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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35960 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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I don't know what oppressive norm you are talking about, but the fact that people can lie or be wrong about their own nature is exactly my point. For example: People charged with crimes commonly claim to be mentally ill, in an attempt to mitigate punishment. If we want to know the relationship between mental illness and crime, we don't want to take those people at their word; rather we want to look at people who are actually mentally ill, or at the very least who claimed to be mentally ill before they committed the crime. Yet, re transwomen, the OP is advocating doing the exact opposite.

If your policy on sentencing the mentally ill is "they count as mentally ill when they say so", then that has to be the standard we use when analyzing what's wrong with the policy. That is not currently the policy for the mentally ill; it is currently the policy for trans people.

If we want to know the relationship between mental illness and crime, we don't want to take those people at their word; rather we want to look at people who are actually mentally ill,

And there it is, this is oppression. Because you're imposing your view of reality on them, using the cover of the idea that there is such a thing as "actually mentally ill", a doubly made up concept which is nothing but power.

At least that's quite literally what Foucault would say.

The current progressive philosophical paradigm is not equipped to deal with this problem, because subjective feeling is explicitly more important than objective reality in its hierarchy of concern. And if it was not so, transpeople wouldn't get the privileges they are afforded today.

Asking for coherence or some sort of standard to deal with the ground level problems generated by this view is never going to work or make sense within the paradigm because those problems are all assumed to be stemming from oppression in the first place (blame Rousseau for this one). And you are hence condemned to be a conservative, one who seeks to slow the bulldozer but ultimately is powerless to stop it or change its course.

Yes, I am sure some people would say that it is oppression, but who cares? You know, the American Political Science Assn just had its [annual conference]9https://convention2.allacademic.com/one/apsa/apsa22/), and although a search of the conference schedule for "oppression" turns up 71 hits, a search for "modeling" turns up 447. And while the division on Critical Political Science had 9 sessions, the division on Conflict Processes had 56. There are, by the way, 56 divisions. I have been to that conference, and the people talking about real issues go the entire 4 days not caring what those other people are talking about in their little bubbles. So, yes, it is perfectly possible to determine whether people who identify as trans before going to jail and conveniently discovering their identity actually commit more sex offenses than average, or if they don't, regardless of whether some people deem that a form of oppression.

Much as it is in litterature, the people studying politics are some of the least likely persons to actually engage in it in any meaningful level.

You're coming at this issue from some sort of liberal issue based framework. But that's utterly ill equipped to deal with the issues of today. You're not living in a world where everyone shares that framework anymore, and in fact you live in a world where it's so thoroughly hacked that you can be used to produce anything up to the inversion of your ideals if manipulated correctly. Experts say. Sources confirm. New study shows.

I've seen it happen too many times now. If the stats are favorable they will be promoted, every redditor will quote them to you at the first chance. If the stats are not favorable, you'll be banned for even mentioning their existence.

All this quality scholarship about what we ought to do were we good little managers? It's all mere justification.

All this is really about is power. Which neither of us have.

It doesn't matter how many people get hurt by policy. It doesn't matter how well you can spin it either way in very respectable papers. This is just the process to legislate what has already been decided by those who can make the exception.

So a persons word isn't the only factor in determining their true gender identity, an external investigator is needed to probe it?

Doesn't this invalidate the self-ID doctrine?

Self-ID is not a 'doctrine' but a policy. I very much doubt you can find any politician etc. of any prominence who argues that it is impossible to lie about gender ID. Obviously it is, the argument is that in some/most cases self-ID is the best choice even if there is a potential for lying, just as advocating for a more stringent system does not mean one believes that no genuine trans people will be erroneously denied a legal change.

It seems like we have enough evidence now though to finally state that, in fact, Self-ID is not the best choice, it's harmful and unjust. The only way at this point for activists to try to argue for Self-ID is to cite marginal benefits while excusing massive harms. And if that's the standard, than anyone can play that game, nothing's off limits.

What does that have to do with what I said. Again, I don’t care about the trans issue. I am talking about the data issue: Either mentally ill people are unusually crime-prone, or they are not, and we can know that only if we look at people who are actually mentally ill when they committed the crime, rather than people who claim mental illness after the fact. The same applies to transwomen. So, as I said initially, if you care only about the culture war stuff, then "they made their bed" makes perfect sense. If, OTOH, you care about crime policy, it doesn’t.

If, OTOH, you care about crime policy, it doesn’t.

Crime policy is "you look at people who claim to be trans and count them".

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