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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   36583 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 24, 2022

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I have a very smart friend who is also a talented decoupler, who could easily be a very quality contributer here if dealing with Culture War issues didn't make him bleed from the eyes. He is literally the only person I know whose Facebook posts about politics did not make me lose respect for him. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about contentious CW topics that flirted with the border of Adversarial Collaboration, long detailed discussions handled with fairness, civility, and mutual respect.

Until the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. That discussion was unusually heated. He seemed almost frantic, heated about PPP loan forgiveness hypocrites and just not giving the expected degree of decoupled consideration for arguments about how the loan forgiveness was an overall terrible policy. He seemed personally invested, felt personally attacked, in a way he hadn't in conversations about abortion or gun control.

The thing is, my friend is a teacher. Education is a big factor in his identity. He has taught maybe a thousand students who might benefit from the forgiveness plan. Attacks on that plan are an attack on his class identity. Politics is the mind-killer, and it is a sad fact that a rationalist's Art is most likely to abandon him when he needs it most (or, rather, he will fail the Art). And so my arguments sparked an uncontrolled emotional response that was missing from other, less identity-laden topics.

The second thing is, I've been on the other side of that coin, back when we had our multi-day deep dive into the gun control literature. Gun control hits me emotionally as an attack on my class identity. When I hear a gun control proposal, before I hear a single specific detail or spend a second considering merits, some lizard part of my brain interprets it as "Fuck you, your father, your father's father, and your father's father's father". (Does the word "father" still mean anything to you?) I've begged off having spontaneous discussions about it in person, even with close family, because I don't want to spike myself into rage and other unpleasant feelings. During that deep dive, my excellent friend was so calm, fair and rational that he overrode that concern, and I ended up learning a lot and having a great time.

And I'm thinking about this now, because I notice a similar reaction to the trans discussion downthread. The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I find myself getting heated to an unusual degree just thinking about it. I don't think I'm particularly "anti-trans". I was willing to be accepting two decades ago, when I first learned it was even a thing. But something about the thought that the phenomenon might hit my kids triggers an atavistic survival instinct. That reaction doesn't trigger when I consider my son dressing like David Bowie, or my daughter playing sports. It doesn't happen when a peer goes trans. It triggers at the thought of one of the two corporeal incarnations of my DNA and memes getting sucked into a fraught psychological memeplex, and particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.

Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting. That's roughly the level of emotional hit - some part of me considers this an existential threat.

But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.

So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.

Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?

Not exactly on point but flaw in my own personal thinking: I find it difficult to take men seriously who complain about their lot in life. This is, in all honesty, a failure to check my privilege in the classical sense, God has blessed my life in numerous ways, and I should be aware of that. The things in my life I perceive as challenges I've overcome were, if I'm honest, not that hard.

But in a lot of conversations, I just can't get past, dude it's not that fucking hard. Just do it. Make better choices. Or at least don't lecture me about how the whole world is conspiring against you and yours because you can't get a date/job/house/friend whatever.

I need to work on that. Covid was good for me, God sent it at a time when I needed to be humbled about the physical struggles that many of my friends and family members were going through, and realize that take away just a touch of cardio health and things like walking the dog a couple miles are suddenly a lot more work.

There's a funny link between the things that upset me and it's that they all claim the part of me that I put last is bang on. Euthanasia, the medicalisation of everything, prostitution; things that play to quitters. I get reminded of Darwin's "endless forms most beautiful and wonderful" when I think about it because I believe even intelligent life just moves about ironically, and nature bears a literally fantastic diversity of losing battles.

How does prostitution fit in with the others for you?

Maybe I was too quick to lump those things together. What I meant was people endorse legalised sex work when they want people's needs to be met in a very impersonal way with some government involvement and less reflection about moral development.

with some government involvement? I don't get it

well it would be taxable

There's almost no issues that I can't discuss calmly or take both sides on with a bit of effort; I'm deeply ambivalent about almost everything from abortion to guns to energy policy to vaccine mandates to immigration.

But what makes me go absolutely apeshit is gaslighting, on any topic. That's why reddit and 2020 were such game changers for me: you would read someone's apparently reasonable argument, then check their account history and see them gloating in /r/quokka_hunters about how they tricked those gullible idiots into helpless passivity. You never used to get that kind of evidence trail on image boards.

I think everyone's familiar with this "it's not happening but it's good that it is" stuff by now: guys came into the motte going "nobody supports banning meat, you're just paranoid and evil for opposing sensible animal welfare laws," and then posted on /r/vegan about how those laws are a good first step to making meat uneconomical so it can be banned. "Nobody wants to take your guns" is an infamous meme, but people still try pulling it constantly.

But the gaslighting about the 2020 riots was by far the most infuriating thing I've ever seen. That "productiveaccount" guy who came in claiming nobody ever supported riots while having multiple pages of supporting riots and violence in his post history had my blood boiling to the point I almost lost it.

It's something about the mix of blatant sociopathic manipulation, the insultingly obvious way they go about it, and the hideous pride they exude at being bullying conformity enforcers for their clique. That many of them are quite intelligent makes it even worse.

Obviously this puts me against the left on most issues recently, from puberty blockers and mutilating surgeries for kids to electrification and "decarbonization" in energy policy (more on this in "heat pumps & policy" post #2). The viciousness with which they enforce conformity combined with the dizzying speed they change the party line makes every discussion feel like an existential struggle against being brainwashed (or "darwinned")

But the right's "nobody wants to overturn Roe v. Wade you hysterical pansies" pivot is a good example of the same thing coming from the other side, and it's no less infuriating to deal with. There's also an element of it in the 2a team's "nobody's against the sensible gun laws we already have enough of, but also the ATF should be a convenience store and all gun laws are invalid, yeehaw!" It comes across as insincere and manipulative despite my sympathies for them.

So yeah, one reason I was so excited about the new site is being able to discuss and explore things I'm uncertain about without feeling like we're in a constant war against trolls doing shit like this that makes me want to throw down and fight instead of talk.

The right's "nobody wants to overturn Roe v. Wade you hysterical pansies" pivot is a good example of the same thing coming from the other side, and it's no less infuriating to deal with.

Wait, what? The effort to overturn RvW was conducted very much in public over five decades! I cannot imagine how anyone missed this!

Yeah, which is what made watching the gaslighting so upsetting, especially when all the anti-abortion guys on the motte took a victory lap after it happened. I don't have logs for it, but I'm sure some of the pro-abortion regulars do.

In fairness some of them were saying things like "holy fuck, Kavanaugh actually found his balls," indicating that they were legitimately surprised rather than going "lol libs, we fooled you all along." So it's not the most awful variant of that behavior, but there was never a moment where people went "ok, yeah, in retrospect all that panic about Roe was justified, my bad"

I am completely confused about the foundation of your claim of gaslighting. Who ever made the claim that "nobody wants to overturn Roe vs. Wade you hysterical pansies," and to the extent that anyone ever made that claim, why would anyone take that person seriously?

There was a national movement, involving millions of people, over five decades, all with the explicit purpose of overturning RvW. This was not a secret.

Sorry, I didn't keep logs during the Kav and Barrett hearings (not sure I even had an account during the first one), but hopefully one of the pro abortion posters can back me up on this one. IIRC lot of people were accusing the Handmaid's Tail cosplayers of being performatively hysterical about the possibility of Roe being overturned because of the usual "republican judges are cucks, they'd never go through with it" argument.

Edit, here's two NR articles that piss me off in a similar way

No Supreme Court appointment by a Republican president would be complete without the Left’s obligatory hysteria about the purportedly imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, that indefensible exercise in judicial lawlessness whose atrocious consequences include the deaths of millions of unborn children. Once again, it’s a political narrative with little foothold in the real world.

It has that same smug, sneering "what are you gonna do about it?" conformity enforcing attitude as other "it's not happening but you'll deserve it when it does" stuff, and I find it really upsetting.

Sure, but did anyone claim they wouldn't overturn roe if they could? NR is making fun of the idea that overturning roe will utter in some kind of vaguely-described dystopia where women are chattel.

I don't believe you understood the critique being made. Those protesters were not merely making the claim "oh no, RvW will be overturned." They were claiming that the removal of RvW would lead to something in the vague ballpark of a Handmaid's Tale dystopia. This is, at a bare minimum, a much stronger claim.

On the Republican side, a sentiment like "republican judges are cucks, they'd never go through with it" was not insincerity, it was fatalism, based on the long history of Republican-nominated Justices who refused to overturn RvW. This was a plank in the Republican platform, a campaign promise made at every opportunity, the basis of an endless number of fundraising pleas, and for nothing until Dobbs.

Edit to add: I'm not a fan of McCarthy's style there either. But I'll give him half a point for stating straight up that he wanted Barrett to be the vote necessary, but just didn't think she would.

Yeah, agreed, it's not a perfect example, and it's hard to find many from the right because they lack the aggressive and omnipresent conformity enforcement systems that the left has. I hope someone can come through with some of the motte quotes I was thinking of, which were really dismissive to anyone who thought the Roeverturn was going to happen right up until the leak, when they switched to doing touchdown dances lol. I swear to God someone here was complaining about it just last week.

"Russia will never invade Ukraine, that's crazy, you're crazy" is another one that happened on the motte, but I didn't want to bring it up because more people are still mad about it, and it didn't break down along typical partisan lines.

One rightwing example is people saying they are just stating facts about race and iq that they don't want to oppress anyone and then they post slurs and holocaust denial and blatant racism

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Yeah, one of the things that makes me mad quickly is dismissive "but both sides" when I'm like, wait, you need to show your work. Yes, both sides of any question are made of people; people are demonstrably imperfect; both sides of any question have flaws somewhere. But not all flaws are symmetric!

The Russia/Ukraine thing is a prediction I got wrong, though not in that way. I thought Putin would salami-slice a bit more of the Donbass and get away with it again. The full-bore invasion striking directly at Kiev came as rather a shock.

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Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

I suspect that my opposition to lockdown is, while not irrational in itself, filled with irrationality when it comes to what I should do in opposition. Trying to convince people by rhetoric to e.g. not support the government locking me down is a waste of time, and I'd be better off if I just hit the gym and got so swole that nobody would have dared challenge me over masks, vaccines or whatever ever again. I certainly noticed that those most frequently threatened by staff/police/etc over masks were frail, short women.

What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

Covid lockdowns. Vaccines? Very sensible. Vaccine mandates? Extreme, but I can imagine taking that position on the balance. But the idea of total loss of the most fundamental freedom - in my country, needing an excuse just to leave my house? I find it very hard to have any more sophisticated response than "fuck you and fuck your excuses", and on some deep emotional level that I can't shake it feels like everyone went completely insane at once on just this one issue.

It's especially weird because I'm pretty woke on most things. But in this case the mainstream feels totally insane and its viewpoint feels totally opaque to me, and inspires that kind of rage-and-panic reaction (which is not a pleasant thing to nearly constantly feel for more than a year).

I had pretty mainstream thought on Covid all the way through, so I can give you an example of my thought processes.

From what I remember, the logic (over here) went like so:

1 - We're going to get a vaccine soon, so we're going to do lockdowns and hold out until then. They suck, but we can contain the virus with lockdowns because it's virtually not in Australia.

2 - Once we get the vaccine and everyone takes it, Covid will be over and we'll return to normal life. This sucks, but it is a temporary suck that we will swiftly overcome. During this terrible time everyone needs to band together and accept the shittiness.

I'm not sure I would've supported lockdowns knowing what we know now about the virus. People were talking about a 2% fatality rate (so, what, seven million people dead in the US, 500k or so here) which is much, much larger than what we ended up with. I weighed half a million dead in my mind against a temporary restriction on my civil liberties and thought 'okay, this is the sort of situation where I can accept restricted civil liberties'.

I'm not so sure I would've accepted it in almost any other country in the world. The United States didn't have a choice to not have Covid in its borders, Australia did.

We moved on to getting the vaccine. I think at the time the claim was that vaccines stopped Covid spreading. If the option was 'zero Covid, but you have to get vaccinated' or 'Covid kills ~100,000 people (Australia, so I'm reducing the US numbers tenfold) but we don't enforce vaccines' I am in fact okay with a vaccine mandate. Mostly I'm not okay with mandating stuff like that, and as soon as it turned out that no, we weren't vaccinating ourselves back to a no-Covid world, I changed course pretty rapidly.

Vaccine mandates lagged popular opinion here - they were popular because we thought vaccine mandates would make this all go away. Lockdowns were popular because we thought they were the precursor to getting the vaccine, and, again, making Covid disappear like a bad dream. Your average person doesn't support lockdowns or vaccine mandates now, but that's because they've been proven ineffectual. China is still locking down over Covid and can't seem to accept the reality of the situation.

I think '2% of the population will die if we don't do this thing' is a good reason to consider the temporary suspension of civil liberties, and I think I'm very much a normie in that sense.

NB: I apologise if this reply seems harsh - I've tried to avoid that but see above on why I don't think straight about this.

I think this exemplifies my problem, really: it's all talked about in vague terms that can make the frighteningly insane sound perfectly reasonable.

Never mind "temporary suspension of civil liberties to save lives", which covers almost anything: how long and how bad for how many? If saving those 500000 people costs two weeks of no nightclubs, OK, I'm listening; if it costs a decade of China-style welded-indoors lockdown, no deal, molon labe etc.

But this was just never discussed. It wasn't a matter of "we'll consider these restrictions if they're projected to save at least this many lives", it was "your fundamental civil liberties are gone, you want to know what our cost-benefit analysis is, it's fuck you that's what it is".

And there's certainly no admission of failure now. If as it turns out they were crazy all along, that's critical evidence against them for the future, and I at least reserve the right to say "I told you so, clearly nobody involved in this fiasco should work in their field ever again". But it's just quietly dropped for the next Current Thing like the world didn't go insane for a few years!

I'm not 100% sure about Melbourne, but IIRC it was never banned in the Australian lockdowns or vaccine mandates to walk from your home to the supermarket, buy food, and come home with it (you had to wear a mask in the shopping centre, though, unless you had a medical exemption). This is a rather-important difference with the PRC's policies.

I was unable to go into a store to buy office supplies once because I didn't have my vaccine certificate with me, though.

Seems to me that you just gave your rational justification for being so fiercely activated.

Anyway, to further elaborate on these feelings, lockdowns are a personal threat to you (and to me). Of course people react negatively towards people threatening them. Whether that be "I want to kidnap you" or "I want the government to kidnap you" should make little difference. Wanting to hurt me, but being too cowardly to do it yourself and instead insisting on the government doing it for you, does not impress me. And, of course, being unvaccinated, I also find advocates of vaccine mandates to be making a personal threat to me when they do so. Against my repeated refusal, you insist on inserting your prick into me and squirting genetic material out of it? You just might be a rapist.

What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

People defending Covid restrictions, lockdowns, vaccine mandates etc.. Whenever the topic comes up I lose my temper far more quickly than I do on virtually any political topic. On some level I know that I'm overreacting, but it invariably inspires this ferocious response in me. I'm unsure why except that it seems to hit a lot of my pet peeves at once: admonitions to "trust the science" from people with a decidedly remedial understanding of science, smugness, lack of forethought, dismissiveness, self-absorption.

I never really understood, on an emotional level, why someone would want to own a gun to protect themselves from the government. Covid made me understand.

Kudos on the self-awareness. What you're saying sounds pretty closely related to some discussions we've had on /r/theschism about visceral threat responses. I feel like responses of this type are a pretty crucial part of how a lot of Culture War fights get so hot.

Children and child-rearing can be pretty hot subjects even before you get trans issues involved. I've seen so many horrifying comment sections on parenting forums on what you would think would be minor topics that people could agree to disagree on: breastfeeding, sleep training, etc. Obviously the parents of babies are all pretty sleep deprived, so that doesn't help, but even so it's pretty incredible how worked up people get.

Most of my own hot button issues are feminism-related, whether it's about social acceptance for female ambition or social norms around turning down sexual advances. Being able to take a step backwards and say "I am having a threat response right now" can make a big difference in enduring tricky conversations, but I shouldn't get too overconfident about that. You never know when you'll let your guard down just as it's about to hit you right in the face.

I first thought the annoying tendency some progressives have of claiming that problems of modernity were 10,000x worse under older, traditional norms, without any evidence. But while that’s a signal to me to stop engaging, it’s in large part because it’s a signal that those people are not to be taken seriously and are annoying, not because they’re anger me. Likewise for the ‘the GOP is literally fascist and Auschwitz will be going up in south Texas any day now’ crowd.

No, the only thing that angers me, in the sense of anger is the Covid response. It wasn’t an emergency, full stop. I find myself hoping the vaccine has severe side effects to punish the people who took the virus severely. Fauci is my go-to example of ultimate evil, not Hitler. I want bloody vengeance taken for every restriction.

My current berserk button: Dog attacks/dangerous dog ownership/breed of peace. I've written some wild stuff here about them. I think that it's Parenthood and knowing that little kids are especially vulnerable to harm from dogs (since they're at the dog's level) paired with the massive emotional weight of it not just being some tool like a gun, but rather someone's best friend.

Second question first, and then I'll get to point one.

For me....it's the danger of internalizing/actualizing Woke/Neo-Progressive/Whatever ideas. I actually think this is related to the Trans issue, although I'm certainly not anti-Trans. But I am concerned about how not putting up guardrails to prevent people from internalizing/actualizing these ideas might be causing people to develop a form of Gender Dysphoria, although I do think it's different enough. I'll be honest, I've talked to enough people in that political culture who have directly told me that internalizing/actualizing these ideas isn't intended to say this and not feel like I'm being partisan about it. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Or that they're even willing to take steps to prevent it from happening.

And that goes to point one. I think the desire for Kayfabe is just too strong. The idea that these ideas actually could be harmful if taken in the wrong way, is something that breaks Kayfabe, that stops things from being good guys and bad guys. And as such, that idea needs to be kept entirely out of the discourse. And I think that comes back around to the other reason why I think the Trans issue is all squirrely, and that's the Progressive Stack, or at least a version of it. The idea that people who are lower on the stack (or higher, depending on your PoV) are above reproach, is unfortunately far too common. This is something that does turn minority groups into abject threats, to the point where I'd argue we should look at this as a form of bigotry straight up. I think it should be seen as just as harmful as the thing that it causes. Good guys and bad guys. That's what people north of center want things to be. Pure Conflict Theory.

You mentioned below that you didn't have an issue with your possibly bisexual kid. And that's understandable, because you didn't see that as a result of this sort of self-destructive pressure being aimed at them. Might it interfere with your bloodline? Sure. But your kid is going to be just fine. So I don't think that's the problem. I think the problem literally is the stuff I mentioned above...it's not about reproductive self-destruction....it's just straight-up self-destruction. And I think most people know it, left right and center.

What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

Anything about incels, low-status men, or nerds. Especially in regards to life development, dating, or gender relations. (In exactly the direction as expected from a Motteposter/SSC reader)

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Obviously very very few people think your school will brainwash your kids into mutilating themselves but you know you can just home-school them right?

There is no such thing as "just" homeschooling.

Do you mean to say it's unjust? I know lots of families in my community that home schooled their kids and they seem perfectly nice.

Rephrased: there is no such thing as "merely" homeschooling. It's a big fucking decision with big fucking tradeoffs.

Obviously. It's a large financial and time commitment as any when it comes to kids (one of the largest time/"lifestyle"/financial changes your life will ever have) but the guy posting above said despite being anti-gun the idea of schools teaching his kids makes him want to go shoot dozens of people to death, if he feels that strongly about it I think it's a good reminder he absolutely has the option to take them out of school.

I think the point is that it is a full-time job and not always feasible (particularly for a single parent, though if a couple is trapped needing two incomes the problem also arises; some people are also not good at teaching).

Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?

Maybe not super popular here, but NIMBYism. IMO, the level of entitlement of certain suburbanites rivals that of woke college students. You don't have the right to arbitrarily control land you don't own. You don't have a right to consistent and large increases in property value. You had kids and now people need somewhere to live. Your neighborhood is not "full" it has fewer people than it did 50 years ago. Your car creates tremendous costs on other people that you don't even acknowledge, and your way of life is incredibly subsidized. You don't want the gas tax to go up, even though that was originally how the federal government was supposed to pay for those highways you need. You do everything possible to reduce traffic in your own neighborhood while driving to everywhere else and objecting to anyone else who doesn't want you to drive in their neighborhood.

Environmental review gets used as a bludgeon to stop anything that might help the environment, or is applied wildly inconsistently. Half the land area of downtowns, the most valuable space in the country, is devoted to highways and parking lots. We can find money and space to make 6 lines of roads for only cars, but bikes get to stay in an 18-inch space between stripes of paint which oh by the way regularly crosses over turn lanes or is next to the line of cars whose drivers will door you without a second thought. Our engineers design infrastructure that is simultaneously something cars are expected to hit, and pedestrians are supposed to stand next to.

Why we ever let this sort of thing become normalized is beyond me.

Also, opposition to nuclear. We might never have heard the phrase "global warming" if "environmentalists" hadn't thrown a fit in the 70s.

Which country?

The only consistent alternative to NIMBYism is Kyle-Rittenhouseism -or Goetzism for the older version- in America.

You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?'

You can't simultaneously assert the right of one urban demographic to burn down, tear apart, annihilate downtown and then turn around and complain about food deserts, sprawl, bulletproof windows, shrink prevention devices...

Getting pushed onto subway tracks is 'part and parcel of living in a big city', yet it's not everybody's cup of tea.

This is the US, though I believe that Canada and Australia tend to have similar policies.

You can't simultaneously assert the right of one urban demographic to burn down, tear apart, annihilate downtown and then turn around and complain about food deserts, sprawl, bulletproof windows, shrink prevention devices...

I never asserted any such right, and I do believe that people have the right to defend themselves and carry firearms. Also, most of these have nothing to do with policies that enforce car-dependent sprawl, which date back to shortly after WW2 and are clearly not a reaction to the 2020 riots.

Getting pushed onto subway tracks is 'part and parcel of living in a big city', yet it's not everybody's cup of tea.

How often does this actually occur? I'm going to register the prediction "far far far less often than people die in car crashes." Does it really make sense to base your entire urban development policy on events that are so incredibly rare, rather than ones that are common? Most American cities have become a lot safer in the past few decades and there are only a handful that are still very dangerous; the reference to Bernie Goetz is at least 25 years out of date. Certainly places like New York and even Chicago aren't dangerous enough to prevent plenty of suburbanites from commuting in. And "urbanism" can apply to small towns which aren't even anywhere near a big city--Not Just Bikes has videos on the finances of several such small and medium towns.

In any event, non-NIMBYism doesn't mean everyone lives in the inner city. For example, this video praises a suburb of Toronto known as Riverdale, and this video, the people behind an urbanist channel point out they have very rarely lived downtown and prefer to live in mixed-use areas outside of downtown. Perhaps I'd be more sympathetic if so many NIMBY's didn't explicitly cite "neighborhood aesthetic" or "property values" when opposing even the mildest bit of development; most sprawling suburbs are ridiculously far from being downtown and even decades of development into a slightly denser suburb won't make them anything like a big city.

I never asserted any such right, and I do believe that people have the right to defend themselves and carry firearms.

That right implicitly exist in America.

The people living in big cities with the highest population densities, in short 'urbanites' are the ones electing lax-on-crime government, supporting crime and rioting.

Also, most of these have nothing to do with policies that enforce car-dependent sprawl, which date back to shortly after WW2 and are clearly not a reaction to the 2020 riots.

Sprawl is intimately-related to white flight, which has been a thing for quite a while. Local example : affluent neighborhood votes against a bus line coming through. Why? On one hand they would benefit from their kids being able to take public transit, or just being able to ditch their vehicle once in a while, on the other hand having a bus line come through their neighborhood means having people from the other side of the bus line (ie poor people) commute through and potentially stop in their neighborhood. For the same reason these people pay premium to live in gated neighborhoods, they vote against bus lines.

clearly not a reaction to the 2020 riots.

Riots are not unfrequent. In living memory, notably the 1967 Newark riots, 1992 Los Angeles riots, 2014 Ferguson riots. Unrest also followed the death of Trayvon Martin, in an altercation with a member of a neighborhood watch, just the kind of people that would oppose policies that would help more Trayvon Martins to show up in their neighborhoods.

How often does this actually occur? I'm going to register the prediction "far far far less often than people die in car crashes."

25 this year apparently. But subway-pushers are not the only criminals in NYC.

Most American cities have become a lot safer in the past few decades and there are only a handful that are still very dangerous; the reference to Bernie Goetz is at least 25 years out of date.

Bernie Goetz is simply the avatar of the American vigilante. More recent example is Rittenhouse. Americans are simply not going to live next to one another without violence, simply because a whole 13% of their population commits a lot more violent crime than the rest.

America itself can be very peaceful locally. Sprawl is just a way to pick your neighbors when the federal government made every other tool illegal like redlining, Jim Crow etc.

For the record I actually support reducing the influence of the car, but I understand that it simply is not practical in America without ramping up the efficiency of the police or relaxing self defense and gun control laws in big cities.

This is exactly the opposite than what the urbanites are voting for, so it's not surprising that anybody that gets to work remotely would move to safer, less dense areas.

The people living in big cities with the highest population densities, in short 'urbanites' are the ones electing lax-on-crime government, supporting crime and rioting.

I don't think even most city-dwelling Democrats actually supported the riots, but so? What do you think is actually going to happen? Do you think that living slightly closer together would cause suburbs or small towns to radically change their voting patterns?

For the same reason these people pay premium to live in gated neighborhoods, they vote against bus lines.

Voting against a bus line is whatever. I'm thinking about zoning laws that say "you own this land and pay thousands of dollars a year in property taxes, but you are legally barred from building anything except a single family home of this size and which your neighbors have say over how it looks." In my mind that's not the proper role of government. If you want to keep someone out of a space, that's up to the owner. You don't get to buy 1 acre and control everything that happens for a mile every direction.

Riots are not unfrequent. In living memory, notably the 1967 Newark riots, 1992 Los Angeles riots, 2014 Ferguson riots. Unrest also followed the death of Trayvon Martin, in an altercation with a member of a neighborhood watch, just the kind of people that would oppose policies that would help more Trayvon Martins to show up in their neighborhoods.

That's not very frequent at all, especially since you're typically referring to events in 1 city. An individual's chance of being affected by any of these riots is quite small, even among people living in a downtown; for someone living in an outskirt or suburb, the chance is smaller still, and would be unaffected by making that suburb slightly denser (it's not like rioters pause their destruction while they wait for the bus to the outer part of the city).

Millions of people choose to live along the Gulf Coast or the Southeast Atlantic, despite a regular threat of storms that are more destructive and probably more regular than that. For example, Hurricane Ian from this year, which is already passed out of the collective memory, inflicted 50 times as much property damage as the Rodney King riots and killed over twice as many people.

25 this year apparently. But subway-pushers are not the only criminals in NYC.

NYC has a violent crime rate of about 0.005 per year per person, in contrast to the nationwide car crash rate which is about .02 per person per year. Unfortunately I can't easily find good statistics on how bad most crashes are, but even a "small" crash can result in injuries and thousands of dollars of damage.

Focusing on deaths, the comparison is much easier--more than 3 times as many people die in car crashes as in all homicides combined (and that's not counting vehicle crashes that kill people not in cars). You are almost certainly much safer taking the NYC subway to work than driving a comparable commute.

Americans are simply not going to live next to one another without violence, simply because a whole 13% of their population commits a lot more violent crime than the rest.

I don't think that reducing NIMBYism is going to radically alter the demographics of many neighborhoods. Many walkable places are quite desirable, with apartments in mixed-use developments being snatched up by yuppies. Lots of people probably rent in a neighborhood they might like to buy in, but can't afford to. People who are very poor are still not going to be able to afford to live in nice middle-class neighborhoods, and really sprawling areas can still exist for the people who want them.

I went to college on the South Side of Chicago, in a very nice, walkable, dense neighborhood. It reaches a population density of, I believe, 18K per square mile, despite consisting of mostly single family homes, duplexes/triplexes, and small apartment blocks. And despite being surrounded by some of the most notoriously dangerous urban areas in the country (which, by the way, are on the outskirts, not downtown) very little of that trickled in. Yes, sometimes, it does. But for how close it is physically, and how easy it is to walk or bike or take the bus into the neighborhood, it happens pretty infrequently. And, if Zillow is to be believed, it's still very desirable.

This is exactly the opposite than what the urbanites are voting for, so it's not surprising that anybody that gets to work remotely would move to safer, less dense areas.

This I'm really curious about, do you have data? I know many people left the Bay, specifically. And Austin seemed to explode in popularity--not as woke or dense as the Bay, but pretty blue nonetheless, and certainly not a small rural town.

edit: one last thing. Some of the ritziest places in the country are either in cities (NYC's Tribeca and similar areas, Chicago's Golden Mile, etc) or are in small, remote towns but which still manage to be walkable. Fire Island, Vail, Telluride, etc. The former bans cars and the latter 2 are dense, with pedestrian plazas, free buses, mixed-used development, duplexes and apartments, etc. It's entirely possible to build these places without succumbing to urban blight and crime.

Was this reply meant for a different comment? I've read it 4 times now and don't understand how it relates to the above comment about bike lanes and mixed development

Well my point is simply that because the government made tribalism/racism illegal across the board, Americans will come up with any available reason to preserve their way of life without explicitly coming across as 'racist/tribalist'.

'Property values', 'neighborhood aesthetic' etc are just code words for 'we don't want to become the latest mostly-white town turning into Detroit, Philadelphia, NYC...'.

Warranted or not that fear is a major driving force behind the awfulness of American urbanism. The suburbanite is backed against a wall and will keep running farther away as long as possible.

Luckily for everyone else, there is still a lot of space left in America to run to, potentially until the founding stock of the country goes extinct, and it can finally finish devolving into the Brazil that our overlords demand.

So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.

I think Lex Fridman’s interview with Kanye West was an amazing example of this.

If you know anything about Lex Fridman, the guy is obsessed with reading about the horrors of history and taking it very seriously. He’s also Jewish and of course had a family history of experiencing everything that went down in Europe. But it’s almost secondary to how much he reads and tries to understand why humans commit atrocities. Very serious person about these issues. It’s gotta be a core trigger for a person like this to make light of what happened in WWII, or the Soviet Union, etc.

So he interviews Kanye, and with this background, you just know that every time Kanye says something like “Jewish media” — there’s pits full of bodies flashing behind Lex’s eyes.

But man does he keep it stoic. He even gets personally attacked during the interview. Equated with the Jewish media and everything! Later goes on to confess that it hurt him when Kanye lashed out at him. But throughout the entire thing, you can tell he’s striving with every ounce of himself to be open and calm and understanding/compassionate to the human in front of him, while also being true to his own principles and calling out the bullshit where he sees it.

Kind of an inspirational example of not allowing yourself to shut down into angry/closed off mode, in my opinion.

, what's the point?"

Concern for your fellow man? Maybe family and friends would be less critical if you looked just a little further than the end of your own nose. Hardly a terrible imposition being asked of you.

  • -14

Putting untested technology in your body completely unnecessarily (SK already had COVID) most certainly is a terrible imposition. And that was the state back then, now we know it wouldn't have changed anything anyway.

Did you miss the part where I'd already had covid by the time the vaccines became available?

Apart from that, you might consume other news than me, but I keep hearing that vaccines do little to stop the spread of the disease and are in fact mostly if not entirely meant to reduce the effect of the disease on the one vaccinated. I.e., entirely a matter of one's own nose. I suppose you have heard differently. Have you also heard that natural immunity does not work?

Did you miss the part where I'd already had covid by the time the vaccines became available?

Having covid + getting even one PFizer shot seemed for over a year to be the optimal level of safety against hospitalization and death in regards to covid. I don't really understand why this community cannot separate abject facts like the above one with clown statements made my the media and Fauci himself. It's really irrational.

I had covid. I had one Pfizer shot a year later and another like 9 months later (ish - I'm not great on memory). It's fine that you don't and it sucks that you had wacky family relations - but why lie about things in the nature of ' why bother ' when it's very obvious why bother. The ' had covid + one shot ' was practically a meme around here for months.

Not sure if I read you correctly, but at the time (late 2020) it was by no means common knowledge that covid + shot made a difference relative to only covid. In fact it still isn't that common; I still don't know it. And it's moot - I never encountered statistical arguments IRL.

I think vaccinations are good, but sadly there's no vaccination for tribalism and hysteria. From what you're describing what happened to you has less to do with vax vs antivax on the medical merits and everything with vaccination the memeplex. Which tbf the government is only limitedly responsible for. I think you're mixing up a bunch of different causes and effects that are only topically related.

I like to call it the Politics-Media-Public complex that did it. Still trying to come up with a catchy abbreviation. PoMP? PuMP?; Anyways, interactions between those three that kept boosting the signal out of control in some sort of autocatalysis. I blame everyone for it, and I'm not even getting at the causes, that'd be above my pay-grade. I just see people involved acting it out, the effects thereof, and that's what I'm angry about.

Hey, I'm sorry you went through that.

We managed to be friends with both rabid vaxxers and anti-vaxxers, but it wasn't always easy. I even (gasp) played volleyball with some unvaccinated. They were fairly young and healthy, I was vaccinated and healthy. I don't share your anger at the mask mandates, but I see where it comes from after hearing how your own family treated you (especially given you'd had it, which was generally thought to be better than a vaccination, I thought).

I think something about the fear of death, and maybe plagues, triggered something deeply primal in a lot of people ("broke their brains") and we got a lot of extremism out of something that was comparatively mild (especially once a vaccine was available).

I wish more people were like you, then. I've had too many conversations in which people claimed to be indifferent to others' vaccination status on stated liberal principles and then proceeded to completely cut the unvaccinated out of their lives as soon as they learned of their status.

And yeah, I suppose brains are easily broken, on every level of society. And normally I'd want to stand back and observe and give my best judgement on the matter, but as per the objective of this subthread, I'm somewhat beyond reason when it comes to this topic. That kind of panic being infused into my hitherto tranquil private life just seems like too much of an act of aggression, like norms being broken the breaking of which should not be tolerated.

Why not just get vaccinated? I also thought it was kind if bullshit but did it to avoid running my social life.

Are you concerned about health risks or is it a principle?

In your case, why not just lie that you got it and not get it?

Because I still remember the lessons I learnt from DARE presentations in school, and "It's cool to let someone shoot you up with drugs you don't want if the peer pressure is great enough." wasn't one of them.

Funnily enough DARE has been heavily discredited from both sides - their programs actually made kids more likely to do drugs on average, it seems.

Would you mind giving a serious answer though instead of making a joke about your outgroup?

What the Bailey King said, but also just because I don't like being serious doesn't mean I wasn't taking it seriously. Take out the reference and what do you have? I don't cave to peer pressure. This was considered one of my most admirable qualities before covid. Anyway I was all set and even keen on getting the jab until everyone started the whole "It's totally up to you to choose if you get the vaccine, we really care about bodily autonomy and freedom and would never force anyone to get it! But also if you don't get it we will try to get you fired and do everything we can to destroy your life, and no we don't see any contradiction in that statement." thing.

There are no shots at my outgroup in that post though, if anything I thought I was self deprecating.

It is possible for DARE to be less effective on average and more effective on certain individuals.

And that's why you don't accept anaesthesia for surgery, I presume?

edit: Ah sorry, didn't see the "you don't want" there. Important factor to be sure.

I have never not wanted anaesthesia in my life. I don't mean during surgery, I mean full stop.

Speaking as someone who (I think) feels similarly as OP, it's purely about principle. Family should be beyond reproach, as he wrote. In a hypothetical universe where I didn't get vaccinated, it should still be beyond reproach. I hope I'd have the courage to spew this kind of bile in real life if the old, tired topic of covid ever comes up in meatspace. I'd know my success when my friends reply to my rant: "wait, aren't you vaccinated though?"

Yes, and?

How would you feel in a hypothetical universe where COVID has a 10% death rate the vaccines actually were perfect at stopping transmission? Because in that universe I would 100% support all of the hate directed towards the unvaccinated and more. That's why I think it's tricky to say things should be beyond reproach.

Most vaccine mandate supporters believed, approximately, that covid is that dangerous, and that vaccines are that good. Which is why setting any conditions on when a vaccine mandate becomes acceptable is a waste of time - if there's a condition, governments will just lie to meet it.

That's honestly the impression I was under during the period, and which still seems correct. Now my jimmies are very rustled so I won't pretend to be able to judge it fairly, and especially not that I have any proof or deeper insight than a gut reaction and hazy memories of the time period, but the way the science seemingly turned on a dime and seemingly contradictory messages were true on different weeks and every checked fact and expert truth under the sun conspired to make it so that vaccines and only vaccines would save us but only if everyone took them but then with certainty sounded less than credible. I wouldn't go as far as to say the government lied; that seems to imply agency and malevolence that I don't think our government was actually capable of. But they certainly didn't give a shit about telling the truth, and it sounded an awful lot like instead saying whatever would shift the blame onto the outgroup and damn your lying eyes.

So yes, I agree in practice. Governments will make policy whatever they like, and if there should be any hurdle to that then I think we can be sure they'll use every dirty trick in the book to clear it if only because that's the kind of behavior that representative democracy has always selected for.

Well I suppose I'd say you're lucky in this day and age to have a family that you actually spend time with. Many aren't so lucky.

I took the vaccine simply to keep my friendships, the social network I'd built up was far more valuable than any principles I held being violated. Which principle is it about for you?

Thankfully I didn't face this choice (both because I got the vaccine, and because my social circle isn't crazy). But if I had, I would have chosen to lose my social circle. For me, this comes down to the age old principle of "if they treat you like that, they were never actually your friend". Painful though the separation would be, I wouldn't want to continue being friends with someone who considers political disputes like this to be more important than me and our friendship.

That's a fair point. I will admit that my social circle got pruned quite a bit during and after covid. Part of that was people no longer wanting to come out, and part of it was me consciously not associated with the more insane covid folks.

I'd rather have more control over the process I suppose, than have my reputation nuked and have relationships taken away from me without my say so.

Speaking as someone who (I think) feels similarly as OP, it's purely about principle. Family should be beyond reproach, as he wrote. In a hypothetical universe where I didn't get vaccinated, it should still be beyond reproach.

One of our extended FM is antivax, but like, full qanon "threaten violence against family members if they get vaccinated" tier. "Beyond reproach" is one thing, but at some point it becomes too painful to interact with them.

Yes, in this case the analogy is backwards, the family member is being the aggressor, not you.

Right, I'm just highlighting that people will have different reference classes in mind depending on their experiences. I think it's less "the vax memeplex makes people crazy" or "anti-vax makes people crazy" so much that many people are just latently crazy and you only really notice it when you and them diverge.

At first I just saw it as very unnecessary, since I had already had covid in the summer of 2020 and it had been harmless. By the winter of that year the vaccines were out but I was still feeling safe without one. Then everyone went crazy as described above, plus the creepy politics and media campaigns, and from there on you might call it principle or just spite.

The whole thing caught me off guard; I never saw the social pressure and the social ruin coming until was already too late. I had mistakenly assumed that people around me were running on mistake theory and that my reasons might matter to them. Silly me, it was conflict theory all along and I had strayed into the enemy camp.

But had I seen it coming, I would have done the same anyways. Only with more firing back right away.

Vaccine safety didn't factor into it for me.

from there on you might call it principle or just spite.

Thanks for answering honestly. I get this sense from most educated anti-vaxxers I talk to. I don't feel the same way but I understand how people would, and definitely think that the lockdowns were insane and over the top.

I never saw the social pressure and the social ruin coming until was already too late

Yeah luckily I was organizing some far-left local dance groups that totally freaked out - helped me see the writing on the wall very early. I wonder if people who don't associate with leftists just didn't understand how bad it would be?

Although apparently it's not very popular here, my calculus was more like - is it worth destroying all these important relationships I've built over the years, or risk taking a relatively untested vaccine? The choice was clear for me.

You mention principle, what is the principle here? If vaccine safety wasn't a problem, do you place your right to avoid government mandated drugs higher than social values?

For me the principle involved in refusing the vaccine was simple- white hot rage at people who took the pandemic seriously. The hypochondriacs of the world had already infringed against me, and now they dared to lash out at me for not dancing along to their tune on imagined risks?

There were a lot of deaths. What is your standard for taking a risk seriously?

I wonder if people who don't associate with leftists just didn't understand how bad it would be?

Quite possibly. I associate with them plenty, but I figured this was something that people were still allowed to make up their own mind about. Yet another topic on which some may have opinions they consider morally significant, but which in the end remains a private matter. Like electric cars, or vegetarianism, or what kind of companies you buy from.

You mention principle, what is the principle here? If vaccine safety wasn't a problem, do you place your right to avoid government mandated drugs higher than social values?

There are several principles at work. One I might charitably call bayesian thinking, or less charitably being a stubborn ass who'd rather trust his lying eyes than any number of wise mouths speaking words of wisdom. Another is not succumbing to unjustified social pressure so as to not validate people and trends who would wield it. Another is not playing along with government policies I disagree with, to the extend that I can afford to. I could come up with more, but really, spite is the most of it. And yeah, I draw something of an arbitrary line at anything being mandated to go under my skin, or be carried on my person, or anything other than lie at home in a drawer where I can forget about it. That just seems like the government overstepping its bounds, severely, and not something to be done unless there were no other way. And in the case of covid anything down to "do nothing at all and come through it fine" was another and a preferable way.

I would have just lied about it for as long as it benefited me. It would be impossible for anyone to prove otherwise. I'm sorry your family is like that.

I wouldn't. Stupid of me I guess, but on that point it is a principle.

I mistakenly assumed that everyone around me regularly got flu shots and would be totally ok getting experiencing less than a second of pain to avoid harming my family. And I suppose now that the old folks are already dead from covid I shouldn't have anything to worry about-it's not like they're going to die again. But just like you, I feel like it's the principal of the thing. Choose Team Mankind or Team Virus (or, hell, Team China if you believe in lab leak theory.)

I think people should have the absolute authority to choose what goes in their arm, but if I see someone with 'death to /u/evinceo's ancestors' tattooed on their forehead, I'm going to treat them with some amount of contempt.

  • -15

experiencing less than a second of pain to avoid harming my family

FWIW, both Covid shots resulted in 8-12 hours of moderately severe flu symptoms, and this seems very common among my friends and family. For those of us who had already had Covid at that point, it's more like 5-10% of a "call out sick for a week" infection for a negligible reduction to our transmission risk.

The decision to take a vaccine can only be understood in context of (what I see as) the authoritarian push that surrounded it. I got vaccinated but would have unvaccinated myself in 2021 if I could.

From my perspective you were party to a crime in lending emotional support to a push for mandatory medical procedures. Nevertheless, I do not see you as wearing a 'dystopian social credit system and human domestication for @popocatepetl and all future humans' on your forehead. I understand that you do not believe what I believe and have a different moral ecology between your ears, and so I don't jump to assuming malice or cruel indifference on your part. I do consider it a moral failing that you do not extend the same charity to us.

During the height of the War on Terror, I remember people demonizing the tiny number of Americans who did not extend the "simple courtesy" of standing for the pledge. It's "the least" they could do. As if they were resisting the overpowering wave of social pressure out of simple desire to rest their legs.

The decision to take a vaccine can only be understood in context of (what I see as) the authoritarian push that surrounded it.

I guess we just straight up differ here. I see it mostly in the context of what it costs (practically nothing) and what it achieves (some nonzero decrease in the chance that people get sick.) If you only care about the signaling you can always get vaccinated and not tell anyone.

From my perspective you were party to a crime in lending emotional support to a push for mandatory medical procedures.

I've been careful to repeatedly state my opposition to mandates, which I don't agree with. I have a personal issue with people not doing it.

If you're willing to stretch to see me as morally culpable for mandates, would you permit me to see the antivax movement as morally culpable for the FDA's extremely slow, fatally cautious rollout of the vaccines, leading to excess deaths including people I really would have preferred to remain alive?

I guess we just straight up differ here. I see it mostly in the context of what it costs (practically nothing) and what it achieves (some nonzero decrease in the chance that people get sick.) If you only care about the signaling you can always get vaccinated and not tell anyone.

Is there a way to vaccinate without being statistically logged as having done so? I would consider it if another 2020 Covid situation comes around.

As for getting a booster in late 2022, I see the new updated vaccines as having an unclear cost/benefit ratio (EDIT: for me and for transmission), which I did not believe in 2021. Probably not worth the $110 they apparently cost the government. I guess I'll donate another buck to the Red Cross this year, or incur the equivalent moral debt by not doing so.

You may see that as a ridiculous moral framing, which leads me to:

If you're willing to stretch to see me as morally culpable for mandates, would you permit me to see the antivax movement as morally culpable for the FDA's extremely slow, fatally cautious rollout of the vaccines, leading to excess deaths including people I really would have preferred to remain alive?

Yes, clearly. You can see our decision as woefully morally incorrect. On the other hand, you're not morally entitled to suspend imaginative empathy and micharacterize the intent of our decision.

Imagine were I to say "@evincio wants to create a police state because he'd rather not get a cold". That is a twin of "@Southkraut doesn't want to experience less than a second of pain to avoid killing my relatives". The statements assume that the subject accepts a premise of the speaker's — that Covid measures are a slippery slope to a police state, that not vaccinating will lead to @Southkraut killing people — and frame the subject's decision in the most uncharitable way possible.

@Southkraut may not be able to articulate the principle behind his actions. Those principles may be dead wrong. And yet it is clear from his resistance that it was not out being miserly with his time (thirty seconds walking to the pharmacy counter the last time he swung through CVS) or unwilling to endure the pinch in the arm. This is obvious enough that I feel failing to see it is willful, which is what I'm responding against.

I guess I also don't buy that avoiding a non-mandatory vaccination is in any way resisting the imposition of a police state.

I mistakenly assumed that everyone around me regularly got flu shots and would be totally ok getting experiencing less than a second of pain to avoid harming my family. And I suppose now that the old folks are already dead from covid I shouldn't have anything to worry about-it's not like they're going to die again. But just like you, I feel like it's the principal of the thing. Choose Team Mankind or Team Virus (or, hell, Team China if you believe in lab leak theory.)

Choose team liberty over team coercion. Choose team bayesian inference over team blind obedience. Choose team calm over team panic. Choose team economy over team lockdown. We can all spin this any way we like.

I think people should have the absolute authority to choose what goes in their arm, but if I see someone with 'death to /u/evinceo's ancestors' tattooed on their forehead, I'm going to treat them with some amount of contempt.

I'm really not sure what you're saying here, except for the surface-level reading which seems both obvious and very unlikely to occur.

Choose team liberty over team coercion.

IMO past lockdowns permanently increased liberty in the future, by shifting the default from office to remote work, where applicable.

The previous arrangement was plain coercion (just look at the management class still trying to fight back occasionally, despite workers clearly preferring their freedom). Which actually affected lives, to a drastic extent. Lockdowns were lukewarm, and very temporary.

Choose team economy over team lockdown.

Same here; it could've only increased the pace of change long-term. Killing/damaging obsolete sectors of the economy like physical retail is good.

Choose team liberty over team coercion.

Same, but please also make good decisions, not just decisions based on vibes.

Choose team economy over team lockdown.

What does that have to do with getting a shot?

I'm really not sure what you're saying here

I was hamhandedly drawing an equivalence, ie, a very expensive signal to show that you don't care about me and mine. Which is fine. I don't want to coerce you into caring about who you hurt. But it might affect my decision to invite you to parties, yeah?

Consider the pledge of allegiance-US school kids recite it every day. Compared to getting a yearly shot, this is an astounding amount of time, and a much clearer signal of conformity. I assume you're US-based, did you refuse that too?

And you never did mention if you got your flu shots.

And you never did mention if you got your flu shots.

I never got a flu shot. Why would I? I'm neither old nor immunocompromised.

Same, but please also make good decisions, not just decisions based on vibes.

Here's my good decision: I don't worry about what's not a problem. The flu is not a problem. It comes, it goes, its effects are negligible. Covid was not a problem. It came, it went, its effects were negligible. Nobody I know had any problems from covid more serious than flu symptoms, no matter how sickly or old they were. Yes, damn my lying eyes, the cost is low even for small benefits so just get the shot you troglodyte, and again as per the actual topic of this sub-thread: No. There is an ongoing conflict here, and I will not accommodate the opposition by retreating into mistake theory while they sit on their conflict theory gains.

What does that have to do with getting a shot?

Getting the shot, especially when there's no need for it, validates the ideological crusaders and policy-makers and nudges the overton window in their favor. Since their policies and ideologies would give away great amounts of freedom, prosperity and social trust in exchange for marginal protection from a fairly harmless virus, and no just "getting a shot" cannot be separated from this memeplex, I would rather spite them for all the harm they've done than cooperate to attain some minor benefit.

I was hamhandedly drawing an equivalence, ie, a very expensive signal to show that you don't care about me and mine. Which is fine. I don't want to coerce you into caring about who you hurt. But it might affect my decision to invite you to parties, yeah?

Do you care about me and mine? All that I can see is that both care about how our societies behave, where you are afraid of society's vulnerability to viruses and I'm afraid of society's vulnerability to totalitarianism/social engineering/witch hunts.

Consider the pledge of allegiance-US school kids recite it every day. Compared to getting a yearly shot, this is an astounding amount of time, and a much clearer signal of conformity. I assume you're US-based, did you refuse that too?

You assume incorrectly.

I never got a flu shot. Why would I? I'm neither old nor immunocompromised.

Because A) getting the flu can suck even if you're young and B) you might infect a child or elderly person, or infect someone who does.

It comes, it goes, its effects are negligible.

I suspect you've had colds rather than the flu. When I was young I had a flu which kicked my ass. Though I'd actually been vaccinated, so I suppose that's not the strongest argument for vaccination!

Covid was not a problem

Well not for those who didn't die I suppose.

Nobody I know had any problems from covid more serious than flu symptoms, no matter how sickly or old they were.

Your anecdote; mine is that people I cared about died.

I will not accommodate the opposition by retreating into mistake theory while they sit on their conflict theory gains.

My initial post regarding the face tattoo wasn't conflict theory enough?

validates the ideological crusaders and policy-makers and nudges the overton window in their favor.

Let me get this straight: the insurmountably small protection you get from a covid shot is negligible, but the insurmountably small influence on policy you exert by getting one isn't?

I would rather spite them for all the harm they've done than cooperate to attain some minor benefit.

This is hard sentiment to sympathize with, because you're hurting everyone to spite them. This is the type of thing I was comparing to a face tat. Or spitting in people's hamburgers because you hate your boss at McDonald's.

Do you care about me and mine

I would prefer that y'all not get sick, if that matters to ya.

where you are afraid of society's vulnerability to viruses and I'm afraid of society's vulnerability to totalitarianism/social engineering/witch hunts.

I see 'surrendering to a virus' as just as dangerous a meme as what you've listed. We are mankind and we make shit extinct, damn the consequences.

You assume incorrectly.

That might explain some of the disconnect then. Maybe you live somewhere where the lockdowns were truly draconian. Stateside they, well, weren't. Unfortunately, having not actually imposed a lockdown from the top down, nobody had the proper authority to lift the lockdown either, so you've still got some folks for whom 2020 never ended, which is its own kind of problem, while the rest of us have long since resumed our lives.

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Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting

I don’t know if it’s naïve, but I’ve always sort of assumed that transition is something which gets recommended after years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric.

I’m curious because I think this is a key point where left assumptions and right assumptions tend to diverge. Left assumption: you talk about gender dysphoria with a therapist and they evaluate you for a long time to make sure it’s actually there and is affecting your life in a severe way before recommending any life altering treatments. Right assumption: any old kid reads something online about gender fluidity, experiments with the idea for a short phase, the doctor algorithm says, dysphoric, boom here’s some hormones to take.

Idk which one it looks more like in reality.

Like, I think it’s fine that people transition, but I also know it’s easy to basically trick psychologists until I get prescribed Adderal. Right? So ideally transition would be there but you’d have to spend a huge amount of time and commitment to get anybody to open up the door where it’s locked up at.

That feels to me like a place where some common ground can be found? But maybe I’m also naïve there too, lol.

This is part of a bigger suspicion that all of our problems are solvable by understanding that there are fractions of truth claims in what both sides tend to offer, but it’s very unpopular to say so because we immediately perceive the other side as the worst consequences of their way of thinking rather than looking for where there is a bit of truth in what they say.

years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric

Hospital in Canada:

“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”

Children’s Hospital, London, Ontario.

I suppose if the hospital's "Gender Pathways Service" is already prescribing puberty blockers so freely that there's no requirement for diagnosis beyond the child or child's parent getting a referral by saying something about transgenderism to the family doctor, giving them before the first appointment saves time. While doing so based on 0 appointments is obviously unusual, quite a few of the anecdotes I've heard mention prescriptions after the 1st appointment. The way you describe it used to be much more standard, I remember trans-activists complaining about previous requirements like living for 6-months to a year as the opposite gender, but doesn't seem common anymore.

It's possible they justify this with the argument that puberty blockers are much less significant than opposite-sex hormones and are just "giving the child time to choose" or some such thing, but that seems heavily contradicted by the evidence. For one it amounts to much the same decision: 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans. For another puberty blockers themselves, particularly when used to avert puberty entirely rather than delay precocious-puberty a couple years, are serious business. We know about them impacting bone density based on the use with precocious-puberty, but we also have reason to believe they impact brain development but have zero research on what that impact is in humans. The best I've found is this study on sheep. A concern mentioned by the NHS's independent review:

A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.

Given how the medical system is normally so obsessed with the precautionary principle (like the FDA shutting down early unapproved COVID testing) it seems crazy that something as significant as preventing puberty entirely has become standard practice based on no more than the same drugs previously being approved to delay precocious puberty. There's a severe lack of research on even the safety/side-effects of using those drugs that way, let alone a randomized control trial of effectiveness indicating it actually performs better as a treatment of trans-identifying children than doing nothing.

97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans.

Broadly, I don't necessarily disagree, but surely got to be careful with selection effects here, and the direction of causation. It would seem likely that the kids who felt 'strongest' about their dysphoria would want to go on blockers immediately and those who weren't so sure watch and wait, and further that those kids who felt strongly would be more likely to persist in transition. Which is to say, it isn't that blockers make it more likely to continue transition, but that people more likely to continue transition take blockers.

The selection effects wouldn't be that straightforward because the second link is to a meta-study of studies by clinics on outcomes for all the children they diagnosed with gender dysphoria, none of whom were given puberty blockers. There unfortunately aren't many studies like that and the children in question were diagnosed before use of puberty-blockers became widespread.

Now, that definitely raises its own serious problems in comparing the two groups. In particular, the number of children diagnosed with gender dysphoria since those studies has risen enormously. At the recently-closed Tavistock/Gender Identity Development Service clinic in the UK, the NHS's only gender clinic for children, referrals rose from 94 in 2010 to 2,519 in 2018. So there's not a lot of reason to believe those diagnosed with gender dysphoria in the earlier studies included in that meta-study are representative of more than a small fraction of those diagnosed today. But it seems difficult to justify that those diagnosed with gender dysphoria before the increase would be more prone to desistance under a watchful-waiting approach than those who seemingly wouldn't have been diagnosed if they were born a decade earlier. It's possible to construct a narrative like that - I've heard arguments that the ability to diagnose gender dysphoria has become more accurate, or that the desisters would be better-off as trans but were forced back into the closet by a transphobic society. But it certainly doesn't seem safe to assume, let alone prescribing puberty-blockers based on that assumption.

“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”

I just have to repeat that. Because the usual excuses I see made are that the doctors that screen these patients are just that damned good at their job. 100% success rate at identifying which pre-pubescents need puberty blockers. Nothing at all to do with the puberty blockers actually prolonging or increasing dysphoria.

But when the doctor hasn't even seen them yet, shifting the goalpost to "Yeah, I guess only kids that really want puberty blockers take puberty blockers" seem... weak? And inconsistent with everything everyone who's ever had any proximity to any children what so ever knows about this little thing called a "phase".

Lol, yeah that’s pretty wild.

I stand very corrected.

I think you laid out part of the "two movies" effect at play. Personally, I know one trans person, and as I keep saying, she got on estrogen literally the first time she had a meeting with a healthcare professional. She got a round of bloodwork done within a few days; results came in a couple weeks later and showed a severely low T level. Neither that, nor the obvious other severe issues (alcoholism, depression, political radicalization, Covid alienation induced mania) gave anyone any pause.

Maybe that's extremely unusual. But the Tavistock Clinic was recently shut down over complaints that they single-mindedly pushed transitioning, and apparently the UK is reconsidering those policies.

Wow, yeah that’s wild. I’ve never really talked to anyone who is trans about it so I’m blind on how it really works.

Am teacher in Canada. You are naive. Social transition is instant. You’re a girl. You fail a test, you get scolded for it, you say “I’m trans” and suddenly everyone is terrified you’ll kill yourself and the test is forgotten. All you have to change is your name. Your clothes, behaviour, love of manly stuff like anime and fan fiction all remain unchanged, only now you don’t have to do any work at school because of your “mental health.” The other girls trip over themselves to affirm your new identity, and you all hug and giggle together in the cafeteria. If a social worker or counsellor is in on this, they will insist that your identity must be affirmed and your (in most cases, single) mother, aiming to literally save your life (because, suicide) will take you to the doctor to begin treatment. You dare not refuse, because you told everyone this was Not Just A Phase.

You can overdo it and say you’re a demon or something, but if you stick to the script and go to the right places, you can be well on your way to embodying the masculine ideal (5”2’ , blue hair, with a hint of a moustache) in a few weeks.

I don't live in Canada, I'm in the UK, but I've got to say the world you have described sounds fucking alien to me. I live in a very blue-tribe sort of sphere, but people who say that being trans has become 'cool' feel like they're on a different planet to me. Not sure how to resolve this really; I'm left thinking, if I, a very left-leaning person, have 0 experience with 'trans-trending', where are these trenders?

I mean, being trans sounds like a fucking nightmare to me.

  1. They trenders are 16. If you don’t hang around teenagers you won’t meet them.

  2. It’s probably a nightmare if you really are trans. What is crystal clear, though, is that almost none of the kids who say they are, actually are. That’s why it’s all girls. If a guy is trans he has to bear a lot of costs: get new clothes, look weird, change his voice, etc. A girl can change nothing, not even her clothes, (changing your name is really something you make everyone else change)and everyone will cheer-lead her bravery, and fall in line to affirm her new name and identity. The costs are borne by everyone else. It’s a cost-free power move, so it’s not surprising that kids are drawn to it.

love of manly stuff like…fan fiction

Wait what? In my perception this was always a girly thing.

I meant that these "trans" kids have zero masculine qualities. Nowadays, there's nothing girlier than saying you're a boy. One of them skipped my class, and when asked where they had been, replied "Home Depot." I felt bad, because I had judged this kid to be most unconvincing. But Home Depot? Perhaps I had been blinded by bias. "What did you buy there?," I asked. The reply? "This potted pansy! It's gardening day!"

I think so too. Calling it "manly" feels like sarcasm to me - that the standard for counting as a trans boy is so low, no one cares if the hypothetical girl shows interest in any manly interest.

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In many of my teenage friend groups I was actually the weirdo for not being interested in anime, and that counts both the male and female friends I had.

As an older millennial I can only marvel, not without a little jealousy, at the brave new world we live in. Wow.

I don't think the gender skeptic side thinks doctors immediately recommends medical intervention, although some rhetoric around puberty blockers being harmless and "buying time to question" being held as important is worrisome. I think the main concern is that everyone is just so unquestioningly affirming in such a way that there isn't a good offramp. Growing into your body is an often not affirming process and an alternative where you're constantly affirmed, on a topic where there isn't actually some objective or even internally subjective way to really verify the truth value of a claim like "I'm really a woman" is troubling. I don't trust the advocates to frankly lay out the case that a kid might not be trans and the only people in the pipeline are advocates. Hell, I have trouble actually rigorously proving to myself that I'm not trans if I adopt the framework that these advocates advance and I'm a pretty masculine person who is quite happy with my station in life. Seriously, I can't stress enough just how underdefined the whole thing is, a sufficiently charismatic person may be able to talk nearly anyone into questioning their gender if they buy in the premises of the ideology. I fear that the social groups these kids will find them surrounded by are the likes of /r/egg_irl who have memetic antibodies against all counterevidence that it's a phase. I fear puberty happening might actually be the thing that cures many of gender dysphoria and naive use of puberty blockers might force someone who could have been perfectly happy with their body to live as a permanent and sterile consumer of pharmaceutical drugs to poorly imitate the opposite sex.

What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

Computer problems and being forced to go through call trees to contact some organization. If I'm alone I will scream and swear.

Or when the 'on hold' music is interrupted every minute with a recorded voice so you can't even stop paying attention until someone answers.

And the voice just says 'have you tried using the website dumbass?'

Ooh, this is a good one. In particular when it's the voice activated kind, instead of just being able to press a button. They are absolutely horrible to deal with and I can feel the rage rising every time I encounter one.

I cannot understand why the phone dungeons have been turned into phone struggle sessions. What possible advantage was gained? Is it accessibility? Are there phones, somewhere, which can no longer generate key tones? Why??

Not 'no longer' so much as 'never could'.

(I've known children who didn't even grasp the concept of "I can't take the phone to him, it's attached to the wall." #getoffmylawn)

I was ready to argue that even rotary phones were using in-band multi-frequency signaling, but it turns out that was just for underlying infrastructure. Using the actual sound to control the channel wasn't commercially popular until Bell got ahold of enough transistors for touch-tone telephones. Still, 50 years of DTMF, displaced by companies that think repeating your menu choices is cool!

Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting.

Just to note, this isn't really a hypothetical anymore. Canadians are nudged towards euthanasia after being told how much they cost the healthcare system and a survivor of the Belgium airport ISIS attacks in 2016 was euthanized this year after expressing suicidal ideation. The only difference is that this is not happening to kids and people protesting it are not jailed by governments. Not yet, at least.

Interesting. But economics taught me that these Canadian healthcare workers aren't dealing with their own money, but rather taxpayer money, so why should they care about costs? They have soft budget constraints.

As for nudging, is there any such thing as merely making people aware of their options, or is that actually impossible? Any option you make people aware of you've necessarily nudged them toward?

Nudging is a technocratic concept of giving pretense of choice, but then “highlighting” the one preferred in order to manipulate the result. It is the difference between opt-in and opt-out model and similar concepts. It is named after the 2008 book The Nudge by Richard Thaler, the 2017 economic “nobel” prize winner for behavioral economics

While there is probably some argument to be made for it, the equilibrium is ultimately unstable, often due to Lucas Critique. If you try to force people that clicking large green button to “accept” as opposed to small grey button of “reject”, over time your “psychological” tricks will lose efficacy over random choice. Nevertheless “nudging” became pop-psych concept used by your cookie-cutter PMC class wannabes to show their dominance. Which by my estimation exactly reflects the late oughts thinking from elites when it comes to public policy and similar issues.

That seems like a highly uncharitable description of nudging. The whole point of them is to preserve choice for anyone who actually cares. But in many cases most people either don't seem to care, or don't know about the decision they're trying to make, and therefore just stick with the default. Knowing this, it is inescapable that whoever is providing the choice (a company offering a 401k, the government asking if you want to be an organ donor, etc.) is creating quite a large impact on the outcome simply by the way in which choices are presented. There is no "neutral" way of doing it for most people.

That seems like a highly uncharitable description of nudging. The whole point of them is to preserve choice for anyone who actually cares. But in many cases most people either don't seem to care, or don't know about the decision they're trying to make, and therefore just stick with the default.

Sure, that is "the argument" I have mentioned to be made for this idea. The question that remains is who gets to construct the "default" choice. And technocrats thought that they can use some simple psychological tricks to "nudge" people to their preferred option. And this is where the "pretense" comes into play. If you agree to something devastating just by impulse of clicking the bright green button as opposed to hidden white button, you can pretend that the target made the choice. Like "nudging" natives to write X on some paper in exchange for some beads in order to save their immortal souls of course - as all learned people know. What a novel, Nobel prize winning idea we have here. Until you are proven otherwise by getting a bullet in your head by some outraged individual at the most extreme.

Of course the idea is that the enlightened elite will "nudge" the plebs toward the policies and options that will make them happy. And then everybody will sing kumbaya together with plebs praising their overlords for their wise leadership and the lords humbly accepting the praise and sending 10% of their excess income to buy malaria nets for Africa as an indulgence for some nagging feeling of something being wrong there.

And again, I am not saying that there is nothing like some arbitrary choices. You can have just some multipliers of chicken wings in your order at one natural extreme, or maybe there is an option to opt into three choices that have to be designed in some way. However the Nudge theory in its core is about ability to shape population by some decisionmaker to specifically design the choice to get what he wants. Which is of limited possibility. To use another "neoliberal" theories, we are talking about Public Choice Theory and Principal Agent Problem

And I am sure that there are some rationalists who have beaten that all to death, but this is not what is meant when you randomly read about "nudging" in New York Times in the context of a new "nudging" anti-racist department of social justice, or maybe alternatively by Daily Wire regarding some new DeSantis proposal of life affirming care program for prospective mothers.

And this is where the "pretense" comes into play. If you agree to something devastating just by impulse of clicking the bright green button as opposed to hidden white button, you can pretend that the target made the choice. Like "nudging" natives to write X on some paper in exchange for some beads in order to save their immortal souls of course - as all learned people know. What a novel, Nobel prize winning idea we have here. Until you are proven otherwise by getting a bullet in your head by some outraged individual at the most extreme.

This is an utterly wild leap of logic. Is there any actual connection here? Tricking or coercing natives into signing treaties they didn't understand (or had a different conception of) is absolutely nothing like the economic idea of nudging people by having a 401k plan be opt-out.

It is “like it” because you are “tricking” people to select the option designer prefers speciffically assuming they they do not know any better. The only difference between “nudging” and “tricking” lies in supposed “good” or “bad” result for the subject - of course as is viewed by the “nudger”. Who himself can engage in certain level of self-deception, using euphemism for tricking people being the very first step.

Even to use your example of pension plan, one of the moves Orban did in his quest to nationalize private pension plans was declaring that unless savers specifically opt into the plan again, the default option will be read as agreement with nationalization of their savings and promise of state pension. Was he nudging or tricking people?

They are not remotely the same.

The whole point of a nudge is to be small, and for there to be a legitimate choice. If you actually care about your 401k or organ donation, you absolutely can decide. By revealed preference, most people either don't care, or don't know anything about it. The alternative is plainly there, most people just don't bother. A treaty for large amounts of land, probably with each side operating under a different legal framework (not that anyone in history bothered to keep treaties), by people who would take the land by force anyway, is just not even remotely comparable. If you can't see there's a difference between nudges and "lie through your teeth and murder anyone who disagrees" then I don't know what to tell you.

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Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

The student loan subject, but in the opposite direction. I find it absolutely infuriating, I think people that want me to pay their willingly incurred debts are greedy and untrustworthy. I wrote more about why I think it's [so wrong here] (https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kcsx2u/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_december_14/gg9ijd4/):

On student debt forgiveness, I'm seeing the emergence of a new framing that seems almost completely nonsensical to me. In a recent Voxsplainer, this quote is included from a policy person:

“What’s attractive about student debt cancellation in this moment is that in addition to righting a policy wrong — which is the decision to make the cost of college an individual burden when I would say it’s a public good — is that it can help stimulate the economy at a moment when we need economic stimulus. And it has significant racial equity implications as well,” said Suzanne Kahn, director of education, jobs, and power at the Roosevelt Institute and an advocate for complete federal student debt cancellation. It’s also something Biden could try to do independently of Congress, which is attractive since stimulus talks have stalled out.

I want to emphasize the use of "public good" there - this doesn't mean something that's good for the public, this is a specific economic term used deliberately. The meaning is:

In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.

...

Non-rivalrous: accessible by all whilst one's usage of the product does not affect the availability for subsequent use.[8]

...

Non-excludability: that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.

This is not at all what university educations look like. Not only are degrees both rivalrous and excludable, they're also positional goods that convey signaling benefit to their recipients. To make them non-rivalrous and non-excludable would substantially remove their value to the individuals receiving them. We can imagine a world that looks like that, where Harvard offers all of its classes online to anyone that would like to take them and anyone that signs up and passes receives that Harvard degree, but that looks nothing like the world we actually live in.

From my perspective, student loan forgiveness would be one of the worst policies in American history. It would:

  • Reward irresponsible people that had no plan to pay debts freely entered into.

  • Reward universities that conferred expensive degrees that don't have an actual return on the investment.

  • Reify moral hazard and perverse incentives related to the above.

  • Continue to inflate college costs due to the expectation that no one actually has to pay for anything.

  • Further the class/social war by explicitly choosing to extract from non-university labor to reward the formally educated.

Almost all of the upsides seem to me to be incredibly short term and ignore normal human reactions. To me, the justifications all look like sophistry in service of smash-and-grab politics.

They're just using "public good" as an applause light, more in the plain meaning of "something good for the public" than the economic term, although they are attempt to borrow the legitimacy of the economic term.

What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?

Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.

Probably because it's, at least in part, an attack on my core identity - a hacker, computer programmer and free software advocate. But also, because it's one of the most blatant forms of authoritarian oppression: Not being able to do something with my hardware that I know it's capable of drives me furious, because there's no technical reason for it. It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.

Unusually, for not being CW at all: Proprietary software, especially the type that takes control away from the user and keeps getting more bloated and awful with every version. And in particular, being forced to use it.

Same. Especially firmware.

It's 100% due to a quasi-psychopathic desire by big tech companies to maintain an iron stranglehold on their users' rights.

There's also the thing where, if you root an Android phone, suddenly random bank apps and such try to fight back against it. This Reddit thread is very triggering.

So you reviewed with 5 stars previously, now changed to 1 star because they care about users' safety ... hmm, I see, I see.

Their company, their rules. They should be able to do whatever they want with their company.

That argument works both ways.

Edit: I'm just showing that the argument to freedom here works both ways. the same freedom the redditor is arguing form can be used by the company to do whatever they want as well.

Or this Asus forum thread. Specifically, this response from someone actually working there:

No plans for open source that I know of. Other than the complexity of making such a solution possible (there is already a ton of work required), we are also in a market which has fierce competition - one of the few things remaining outside software where vendors get to stamp their uniqueness is via UEFI and the dedicated hardware we use. We would not want to give away any of the special sauce we use to mitigate platform obstacles for others to freely copy or tinker with for example.

The timelines in which this buisiness operates is also unsuitable to support multiple solutions - it does not make sound business sense to do so in many cases and I believe this would be a similar situation.

This makes me wish for terrorism. Sadly no one is going to bomb a mobo manufacturer for these reasons. I just don't understand why it's not all leaked...

"stamp their uniqueness", lol. Maybe that would be convincing if this wasn't utter garbage. Eh

Is it hypocritical to hold this view while also making a comfortable living writing proprietary software :)

I wish there was a way to thread the needle and have decent open source software in more domains. Like you say there's no technical reason why proprietary software couldn't be made more open but I think realistically the users like yourself who could actually do something productive with it are a tiny minority, and most people will just try to get the software to do what they want, give up if it's not important or fork over cash if they absolutely need to. Presenting them with an SDK or source tree will yield anything useful. So there's probably no economic advantage to be found in opening up, and keeping all possible control over software is probably the safest position to be in. The ethical get outcompeted by the cutthroat.

One thing that really gets me in this vein is when hardware I already own gets worse due to forced updates. For example, I own a PS4 (bought it when they came out). And at the beginning, the "video" section of the UI was great. Just a simple list of all video streaming apps you had installed, pick one and go.

At some point, they overhauled the UI to make it advertising-centric. Now, when you go to the video section of the UI, most of the screen is dedicated to ads "helpfully" telling you about some new show you can go watch. You have to go past those to get to a little strip of icons for "featured" apps, so you can just go into whatever app and watch your content. This strip is also a form of advertising, in that it forces the big name apps (whether you even have them installed or not) to be in the list, prioritized over any apps that haven't gotten Sony's favor (probably haven't paid them enough money). It doesn't matter if you don't have Apple TV installed and never used it, it will always be towards the beginning of that list. And because the screen has space permanently taken up by the "featured" apps, it means that some smaller apps you use simply may not have the space to appear. The old style "just show me all the apps I have" listing is still there, but you have to dig through one or two screens of UI to get to it.

To me, it is completely outrageous that Sony would do this. It should arguably be illegal. As a consumer, I try to make informed decisions and only buy products that have a good experience for me, the user. But what am I supposed to do when corporations can ruin a product I bought after the fact? I don't have a way to determine if some mega corp will decide to screw over its users for profits years down the line. This sort of thing robs me of the one power I had in the marketplace, and it really upsets me.

I have a lot of disagreements with Richard Stallman. I think he's an ideological zealot who is too insistent on purity to an ideal that doesn't actually benefit 99% of users, and I think he has an overinflated sense of the importance of his contributions to open source. Nevertheless, when some shit goes down like what Sony pulled with my PS4, I can't help but sigh and go "fuck... Stallman was right."

+1 to this. I had a similar experience with the PS3 when an "update" added anti-piracy software that made my perfectly-working cloud library impossible to use. It didn't disable playback, it just muted the sound and put up a banner every few minutes if it did not detect the CD in the drive. Absolutely enraging.

I remember having a similar reaction when microsoft started slathering ads all over the xbox home screen.

I can't believe my education on this issue started with John Deere.

I think John Deere was the point at which things had gotten so bad that right-to-repair started to gain real mindshare, so don't feel too bad.

Thinking probabilistically, I don't think trans acceptance, even encouragement, has a very big impact on your odds of having grandchildren.

Do you feel the same fears about your children being encouraged to be homosexual? Homosexuals can still reproduce (especially women), but they have much fewer children on average and homosexuality is much more prevalent than transexuality, certainly the sterilized kind.

1950s lynch mobs didn't have much effect on your lifespan. There weren't lot of people lynched compared to the total population. But a system that can lynch anyone, anywhere is scary, and a sign of other problems; lynchings are scary even if you only have a 1/1000 chance of being lynched.

If kids go through a gay phase and end up figuring out it's not for them, even if much later, there isn't permanent damage. At least that's what bothers me about the idea. Transitioning really seems like a one way street both in that the encouragement seems like a totally different type of thing to gay initiation(for lack of a better word) and has much much more sunk cost.

Do you feel the same fears about your children being encourages to be homosexual? Homosexuals can still reproduce (especially women), but they have much fewer children on average and homosexuality is much more prevalent than transexuality, certainly the sterilized kind.

We've actually already crossed that bridge and come out fine. My teenaged daughter is part of that ~15% of teenage girls who "identify as bisexual", but have never displayed a non-straight inclination in any manner whatsoever. It's an aesthetic, a rainbow wristband to pair with her emo band t-shirt, in the same way she used to tell classmates she was a vampire. In the vanishingly unlikely event that she ends up in a stable adult relationship with another woman, I will sigh and artlessly ensure she is aware of her options.

I think the whole trans right activism has moved very fast, much faster than gay rights activism. Maybe that had to do with all the spadework and heavy lifting already being done on gay rights, same-sex marriage and the rest of it, so trans activism could piggyback on that.

And the first requests were not unreasonable: "we just want to be called the names and pronouns we prefer/we just want to use the bathroom in peace".

I think most people were like my own attitude: eh, if you're 20-30 and you've been wearing women's clothing at home for five years and you simply want to change your name to Susan and use the ladies' loo, fine.

It's when it moved down to "two year olds can have a firm sense of their gender identity" that people started going "Whoa, hit the brakes there, friend!"

And how early do you feel like you can tell that a kid is going to grow up to be someone who lives as a member of the opposite sex?

That's the million-dollar question right there. Here's how I would answer that: As early as toddler age, you can begin to tell that a child is going against the normative gender grain for the culture. For many children they will show it in toy preference, in movements and actions. So that parents who have a little girl will start to notice that their little girl is wanting to play with the trucks more than the dolls, for example.

But that can't tell you that the child is transgender. Usually the earliest you can know comes a little bit later when the child has language. Somewhere between 3 and 4, and sometimes between 2 and 3, a [male] child will begin to say "I'm not boy; I'm girl." So I would say that as early as 2 or 3 you can begin to wonder.

But can you be certain?

I would want us, particularly at this moment in history, to be very humble about our confidence on that question. I think it's a really complicated unfolding phenomenon. I would say I never feel totally confident. But I think that if we really listen to the children, for some children you can know as early as pre-school.

What do you say to Ken Zucker's argument that children this age are flexible, that you can never know?

I would say that I think that there is a subgroup of children who, if we listen to them carefully, will tell us, "I know who I am. And if you let me be who I am, I will be a healthy person. And if you try to bend my twig" — which is what I think Zucker does — "then I will be a repressed, suppressed, depressed person who will learn to do what other people expect of me and I'll hide who I really am."

Especially when it comes to drag shows in libraries and schools, and pat little anecdotes like the one in this article:

Around the corner from the library I tend to each day is the Kindergarten classroom of my co-worker John Paul Kane. A towering presence in a room full of very small children, JP is also a drag performer and one-half of Fay and Fluffy’s Storytime. JP and his performance partner tour libraries, children’s events and Pride festivals sharing stories with kids and their caregivers.

One heartbreaking recollection JP shares with me underscores the importance of a school environment that is open to a range of gender identity and expression. He tells me of a distraught Kindergarten student who eventually opened up to him about what was bothering him:

“I know you know me,” the youngster said. “You know I look like a girl, but I know you know I am a boy in my heart.” Thoughtfully, Kane asked what name and pronouns the child would like him to use. “You can call me by my name and you can also call me ‘he’ or ‘she,’ ‘cause that is still who I am right now,” he said.

“I was deeply touched that the child trusted me to share such a significant piece of themselves with me,” says Kane. “The parents felt relieved that their child was beginning to share their true selves with others they cared about.”

This story could be true. There's no indication of the child's age, and my scepticism is more due to how it's such a handy little story, but maybe it's become polished over many recitals and tidied-up, and the child's words have been 'improved'. It could be true. Or it could be "my friend the drag teacher and his class of gender nonconforming cute moppets, don't you want to make sure no child tries killing themselves, have you seen the suicide statistics for trans kids?" propaganda.

I think there are some earnest and well-meaning people, and a lot more who are pushing a progressive agenda out of the genuinely-held notion that breaking down the binaries and the mystique around sex and all the rest of it will make society a better place.

I think it's natural that we all have strong feelings around protecting children. It's possibly an evolutionary instinct; you can't reproduce successfully and maintain the existence of the species if all your young come to harm.

I always preferred dolls to cars, thought it was cool that one time someone gave me a hot pink t-shirt, and was amused when that first letter my parents received about disability benefits kept calling me "she" ... But none of that made me a girl. And if we're talking gendered stereotypes, I preferred action figures and rough-housing and swords most of all, and was conspicuously annoyed when people intentionally misgendered me (unintentionally was / is kinda neat).

When I was 8-9-ish, my grandpa tried to hide a doll I'd sleep with. This was quite upsetting. Were I 8-9-ish today, and anyone at school found out about these things, would I get the opposite treatment? ... And it's hard to imagine how I'd'veresponded. I think I was both aware enough of the absence of seriousgender identity concerns, and stubborn enough to say so bluntly, but I'm only, like, 75% ish confident in that. And that mostly because I haven't heard anyone who would be doing said hypothetical convincing sound like they'd have any idea how to be convincing to 8-9-ish me.

The especially frustrating part about this whole mess is that I've always wished I'd somehow dodged puberty ever since puberty. But I had to experience a good deal before I could really make that decision, after which it was far too late to do much about it. What's more, I get the sinking feeling that the neurological effects of puberty were relevant to my figuring this out, and to certain ... positive character development? things, and this was never just a physiological dysphoria. Negative character development throughout elementary school also hurt a lot when I became aware of it. As much as I deeply loath what has become of my body, I was at peak a-hole in the couple years before puberty. I like to think I could be reasoned into realizing this and trying to improve, even without getting mindflayed by hormones, but it doesn't seem at all likely that such would actually happen if all this were taking place today. Someone would say "Are you sure you're not a girl? Here: let's put off puberty while you think about it." And that would be it, and I'd probably be even more emotionally incontinent for lack of the trace amounts of prepubescent testosterone or whatever that enabled me to train resistance to crying over minor things.

This whole situation is just so frustrating! Even if I had a mental time-machine, it's not like I could go back to the 90s, chop off my testes, then hand them off to someone who could science up viable gametes just in case I found someone willing to be artificially insemenated by a permachild for some reason other than that I obviously brought the winning lotto numbers back with me. I can't Detective Conan myself smaller now and take advantage of The System™ without contributing to its misuse against children, the majority of whom I'd be quite shocked to discover are any better at resolving this stuff in time than I was. Oh, and the trans activists probably would hate me because it being age-related instead of gender-related pattern-matches to trolls who claim age dysphoria as an excuse for active paedophilia to tarnish trans people by association. (FWIW, I denounce said trolls.)

There really should be more options for helping children with dysphoria, whatever the type. There really should not be a creepy movement to sterilize children based on a short conversation. The information necessary to make a decision like that is not available to humans with our current level of knowledge and technology. As much as I might wish I'd accidentally sat on some dry ice when I was 10, I can't in good conscience support the policies that would have given me what I want when it would have been viable. When we get Medical Omega, maybe things could be different, but for now, I'm not sure there's anything to do for kids like me besides support after it's too late.

(Attempts to prove me wrong are very, very welcome.)

This story could be true. There's no indication of the child's age, and my scepticism is more due to how it's such a handy little story, but maybe it's become polished over many recitals and tidied-up, and the child's words have been 'improved'. It could be true. Or it could be "my friend the drag teacher and his class of gender nonconforming cute moppets, don't you want to make sure no child tries killing themselves, have you seen the suicide statistics for trans kids?" propaganda.

My assumption would be that no kindergarten age kid has given any organic thought to pronouns without an adult prodding them to think about pronouns.

What kid would ever say "you can call me by my name"? That's just miles from how kids speak (in my experience).

Thank you for articulating this. I long suspected that something like this was the case, but my friend group is fairly thin on people with any negative reaction to trans issues. (Not surprising, considering my partner is trans.)

So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.

Sadly, I think that in spite of me recognizing the edges of this phenomenon before your post, I'm light on ideas on how to route around this.

Part of it is that I believe there are other forces much more likely to "psychically castrate" your offspring than trans ideology. Almost my entire friend group is queer people, and none of them have plans to have biological children. Even my old college friends who are in long term relationships or getting married have no plans for children. My sister is dead set against children (and that was before she learned about the heritable medical condition she has.)

The birth rate is low in the Western world, and the trends depressing it are bigger than any one object-level fight in the culture war. Sterility and the end of legacy is the water we swim in and the air we breathe. Lack of issue is the curse of modernity. The trends in Bowling Alone and since the advent of the internet are only making things worse. We are slowly becoming Japan.

I understand that imagining your own child becoming a modern trans eunuch touches a nerve. I don't necessarily think it's healthy to focus on one relatively unlikely source of "castration" when society is full of these kinds of pitfalls and in much more likely forms like feminism and certain kinds of environmental activism. Parts of Western society have become a nihilistic death cult, waiting for the End and unwilling to propagate itself into the future with offspring.

But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.

I was hoping to dig into your 2% figure here, but the linked page didn't really break things down the way I hoped.

I'd speculate that the 2% figure is a bit misleading though. There's a big difference between 2% of youth using alternate pronouns, and 2% of youth becoming de-sexed eunuchs. What percent are on puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and undergo surgeries? I would suspect it's much lower than 2%. That might be a small comfort for a parent worried about the worst case scenario for their own child, but even if your child comes out as "trans" it might not be the end of your bloodline.

I'm reminded of my dad constantly checking if the front door was locked growing up. It was like a ritual to alleviate worries for him. Never mind that if an intruder was truly determined to get into our house, the front door would hardly work as a deterrent. I think it is a mistake to focus your worries too much on one angle of attack, especially one where the "average" case isn't as bad as you're imagining (insofar as a lot of "transition" for younger people is purely social.)

You should also think about whether you'd be okay with your children being "psychically castrated" in other ways as well. It would be disappointing obviously, but would you still love your children if they came to you at 18 and made it clear that they have no intention of ever having kids? Could you be happy living in the doomed world where your kids decide they would rather travel the world and party their 20's and 30's away, instead of having children or starting a family?

I think this comment is pretty much spot on. The fight over the effects of puberty blockers, the surgeries et al are a kind of a proxy battle for a war that's already been lost. Even if the kids aren't being literally sterilized, they're being culturally sterilized by the waters we're all swimming in and the sociocultural forces at work are so large and complex that they're impossible to compress down into something that can be fought against in a way that puberty blockers for minors can be, so you get these vicious fights that are sort of stand ins for these abstract and borderline unopposable forces. I fully expect fertility rates for western countries to hit well below 1.0 before the close of the 21st century.

Have we really made the transition from “they’re not recruiting your children” to “so what if they are?”

It's more "They've already recruited (most of) your children, it's just a matter of degree now".

I understand that imagining your own child becoming a modern trans eunuch touches a nerve. I don't necessarily think it's healthy to focus on one relatively unlikely source of "castration" when society is full of these kinds of pitfalls and in much more likely forms like feminism and certain kinds of environmental activism. Parts of Western society have become a nihilistic death cult, waiting for the End and unwilling to propagate itself into the future with offspring.

It's less "I am generally deeply worried about trans issues" and more "When the topic of trans kids is brought up, I have a disproportionate emotional reaction, let me dig in and try to understand where this is coming from."

Some people get extremely apoplectic about racism in a way I don't understand either.

Generational greavences are always like this.

Only when this core truth is understood - that trans identification is in many or even most cases about what feels (to the child) like a rational reaction to perceived but mostly real low social status*

This is the personal memory I think of every time Trans Kids come up. Sitting in seventh grade biology learning chromosomes, XX and XY. The teacher talks about, as a curiosity, a throwaway fun fact, that some men have two Y chromosomes, XYY, and that they are disproportionately found on death row, and that it is theorized the extra Y makes them extra aggressive and leads them to a life of violence. And some men are XXY, and correspondingly maybe a little more feminine. I remember feeling, with a deep sense of dread, that I must be XXY. That's why I was such a pussy! That's why I wasn't as good at sports as I wished I was! That's why girls I liked didn't like me! That's why I wasn't as tough as the blue collar farm kids I worked with who threw hay bails all day and never cried, why I couldn't make heads or tails of a small engine, why I liked books and old movies rather than manly things*, why my dad was always yelling at me to harden up and be a man and work harder, it explained everything!

Thank God I didn't have this shit around at the time, I might have said something to someone, and been on the path. Instead I just needed to wait five more years to grow into myself, and learn how broad the definition of Man can be, and reach a time when girls liked things that I was good at rather than things I wasn't and when socialization changed a little. I'd like to say I've grown into a decent man, fairly masculine, still an Iced-Coffee-All-Year bitch but that's hardly grounds to transition. Still, I remember that fear so distinctly, that sense of certainty that this was everything that was wrong with me, and I can't shake the sense that transmodernity can open like a trap door from one moment like that.

*Yeah, that's a long list, my expectations at 13 were basically to be Heinlein's Competent Man. Which is still my goal today, but I have enough achievements under my belt to understand what I can and can't do. A man's got to know his limitations. Which I think is another problem with status concerns for teenagers: they're based on expectations. The Apex Fallacy, looking at only the best and assuming that is normal, is so easy and so tempting. Truth is, I was probably >50th percentile at sports, I just picked the wrong ones back then. I've never been tough and I've never been graceful, so basketball and baseball and football were never for me. Today, I'd gamble I could beat anyone in town at a certain combination of skills, and that's good enough for me to feel good about myself. But I still can't shoot a basketball for shit.

I feel a kinship in this story with you brother.

Interestingly, gay men also tend to be shorter than straight men (OkCupid post; or, an actual study). Perhaps non-normative sexual identities are generally driven by failure to have social success within a normative straight, cis identity.

Or maybe whatever hormonal or in utero quirks result in gayness and other effeminate traits in men also result in not growing as tall...

Perhaps; it probably depends on the individual. As a pretty short bisexual guy, I know that I started hooking up with guys due to lack of opposite sex options. I likely never would have if not for that lack of options. Now that I do have them available, I tend toward women, though still experiencing same sex attraction.

Orientation is likely the result of a complex interaction of biological and social factors.

There was a great comment on the Motte (or perhaps even SSC, it was that long ago) in which the husband of a schoolteacher opined that his wife had noted that it was almost never the prettiest girl in class, or the handsome football player, who came out as trans. A cursory glance at trans forums and even, occasionally, at the writing of trans people online makes clear this is the case. The "incel to trans" pipeline is widely noted, and we might add the "ugly girl to trans" pipeline to it.

Could there be a confounding variable here, i.e. someone uncomfortable with being a man/woman might not be comfortable with putting effort into looking more attractive, as it usually means looking masculine/feminine? Or are these people really irreparably ugly?

I know one fantastically handsome (he was already modelling and I am sure he had a future) gay guy who transitioned in his 20s but other than literally every case I have witnessed confirms very well with the OPs description. The meek, awkward, ugly and shy.

One exception is the girls who first get into queer theory and only afterwards start playing with gender bending. Typically they are pretty in my experience and don’t go to far down the rabbit hole.

"Lesbian until graduation" phenomenon?

I truly hope so because I am worried about some people I know who is going down this path.

Great post

Please avoid low effort "I agree" / "I disagree" comments.

The first, of course, is to make sure neither you nor your spouse are ugly. The second is to ensure your children have a real, durable sense of self-worth. Do that, and I doubt even Elizabeth Guzman can take your kids from you.

I'm not convinced tbh, for a few reasons:

  1. The internet - especially TikTok -is awash with this shit.

  2. Authority figures are also promoting it and potentially creating a situation where denying it comes with huge social cost so parents not only might be wary about inculcating their kids with skepticism but the kids themselves may come to see their parents as bigots for trying.

  3. Boys and girls (who now make up the majority of cases) may just not be the same here: higher rates of co-ruminating by females could allow this to spread even if your daughter isn't a low-status person. Her friends are doing it and she gets sucked in.

tl;dr: It takes a village, parental influence is limited nowadays.

Parental influence is not actually that limited, it just takes far more enforcement.

Parent influence isn’t limited. Just take the phone and unplug the internet.

Boom, dysphoria cured

And what if she watches stuff on her friend's phone? Or she just picks it up from them? This is the rapid-onset gender dysphoria idea after all.

Or that nice teacher Mx. Robinson "teaches" her the truth about gender and how she can choose to be whatever she likes if she has some discomfort with being a girl? What if - as some activists want to become policy - the school encourages her to transition and never tells you, so you don't even necessarily know enough to counter this stuff before it sinks in? Kids spend 8+ hours at school. That's a lot of influence.

And, tbh, for whatever reason, I think a lot of Americans are unwilling to go this far. Maybe laziness, maybe not wanting to appear tyrannical (Western parents tend to be softer imo), maybe because it seems like an overreaction.

I don't think this sort of Benedictian withdrawal is feasible for most. Especially if you factor in the state -vastly stronger than it was in Benedict's time- coercing you anyway. Who is optimistic that the state won't encroach on your territory?

Sometimes there's no replacement for simply having a sane society with good norms (or at least norms that favor you). The other side seems to understand this implicitly; the libertarian "you go your way, I go mine" definitely doesn't seem to be their operating principle. If they don't think it works for them then you should ask why it would work for you?

And what if she watches stuff on her friend's phone? Or she just picks it up from them?

For most of these types of teens the problem is they don’t even have irl friends. Most of this social contagion is spread online amongst the terminally online and desperately lonely

The school stuff could conceivably happen. Live somewhere conservative? Check in with teachers and pay attention to what’s going on at school, attend the meetings etc

I’m not saying stop resisting their propaganda and social engineering, I’m just giving some basic and helpful tips.

Soon enough that will be considered child abuse.

I’m sure some already do but good luck enforcing mandatory internet and smartphones for everyone. They cant even keep potholes filled in my city

There was a great comment on the Motte (or perhaps even SSC, it was that long ago) in which the husband of a schoolteacher opined that his wife had noted that it was almost never the prettiest girl in class, or the handsome football player, who came out as trans.

Obviously, anecdotes against anecdotes is hardly good statistical thinking, but this hasn't been my experience, depending on how broadly one interprets "trans."

Within my friend-group, one female-bodied they/them person is hands down the most attractive person there - flat athletic tummy, great curves, etc. They're also a very autistic person who has trouble reading people, and I suspect that's the reason for them identifying the way they do. But they're polyamorous, and it seems like every unattached person in the group likes the idea of getting with them.

Though I suppose I'm being a little unfair, because a few of the trans people in my life have definitely reported something along these lines. One trans man talked about getting really into expensive gothic lolita fashion before admitting that wasn't working for him, and coming out as trans. And a trans woman I'm acquainted with reported a similar thing about trying to lean hard into male stereotypes before realizing it just wasn't working out for her.

one female-bodied they/them person is hands down the most attractive person there - flat athletic tummy, great curves, etc

That's not a trans, that's a woman trying to be cool and edgy by following the latest social trends.

I think there are many facets to this particular issue. I agree that what you've identified is one of them, but there are others. (And different facets will apply to different degrees across many individual cases.)

One observation that's practically prehistoric is that men and women frequently have trouble understanding each other. There are real, experiential differences that even given time, energy, eloquence, and the best of good faith can be very hard to fully communicate. One common assumption that crops up all the time is "as a [man/woman], this thing I deal with all the time is rough; [women/men] don't have to deal with that; it's so much easier for them." And it's even true! ...But it's true in different senses both ways, and it's easier to see the ways you've got it rough than the ways you've got it easier.

An example--one distinction I've seen in the described experiences of being a man vs. being a woman might be summed up as "no one cares" vs. "everyone cares." The male side of that talks about disposability, never getting compliments, feeling alienated, etc. The female side of that talks about unwanted attention, constant judgment, feeling smothered, etc. So an unhappy man might desire the sense of being important and connected that comes so easily to women, and an unhappy woman might want to take a break from all the expectations and just be able to chill like men do.

I'm 5'8, and yet I think all of the transwomen I've met in real life, except for one very spindly 6'3 transwoman with an unfortunate facial disfigurement, have been shorter than me. (Apparently there are actual studies of transwomen in Thailand that suggest they are shorter, on average, than cis men even when transitioning post-puberty). The reason, of course, is obvious - instead of spending a lifetime at the bottom of the male social hierarchy, some men opt-out. They quit. They say 'fuck you, I'm leaving'. And they become women.

A more obvious reason to me would be shorter people being more likely to actually transition than taller people because being short is an advantage for "passing".

If that were truly the case then how do you explain the "HST vs AGP" controversy? One of the major distinguishing features of the AGP categorization was "sudden" late transitioning of a person who by all outward appearances was succeeding at performing the male gender role, with many considering them not truly trans because of that extended performance, leading in turn to a huge controversy that eventually discredited the categorization itself. I think anxiety around passing due to that history is a far better explanation for your observations than petty concerns about social standing.

The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I

For the practical minded; As you said the probability of this happening is very low, as low as other things that should spark a lot of worry of their own. Even with the increased probability due to social contagion of the times, it's still not that high.

However, even if that is too much for you. Consider raising your kids outside the Anglosphere, ik ik easier said than done. But woke culture is very much the behemot that it is only in the US,Canada and UK. It's not that far left identitarian rhetoric doesn't exist elsewhere but to a much lesser degree.

Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?

Anything to do with covid.

Untold amounts of suffering caused by literally shutting down the world for what exactly? To make sure 85 year olds can live to 86?

The magnitude of the irrationality behind border closures, mask mandates and vaccine passes is too much for me to process.

"To make sure 85-year-old can live to 86?"

Yikes, I see a sentiment like this and it makes me think it's not the left that is on the side of some kind of youth cult that disrespects elders but rather the libertarian right, which is just the entire American right it seems, even when they're not talking about wealth creation and entrepreneurship. There's a flippant, distinctly young healthy male attitude to so much of their thinking

The issue is not that old people are worth less, or some crap like that. It's that the costs here were borne by all of society, for the disproportionate benefit of a small slice of society. That isn't really cool.

At the start of the pandemic, whenever I pointed out that Covid disproportionately affected the old and infirm and posed about as much risk to young people as the flu, the response from doomers was generally some variant of "Oh, so you think a young person's life is worth more than an old person's? (You monster?)" And I would hastily backtrack and offer some mealy-mouthed equivocation like "Oh no, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying we have to balance costs and benefits... weasel words"

Within a few months, my response hardened into a resolute yeschad.jpg

And honestly, I really don't think that anyone actually thinks an old person's life carries the same moral weight as a young person's. Go to the funeral of an 88-year-old person. Sure, people may be a little sad, but the atmosphere won't be significantly different from a golden anniversary.

Then go to the funeral of an 8-year-old person. People will be distraught. They will be tearing their hair out, wailing and gnashing their teeth. Likewise at the funeral of an 18-year-old or a 28-year-old.

There is no meaningful comparison that can be drawn between any of these and the funeral of an 88-year-old person, and it's absurd to pretend that there can.

There's a flippant, distinctly young healthy male attitude to so much of their thinking

Young men make or break civilisations. They invent, fight, discover, innovate and destroy. There is a reason almost any “historical figure” who did something exceptionally good or bad is a man. A society that channels their energy to productive and creative forces progress. Otherwise the young men will find a way to express their innate energy in whatever destructive way.

Protecting the elderly or the women are secondary tasks of a society and should never come at the cost of telling young men to indefinitely stay at home, not aspire to anything, jerk off three times a day. Because then soon you will have no society left to protect the vulnerable.

If we have to sacrifice 77 young person years to increase 1 old person year, then yes, I do disrespect the old, and their demands of everyone else to make disproportionate sacrifices for them.

It's not the old people making demands, at least in my experience. Whether it was my older family members or my older customers at work, they gave less of a shit than young people.

Exceptions exist, all the usual caveats, but that's what I saw.

Untold amounts of suffering

Obviously worrying but doesn't actually prove anything until you can parse out what the effects would have been if strict measures weren't introduced, which is to say what part is actually attributable to Covid measures and what to just Covid itself.

what the effects would have been if strict measures weren't introduced

Just about the same as what already happened. Minus the economic and social ruin.

A cursory google search seems like this working paper (which is not peer reviewed) seems pretty controversial, and lots of the criticisms seem pretty reasonable. They are reviewing a tiny slice of the entire literature, and for apparently no good reason. They say they're looking only at studies using a diff-in-diff approach, but some of them aren't even doing that, which raises the alarm of cherry-picking, especially when a lot of the studies that receive the most weight are from ultra-obscure journals. One of the studies, which it looks like received the most weight of all is from a journal, called 'Sustainability', so rubbish that in Norway it was the among the first 13 journals to be rated as predatory, and is now not even recognised as an academic journal there, having been removed from the national register because it was just a 'gun-for-hire' journal that would publish anything if you paid them for it.

Valids points, and in no way am I saying this paper is perfect or irrefutable.

But I will say;

  1. Control for mainstream/publication bias. The (scientific/)establishment consensus was that NPI's were effective. This was enforced with strong Big-Tech state colluded censorship.

  2. Most if not all the papers that speak positively about lockdowns have similar shortcomings. The only difference is they don't get much if any scrutiny at all. You won't find 50 links "debunking" a popular just as flawed meta analysis as the one I linked.

  3. I think mechanistically even bereft of any empirical analysis, the costs of lockdowns are far too much relative to their benefit. This can be easily argued for. see https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051?journalCode=cijb20

We know exactly what would’ve happened- there would be far fewer old people. How many fewer is an open discussion, but let’s not act like this was ever going to be the Black Death 2.0.

I'll speak for the OP and say that there's really no point in litigating the Covid lockdowns again. They really are the ultimate scissor statement. To me, its obvious that the lockdowns were completely unjustifiable, failed at their purpose, and caused untold harm. A lot of very smart people feel differently, and I've yet to see anyone be swayed on the issue no matter how convincing the data. Personally, I doubt there's any data that could sway me in the other direction either.

If you can't answer "what would change my mind", there's not much point in having a discussion about it.

I've yet to see anyone be swayed on the issue no matter how convincing the data. Personally, I doubt there's any data that could sway me in the other direction either.

I was swayed. I was radically concerned about covid and pro lockdowns. I was reading Chinese news and told all of my friends that covid was going to be a huge deal back in the first december before it really showed up in america. To the point that my girlfriend said she was going to stage an intervention because I was taking this too seriously. My friends all thought I was being crazy.

Then when it did pop off I helped convince the business I worked at to go fully remote, and fled my city with my gf to live in a rural area (obviously my views were aided by the fact that I have the resources to do that and it wasn't a real hardship for me).

I was, for a LONG TIME, one of the most intense about covid safety in my social group. I was wildly cautious about my own exposure. I don't think I ever judged people who were less cautious, but that didn't stop me from supporting the more consensual lockdowns at least. And I certainly avoided hanging out with people who weren't extremely careful.

But my mind was changed entirely. Not necessarily by any argument anyone made. But as the months passed it became clear that covid was not the black death and that lockdowns weren't doing anything good. They only hurt the young to protect the very old. I watched people I knew get covid and saw that it wasn't a severe disease. And towards the end of the winter of 2021, my perspective had done a 180.

I fully recant my original position. My reaction was too strong, and the lockdowns, etc, did nothing but harm. I really regret my original position and feel kind of stunned by what it says about my psychology that I became so intense. Some part of me still does think "the big one" is out there in a lab somewhere, so it's not like I've fully moved on from the preoccupation with potential plagues.

They really are the ultimate scissor statement

Maybe but I live in a super blue bubble, and covid fanaticism has died out rapidly and is almost non existent now. Sure, you're supposed to get boosters and claim that covid was a big deal. But many don't get boosters (I don't and have successfully convinced my very blue family to avoid them). I have also found that saying it wasn't a big deal ever and that we made a mistake, has not made any of my friends particularly bothered.

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I'm with @f3zinker in that this sort of reply is so viscerally triggering, incites such a degree of anger, that I definitely don't trust myself to engage in a decoupled analysis of whether the suffering is a product of government force, propaganda causing panic, the mass hysteria of 2020 (including the Floyd riots and November election), or some combination of them.

Side note; Is it really two percent? it seems that must be an exaggeration that they arrive to by counting non binary types as trans.

evolutionarily self-destructive choices

particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.

Not the thrust of the comment I know, but I'd be curious if you really think this is at the root of your reaction. I mean, would you react in the exact same way if your kid was in some other way rendered unable to have kids themselves, like they were gay or got a vasectomy once they were an adult?

Also;

I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State

I think we're tipping in hysteria pretty clearly here.

I would be pretty upset if my kids were childfree. I wouldn't try to coerce them away from that decision, but I would feel like I had failed on some level, or that society had failed them. Family formation is a pretty core value for me. Is that wrong?

I don't think it's morally wrong, but I think it's certainly irrational to think that. It's their free choice, and doesn't represent a moral failing (on your part or theirs) any more than if you had a family business and none of the children wanted to take it over as they got older.

To be honest, I have a hard time understanding how anyone can want children, but that's just something I have to accept as "different people are wired differently". IMO children are a burden, not a blessing, and the prevalent veneration of parenthood in society strikes me roughly similar to if people considered it super important to have a guy come around to punch you in the stomach once or twice every day.

any more than if you had a family business and none of the children wanted to take it over as they got older.

Well unfortunately I don't have a family business to pass on to them, but if I did I would also be pretty upset if they didn't want to take it over as they got older. And I wish my parents had a family business to pass to me - ideally one that they would be mad if I didn't take over lol

IMO children are a burden, not a blessing,

Well they're definitely a burden, but can't they be both? I tend to think most valuable things are obligations.

To be honest, I have a hard time understanding how anyone can want children, but that's just something I have to accept as "different people are wired differently".

Fair enough. Clearly wiring has a lot to do with it. I'm probably wired to have a strong desire to have children.

But I also have good feeling about family that aren't just based on wiring. My fondest memories are oriented around family. I have incredibly positive memories that are focused on older and younger family. So I have in my brain a positive association with being the older family member getting to introduce the younger to the world and play with them. And also a desire to fill that positive roll that older family members filled for me. There are burdens involved but my general feeling around family is very warm. Those were always fulfilling relationships for me.

I think most of the good things in life are warm, fulfilling burdens. What do you think is valuable to do that is not a burden?

I think you make an interesting point about things having a dual nature, but I can't think of anything where I'd characterize it as a burden. For example, marriage entails certain obligations on both parties: I have to take care of my wife, I can't go chasing other women, things like that. But none of those things is a burden to me. At most, when we argue I am frustrated in the moment and put it aside for love. And of course there are lots and lots of upsides to marriage. We take care of each other in times of weakness, having a companion is really good, having sex is fun, all that.

Conversely, I find the difficult parts of dealing with children to be far worse in magnitude. Like, just the sound of hearing a child throwing a temper tantrum is like fingernails on chalkboard to me and far worse than anything I have to cope with in marriage. And you have to put up with that a lot as a parent, because children take years and years to learn to properly cope with minor situations. You also have to deal with all sorts of things like having to literally wipe your child's ass, etc etc. And all of that without really having the copious upsides that marriage has. Kids can be fun but it takes years of slogging through shitty un-fun times to get there, and while they may be there for you when you're older that isn't really something you can (or should) bank on happening.

To me, the far superior path to be around kids is to be the cool uncle. I have two nephews (3 and 6), I try to make sure I'm in their lives, and I do enjoy seeing them. But when my nephew starts throwing a temper tantrum because he's 3 and that's how he rolls at that age, I don't have to deal with it - I can just grit my teeth and power through with ignoring it. Or if one of my nephews ever asks me something awkward like "where do babies come from", I can dodge lol. I love being an uncle, but I would definitely not want to have children of my own.

I think you make an interesting point about things having a dual nature, but I can't think of anything where I'd characterize it as a burden. For example, marriage entails certain obligations on both parties: I have to take care of my wife, I can't go chasing other women, things like that. But none of those things is a burden to me. At most, when we argue I am frustrated in the moment and put it aside for love. And of course there are lots and lots of upsides to marriage. We take care of each other in times of weakness, having a companion is really good, having sex is fun, all that.

I think that's mostly a semantic difference in defining burden. I was trying to interpret burden in a more positive way, essentially the same as obligation, which is why I introduced that word.

If by burden you just mean a bad obligation, then by definition that is bad. I was thinking more like a backpack full of supplies on a hike - a heavy load. Something you have to expend energy to carry, but probably for a good reason not a bad one. Doing hard things for rewarding reasons is the best thing in life.

But the rest of what you said shows that it REALLY is a wiring difference between us. So there isn't really any interesting convo to have with me arguing that kids are a good investment. Your feelings about kids truly are fundamentally different from me on a base level.

Conversely, I find the difficult parts of dealing with children to be far worse in magnitude. Like, just the sound of hearing a child throwing a temper tantrum is like fingernails on chalkboard to me

Even when kids are throwing tantrums it doesn't bother me that much. I enjoy working with kids even when they are being very difficult. If it fundamentally makes you that uncomfortable, you're right, kids would be a huge net negative.

What about the family business concept? Businesses don't throw tantrums but you imply you'd resent having that thrust on you as well.

I actually did turn down the family business, though it wasn't something my parents ever pressed upon me. I grew up on a farm, and I have no doubt that my parents would've loved it if I had decided I wanted to be a farmer and took over the business from them. But my interests lay elsewhere, as did my other siblings' interests. Thankfully, my parents never made it a big thing, they just understood farming wasn't for me and that's that. If they had really pressed the point, I believe you're correct that I would've resented it.

Nah I think building a family yourself has always been one of the most reliable ways to cultivate a true, sustained happiness. I guess I wouldn't know from personal experience, but it seems like pretty much the only way not to end up completely alone by age 60.

I mean, would you react in the exact same way if your kid was in some other way rendered unable to have kids themselves, like they were gay or got a vasectomy once they were an adult?

I find myself having a mild preference against them being gay for what seems to be this reason, but homosexuality is less of an obstacle for having biokids these days. Similarly, I'd be rather annoyed if they both went childfree, but in that situation I can consider context or make the pitch for why kids are worthwhile and then respect the decision of reasoned adults.

I think we're tipping in hysteria pretty clearly here.

The downthread topic that sparked this was a proposed bill to take kids away from parents who expressed resistance or skepticism. Take that threat entirely off the table, and ensure that I get to make my own determination on how sincere/serious the gender-nonconformity is while my kids are minors, and almost all of the heated goes away.

a proposed bill to take kids away from parents who expressed resistance or skepticism

What bill? I hope you're not referring to SB107 because that isn't what that did.

Here's the link.

I think we're tipping in hysteria pretty clearly here.

In Canada it is explicitly illegal to question your child regarding anything trans. If the local school commissar gets their claws in them, there is no recourse.

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