07mk
5hr ago
So it stands to reason that making it harder for women (and people in general) to secure student loans would reduce their attendance rates and would organically, downstream of that, lead to more relationships, marriage, and children.
That's simply not going to fly, for as long as people believe in blank statism. Unfortunately, the belief in blank statism has been self-reinforcing, due to policies under its belief leading to less competent people getting elevated to positions of status and power, leading to less rigor and more nonsense being taught as true, leading to more people believing in blank statism. Unfortunately, the beatings will continue until morale improves, or until enough of society is destroyed enough such that no one has the energy to carry out any more beatings than necessary to fend off starvation for one more day. I have no idea how to escape this cycle outside of maybe pinning my hopes on AI actually enabling fully automated luxury Communism, but that's a long shot.
This is why I've said that if I were to become emperor of Earth, one of my first decrees would be to outlaw all demographic-based statistical analysis, under penalty of summary execution, with all civilians being deputized to carry out this punishment. It probably wouldn't be enough to fix it either, but it seems like less of a long shot than AI saving us.
07mk
6hr ago
I would say it's reasonable to expect an illustration of reasoning you disagree with to be a somewhat plausible application of that reasoning to a somewhat plausible scenario.
I would say it isn't reasonable, because that's actually not engaging with the reasoning. The thing with reasoning is that it's an abstraction that explains the interaction between real things, not an expression of real things in themselves.
Interesting, thanks for sharing. I have long been sceptical of "intersectionality" and related ideas, but it's never led me to oppose trans people as a whole. If people share bad arguments in favour a position, or if bad people share arguments in favour of a position, that doesn't imply (in the sense of logical implication) that the position is wrong.
You seem to be implying that I "oppose trans people as a whole," which is plainly not evident in the comments that I wrote here (or anywhere - because I don't oppose trans people as a whole or even in any meaningful way - I oppose certain types of trans activists in their specific activism). It's also not that bad people make bad arguments in favor of a position, it's that the only arguments in favor of a position are bad arguments (whether they're from bad people or not is neither here nor there; some of them are bad, others aren't, but they all engage in bad reasoning when making these arguments).
07mk
6hr ago
The tone of the entire paragraph certainly suggests that you disagree with what you have dubbed "dualism".
That suggestion you notice is accurate; I certainly do disagree with dualism in general and this form of dualism specifically. This doesn't imply that my statement:
e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.
is a statement of complaint about some real events, rather than an illustration of the reasoning being explained.
If you don't mind sharing, what made you change your mind?
A combination of a lot of things, many little, a few big. The big/overarching ones would be: being tired of how much motivated reasoning I had to engage in; reading primary sources of the most highly-regarded "scholarship" that underpins intersectional feminism and realizing that there's no there there; noticing the complete lack of self-awareness by the supporters of the ideology in analyzing their own motivations for believing and supporting the ideology (i.e. searching for self-serving reasons that explain one's genuine belief in the ideology), which extended to punishing people for attempting to be self-aware themselves. This led me to conclude that this truly was a secular religion that was faith-based to its core, with, at most, one grain of truth (i.e. people sometimes treat other people unfairly due to their biases) which had already been incorporated into basic liberalism for decades anyway.
07mk
7hr ago
A Communist incel angry about free internet porn going spree shooting, leading to a Canadian woman cop killing a Jewish figure hits so many culture war points that it basically proves the simulation hypothesis beyond a reasonable doubt.
07mk
8hr ago
Broke: High status men are the real danger to society because they're too right-wing.
Woke: Incels are the real danger to society because they're too right-wing.
Bespoke: Incels are the real danger to society because they're too left-wing.
07mk
8hr ago
It doesn't make sense to complain about some bad thing your opponents caused if it never actually happens. I find it most implausible that someone should have "years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret" and then come out as gay.
Who's complaining? Please point out to me where in my:
e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now.
implies in any way that this is a bad thing or that I'm complaining about it.
With all due respect, this suggests to me that you don't actually understand the other side very well. Trans activists, drag queens, and associated people draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens. It is mostly anti-trans people who conflate the two.
With all due respect, this suggests to me that you haven't actually spoken to people on your "side" (an aside: what an ugly word to use in this sort of conversation). I'm basing this on actual conversations I had with actual trans activists who I was on the same "side" as all the way through around early 2020s. I used to be an intersectional feminist (still a feminist today, just not that kind) who was very much on the entire "break down all social norms and queer everything" train (heh) up to that point and know for a fact that, yes, trans activists do draw a very clear distinction between trans women and drag queens, but they certainly see the normalization of the latter as a good tool for normalizing the former, via attacking heteronormativity and opening up people's minds to the possibilities of human expression and sexuality and etc. that are being suppressed by our current oppressive system. My comment did not, in any way, conflate trans women with drag queens, nor did my comment imply such as a base assumption.
07mk
9hr ago
I'm sure there's a range between 1x and 100,000x for any given victim, and the distribution of how many in each bucket in between is the real question. I honestly don't know if anyone has good data on what that distribution would be, since the people who have the tools and purportedly the societal responsibility to get the data required to model this sort of stuff accurately have pretty clearly intentionally avoided collecting the data. I'm just guessing, given how brazen these gangs seemed to have been, and the rather enormous numbers coming out in a number of anecdotal cases, roughly 1-2 orders of magnitude per victim as a mean seems reasonable. Maybe I'm wrong.
07mk
9hr ago
I can believe that the UK has a higher rate of sex crimes than Ireland, but I do not believe it is over 100 times higher.
1383/100k vs 10/100k isn't based on comparing like-for-like, though. AFAICT, that report doesn't list it based on working-class grouping. And if we were to take an average of the 3 numbers you calculated instead of picking the lowest one (as the 1383 count is an average over multiple years, it's quite possible that it varied from 600/100k to 1800/100k in any given year, if the range was anything similar to Ireland), then it'd be about 60x.
Is 60x believable? Depends on your perspective, I suppose. I personally find 100x easily believable when comparing one particularly vulnerable subset of one population to the entirety of another (both being the <18 subset, of course) and would barely blink even if it were 1000x, because humanity is truly diverse. But if you find 100x unbelievable, perhaps 60x is unbelievable as well.
07mk
9hr ago
How often does this happen?
Who knows? Doesn't matter, according to the "born this way" metaphysics of homosexuality.
Claims of "trans genocide" focus on alleged actual killings of trans people.
They focus on that, certainly, but focus doesn't mean exclusivity. Another common claim of "trans genocide" is that any microaggression against a trans person could be the marginal straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back that pushes them to suicide (which is famously common among trans people). And certainly, yet another is the but-for reduction of trans people by not allowing youths to transition. Which is why, e.g. pushes against "Drag Queen Story Hour" and similar activities have been labeled as part of "trans genocide" - the reasoning being that, if you don't normalize subversive gender expression like that among children, there will likely be at least some of them who would have discovered their innate transness but never did to due to not encountering such subversions, which reduces the population of trans people.
07mk
10hr ago
Sure, but the thing about inhuman monsters is that they're often very good at having their way over the preferences of humans.
07mk
11hr ago
One issue here for me is that there's likely a lot of repeat victims. I could easily believe that there were 14K victimizations of underage girls by organized Muslim rape gangs in the UK each year. But for there to be, on average, an additional 14K new such victims each year, given that many of these girls seem to have been raped dozens or even hundreds of times, it would require on the order of 100K - 1MM underage rapes per year, just from these rape gangs. Which is possible, but also, it's sufficiently high that I'd want to see the evidence and the math. Which are lacking. So the number is believable, but not credible.
07mk
11hr ago
I think the part you don't understand about the argument - because it's hidden, even from the arguers themselves - is that the argument rests on a fundamental belief in dualism. That is, that a person has a soul that is some gender or another, which is only accessible to the person's mind and, as such, they are whatever gender that they believe they are. This form of argument was taken from the successful fight for gay marriage around the late 00s/early 10s, where it was deemed that gay people were "born that way," and as such, e.g. someone who comes out as gay after years of enthusiastic heterosexual sex that they didn't regret was always gay from the moment of birth to now. This, of course, also rested on a fundamental belief in dualism.
This is also why one common trans activist point of agreement is that babies can be trans before they're even verbal, which can be detected by their parents carefully observing their behaviors, a la facilitated communication. Interestingly, the belief in dualism and maximum autonomy also results in push for what seem like the complete opposite, that someone can change their gender at will, since their gender is entirely and only determined by the person's opinion.
So when a prepubescent person is confused about their gender identity, this isn't the result of them simply not having enough experience in life, or of them not having knowledge of what being a man or woman is like, or of them having been exposed constantly to social messaging about transness; it's necessarily only the result of their eternal soul expressing themselves in the truest, most genuine, real form. As such, denying them the ability to get on puberty blockers in order to transition their biology before their actual sex's puberty causes biological changes to them is cruelty. Furthermore, if they actually go through their natural puberty, they might believe that they "grew out" of their innate transness, which means one less trans person than there otherwise would have been, which is one of many forms that "trans genocide" takes place.
07mk
12hr ago
I don't think it's a moral/ethical defense, but rather a sort of realpolitik analysis of why things are happening the way they are. Of course, once you enter that realm, then it follows that if enough anti-rape-gang Brits decide to implement what you say is deserved, there's no grounds by which to condemn them other than by gaining enough power to stop them. Which usually leads to bad results for everyone all around.
07mk
23hr ago
It's kind of a meme or cliche in the gaming communities that any time someone talks about a woman speedrunner or pro e-sports player who performs at a world-class level, the odds are at least 9/10 that it's a trans male. That said, your comment reminded me of the YouTube channel Britta Food4Dogs, who, AFAICT, is just a regular old woman who seems to have genuine love for extremely nerdy JRPGs and other anime-related media, from watching some videos of her covering some very niche nerdy visual novels that I'm familiar with.
07mk
1d ago
Surely this can't be serious?
07mk
1d ago
I would contend that that falls under the "trade secrets or photos of victims or whatnot" where I outlined the exceptional cases where it could be reasonable to censor grids of pixels in scientific papers.
07mk
1d ago
Difference in preferences becomes difference in ability, which becomes difference in moral value, which becomes difference in rights. I am not exaggerating. The innate differences of men and women have been used to excuse systematic denial of women’s rights. Same for white vs. black.
This has been the standard excuse that I've kept encountered from those on the left who deny HBD or anything similar to it on ethical grounds, but I've found it to be rather lacking. As you write, it has been used to excuse denial of rights based on genetic categorization - which had been going on for literally centuries and likely millennia before anyone ever knew anything about genetic causes of average differences in behavior. And starting from a world where basically all of human history had unequal rights for women vs men and blacks vs whites (vs yellows vs reds vs etc), equal rights were achieved not through scientific arguments about genetics. Whether or not genetic reasoning would be successfully used to justify the implementation of such a denial of rights in an environment where such equal rights are already taken for granted is a very different question, and pointing to how some people in the past wrote essays reaching for genetics to justify the pre-existing millennia-old status quo of unequal rights as evidence that it would just doesn't look like anything other than paranoia to me. Anecdotally, but I've yet to see anyone who's sexist/racist enough to call for denial of rights to women/blacks who seem like they would have been egalitarian equal-rights-supporters but for their knowledge of HBD or similar scientific concepts. I'm sure some exist, but the evidence that such people are so numerous as to meaningfully affect political outcomes in terms of equal rights is something I'm rather skeptical of, and something I'd absolutely love to see actual good, rigorous scientific research done on, in order to better inform all of us with respect to the value of denying this science on ethical grounds.
07mk
1d ago
The only way I think in the US a woman might think that boys systematically get better nutrition than girls is if they have an eating disorder which they justify to themselves as "everyone does it."
I think you're underestimating the extent to which US education (all education?) involves telling students, "Who are you going to believe, the trusted experts or your lying eyes?"
07mk
1d ago
As funny as that comparison is, the reality is certainly far worse than that. Because "ethically modifying" a meme by changing its pixels also fundamentally alters the meme in such a way as not to present the reader with an accurate depiction of the actual thing being purportedly studied, in a way that using nicer-sounding words doesn't. It'd be more like talking about genital herpes while presenting pictures of mosquito bites because pictures of genital herpes is icky, and mosquito bites kinda look similar.
07mk
1d ago
I encountered this on Twitter over the weekend, and, as should have been predictable to almost anyone, it resulted in the "ethically modified schematic reconstructions" themselves birthing new memes. My favorite is probably the article 13 compliant frog, but there are others too that made me laugh. Should be interesting to see how this develops.
On the paper at hand, it's hard to think of a more harsh condemnation of the authors and the journal that published it and possibly the entire field that found this behavior acceptable than this sort of "ethical modification" of memes in a purportedly scientific paper. If it were trade secrets or photos of victims or whatnot, that would be one thing, but this is because a particular grid of pixels was deemed unethical to show other academics for the purpose of scientific research and discussion, due to the idea contents of that grid of pixels. It creates a complete abomination of the idea of scientific inquiry, which requires entertaining ideas and presenting facts as they are. I think the continuing self-discrediting of academia is likely to keep getting worse before it gets better, if ever. AIs performing automated research and producing automated papers gives me hope, but also, I think the same forces that created this abomination are likely to dominate those too. I just hope that automating scientific research and papers will become so cheap and accessible to the layman that it won't be possible to truly censor.
07mk
5d ago
Reminds me of the quite commonly expressed notion over the last decade all the way to today, that censorship of wrongthink is required for free speech, because for women/POCs/LGBTQ+/etc. to have free speech, they must be free from other people expressing opinions that "make them feel unsafe" or "deny their humanity/basic rights/existence/etc." Another case of people smashing a square peg through a round hole because the roundness is what's been declared as sacred.
07mk
5d ago
Well, in Total Recall, it was genetic mutations due to living on Mars (no idea what the actual mechanism was - the UV rays or the limited oxygen or both?)? That woman was just intelligent enough to make use of her genetic luck. Though perhaps if Elon has his way, we'll be able to run the actual experiment of human colonists on Mars, to see if we get such positive results soon enough. Everyone was joking about Elon Musk making catgirls real (which I could also see as a future body augmentation for similar purposes), but his true contribution to humanity may end up being making triple-breasted whores real.
07mk
5d ago
The way this number was calculated and is being bandied about makes me actually wonder if it was placed as fact-checking bait. It gives the anti-rape-gang people the grounds to ostentatiously complain about splitting hairs, e.g. "Oh OK, so it's probably not literally a quarter million. Maybe it's off by 10 and it's only 25k. How many underage victims of rape gangs do YOU find to be okay?" It's somewhat akin to the utterly absurd claim that 1/5 - 1/3 of women going college in the USA would be raped, which fortunately seems to have mostly disappeared.
My gut feeling is that, for most people, the higher barrier that prevents them from having rape dogs is their dislike of committing or enabling rape, rather than their inability or dislike of training dogs.
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