Aapje58
11d ago
I said just 'giving up' the issues, not coming out with a full-throated denouncement (which might or might not have helped, but would have been a lot more risky).
I don't see how this would have helped against the attack ad that showed her stating that she would give trans care to illegal immigrants. Although I don't see anything that could really have diffused that.
Did anyone even know she voiced tepid support for free gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicts before republicans dug it up? I don't think it won her many votes at all, even in the form of solidly blue voters who would have otherwise stayed home.
Her strategy to win the primaries for her presidential run was to be very extremist. It is somewhat understandable in the sense that the primary voters are more extreme, but it speaks to her (or her handlers) being in an insular bubble that she (or her handlers) thought that being that extreme would be a winning strategy.
And it was very short-sighted because if she would have won the primaries, it would have been hard to pivot hard enough to win. And once she was anointed by Biden, it turned out that time didn't solve this issue.
Anyway, I think that you ascribe way too much rationality to Kamala and/or her campaign. I don't get the impression that they had a strategy other than to try to be as inoffensive/bland as possible and hope that anger at Trump would make her win.
Transgenderism is about a desire to be the opposite sex, so there is no way to be mistaken about it.
You ignore that there are different desires. An emotional desire for food can not be mistaken, since it directly reflects a biological process that creates that desire. But even then it can be dysfunctional when our body craves more food than we need and we may want to suppress this desire with medicine rather than give into it.
But there are many desires that are based on a conscious or subconscious assumption that if we achieve our desire, we will meet a deeper desire. For example, a lonely person may have watched too much Sex in the City and may desire to live in New York, because they imagine that this will cause their life to be like in the series, but they will most likely be mistaken in their assumptions. Their non-mistaken desire is their wish for friendship, but their wish to live in New York is merely a derived desire that they imagine will achieve their deeper desire. It is definitely possible that they will end up even more lonely and regret their move.
There is evidence that for at least part of the people who desire to transition, this desire is not a core desire, but a derived desire, which thus may be mistaken.
Aapje58
26d ago
The timeline seems to be that another academic, Dave Harris, found some evidence of plagiarism, when checking things by hand, and put it on his personal website. Then Cofnas saw it for some reason (perhaps because Harris wrote a critique on Critical Race Theory), and decided to run Arday's works through a plagiarism checker, that found damning evidence. Then for some reason, people pickup up on what Cofnas wrote about it.
Aapje58
26d ago
Aella just likes asking weird questions to people. It's not a ploy to gather blackmail material.
Aapje58
27d ago
The point of "is there anyone you forgot to ask" is that they have no inherent right to insert themselves.
We live in a society with a culture, and that means social norms. If you violate those social norms, then people have every right to react with behavior that is legally allowed, like gossiping, stating their disapproval, convincing people with power to apply that power to punish the people involved, protect their own reputation by disassociating with the person breaking the norms, etc.
You can blame 'meddlers' all you want, but this is all just human nature and it won't go away. You can at most change how people react to social norm violations and what things they see as a violation.
Jane Doe seemed to not be aware of this and be under the impression that the virtual cage she was in was entirely of her own making, and she could simply escape it by not believing in it. She was wrong and learned a lesson. Unfortunately, it seems that she is trying to fix her situation by hurting other people.
Aapje58
27d ago
Even in theory that only works if there is strict segregation between communities, because otherwise the pedo community will groom your kid and have him make 'free choices' that violate your norms. But human nature is simply not compatible with accepting the reality that other people are doing things that one considers morally wrong to such an extent that there is a moral duty to stop it, so it can never work in reality. There is not even really such a thing as voluntarily choosing things as people to a large extent irrational and do not even have the capability to choose their own norms, rather than live them through their actions.
The Cornell case is a good illustration of how the guys never actually broke the overt norms, yet are being persecuted because they broke norms that the involved people would claim they do not have.
People have individual principles to a far lesser degree than they pretend to, anyway, and to a large extent just use supposed principles as weapons. Only using them to get their way and not to limit their own actions, which is what really principles would result in. The only way to actually have somewhat consistent community norms is to enforce norms through social and legal pressure.
Aapje58
27d ago
but as an adult they are judged to be able to make these decisions and suffer the consequences, without having the ability to point to the nearest person and displace all accountability.
I leftist spaces I do actually very often see a demand that people be protected or given redress for all kinds of supposed wrongs that happened to them, where they themselves were the architect of that.
It often boils down to a demand for a semi-fascist police state, where companies are supposed to spy on and police their customers, and governments then do the rest of the spying and policing.
Aapje58
27d ago
Patriarchy is not rule by men collectively. It’s rule by, specifically,
In reality it is even more subtle, with older women usually having a lot of power, but exercising that power either through their husband or by using social weapons, like shaming.
Aapje58
27d ago
Yes, the most unfortunate duty placed upon men is that of reading women's minds.
This has never been the duty and it is utterly impossible and thus unreasonable.
In the past there were explicit rules where men were allowed to have sex with women (and vice versa), and it didn't involve mindreading, but marriage. The new messaging to men is that they must have consent. These men are now also being persecuted based on the accusation that they didn't ask for consent, not for a failure to mindread, even if the hidden motives may be different.
But it is simply not workable to demand that men do the impossible, or to tell men to do a thing and when they actually do that, persecute them for it.
And I don't think mediating an ugly freeze-the-status-quo armistice that doesn't lead to a peace treaty is close to a Nobel-worthy achievement.
The peace Nobel prize is never actually about the achievement, but about the message that the Nobel Committee wants to send. It's just incidental if the message they want to send is approval of an achievement. They gave the peace prize to Obama because they approved of his election, not because of an actual achievement. They gave it to Malala to take a stand against the Taliban's opposition to girl's education, not because she did anything special (getting shot is not an achievement).
Aapje58
27d ago
It makes me wonder, based on the glazing I've seen here and back on the SSC subreddit if this is actually more in line with his normal output and that my respect is somewhat misplaced.
All his really good writing is from long ago, and he is now operating on a lower level. This is not surprising, as most famous academics also did their innovative work when young. Probably just a consequence of the plasticity of younger brains.
Aapje58
28d ago
If Scott is regularly organizing CNC orgy meetups worldwide, I must have missed that.
He has written that he is asexual, so him giving into his base sexual urges would mean not organizing an orgy.
Aapje58
1mo ago
The schools seem to avoid any chance of being held accountable. By her account they didn't do any standardized (racist, she would have called them) assessments and it was pulling teeth to get them to do it, gave no homework (which would help parents get a benchmark) and at a certain point they were just passing her on effort in algebra.
The issue is that these schools don't have the ability to do anything about it, so it is logical that they will just hide it.
If only a small percentage of students come from a dysfunctional family, then the school can put a lot of effort into helping them, or just kick them out. Then the functional majority sets the standard. When the majority is dysfunctional, the same solutions no longer work, and you would need other solutions, like extending the school day, and having children do their home work under supervision of a teacher.
The school can't decide that though, and the people actually in charge of the education system have delusional ideas, where they design a system around mostly functional communities with rare exceptions, not communities that are mostly dysfunctional with rare exceptions.
She herself was almost certainly negligent despite her claims to have been open to tutoring her kids
She is or at least was just as delusional as the people in charge of the education system. She assumed that the school would grade and communicate honestly, even though if they did, she would be the first in line to call them racist.
Aapje58
2mo ago
Apparently there are no checks.
There are checks, but it's about playing social games.
Aapje58
2mo ago
They already use something like this for some soccer competitions, where a player who claims to have an injury that requires the play to be stopped, has to leave the field and get checked out. The referee can informally punish the player as well, by delaying the permission to re-enter the field.
Aapje58
2mo ago
The last thing I want would be to "design society".
We already do so to a great extent, whether you see it or not.
Aapje58
2mo ago
There are a lot of famous male chefs and my gut says more than females.
This is probably more because working in a professional kitchen is a tough job where you have to perform quickly and get things right each time.
Aapje58
2mo ago
The problem is multi-faceted, we have many people who have many theories and have tried many things.
Like what?
They're just as eager as you to fix it, and they've been trying very hard to fix it for a long time.
Sorry, but this is just nonsense. They've been trying very hard to fix it merely in the sense that almost all actual solutions to the problem have been declared off limits, and part of the 'solutions' like rent control just make the situation worse.
Aapje58
2mo ago
By modern standards, that is a tremendous success. I know you're comparing yourself to your father, but you and your wife have had three times as many children as the average US couple. And more than twice as many as the average human on the planet.
This just reinforces his point though. He is way more successful than the average, who generally want to have more children than they actually have, yet he still fails to match his parents.
That is certainly not the experience of most people 30+ years ago.
Such comparisons ignore that things got better for a long time and then many people believe this trend reversed. If you lack certain things and the trend is to make such things more affordable, then this makes it easier to chase dreams. If the reverse happens, then it is harder.
If the amount you can save is less than the rise in housing prices, then if you cannot afford a house today on your current salary, you will be able to afford it even less tomorrow, despite your saving. Then you need a yearly salary increase just for housing to stay as unaffordable as it is today, and a far bigger salary increase to make it more affordable. If those salary increases don't happen, then it can be equally true that you are wealthier in some ways than your parents, and still feel like you are circling the drain, rather than making progress in life.
And if lots of things are getting just a bit more expensive than the growth of salaries each year (on average), then that would feel like death by a thousand cuts, in other words, a feeling that something is wrong without ever having a clear casus belli. Then I would expect people to blame one of the cuts that is slightly deeper than the rest, which can then be dismissed as being wrong, but the reason would then not be that the price of burritos is actually fine, but that the price of thousands of things are slightly wrong, combining into a big wrong.
A second issue with such a comparison is that studies have shown that happiness due to wealth is more about one's relative position. This makes perfect sense in many ways. If you are the richest man in a medieval town where everyone is almost unfathomably poor by modern standards, including that 'richest' dude, then that guy would likely end up with a one of the most beautiful women in the town and be respected by everyone. And if they would die of a disease that we can easily cure or prevent today, they would never be aware that this technology would exist in the future. No one in my childhood was upset over not having one of these not-yet-existing smartphones.
It seems that women's standards have increased by a lot, and way faster than how men have improved, so most likely we have a women's affordability crisis that is just as insidious as the housing affordability crisis, but cannot be admitted to by mainstream people due to ... reasons.
And the standards for raising children have also increased a lot, while the ways to meet the standards have become commercialized, so it become very hard to afford children if you want to also meet societal standards with regard to how to raise them.
My suspicion is that many young people are already experiencing a strong sense of dread (often subconscious) at how milestones that have been considered at the core of human existence for most of human history now seem totally out of reach, and the anger at burrito prices is more an immense anger that even something relatively minor, but meaningful to their lives has become hard to afford: 'we can't even have that?!'
Aapje58
2mo ago
Even if that's the case, that's a completely different claim to the claim that Mossad and Shin Bet rigged the votes without the EBU's knowledge.
Who is claiming that? EBU rules are that government funding may not be used to campaign for their country, nor may they (or the artists) engage in 'canvassing.' Israel had spent a more modest amount previously and after considering the results a success, they stepped up the spending massively. This money seems to mostly have come from a fund to promote Israel internationally, run by the foreign ministry of Israel. Netanjahu also personally called for people to vote the maximum number of times, which is canvassing and thus not allowed.
Also, a large amount of the controversy is that EBU knows this, but refuses to punish Israel for breaking the rules.
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/11/world/europe/eurovision-israel-gaza-netanyahu.html
Your summary seems to be nothing more than a straw man argument, that gets pretty much all of the controversy wrong.
Aapje58
4mo ago
But it is copyright that causes this. Good adaptations will be sued to death. So it only makes sense for bad fan fiction to exist, because their awfulness keeps them from succeeding and thus from being targeted.
Fifty Shades of Grey is a good example of how an author that turned out to be good enough for success, rewrote her copyright-violating fan-fiction into an original work.
Aapje58
4mo ago
That seems like a rather ridiculous belief since those fans would typically like the author, and would also want the author to create more works.
Aapje58
4mo ago
Pretty important difference: it prevents Disney from putting $100 million into marketing their own version of Tolkien while he was still writing his.
I think that this is a very weak argument. With a 10-15 year head start, the author has plenty of time to establish their brand, and it would be horrible PR for big movie studio to make a movie against the wishes of the author of a book. Cutting the copyright short is more beneficial to small content creators than big businesses that cannot afford to be seen as exploiters and to face a boycott.
In the case of Harry Potter, the movies were made well within even a 10-year copyright period, and Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies were made long after, when Tolkien was already dead.
Also, your entire premise seems to be that Hollywood would be able to write a quality work that is not actually using the story from the books and the crucial element of success would be the ability to slap 'Lord of the Rings' on the poster. Yet we currently see that Hollywood fails utterly once they diverge from the books (not just Lord of the Rings, but also Game of Thrones).
I think that a much better argument would be that people can get tired of a fantasy world when too much slop is released based on it.
One of the common disagreements in politics is that one side believes that their policies have large positive effects and minor or no negative effects, while others believe that those policies have large negative effects and minor or no positive effects.
You cannot just declare your subjective opinion on such matters to be 'the truth.'
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