07mk
11mo ago
But assuming the allegations are false, what then? The natural inclination is also to deny, except you're in a legal bind. Any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying.
This is the part I find a lot of problem with whenever this topic comes up, often in the context of sexual assault/rape accusations. I don't think any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. It necessarily implies that the accuser is wrong. Given what we know about the fallibility and malleability of memory, particularly when stressful situations are involved, it's entirely possible for the accuser to be honest to the best of their ability and still be completely, entirely wrong about the facts of what occurred. I don't know if this affects the legal calculus of the potential defamation suit; is the claim that an accuser is making an incorrect accusation for whatever reason - without implying that the accuser is lying - defamation? I don't know, but that's the actual pertinent issue than the claim that they're actually lying.
07mk
1yr ago
As an aside, Tom Cruise might be weird as fuck, but that mother fucker knows how to make a fucking movie. Sure, he's no Stanly Kubrick. But in a world of complete and utter drek, someone autistically repeating the steps movies used to take to be good, whether he understands what he's doing or not, comes off like a savant.
I legit think Cruise is one of the best filmmakers of all time, at least within the role of "stunt actor." How many people have ever strapped themselves to the outside of a plane that was taking off, much less done it 8 times just for the sake of creating entertainment? Given the continual development of CGI technology, he also might be one of the last such figures, since it won't be too long before we can get literally identical results on video without putting real people at such high risk.
07mk
18d ago
Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.
Not having read this essay, one thing that really stands out to me about the headline and the URL is how it frames NPR as the active party that "lost America's trust." This is in stark contrast to 99% of the recent mainstream narrative about people coming to view journalists and journalism outlets with mistrust and even disdain, which is more along the lines of, "Why do these dumb ignorant fucks not trust what we publish, when we're doing everything right? Clearly they must be getting manipulated by disinformation merchants who just know so well how to appeal to their tiny little minds." Back when journalists being less trusted by the public was becoming an issue during the Trump administration, I recall thinking that this should be a time for introspection for journalists, for them to question why they - literal professional writers and speakers - were just so bad at communicating that they were losing out not just to a politician but a politician of the dishonesty level of Trump. Such introspection has been rare indeed, and it's both nice to see it here and unsurprising that this guy was penalized for performing it.
For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.
I used to listen to NPR a ton as a kid in my parents' car and also in my young adulthood which was 10+ years ago now. The rare times I drive these days, I still put on NPR, but I honestly can't stand it either, and I'm not sure if it's because I changed or because NPR changed. On Reddit's /r/stupidpol (subreddit for leftists who consider identity politics to be stupid), I read someone say they play a game whenever putting on NPR to see how many minutes it is before there's some mention of a racial or sex/gender-related angle to whatever story they're covering, and they almost never go past 5 minutes; ever since starting to play the game myself, I actually rarely go past 1 minute these days. Could just be coincidence given, again, I rarely listen to any radio anymore these days, but I suspect it's not.
At least, the few times I tune into Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me, it's still mostly enjoyable. The kind of self-satisfied smug "obviously the mainstream progressive Democrat narrative is the correct one" attitude can be kind of annoying, but it honestly doesn't seem any worse than when I was a kid - I've just become more aware of the biases I used to have - and I still find Paula Poundstone hilarious.
07mk
19d ago
Overall I'd say, "game writing was never good." Most classic games barely even had writing, either because it was pointless for an arcade-action game, or because there just wasn't enough memory or disk space then to handle a lot of text. Japanese games had an especially tough time with text.
And, aside from technical issues, a lot of games just don't need a lot of writing, and made a design decision not to include it. They tell the story in other ways. Famously John Carmack decided to put only the bare minimum of story into Doom because “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie, he said. “It's expected to be there, but it's not important.". It's only in more recent years that it's just expected that every game must have some sort of story, with full-time writers cranking out the content.
I think this actually explains why game writing in the past was good compared to now; having barely any writing because they didn't need a lot of writing can be very good writing, if it serves it purpose exactly as needed. To build on Carmack's analogy, a film whose entire script is: "Did you order the pizza with extra sausage?" "Yes, but I'm afraid I don't have any money. How ever will I pay you?" or the like has much better writing than something like Rise of Skywalker. The writing in the former doesn't need to be any longer or deeper than that in order to accomplish its goals, and trying to accomplish more with the writing would likely be counterproductive. With the greater production values and focus on narrative in many modern AAA games, writers have a lot more degrees of freedom, which means more room for error and also more rope to hang themselves with. That's even without considering the overt attempts at injecting ideological messaging that has plagued much of modern writing, in games and other media, which was much less common in older games, in a large part just due to older games not having as much writing.
07mk
1mo ago
Game writing was dreck before these consultants and is so now, too. The reason for this is simple - almost all game writers are D&D geeks who almost exclusively read science fiction and fantasy garbage and have no understanding of classical literature or even film to broaden their ability. Everything is a Marvel movie to them because it’s all they know.
I think it really speaks to the utter incompetence of the types of writers that work at and are sympathetic to Sweet Baby Inc that even by these extremely low standards, the writing they produce is recognized as significantly worse than the standard dreck of AAA game writing. The way that they allow their ideology to completely subvert their ability to write "good" characters and narratives - again, "good" only by the extremely low standards of AAA video game writing - is actually pretty fascinating, especially given that these are people who specifically claim to have insight about how to write good characters and narratives. This seems to be the same phenomenon as in the film/TV industry where even literal Marvel movies have had what little artistic merit they had nearly completely destroyed in a large part due to this type of writing, with the financial consequences that follow.
I think it's a good reminder of the fact that, in life, things are never so bad that they couldn't get worse, and whether or not it does get worse matters.And, in fact, it's often the case - certainly in this one - that many people are actively pushing to make those things worse while telling you that it's better.
07mk
6mo ago
Underdog analysis can also be complicated by questions of scope
To me, this is one of the key issues of the whole thing which makes it just a non-starter. The degrees of freedom there are in determining who is the underdog and who isn't is effectively infinite, because human capability of self-deception is effectively infinite. So if one takes on the framework of the "righteousness of the underdog," then step 1.00001 that follows immediately after this is to deem [whoever I like] as the underdog, while twisting logic in any way required to reach that conclusion. By the time we reach step 2, step 1.00001 is long forgotten, and any scrutiny about that step is shut down as picking on the underdog who has been Firmly and Uncontroversially Determined to be the Underdog in this situation. It's just naked bias and favoritism with a particularly flattering narrative that makes it easier for people to believe even when they like to think of themselves as disliking naked bias and favoritism.
This is why when I hear "punching up" and "punching down" in the context of comedy or satire or the like, I always translate "up" to "direction I want punches to be thrown" and "down" to "direction I don't want punches to be thrown;" in practice, that's what they mean and only what they mean.
07mk
1yr ago
Personally, I don't really think of piracy as an ethical issue at all. Intellectual property is a legal fiction that exists for the purpose of incentivizing people to create more and better works of art and inventions, for the betterment of society. This is accomplished by restricting most people's right to speech - their right to transmit certain strings of 0s and 1s to others (which are usually representations of certain strings of letters or certain grid-arrangements of pixels) - while granting other people (i.e. the rights holders) the privilege to express that speech. Like all rights, the right to free speech isn't absolute, and this, like true threats or slander, is one of those exceptions that exist as a compromise to make society more functional and generally better for everyone. But I don't believe there's some sort of natural right that is ethically granted to creators and rights holders to restrict the types of 0s and 1s that 3rd parties are allowed to tell each other.
I do think there are more general ethical issues about simply following along with the prevailing legal norms in society; breaking those, no matter what they are, involve some level of unethical behavior, due to its degradation of the structure that keeps society running. But most people do agree that laws and ethics aren't the exact same thing, and sometimes breaking the law can be ethical; I think most times, piracy doesn't have a sufficient counterbalance to make it, on net, ethical, but sometimes it could. But either way, I don't think the ethical right for rights holders to restrict how 3rd parties transmit 0s and 1s to each other is part of it.
I do think the mainstreaming of digital media over the past couple decades has made it so that the younger generations of today take intellectual property rights as a sort of default correct thing more than younger generations of before. Of course, books, cassettes, and CDs were all real and all copy-able before the 90s, but they were still generally considered physical objects that needed physical action to copy. But the internet has caused the concept of entertainment media to be almost completely decoupled from physical material, and so kids have grown up in an environment where "intellectual property" exists as a concept and is enforced through restricting how 3rd parties communicate to each other is the norm. It'd be natural for them to come to believe in the ethical right to that in such an environment.
For my personal behavior, I used to pirate heavily 10+ years ago for basically all of my digital entertainment. The advent of Steam and more specifically its improved ease-of-use with its central marketplace and library, along with its cloud saving, made it so that I basically don't pirate video games anymore. I also personally get a little value out of knowing that I helped, even in some minor near-imperceptible way, incentivize the creation of more video games similar to the one I purchased. For films and TV shows, I still primarily pirate through torrents, though I try to watch through my Netflix subscription when it's available that way; it's usually just more convenient, and I keep my Netflix subscription primarily due to momentum. For music, I don't listen to music for the most part anyway, and the advent of YouTube as a near limitless free music resource has meant that the few times I do want to listen to music, I can freely access whatever I want. I do think the bit about convenience being the solution to piracy has a lot of truth to it in my behavior.
07mk
1yr ago
We asked white people to give up their segregated spaces to EVERYONE back in the day. Asking women to give up their spaces for trans women isn't asking them to give them up to EVERYONE, just an additional subset of people. A closer analogy would be if we asked categorically that no women-segregated - cis or trans - space ever exist.
07mk
1yr ago
Well, it seems like they are implicitly admitting that open, uncensored discussion of the transgender movement with the possibility to criticize it is toxic to the transgender movement.
I mean, this isn't unique or even unusual to the transgender "movement" within the broader left/"progressive"/SocJus movement sphere. I'd even call this standard operating procedure at this point. It's just the inevitable result of grouping emotional harm with physical harm so as to attach the negativity of the latter to the former and of categorizing "disagrees with me in this issue" as causing emotional harm. It creates a chain of "logic" that allows the activist to say that someone who disagrees with them is being literally violent towards them, and so it follows that any environment in which people are free to disagree with them is one that is toxic to them.
07mk
17d ago
Once again it's only a conspiracy theory when outsiders notice what the insiders celebrate. Even that dev who was recently making excuses about how face modeling is hard snuck in an "and actually it's good to challenge cis hetero beauty standards and we're doing it deliberately" towards the end.
I find this apparent feigning ignorance endlessly frustrating. The writers and academics who call themselves "progressive" are very open about their desire and willingness to manipulate the populace into believing things they want them to believe by putting in certain tropes into the fiction they write. This is justified on the basis of their stated belief that all fiction manipulates the audience, and so it's better to do it with conscious intent for causes they consider socially just instead of doing so unconsciously while merely focusing on creating an entertaining/meaningful work of fiction which they contend inevitably reinforces the status quo which they find bigoted and intolerable. It's not always possible to nail down this as the cause of any given individual case of uglification, but given the prevalence of these types of people in fiction production and the ubiquity of this narrative, I don't think benefit of the doubt is at all justified, and it's perfectly reasonable to default to the presumption that any specific case was due to ideological intent until proven otherwise.
And if we were to follow the same standards by which such people deem fictional works as "white supremacist" or "patriarchal" or "heteronormative" or whatever, there would be no question that we could conclude that these were caused by ideological motives: as long as someone can write a convincing-sounding essay connecting some work of fiction with these concepts they consider bigoted, it doesn't matter what the creators were thinking or intending, these works are ideological and for a bad ideology. If the creators had nothing but pure entertainment-focused intent or even if they were actively trying to send a message of equality, then that just means that they fell prey to their implicit/unconscious biases which proves just how entrenched white supremacy/patriarchy/etc. really is. But double standards are also justified on the basis of relative power and such (which themselves are justified by someone writing a convincing-sounding essay).
You see this more broadly with people claiming not to know what "woke" or "critical race theory" mean. It's a kind of dishonest bit of self deception that fools no one other than themselves. I just wish they would loudly and proudly stand up for what they believe in, proclaim that they are trying to manipulate the populace for the purpose of a better, more socially just world, and let the chips fall where they may. I find Scott Adams to be... a very silly person not worth paying attention to, but when he said that he was hypnotizing people, including through the very same message of informing them of this hypnotism, because his hypnotism would work even if the audience was consciously aware of what he was doing, I could at least respect that more than this shell game of implausible deniability many writers and activists on the left like to play of openly claiming a desire to manipulate the audience and then acting shocked and appalled that others would accuse them of making creative choices meant to manipulate the audience.
07mk
2mo ago
The hardcore Puritans in The Vvitch and the norse pagans in The Northman make sense on their own terms, which actually makes them more relatable to me in a strange way even if I find several of the specifics of their beliefs repugnant.
I get the sense that this is something that's beyond the grasp of so many writers and self-described media-literate critics, particularly in the mainstream in the past decade or so. They seem to perceive everything at surface level, that a character is relatable if they share all the surface-level characteristics of the viewer, who they imagine to be some version of themselves. So they have the right skin colors, ages, sexualities, and political beliefs, but the characters themselves are flat and uninteresting.
Because what viewers relate to aren't such surface-level characteristics. And it's not even the so-called shared experiences of people who suffer due to sharing these surface-level characteristics that idpol likes to push as a real thing that exists so much; even these things are ultimately surface-level. To build a relatable character requires giving them something underneath all that that the viewer can connect with, something deeper and more personal than just having the right skin color and fighting for the right causes. And once you have that, the surface-level stuff largely don't matter, hence why something like a Puritanical colonial New England family in The Vvitch can be relatable to a modern person.
I imagine this is a predictable consequence of being taught that race/sex/etc.-essentialism was not only correct, but that it was the only correct and just way of looking at other humans all throughout their schooling. When your time and energy is spent focused on these surface-level features, then that doesn't leave much room to focus on the stuff underneath that actually matters. Writers write what they know, after all.
07mk
5mo ago
I think the post was a reference to Darwin2500 (I think that was the number?), someone who used to frequent the Motte back when it was on Reddit (as well as the SlateStarCodex blog and subreddit before the Motte subreddit was created). He was firmly in the progressive/liberal/left camp and was notorious for constantly making bad-faith arguments where the twisted logic and wordplay manipulated to land at the desired conclusion was so transparent that his constant claims of ignorance at what he did wrong were mostly agreed upon to be feigning ignorance. He was tolerated for a long time due to being one of the few outspoken left-leaning voices in the space, but as someone who's probably far closer to him in political beliefs than to the median Motte user, I thought he was nothing but a shameful display whose presence was strictly worse for the success of leftism/progressivism than the counterfactual.
07mk
6mo ago
Thing is, I don’t know why this would be limited to elder care. Was there a particular reason—COVID restrictions, or some regulatory regime—pushing staff to other industries? Or does every service job in Dallas have a similar level of churn? Is this post going to start another fight about inflation and lived experience?
Anecdotally, many service jobs I encounter on a regular basis have gone downhill in the past few years post-Covid. I'm thinking particularly servers and cafe clerks, but also public transport drivers. It's not that their individual performance has gotten worse - AFAICT, that's remained the same - but they're constantly understaffed, leading to just inevitably terrible service due to the long wait times. This also causes extra stress on the staff, which sometimes results in less-than-ideal performance that would have been better but for the extra pressure put on them due to the reduced staff.
My pet theory is that the Covid lockdowns made a lot of people in the service industries realize that these jobs generally weren't worth the pay in comparison to other ways they could be spending their time, whether that be staying at home or pursuing some other venue to make money, resulting in a shortage relative to what the economy was used to before. Perhaps it's a bit of a market correction, where these workers, for whatever reason, were priced below their market price, and suddenly a lot of the workers realized this at once and, in an uncoordinated fashion, simultaneously decided to quit the industry.
07mk
1yr ago
The reader will have guessed that, of course, Sam and Hilary are one and the same person, whose story is simply told from different points of view.
The astute reader will have also guessed that they are both me.
I actually didn't see this coming at all. I thought the twist would be that Hilary transitioned at some point MTF later in life, hence the choice in name, rather than that Hilary and Sam were the same person.
I want to say, your experience is somewhat similar to mine, though of course most of the details are different. I recall when I learned about what "autogynephilia" was, probably about 5-10 years ago, I immediately knew it was a real thing, because I knew I had it or at least had had it. It was never particularly strong, not enough to want to be my childhood/teenage crushes rather than being with them or dreaming about being a woman, much less seeking out lucid dreaming to do more of it (though I did get into lucid dreaming at one point for more generic reasons). But I recall being fascinated by sex-change surgery when I was growing up and fantasizing sometimes/often about living in a scifi world where that was actually possible in a truly "passing" sense, and how much I wished I could do that.
I never had any force like religion pushing me away from trans-ness, and living in some of the bluest of blue areas in the US, I probably encountered trans people earlier, more often, and more normalized than most people. But I also didn't grow up in an environment like now, where there are many powerful and popular forces trying their best to pull trans kids "out of the closet," so to speak. I simply "outgrew" it, and like you, I think I might have dodged a bullet, given the permanent changes that I might have gone through in a different environment. Then again, given that my autogynephilia never seemed that strong, perhaps even in an environment like now, I wouldn't have been pulled into transitioning. But the likelihood of it having happened certainly seems non-zero and significant, and it makes me wonder how many boys right now might be being pulled into transitioning when they would have grown up to be perfectly fine with being a cis male like me.
This, of course, ties in pretty neatly with the post below about Scott Alexander's book review of The Geography of Madness; having "MTF Trans" as a neat little groove that one can slot right into will almost certainly push people on the margins (which I might have been, or at least I was close to the margins) with autogynephilia into identifying as MTF Trans. Particularly when it's clear that there's status to be gained within certain circles from doing so. This is one reason why I think all the pretty words about "empathy" and "acceptance" from the activists claiming to support trans people rings hollow for me; there's clearly a cost to this as well, and it's not at all clear to me that these people even recognize this cost, much less have done the incredibly difficult work of doing an attempted rigorous cost-benefit analysis to figure out if what they're asking for would actually be of benefit to people. It just looks to me like it's a bunch of people for whom transitioning was beneficial projecting that onto anyone who could possibly be on the margins and doing their darndest to take out every brake and barrier on the way in the misguided notion that because that would have been helpful to themselves, that will be helpful to everyone. Someone linked this blog post here about a week ago, and the line "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people" really resonated with me (this post seems to have been written 5 years ago; given where ChatGPT is now, such an AI might actually become reality soon).
07mk
1yr ago
Which is the problem with that test: my answers and those of bonafide right-wing white nationalist would be indistinguishable.
I don't think the test is meant to distinguish between those, though. It's not a generic political-position test, it's just a test for wokeness. As someone who is also a liberal myself (I don't know if I "pass" for one hereabouts, but I identify as one), I would classify myself as 100% anti-woke and I would expect an accurate test for wokeness to classify me as such, in a way that's indistinguishable from, say, a MAGA Republican. Because regardless of our differences, a MAGA Republican and I both are completely anti-woke.
07mk
1mo ago
Like, James Damore was unsuccessful, but he did sincerely try to counter wokeness at Google where he worked.
I don't think this is an accurate description of what he did when he wrote and distributed his infamous memo. I'd characterize it more as him sincerely trying to help wokeness, under the belief that the woke (or rather, the equivalents at the time, since I don't think "woke" was nearly as commonly used back then) genuinely wanted to accomplish the things they said they did.
07mk
11mo ago
I have little to add, but I found my experience with the social "sciences" to be similar to yours, and it was discovering this about 10 years ago that made me disillusioned with the social justice/identity politics left. I'm not a scientist, but I did have enough experience with it in college and liked it enough to keep abreast of it after, and the common theme in science, the underlying principle that makes science science, seemed clear to me to be being open to oppositional perspectives. The more I looked into it, and the more rigorous any science got, the more welcoming and actively encouraging of skepticism and attempts to disprove claims it seemed to be. But most social "sciences" do not follow this at all and have, in fact, built up a whole structure of justifications for why basic scientific skepticism is wrong. That's not a science by any meaningful sense of the term, and it can't be expected to land on truth except by complete chance (likely worse than chance, due to how it's not a complete random process but rather follows incentives of its own based around social approval and signalling).
It's a shame, because social science is something that potentially could add immense value to the world through actual production of knowledge. And some of it does seem to happen, just completely drowned out by the monstrosity that wears "social science" like a skinsuit. I think about something the social scientist Jon Haidt (I think) said about biases and belief, that if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?" If social scientists can just try to avoid this fairly obvious pitfall and force themselves to always look for excuses not to believe evidence that reinforces their biases (e.g. that some patterns of behavior must have social/cultural origins rather than biological ones), they might be able to contribute to the betterment of humanity. Sadly, they mostly seem to be committed to the exact opposite.
07mk
1yr ago
the right wing is proving that it’s every bit as susceptible to purity spirals and moral panics as the left wing.
I find it fascinating that this is a claim that's being talked about. When I was a child/young adult in the 90s and 00s, the very concept of "moral panic" was considered a distinctly right wing phenomenon, associated with stuff about fear mongering violence in video games or evangelical Christian busybody Moral Majority types. Perhaps in the back of our heads, we acknowledged that it could happen on the left, but a left wing moral panic was basically considered an oxymoron. Things sure have changed since then, to reach this point where the left wing owns the concept and it's a revelation that the right wing can be just as bad. The thing about history being cyclical or a pendulum might have some truth to it.
07mk
1yr ago
I feel sorry for the OP that no one ever taught him anything, but I still feel like even passively observing people and popular culture, you have to be pretty socially oblivious to reason from "Women like sex" to "Women like being propositioned for sex by their classmates without even being offered a date."
(emphasis added)
I think one of the big issues in this particular case is that the very same feminist messages we talk about also emphasize that things like pop culture and more generally just modern social norms are irredeemably drenched in patriarchy and thus shouldn't serve as things to learn from. It specifically pushes social obliviousness as the right thing to do; instead of learning how to socialize from observing and experimenting in one's culture, one must follow those aforementioned prescribed rules in order to behave in a truly just and equitable way, lest they be a horrible misogynist. Some people take these messages seriously.
07mk
1mo ago
In the media associated with ROP I saw, the racially diverse hobbits and dwarves seemed rather curious, especially compared to its absence in the Jackson trilogy. I also heard that ROP had the same problem of people teleporting across the continent that plagued the later seasons of GOT (also, apparently at one point Galadriel hops off a ship that's hundreds of miles from nearest land with the plan of just swimming back to shore? And it actually works?). Which points to a very distinct lack of understanding of what contributed to GOT's success. Part of GOT's appeal was in presenting us with a believable medieval fantasy world, which, besides the realpolitik and sudden violence the show was known for, included different peoples from different nations looking, talking, thinking in recognizably distinctive ways. Even stripped of all the costumes, the Dothraki looked different from those from Winterfell and they looked different from those from Dorne, and all that made sense because of the presumed lineage of these cultures and nations. And when people needed to travel a few hundred or thousand miles, this presented real logistical issues that would present challenges to overcome, often in interesting and entertaining ways (IIRC Arya and the Hound running into adventures traveling from King's Landing to just halfway up the continent took a whole season, and it was an absolute blast the whole time!). These aren't things you can just gloss over and expect to still be good.
I wonder if the showrunners just thought that only autistic nerds care about that nerdy shit, and what matters is their ingenious powerful narrative that this franchise is merely being used as a vehicle for delivering. And, arguably, that could have worked! Perhaps it would've pissed off the Tolkien fans, but there are more non-fans than fans, and the world of Middle Earth merely being window dressing for a good story could still have been wildly successful. Unfortunately, from what I've heard, the protagonist, a young Galadriel, ended up being just another aggressive, abrasive, overpowered girlboss whose primary flaw is that everyone else doesn't see how correct she is. Which isn't exactly conducive to a satisfying narrative.
07mk
6mo ago
Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact.
I'm 99% certain that, in writing this paragraph, you thought about this issue at least one order of magnitude more than anyone you saw on CNN has in all their lives put together. For at least the past 2 decades, the dogmatic consensus has been that someone's sexuality is a part of their inner essence, that someone doesn't become gay or straight, they merely discover it. If you think about it empirically, it becomes immediately clear that we simply lack the mountains of scientific research in order to conclude this, much less have any confid in the conclusion, but why think about it empirically when thinking about it empirically can get you accused of homophobia?
More generally, there's a tendency of people to reject the effectiveness of what they consider morally abhorrent. You see this with other CW topics like death penalty (obviously it's barbaric AND it doesn't deter crime any better than the alternative) or torture (obviously it's excessively cruel AND it doesn't give us good info). The mirror image is the case too, such as affirmative action (obviously it's morally correct to give individuals belonging to oppressed categories extra opportunities, AND this will enable schools/companies to be better/smarter/richer by being able to make use of previously overlooked individuals from those categories).
I don't know if there's some psych term for this, but it's just incredibly common in all realms of politics, I think. Very often, they're even true. But also very often, people just jump to unwarranted conclusions by falling prey to this pattern.
07mk
1yr ago
As just one person who experienced education in the US, including about the Holocaust, I have no informed opinion on the whether education about the Holocaust in the US is really a meaningful contributor of the phenomenon you're talking about, but I do sense that something went wrong somewhere in the education system to lead to the phenomenon you're talking about. I read Night in middle school and watched Schindler's List during my free time (as a budding film/Steven Spielberg fan, not as a Holocaust/World War 2 enthusiast) around that age, and I was certainly hammered with messages as much as anyone about how evil the Nazis were. And certainly the evilness was taught as having to do with their specific ideology and their specific actions, but more generalized lessons were also taught about things like groupthink (not in that term; I didn't read 1984 until high school) and group-based guilt/resentment. One of the earliest films about Nazis I was shown at school The Wave (1981) in either late grade school or early middle school, which was presented as a true story about a US high school teacher conducting a social engineering experiment on his students to show how easy it would be for them to get swept up in some fascist-like movement - one that lacked any overt similarities to Nazism - due to social pressure. The lesson I got through my education on the subject was partly specifically about the Nazis, but mostly generally about social pressure and pitfalls of ideology. Like most people, I didn't think too much about this, but I had believed that this was the overall lesson most people in the US had gotten from the education about the Holocaust and the Nazis.
Of course, as anyone paying attention to the culture wars knows, one big movement/cluster of movements en vogue the past decade has been enforcing groupthink by explicitly advocating bullying people who step out of line, with that groupthink including explicitly condemning individuals due to their group-based guilt, while simultaneously deriding their opponents as Nazis and fascists. This completely caught me off guard and forced me to drastically update my model of how other Americans perceived the Holocaust. Given my own experience with education about the Holocaust, I didn't really think that the style/quality of the education about it in the US had been the issue. My guess had been that the draw of groupthink is just that seductive, but from your post, I'm wondering how much of it is that the education about the Holocaust in the US is mostly really simplistic and flawed. I feel like I can notice signs of such when thinking back with this additional context, but of course I can't discount a sort of Baader-Meinhof phenomenon with confirmation bias there.
07mk
1yr ago
This whole situation seems like a perfect storm of... a lot of things, starting with the fact that it's fundamentally about children, which tends to bring out the least rational, most passionate sides in people, both for better and for worse. I've only heard of this Mermaids group in passing so I'm not intimately familiar with them, but the way you describe them and your further notes about trans activists speaking on behalf of trans kids brings to mind this old blog post that resonated with me, particularly "It felt like I was talking to an AI designed to maximize the number of trans people." The idea of such activists having any influence on actual care providers seems completely FUBAR to me, and likely to cause truly monstrous travesties.
I admit part of my reaction here is colored by a couple of personal factors: 1. I knew a temporarily FTM transman who decided to detransition back to woman partway in and who had felt betrayed by the community that had pushed her to transition and the permanent physical changes she had gone through during her initial transition as a girl in her late teens, and 2. I could easily see myself as having been pushed to transition MTF if I had been born 30 years later and grown up in the same places I have; I am quite fine with being cis male now as an adult. These make me feel that the dangers of false positives are very important to acknowledge and work around. It's only through cold empirical study that we can nail down the proper ways to detect and serve the true positives and false positives, and activists whose motivations seem to be to maximize the true positives with little-to-no concern for everything else should have precisely zero influence in that study.
I think back in 2016-2018, on the actual Slatestarcodex comment section (likely one of the open threads), I had a conversation with someone who believed that calling out the media lying/misleading about Donald Trump in a negative way was worthy of derision, because doing such would help Trump to get (re-? I don't remember the exact date)elected. I disagreed strongly, because my view was that the media spreading such deceptions was discrediting itself, and it was only by calling out such deceptions that the media could be pushed to correct itself and stop its self-discrediting, and it's only by having a credible media that the populace could be expected to take seriously true negative things that the media claimed about Trump. And as someone who felt very strongly about not wanting Trump as POTUS (or as 2-term POTUS), I wanted the media called out on each and every such deception, as harshly as possible.
I feel similarly about this situation. Medical care for potentially trans kids is very important to nail down, and whatever medical institutions come up with the standards for care need to have credibility that they did their homework in a scientific, rigorous way. If there's any indication of undue pressure by certain activist groups to these institutions to put their thumb on the scale, that destroys their credibility, leaving us at square 1 on figuring out this very important issue. So I would expect that anyone who actually cares about helping potentially trans kids would make it a high priority to make sure that such credibility-destroying influence gets called out and corrected. And contrapositively, anyone who's hesitant to call out such influence for whatever reason is someone who can't be trusted to actually want what's good for such kids. And this goes just as strongly for any sort of anti-TRAs that might exist who behave in a way as to maximize the number of true negatives, even if that means maximizing false negatives, who might have undue influence on medical institutions.
That's all pretty meta, and I wish I could form some meaningful opinion at the object level, but at this point, I'll admit that for most CW topics, and certainly this one, I'm just mostly suspicious of anyone who has strong opinions either way at the object level due to how, at the meta level, the ability to find actual true knowledge of the object level concepts seem to have been so corrupted, often intentionally.
I'll second the comment that this isn't enough meat to justify a top-level comment. But to build on the post, I think this is a part of a larger pattern I see, where some people believe in principles and some people don't.
A personal anecdote I've brought up here in the past is me noticing - and being surprised by - around 10 years ago how common it was for people in my leftist progressive circles to describe ideology and behaviors they disagreed with (usually right-wing and conservative) as "gross." This was immediately after the previous couple decades of us fighting for gay marriage and more broadly gay rights and acceptance under the reasoning that personal disgust reaction was something that ought not to carry any sort of moral weight, and thus all those conservatives who found gay people icky had no ground in refusing to accept gay people just as much as they accept straight people. Yet the exact same people - often the exact same individuals - were using their own personal disgust reaction to something as a way to denigrate it.
Around that time around 10 years ago was also when Atheism+ was formed as an offshoot from the existing atheism/skepticism online community. I believe this was the blog post announcing this intended schism, which I quote:
Atheists plus we care about social justice,
Atheists plus we support women’s rights,
Atheists plus we protest racism,
Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,
Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.
This was intended as a contrast to the existing community which was really just that last bullet point in its core, though I would actually describe it more as "Atheists as a result of using critical thinking and skepticism." Most of the above bullet points have nothing in principle to do with atheism, but are rather sociopolitical positions that were popular among online atheists at the time (and likely still today). I came to realize that, for many of my fellow online atheists, the reason they had arrived at atheism wasn't so much due to trying to reason about the existence of a god as it was due to being a way to contrast their own beliefs against the religious conservative beliefs they disagreed with.
Going back to the gay acceptance issue, more recently, I had a conversation with someone here (can't recall whom, and this was several months ago) about liberalism and gay acceptance, and I tried to make the point that if someone doesn't viscerally find gay people disgusting or degenerate or whatever, then supporting gay marriage/acceptance doesn't indicate anything about their support for liberal principles (rather than the liberal side of the liberal/conservative sociopolitical divide in the US); it's only by supporting rights and acceptance for something that one finds personally disgusting or otherwise negative that one can actually meaningfully indicate their support for liberal principles. I recall not being able to make an argument that was convincing to that person.
My thinking is that this is partly/largely an influence of postmodern thinking. In a very real sense, the people that I found surprising are stepping one meta level above where I am; I take one step up from the object level and relying on principles, and they're taking one step up from that and picking and choosing the principles that allow them to arrive at their object-level preferences. I haven't thought about this much beyond this and how to resolve the turtles-all-the-way-down problem here, though. I also wonder if this issue is just as common in other sociopolitical circles, since humans have human failings everywhere, but I notice it more among my own circles. But postmodern discourse and way of thinking tends to be more dominant in the leftist world, so maybe not.
Is it a boycott, or is it just that they're putting out shitty products that people are wising up to and no longer want to pay for? Though wokeness plays a (significant) part in them being awful, many of their recent works would have still been completely awful regardless of the messaging.
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