a relationship depending on the absolute age difference constant is not shared by most people. The xkcd standard of "don't date below $own_age/2+7" is a lot more reasonable (though also not a hill I am prepared to die on).
By your logic, a 35yo dating a 55yo is equivalent to a 35yo dating a 15yo. Yet I do not the much of a problem with the former, while I consider the latter pretty much always wrong.
If I have 25yo boxer fighting against an 18yo boxer, that may or may not be a fair fight, but it will not be in even remotely the same category as the fight would have been if the older boxer was still 18 and the younger boxer was 11.
Maturity is one of these s-curve things. A 10yo is still in the phase where she is rapidly gaining life experience, and a 17yo can sometimes run circles around her in emotional maturity and pressure her into sexual behavior which is not in her long-term interests.
But in the next seven years, that gap between them will get smaller as the initially 17yo will hit diminishing returns on his growth. At age 17, she is much more likely to consider the possibility that he is just looking for a quick fuck when he is talking about how they are soulmates for eternity.
Age both of them by another seven years and the relationship would be entirely un-Problematic. He will not gain great powers to charm women out of their pants between age 24 and 31, and at age 24 she will very likely know what she wants in a relationship and have some judgement on whether the 31yo will give her that or not.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
If we are talking about intentionally making babies soonish, it makes perfect sense for 23W not to pick 18M, because unfortunately, most 18M's are not heirs to vast family estates, nor are most 23W's for that matter. In 2020 (e.g. before AI complicated things further), it made perfect sense for both men and women to postpone having kids until they are in their 30s, have finished their education and have high-paying, steady jobs. Of course, this does not give them a lot of window to find a partner and have kids -- especially if they want multiple kids.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
High-paying jobs are often also paying as much, or more, for the experience in life and work of the individual as their intelligence and qualifications.
Agreed. If companies wanted intelligence, they would just recruit 17yo's based on IQ tests.
Formal qualifications are often a proxy. The point is not that anything you learned in your master or PhD is directly useful for doing software consulting, it is that it filters for (mild) ambitiousness and executive function.
Domain experience is obviously relevant, hence all the companies looking for people with at least three years experience using Claude. But it is also harder to check by HR than formal qualifications.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
but the fact that 18-year-old boys are frequently accused of being an "Epstein diddy blud" merely for talking to 17-year-old girls
I am sure that you can cherry-pick some examples where an 18-yo was accused of being a pedo for asking a 17-yo for the way to the supermarket, and of course the psychopaths (in the mop sense) in woke circles will occasionally weaponize Problematic Age Gaps like they weaponize Problematic Anything, but I seriously doubt that the fertility crisis is due to 18yo boys asking out other 18yo's instead of 17yo's.
In the 1950s, a man could feed a family through unskilled labor. He might even buy a house after a few years. On the other hand, the median young man and his girlfriend of 1952 typically did not have a ton of other options than settling down -- backpacking through Australia, going to university, getting sucked in some video game and so on were all unlikely choices.
Today, the places with a lot of jobs are cities, but they are often expensive. The route to home-ownership looks like "study, do a PhD, work five years as a software consultant for a bank, pay the down payment of a house which is still barely in the public transport hub of your city. At this point you can then reasonably think about having a kid (provided you have a partner and have not aged out of the fertility window)." And of course there is still the possibility that AGI will take your job next year and you will raise your kid on what Elon Musk is willing to spare as an UBI.
Of course, it also does not help that handling a small kid is more than one full-time job. In 1950 women did not have a better option, but today they do. Men have certainly become more willing to help with the kids, but probably not to the point where they are willing to share the burden 50-50. If I am optimistic, I (a guy) might say that I might be able to take care of a baby eight hours a day, every day, until it is old enough for daycare (and the caretaking requirements relax slightly). Unfortunately, this would only work if I had a partner who was willing to take care of the kid 16h per day, and most women would very reasonably tell me to go fuck myself if I proposed that they take over two thirds of the care work. And this is before monetary constraints: I can kinda manage a 40h work week, but that is with the rest being leisure time. And while my job in academia pays reasonably ok (for now -- one of the benfits of having a long-winding education), at 28h per week it is not something which can feed a family with Western standards.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I think it is fair to say that the church has been supportive of the state since the age of Constantine. Sure, the RCC wielded tremendous power in medieval times, and very much messed with worldly policy decisions, but in the end it has survived through pragmatism. Monarchs, states, democracies and dictatorships come and go, and while the RCC is rarely on the forefront of social change (and often has resisted it initially, especially if it was change towards the left), it tends to come around and view it as the god-given order eventually.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Sure, but like most defense contractors, they are bound tightly by government regulations. They can't just decide to outsource their production to China, or hire Indians, or to offer their products to arbitrary countries or sell their company to a state-run Chinese company in the way Ford can make decisions about their civilian car production.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
those men would say an invasion is exactly what's happening
Not a military invasion, no. You could use invasive species rhetoric, but that is quite a different thing. It would be like triggering NATO article 5 because of the nutria invading the US.
Employed illegal immigrants pay taxes, same as citizens. If they murder someone, they are put through the same legal system. These two facts alone set them apart from members of any invading army. If you get invaded by the troops of Alexander, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, GWB or basically any other commander in the history of mankind, the invaders will not pay federal income tax. The idea that during the sacking of a city, local policemen would go around arresting individual invaders for assault or murder seems totally absurd.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Also, if nukes are a constitutional right then obviously forming associations to develop and build and sell them is also constitutionally protected.
"You can own a gun, provided you can file one out of a block of iron and personally mine the saltpeter for the powder because we ban the sale of guns and anything which might be helpful in making or using them" would go very much against the spirit of 2A.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Its first test and major precedent was a complete inversion of the language.
The general understanding is that "not under the jurisdiction" covers invading armies and diplomatic staff of other countries (and also Indians with internal self-governance).
Of course, the tendency to naturalize immigrants (or at least their descendants) is much older than the 14th (slavery non-withstanding). Most ancestors of today's US citizens were neither Native American nor part of the Mayflower.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
While I do not have anything against Leo in general, any Vatican which had the ambition to rule the US by proxy would likely be as much of a disaster as Trump is.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.
With your complaining about the Evil Catholics on the court, I can not help but notice that all of them except for Sotomayor were appointed by Republican presidents. In particular, two of the three you identify as strongly Catholic (ACB and Kavanaugh) were appointed by President Trump. Perhaps ask him why he did not appoint some gun enthusiast evangelicals which favor rounding up the illegals and sending them to megaprisons in some shithole nation, or blow up their ships before they arrive?
To get the obvious out of the way: the SCOTUS upholding birthright citizenship is not that surprising that we need conspiracy explanations. The plain language of the 14th, plus a century and change worth of legal precedent based on a textual interpretation of the 14th is not something you overturn easily. In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe. We do not need to suppose that the conservatives who voted for birthright citizenship are stooges of the pope when the alternative explanation is that they are textualists who are reluctant to say "actually the constitution means X when it says Y because it would be really convenient for the object level decision if it did."
Also, if you think that the Vatican would excommunicate anyone over being against open borders, think again. Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic.
I am also sorry to inform you that some brands of Christianity do not make good foundations on which you can project arbitrary political messages. Christianity comes with its own ideas about what is good. Caring for the plight of the needy was very much instrumental in early Christianity spreading. There were certainly papacies where this message was lost almost completely, but a general attitude of "let the third worlders drown, who gives a fuck" is not compatible with Catholicism. (In better news, there are plenty of choices for religions which are long on not giving a fuck about others. Vance, Hegseth and his ilk might be better off worshipping Huitzilopochtli, Odin or Khorne.)
Also, do you have some source for the Vatican (or even Mamdani) arguing that the best way to fix global poverty is just to open all the borders? Personally, I do not believe that open borders scale very well. Supporting the needy in a First World country seems much less effective than supporting them directly in the global South. Rescuing drowning migrants is, in my mind, not a part of a coherent plan to tackle global poverty. Instead, it is something you do because it is the thing a decent human should do, and you realize that you do not have the stomach to crucify enough migrants to deter them from coming, and do not trust any (hypothetical) utilitarian argument that this would lead to better global outcomes.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think that the "each parent pretends to only understand a single language" thing is a bit silly if carried to extremes.
The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions, but the bilingual parent talks with the kids in the non-shared language on other occasions. If the kid replies in the shared language, she can tell him how to phrase that sentence in her language. "Can I stay up and watch a TV show" -- "Du meinst, kann ich laenger auf bleiben und Fernsehn schauen?"
Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay. If an US expat and a German raise a few kids in Germany, teaching them English from age zero will enable the family to move to an English-speaking country without too much trouble. By contrast, if their monolinual son is in seventh grade when they want to move, the first year of school will likely be very difficult for him, because two years of English is unlikely to be enough to follow the lessons.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Presuppose Roe was decided correctly. But we still had 30% of US population voting to overturn it anyway as single issue voters. Is that good for society? It’s better now people can vote on it.
I think you would need to search hard and long to find someone here who will argue that Roe was the correct decision as far as the procedure was concerned. I certainly was happy that abortion was legal, but the fact on how that was determined seemed rather horrible to me, and indeed created a lot of additional problems, such as the politization of the SCOTUS.
I am a procedure fanboy. As far as the direct outcome is concerned, there is not a lot of difference between cops assassinating a drug dealer and him getting arrested, convicted of murder, exhausting his appeals and finally getting executed. Yet the indirect consequences will be very different because once you grant cops the ability to do summary executions, they are unlikely to stick to just killing drug dealers. It is better to suffer the occasional dealer to go free for lack of evidence than to live in some fascist dictatorship.
Roe was basically the judicial equivalent of just shooting drug dealers.
2A already has been butchered. Maybe it’s good maybe it’s bad. But status quo is a court that isn’t being textualists on 2A.
That depends a lot on your understanding of 2A and what it is for.
As far as keeping the means to fight battles in the hands of the population, the diverge happened no later than WW1. Not all of it is the judiciaries fault either, parts of it is just that the cost of the equipment which tended to win battles skyrocketed: the median American could probably afford to keep a state of the art rifle in 1800 or 1900, but he could certainly not maintain a tank in 1930! Another part certainly was judicial, in that 2A was simply not applied to Tommy guns.
On the other hand, while the judiciary has been fine with not adding new weapon systems to the 2A pool, and has certainly okayed background checks and waiting periods, there was also little attempt to reneg on earlier precedent. Double-action handguns had been in the 2A pool since they were first invented, and there they stayed.
Today the US is one of very few jurisdictions where a citizen can own a rifle or semi-automatic handgun without giving her government any justification why she wants a gun. (Sure, carrying the gun in public is a bit trickier and might require a license in blue states, but contrast this with Germany: to even own a 9mm, I would need to show legitimate need (such as being a hunter or long-practicing sport shooter), and to get a license to carry in everyday life I would basically have to become a cop.)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
End the fed, kill the bank, and stop debasing my money.
Are you certain that giving the president direct control of the monetary policy would lead to less debasing of the US dollar?
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Why not just have the homeless vote in the first place? Presumably most homeless would also mostly vote for the Democrats, and this way you do not go to jail if your little scheme is discovered.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Agreed.
If you do not allow the drawing of blood for evidence, then any DUI laws become basically unenforceable. At best, they would become a shit-throwing fest with cops arguing that according to their eyewitness testimony, you were clearly inebriated. I will rather take my chances with the BAC results of a forensic technician any day of the week, thank you very much.
If instead you want to get a warrant to draw blood of a pedestrian sitting in a park because you want to convict them of being on some illegal narcotics, then I am much less sympathetic because the scope of the alleged crime does not fit the invasiveness of the search, and would argue that any such warrant is unreasonable. (I do not think this is a common MO for cops though, typically they want to catch you with the substance in a bag instead of in your blood.)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Roe v Wade was bad because it was legislating from the bench. It is very hard to make the argument that the constitution grants abortion rights without tying your head into a pretzel.
If you want to argue that the 14th does not grant children of migrants citizenship then you would have to argue that what the authors meant by jurisdiction is in fact the duty to pay capital income tax in the US, and that the former slaves had this duty but foreign residents do not, or find some other bizarre interpretation of jurisdiction.
Getting controversial things out of the court hands has value to maintain the Court legitimacy.
Would you feel the same way about the rights granted by 2A as by 14A?
I am a big fan of a legal system where words mean things, and courts try their best to interpret the meaning of the text while also keeping previous precedent (where it did an honest job of interpreting the meaning).
If words do not mean things, you do not need much in the way of a constitution, you can simply have a SCOTUS filled by wise elders who can veto any laws or decrees they deem unwise and replace them with wiser ones.
You don’t want a different court in 20 years reversing tomorrows decision.
That is an argument for not torturing the text of the constitution until it confesses to your meaning and the Kennedy assassination.
I am solidly pro-choice, but I fully understand the pro-life's anger at Roe v Wade. It is not like there had been an abortion amendment and the SCOTUS was just "jupp, that means abortion has to be legal". Instead, the court conjured this thing out of thin air, because they felt that achieving the right ends was more important than using the right means (e.g. sensible textual interpretations). So pro-life embarked on a half-century quest to replace SCOTUS with more sympathetic justices, and actually succeeded.
I do not hold overturning Roe v Wade against the current SCOTUS because it was clearly a terrible precedent. By contrast, United States v Wong Kim Ark follows a textual reading of the 14th. If the SCOTUS overturns this precedent without providing a rock-solid argument why it was in fact wrong, they will prove that they are as much partisan hacks as the court which decided Roe.
In that case, filling the SCOTUS with their candidates will be the prime objective of both parties. Either the Republicans win, in which case 14A is only of historical interest, and 1A might not apply to anything Trump labels "left-wing radical", or the Dems win, and 2A will only be of historical interest, and 1A will not apply to anything which president Newsom designates as "hate speech", which will coincidentally include most campaigning by the GOP.
Both of these outcomes would be terrible. I would much rather see the SCOTUS return to being non-partisan referees. Luckily for me, it seems that the current SCOTUS is not afraid to vote against Trump when they feel he is just plain wrong.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
As I understand gender ideology (or whatever you want to call it), a "man" is anyone who self-reports that they are a man, and a "woman" is anyone who self-reports that they are a woman. Have I misunderstood?
As far as I am concerned, this is correct. Obviously there can be people who are gaming this system where self-id is the tiebreaker, like Cartman self-identifying as a girl so he (!) will get his own bathroom in school, or trolls insisting that their gender is "attack helicopter" and making up weird pronouns for themselves or whatever.
his position is that there is nothing inherently incorrect in re-defining categories, it's just a matter of semantics.
To quote the man:
I’ve been told some people are misinterpreting this post as “you can define words any way you want, don’t worry about it”. While nothing is stopping you from defining a word any way you want, you should definitely worry about it.
Definitions should preferably carve reality at its joints. A definition of fish which includes some whales but excludes other whales is probably not a good definition. But sometimes there are multiple options for a workable definition.
That being said, society runs on on polite fictions to some degree. If you are invited to dinner and find the food barely tolerable, it would be poor form to communicate this fact directly to your host. Likewise, if your colleague introduces you to his "beautiful wife", most people know better than to contradict him. If you get asked on a date and feel insulted that the asker even considered you in his league, it is poor taste to let the disgust show, and the appropriate response would be to tell them to that you are not interested without going into the specifics of his shortcomings. If my English teacher introduced herself as Mrs Smith, it would be extremely impolite to call her Miss Smith even if I knew for a fact that she has never been married.
There are topics where other considerations overrule polite fictions. If some parents believe that prayer is better than chemotherapy for their kid's cancer, you can tell them that this is an insane view even if it will likely upset them. However, the gender in the social sphere is IMHO not something which is especially worth protecting. It used to be that your gender/sex had a lot of legal implications, but today in Western societies that is no longer the case.
The reality is that in the social sphere, we generally have to infer the gender of people through indirect evidence rather than just looking at their genitals. That is fine for most social situations, if I am selling you a cup of coffee, I do not really care if I sexed you as "female" because you are a cis-woman or because you are a trans-woman who was able to pass as a woman. There is no law prohibiting the sale of coffee to penis-havers, so I do not care either way. The same is true for most social interactions, with the exception of sex and procreation.
Few people would support tattooing people their birth gender on their forehead or criminalizing cross-dressing, so the social gender will not be co-extensive with the sex assigned at birth either way. Given that background, I think it is not a huge step to let people pick their pronouns. Of course, if someone is a trans-woman presenting as a bearded guy, I will probably misgender her a lot more by accident than if she is presenting at least somewhat feminine, and I will not lose a lot of sleep over it either.
So for example, if my mental problems will be greatly alleviated if my therapist starts addressing me as "Your Highness," then he should do so.
In the SSC article, the canonical example seems Napoleon, but that is the same up to isomorphism.
For a psychiatrist, how they will refer to their patient is up to them. If they decide to indulge some fantasy or not I will not second-guess them. If you feel they do not have your best interests at heart, find a different psychiatrist.
In a world where a few percents of the population identify as Napoleon, I think it would probably not be helpful for strangers to go to them and tell them that they are not Napoleon, and that the real Napoleon died on St Helena a long time ago. Perhaps the psychiatric community finds that the best outcome is for the public to indulge their fantasy (within limitations -- no invading Russia). Let them put Napoleon Bonaparte as their artist's/order name in their passport, whatever.
It is pretty much the same for your "king of England". Obviously Charles has constitutional duties which we won't let everyone handle who claims they ID as the British monarch. But if it affected multiple percent of the population, I would be fine with making "king of England" free-for-all and having a separate term, like "constitutional monarch of Great Britain" to refer to Charles.
It is different if you were to id as a physician, because society has good reason to not politely play along with you. We should not change the laws to grant you a MD to make you feel better.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I think that a compromise would be to require postal votes to be date-stamped a week earlier than the date of the election (plus some extra slack when they are sent from out of state). Don't like making your mind up early? Vote in person.
In the unlikely case that some postal votes take more than that, I would still count them simply to disincentivize someone delaying their delivery on purpose. (On the other hand, without a confirmation of delivery it would be easier to just "lose" them altogether.)
Over here in Germany, the mechanics of voting are non-issues. Of course you have to show government-mandated ID to vote. Of course municipal workers try their best (and succeed, as far as I can tell) in making voting easy. Your polling place is often the nearest school, kindergarden or large public building, and you might need to wait five minutes or so. Of course we are using paper ballots, and of course you can observe the counting of the votes.
In the US, there has been a long and proud tradition of voter suppression at least in the southern states. My understanding is that the waiting time in the polling line can be hours. Charitably, digital voting machines are simply a way to shovel government funds to companies, but the intransparency is at least accepted. Besides the other net negatives, this also turns anything about election mechanics into culture war fodder.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Are you adopting his position? Because I would like to ask some critical questions.
Mostly, I am. I still reserve the right to say "oops, I do not agree with him on this sentence in particular".
Feel free to ask some questions. Note that I am defending SA's position "it is worth having trans-inclusive gender definitions", not woke positions like "it is fine to put a third of a school class on puberty blockers" or "if you have any preference for genitals that makes you trans-phobe".
Ok, so I take it that you are disputing that according to gender ideology (and by that I mean the general progressive/leftist/woke position on transgenderism) if a person claims to be "superstraight," they are considered to be transphobic? And that other than that, you agree with my summary?
I am sure that people who use the term "superstraight" are widely decried as transphobic by the wokes. On the other hand, I think that there is not a consensus in the LGBT community that lesbians who are not into dicks are transphobic. On priors, I would expect that a lot of lesbians are not into dicks.
I agree with your summary that trans acceptance requires that we separate sex and gender, and have actually argued previously that we should.
So are Louis XIV, Wilhelm II, Charles Manson, Harvey Weinstein, Bin Laden, Aella, Stephen Hawking, Kim Kardashian, Obama, SBF, Scott Alexander and a ton of others. Should we stop criticizing them all until we reach their level of success and fame?
"Clearly, they simply prosecuted Charles Manson because they were pissed that he had built a sex and murder cult which was much grander than any they could have built."
First off, who is impressive is rather subjective. Some people are impressed by STEM Nobel laureates, or Hollywood actors, or popes, or athletes, or great Starcraft players, or competitive eaters, or mass murderers, or demagogues, or big-chested porn stars.
Luckily, we have invented these things called arguments. Without them, criticizing someone is just booing them, and then we would indeed have to compare the subjective standing of both parties to find out if we should adjust our estimation of either.
Arguments exist independently of their author. If the worst person in the world, in between robbing an orphanage and strangling some puppies posts a comment on ACX taking issue with what Scott wrote, and her argument is solid, then it does not really matter that she is strangling puppies.
This makes arguments especially well suited to anonymous discussion boards such as this one. I do not need to know how many casinos a poster here has bankrupted or if she is dictating her posts to her secretary on her helicopter or typing them on a cracked mobile screen while lying in her sleeping spot under some bridge or from death row.
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