Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 80
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I do not agree, for the exact reason it's fair to call Ghislaine Maxwell a groomer.
Groomer -> Pedophile
Groomer -> Ghislaine Maxwell
Groomer -> Guzman (whoever that Virginian legislator was)
Groomer -> Educators showing their charges books like lawn boy
Groomer -> Educators showing their charges media that has trans/nonbinary/gay characters not doing sexually explicit things
Groomer -> PM me classic memes
Groomer -> pro-trans people (always unclear how wide a net this is casting, sometimes allowing for plausible deniability)
All of these claims have been made in this thread, by numerous different people. At one end, groomers are pedophiles who want to fuck your children (serious and immediate threat!). At the other end, for someone doing something categorically different, you're casting a wide enough net that tens of millions of Americans are now Maxwell-Groomer-Pedophiles (yeschad.jpeg the trolls will say).
I stopped using the words racist, sexist and misogynist for the same reasons that the definitions have gotten so amorphous that some people would call tens of millions of Americans racist (yeschad.jpeg, their response is). Y'all are just playing the same game as the normie Blue tribers you love to hate, to a remarkable degree.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Similarly, all those "anti-trans" bills are about biological males participating in women's sports teams - has anyone finagled some clever scheme to ban trans students from all extracurriculars purely as a Fuck You wedge to punish the outgroup?
This is false.
The latest directive comes in the form of a letter issued in late February to DFPS directing the agency to classify medical treatments for transgender adolescents—such as puberty blockers and hormone injections—as “child abuse” under existing state law. The letter calls for DFPS to investigate parents who help their children access such treatments, as well as licensed facilities that administer them. The letter also imposes penalties on any “mandatory reporters” like doctors, nurses, and teachers who don’t report instances of treatment to the agency, as well as on members of the general public.
The letter is the follow-up to a legal opinion Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a few days prior, defining such procedures as child abuse and labeling gender-reassignment surgeries as “forced sterilization,” among other claims.
The Florida 'Democrats are pedophiles' law attempts to conflate discussions about the existence of gay or transgender people with exposing them to sexually explicit material:
—No Federal
funds may be made available to develop, implement, facilitate, or fund any sexually-oriented program, event, or literature for children under the age of 10, including hosting
or promoting any program, event, or literature involving
sexually-oriented material, or any program, event, or literature that exposes children under the age of 10 to nude
adults, individuals who are stripping, or lewd or lascivious
dancing.
Okay, I'm on board.
—The
term ‘‘sexually-oriented material’’ means any depiction, description, or simulation of sexual activity,
any lewd or lascivious depiction or description of
human genitals, or any topic involving gender identity, gender dysphoria, transgenderism, sexual orientation, or related subjects.
Ohhh, I see the trojan horse now. So, for example, showing a story with a gay couple would be a discussion about sexual orientation, wouldn't it? Or a discussion about why boys have to wear pants while girls can wear dresses would be skirting (heh) dangerously close to verboten language. Essentially, you're claiming that talking about the existence of gay or trans people is 'sexually-oriented' material in a way that discussing heterosexual relationships is not. Republicans want to pass something like this nationally.
If we gave voice to the central majority rather than the extremists on either margin, there's probably a course to be charted. I think most people are uncomfortable with letting 6 year olds opt for irreversible surgery, and virtually all with CPS agents dragging away your child because you questioned their pronouns. Conversely, I also think most people are uncomfortable with a China-like security apparatus trying to memory-hole the existence of gay people.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do we? Does the rap sheet of the mean or median "crack dealing superpredator" actually resemble that of the average "opioid overdose?" If it doesn't, if the behavior of these two groups is actually significantly different, why should we assess them identically?
I wouldn't ask you to assess them identically. But one is viewed as a threat to society, whereas the other is a victim. The crack-dealing superpredator was born wicked, while the opiate-addicted had wickedness thrust upon them by their opiate-happy doctors and the globalists.
There must be 'opiate dealing suprepredators' profiting from the decay of society in the white areas too, no? Overdoses from prescription drugs have been more or less flat since ~2006 (figure 4) so someone is dealing street drugs. Why don't we talk about them?
Progressives sympathize with blacks and sneer at rural whites. Conservatives...sneer? look down on? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my impression is that they look down on poor black communities and sympathize with rural whites. I don't think their plights are identical, but I'd argue that there are significant parallels and that should be reflected in our discussions about them.
I'm pretty sure most or all the murder-capitol-area contenders are majority-black. Most of the current massive spike in the murder rate is black-on-black.
Watched this the other day and it was wild. It's remarkable how much better substack and randos on youtube have become at informing us about the world relative to the MSM. I feel better informed about the violence in Chicago after 20 minutes watching that than years reading bullshit takes from both sides of the aisle.
Suppose you had solid evidence that the former communities were once flourishing, and then decayed into hellholes, while the later communities were hell-holes from the start. Would this not, again, be valid grounds to assess them differently?
That first sentence contains multitudes. You say Appalachian whites were flourishing and had it snatched away by the globalists, progressives would say that in the era Appalachian whites were flourishing, Blacks were still overtly being discriminated against. Each of those arguments deserves an essay that I probably couldn't do justice.
That being said, there were significant numbers of black workers in the auto industry, the other big employment opportunity often brought up in the context of globalism destroying American middle-class communities. 20% of Ford's workforce between 1920 and 1950 according to this source, although it seems too high and I can't really find a corroborating one (this article cites the same number).
The Projects were a project, an intentional expenditure of vast resources and effort in an attempt to ameliorate the evident social problems of the Black community. Did Appalachia get Projects? Did the Midwest? These questions aren't purely rhetorical, but the evidence I'm aware of leans pretty heavily in one direction.
I don't know, nor would I even be sure how to answer that question. Do massive farming subsidies to the Midwest count as equivalent to the projects? What about the fact that, ironically, roughly a third of the State budgets of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are federal aid? It's not clear to me if your point was that America invests more in the rehabilitation of poor inner cities relative to the rust belt or coal mining regions or something else.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?
I confess, I'd never heard of WPATH or those three academics until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the academic side of things. Most of my exposure to the trans community is just real life friends that I have; we don't spend a whole lot of time haggling over DSM-5 definitions or whether they're mentally ill or fetishists. We're just friends who play sports together, or video games, or go out dancing. I don't misgender them or discriminate and it doesn't come up aside from some snark about nasty conservatives now and then, but my trans friends are hardly unique or outliers in that regard.
My (our?) generation sidestepped this issue as all of these people transitioned as adults.
So, say OP is right and the medical field is run by a freewheeling cabal of pedophiles and/or castration and/or autogynephilic fetishists who get off on, as I think naraburns put it, mutilating children. Then, uh, probably WPATH or whatever the other relevant orgs are delenda est. Say the first bailey to that motte is correct, and some higher-than-background level of pedo-castro-autogynes are members of WPATH, what do we do? I don't know. If it's 40% and they're swinging votes, probably delenda est. If it's 5% and the majority of the decisions made are still coming from a place of medical opinion rather than fetishism, it's a bit of a tough call. If it's background level (on par with Republicans or Catholic priests) should we do anything at all besides fire the people who get found out?
If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?
The better analogy would be the Republican himself is the gay prostitute, no? But then, everyone does this. If a Republican gun-owner gives a speech on the floor about gun rights and decries non-gun-owners who don't know an AR-whatsit from a bump-stock-shotgun writing gun control legislation, do your eyebrows go up? Or the wealthy Republican business-owner pitching lower business tax rates, or union busting, or axing parental leave?
The steelman is that gun-owners understand guns better than liberals, Black people understand the struggle of the inner city better, trans people understand trans youth better. The critique is that all of those people have potential conflicts of interest.
Someone with a castration fetish writing guidelines for trans youth is probably a bridge too far for the majority of people though, no?
...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities.
Having read the actual writing thanks to Gattsuru, it seems pretty likely that the eugenics is enough to give him the boot, although he's already emeritus. The optics alone are probably enough for the University to cut ties. The fact that a medical professional is fantasizing about castrating people certainly seems to present a conflict of interest around treating trans (or eunuch?) identifying children. I'm sure elements on the left will say 'blah blah personal life doesn't affect medical opinion' but I don't think your average suburb-dwelling normie will be buying it.
Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?
The fact that he was so bad at opsec is what made me assume he was doing it purely from an academic lens. Yes, it's worth discussing, although I'd hesitate to call the gender studies department at the University of Chico high-status.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
A sound defeat might be just the thing to correct some of the worst excesses of the morality police.
Undoubtedly there are extremist elements on the left (and right) who will be outraged regardless of the outcome. I think the better question is what comes after Republicans winning the house and senate.
Do we spend two years investigating Hunter Biden and impeaching Sleepy Joe as revenge for impeachment of Trump, or do we try to craft common sense compromise legislation a la Bill Clinton era? Do we unite around democracy and liberalism in the face of Russia invading Ukraine and China doing China things, or continue to sour on our ideals and flirt with authoritarianism? I don't mean taking military action against either, but for America to lead the free world it has to believe in it, and it has to believe that is more important than what are mostly low-stakes domestic squabbles. Unilateral action from either side won't lead to de-escalation; all the stakeholders need to buy into it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
2/2
You could not possibly be more wrong. I endeavor to behave in a fashion that requires no justification, and to the extent I fail there is no excuse. My hatred is unjustifiable, flatly evil, and something I am actively attempting to get a rein on.
I wish you the best, and while it's ludicrous and perhaps a failure of imagination on my part, I fundamentally believe this is the attraction of Conflict Theory.
One of us is very badly wrong.
Unlikely. The world is more complex than "Everything is 100% explainable by conflict theory" and "my country(wo)men are saintly altruists who take no selfish acts," and the truth is likely in the middle. The US isn't headed towards glorious fully automated luxury gay space communism, nor is it headed towards apocalyptic prepper wasteland where we fight over bottlecaps, it'll shamble along a good while longer.
Avoid the problem by declining to live in Blue areas or exposing my kids to blue organizations. Coordinate political power along explicitly tribal interests so that we can secure a livable future free of Blue oppression. Attempt to get enough resources to successfully bypass doom if that coordination fails. Hope for a miracle, get on with living life in the meantime.
Well, segregation is your right as a private citizen I suppose. This country only works insofar as we put in the work to have hard discussions across the chasm of differing worldviews, and I'd encourage you to not give up on trying to communicate or understand or empathize, but I suppose it's better than most of the alternatives.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
So what specifically does the sneer about efficiency mean here?
Damnit Spock, I'm a doctor, not a statistician!
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I don't like this debate tactic. You substituted your interlocutor's request, which was basically reasonable and at least somewhat within your power to achieve, for a radical solution that is self-evidently monstrous to most people and completely unachievable, leaving you with no responsibility.
On the contrary. I'm fine with his proposal, and given free rein, I'd go a step further. I absolutely disagree that it's 'self-evidently monstrous' to mix students together regardless of their class and I'm baffled why you would think so. You might disagree, but it seems absurd to call someone monstrous for suggesting that a wealthy student may have to rub shoulders with an impoverished one.
It's also absolutely not within my power to achieve as I'm not a citizen and currently have no children. The only realistic way I can see to take personal responsibility is either volunteering my time or money, which I suggested. I suppose I could run for office, but either way, we're not talking about realistic proposals, yeah?
I don't see how that translates into it being unreasonable to expect Martha's Vineyard to bear some of the costs that they enthusiastically impose on other people, especially when those other people they impose on are almost universally lower status than they are.
Oh, I absolutely support taxing the fuck out of the people who live on Martha's Vineyard and breaking up their elitist private schools. Crank that marginal tax rate, baby. Send their kids to public schools. No more private jets, no more helicopters, no more yachts. No more generational wealth and trust fund kiddies. Raise my tax bracket too, although I'm light years away from buying a house in Martha's Vineyard. What else do you want to do?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Not Syo, but I would assume the majority, likely significant majority, of academics choose a field of research based on personal interests, whatever that may be.
Depends on the field and generation. At least in the life sciences/medicine, there seem to be an even mix of altruists and ego monsters, but no conflict of interests in the same way that I could see in the humanities. I expect it's similar in the harder sciences. Maybe you're right for the humanities, although it would be interesting to see, for example, the breakdown of cis vs. trans academics in WPATH.
In a highly unscientific poll, I picked 8 profiles at random from WPATH and of the 6 I could track down 2 were transgender. So you're probably right that a significant fraction are trans. As (I think) you gesture at, they may well punch above their weight in terms of influence.
I'd venture that the evidence that would convince a skeptic to not be so concerned is roughly parallel, and equally impossible, to the evidence that would convince you that the skeptic's level of concern is remotely justified.
So, what's to be done? Are we just going to be partisans poking each other in the eye for eternity? When we reach an impasse without the data to get an answer, do we just shrug and lower our guns for the time being and move onto other things?
Sidhbh Gallagher is a heck of a creep
Well, at the risk of people complaining I'm not doing my homework again, why do you think she's a creep? Because of the way she advertises to minors on tiktok, or glamorizes plastic surgery? Ah, I see your edit. So you think she gets off on removing body parts from healthy people?
Surgeons have been doing radical mastectomies for breast cancer for decades, and it was quite controversial for a while. If I remember the section from Emperor of all Maladies correctly, common practice in the early days was to take all of both breasts regardless of the stage or size of the cancer. Do you think cannibals and fetishists were/are overrepresented among surgeons as well? Or do you think she's specifically into the pedophilic aspect of it?
the particular costs and lack of (visible?) critique from "within the movement" says something concerning. That WPATH seems to be removing guidelines (removing age recommendations for most procedures) when most of the world is adding more says something, too; we can disagree about exactly what that means, but I would be hard pressed to accept that it says anything good. How bad does the failure mode need to be, and how lacking the internal pushback?
To clarify, you want pushback against the three individuals from OP and Dr. Gallagher from within WPATH?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks! That was a wild ride.
This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories.
It's hard to say, no? The eugenics angle from the second story alone is probably enough in today's climate if he weren't already emeritus. The passage about castrating children certainly seems like some kind of disquieting fantasy, to @arjin_ferman 's point. I think it might be different if it were more personal in nature, but these weird, bigger-picture fantasies about redesigning society that don't seem particularly sexual in nature? It's all utterly bizarre. Mr. Johnson certainly seems to have some kind of castration fetish, and I'm skeptical of his opinions on the treatment of trans children.
As an aside, many moons ago, a group of my friends discovered and passed around the pain olympics for shock value. Funny how these things come around. At least (to my knowledge) none of the youth of Athens were sufficiently corrupted to castrate themselves.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Are you sure that doing so is actually easier, more practical and/or more sustainable than building a figurative wall and deporting anyone who makes it across?
I suppose my point is that haven't we been doing that, and the incentives are so strong that people are coming anyways? I'm not going to propose that nothing we do matters, but it seems like short of fixing the economic disparities, there's no real lasting solution to the problem.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.
Based on your other post, I'm curious how you account for people desperate to castrate themselves if not some odd innate quirk, but we can set that to the side for the moment.
That's a fair point on the influence of those three, although it also depends on the broader argument you're trying to push. Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation? Because that was the sense I got from OP, and I still largely don't believe that (although I'm open to more evidence). Moreover, only Johnson is listed as an author for the WPATH guidelines, not the other two (only cited). I'd wonder whether other people worked on it as well, editorial oversight, etc.
But your point that I was too dismissive of their influence is well taken.
An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit.
I'll grant this too. I don't mean this as a gotcha, but what would you prefer instead? It seems unlikely to me that trans-skeptic (? not sure of the term) people will do gender studies for 6 years of a PhD in order to represent their side in professional organizations, and moreover, that conservative spaces are just as hostile an ideological milieu to any evidence that would purport to find benefits to accepting trans folk as their chosen gender (which I've seen cited numerous times; whether they actually hold water, I've never tried to figure out). I find it hard to believe that in some fantastical world where some unbiased body did publish such a study that conservatives would read it, shrug their shoulders, and the issue would die.
You might argue that I'm comparing apples to oranges by juxtaposing a body of PhDs and MDs with 'Cletus from Alabama' (as other people have said when making this criticism). But with the legislatures getting involved, Cletus be flexing his muscles whatever the eggheads at WPATH say and his opinion is making decisions in this arena.
For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to.
Thanks for the links, and taking the time to lay out your argument. Appreciate it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It was mostly tongue-in-cheek, and I'd probably agree with the first half of your comment.
As for the second, well, I think you just haven't found the right corners of facebook/gab/parler yet.
For all the bitching and moaning that progressives do about the Motte, does how the motte talk about progressives or their sacred cows even hold a candle to how most progressive places talk about right wingers?
Not for the most part, but you're comparing the highly educated and slightly restrained members of one group versus the rabble of the other. Compare /r/pol with the breitbart news comments section and you'll find some interesting symmetries.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It’s this kind of ultra-smarmy response that makes people laugh at you and dismiss you.
It's not smarmy, it's genuine. I'm genuinely sorry that my ethos, policy preferences, whatever it is, infuriate you. I'm sorry that you believe our worldviews are irreconcilable, and we're headed towards whatever conclusion you think that leads us to.
You’re openly advocating and voting for policies
I can't vote.
An uncharitable interpretation of your post is that your main goal here was to “trigger the Cons” and to push OUR buttons, using a conversational tactic that was guaranteed to provoke a hostile response that you could pre-emptively forecast to make yourself look virtuous and us look unreasonable.
Alright. How could I rewrite my post in such a way that wouldn't provoke such a response from you, while keeping the same general point intact?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Half the reason I'm writing these is so I have something legible to gesture to next time someone brings the topic up. In general, though, I guess I'd ask that you understand that we really have some very significant differences in perspective, and it it isn't just invective
And since I ran out of characters:
What makes you think that I don't understand that we have different perspectives? I've been reading what you and others write for something like 4 years now. I regularly do the Fox news/breitbart/OANN circuit to see what you're exposed to. I read your substacks and whatever pieces the conservative users here link. I don't do the youtube/facebook/telegram/talk radio rabbit holes so maybe I'm missing the true, authentic conservative experience, but based on what little I've heard, that's probably for the best.
Your whole goal is to show that our worldviews are irreconcilable, that the die is cast and that our conflict is written in the stars. This is trivially true, in that you can unilaterally refuse to compromise or budge an inch no matter what I tell you and either force me to agree with you or just use that to support your position. Regardless what happens in the wider world, it's wide enough for you to find Bad Things happening, even more so given the incentives of for-profit media. You devote a lot of exposition to how the BLM protests prove that we're incompatible and out to get you, but you blackpilled before BLM, just like you were blackpilled before Trump just like (I presume) you were blackpilled before Iraq.
Differences in perspective are either due to misinformation, or it's a value judgment and one of us values x more than y. Frankly, our world is so staggeringly complex that we're all helplessly ignorant; some few people can specialize in a tiny sliver of one field among many, yet invariably, any given event draws an avalanche of takes from individuals whose conviction massively outstrips their knowledge.
Like, do either of us honestly believe we're experts on poverty rates in the US? Cherry picking some figures from a paper which probably cherry picked some figures in turn doesn't make either of us qualified to draw any kind of conclusion. The true 'perspective' we should be uniting behind is epistemic humility and calling out people who pretend otherwise.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thank you! All very good advice, and you were correct that I misread OP. Yes, I was being sincere.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I'd like a better plan than "let's find out what happens". I'd like that parents have better oversight and control over what's going on in the schools, and I'm happy to nuke private schools, but I think homeschooling needs to stay.
If you want a better plan you'd need to hire me; at the moment I'm but a poor scientist spouting ignorant ideas outside of their field.
I like: Small families who want more control over their child's education and decide to homeschool them a certain way. Talented individuals receiving tutoring from experts.
Dislike: Rich families paying money to tutor undeserving children.
What do you have in mind? What would the substack be about?
Partisan hackery. The substack was a bit of a joke since I don't have the requisite time to really focus on it, but I do have lots of questions I'd be open to doing the old adversarial collaboration style for questions like: What happened to the Obamacare death spiral we were panicking about, and what's happening to it now? What were the ultimate effects of the Trump tax cuts (I heard apocalyptic warnings from the left about rich oligarchs raking in billions and excitement from the right about worker's wages)? In short, revisiting policy items from years ago that the media was hyping as apocalyptic and seem to...not have done a whole lot in the end, or at least not that overtly.
Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)
How, exactly, would you propose to measure transmission reduction in the context of a clinical trial? You enroll a thousand people, 500 vaccine, 500 placebo. 50 in each group get COVID. What next? Do you test whether their cohabitants get sick? Couldn't those people have gotten it somewhere else? You'd have to massively increase your study size to find a signal in the noise, or else try some kind of challenge study.
When you run a clinical trial, to my knowledge (and to be fair I'm not exposed to many infectious disease/vaccine style trials) you need endpoints that focus on the people you actually enrolled. Other papers will try to measure spread at a more macro scale.
And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe. I'd hazard a guess that the updated boosters could also reduce spread, although this might prove to be false given the characteristics of omicron plus some fringe possibilities like original antigenic sin.
What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?
You run into some weird semantic problems trying to strictly define it, and other problems disseminating information to the public through media outlets rather than directly from ID docs. As far back as February 2021, people were saying reducing symptomatic disease. You can also read how the Pfizer group defined vaccine efficacy in their original clinical trial paper, and it's not related to transmission.
Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?
It might have made sense very early on. I'd agree that it rapidly became counterproductive and foolish as new variants emerged and the vaccines certainly did not prevent spread. You could maybe make an argument that in some places like Canada the healthcare system was truly getting fucked at some points by COVID patients, although by then the data wasn't even clear that the vaccines had a strong effect against severe COVID anymore as far as I'm aware. Whether these policies persisted due to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, malice or something else - who knows. You'll find plenty of folks here convinced that they know the answer to that question, so I'll leave it to them.
But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?
We probably shouldn't be.
There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose.
Can you cite the study you're referring to?
Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.
How would you know that? The only real comparator that makes sense is Flu, and we vaccinate for that every year; regardless of whether we did or not, annual flu strains have emerged for much longer than we've vaccinated. HIV was a pandemic, but has no vaccine regardless and is a very poor comparator. SARS, MERS, etc never really took off. So we have no empirical data to support that argument.
But, assuming you're referring to this page (since you didn't actually link to anything), what do you want to do in this counterfactual world? Let everyone get COVID and then his hope is that children generate sterilizing immunity? Moreover, why wouldn't a population where 50% have natural immunity and the other 50% are spreading the virus behave any differently compared to a population where 50% have vaccine immunity and the other 50% are spreading in terms of variants emerging? His argument would hinge on natural immunity restricting transmission whereas vaccination did not, which as far as I'm aware, is not the case.
Children have an amazing innate immune capacity to generate sterilizing immunity. From a public health viewpoint (herd immunity!), it is therefore critical that we leave the children alone. But protecting our children from C-19 vaccination is also critical from an individual health viewpoint as vaccination with these non-replicating vaccines will prevent adequate education of their immune system. This is because spike (S)-specific, non-neutralizing antibodies (Abs) that are continuously recalled by the circulating Omicron (sub)variants will steadily outcompete their innate Abs and thereby prevent the child’s innate Abs to instruct the immune system on how to discriminate ‘self’ from ‘self-like’
It's just false; the half-life of antibody titers for both natural immunity and vaccinations is much too short for anyone to maintain sterilizing immunity for long. For a while, the antivaxx crowd latched onto original antigenic sin (OAS) and argued that natural immunity would be better, but the last time I looked at the data coming out, OAS was a larger problem for people who were naturally infected with the alpha variant as opposed to vaccination, with T cell responses being the wild card. We don't have a counterfactual world where we tried Geert's approach so he can claim he was right until the end of time, but most of the evidence points away from his model.
It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.
The rationalization for vaccines was a huge mess of idealogues on twitter, the media and talking heads on TV pushing their favored ideas with about as much exposure to scientific data and literature as the two sources you give.
Meanwhile, Florida's AG is fearmongering about vaccine side effects (scroll down to 'Florida man' section. I think Zvi is a bit dismissive of myocarditis because other papers have shown it is a side effect, but why Florida tried to do this...I don't know) and it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this). Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
How are they being manipulated? From what I've heard, lots of those being bussed or flown out were asked whether they wanted to go and said yes.
They were (ostensibly, this is dependent on honest reporting) asked if they wanted to go to Massachusetts, not Martha's Vineyard. Would you consider it honest if I asked an immigrant if they wanted a flight to the United States and I dropped them off in Soldotna, Alaska?
But, of course, conservatives are just going to turn around and say that this is exactly what liberals have been doing, and in the even more literal sense of "point-scoring," namely deliberately refusing to enforce immigration laws in order to politically profit from future naturalizations or even present unlawful voting by illegal immigrants.
Politically, perhaps, although if we had that conversation we'd likely recycle tired talking points about how the United States has always been a nation of immigrants. The US population share of immigrants is higher than it was in the 80s, but on par with the early 20th/late 19th century.
From a humanitarian perspective, I strongly disagree that they are equivalent.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Interesting to see what gets downvoted. Parent comment sitting at -5 as I write this.
On the subreddit where scores were hidden, negative scores were very rare. I wonder if it's a difference in the audience or the system.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I never really see you posting here calling out anyone on your side for being gleeful about suffering
Wherein I complain about woke people taking over science fiction awards (so many upvotes!)
Wherein I incredulously share an anecdote about a woke woman denying physical differences between men and women (oh so many upvotes! The community loves me)
Wherein I say the BLM protests were probably on balance bad and many of the conservative critiques were correct (you may want to ctrl+F BLM).
I could go dig up older reddit posts in the same vein, but since you can't be arsed to put any effort into it, I don't see why I should either. For a while now I've wanted to say kudos for the great name and flair, but honestly, your one and two liners aren't worth engaging with so this'll be the last you hear from me.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
1/2
Apologies upfront, but this will probably be my only reply in this thread. Not because I don't care, but because I don't have the time to exchange essays and frankly given the timestamps of your replies it's probably best for the both of us.
Assume that I suck to an unbelievable degree at this, and that probably says woeful things about my character, but it's just barely possible that there's some valuable signal buried in the above shit-heap of noise. Then read it again, and if you're up to it, give me a short summary of the argument you think I'm trying to make.
Alright, I read it again. I'm still incensed. I'll expand on why in a moment, but we can go piece by piece.
I did not make sweeping generalizations about a group I dislike.
You did.
This law isn't being proposed because it solves a problem. It's being proposed because Blues hate Reds and want to harm them. That tribal hatred, by no means unique in its character and very much reciprocated by Reds, wants to Do Something About The Bad People.
From the Blue perspective, legally redefining Red Tribe parenting as child abuse is certainly a pretty good way to hurt the outgroup, and options for retaliation are limited and costly. The algorithm is working! And for those who might have concerns, never fear: Guzman's got you covered. '
when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
You don't get to open with an angry rant about a law being proposed by a Virginian democrat, pepper it with mentions about blues hating reds and wanting to harm them, wrap it up with 'actually, these people are groomers and I consider them an immediate and serious threat to my children', stuff the same argument you've been making for as long as I've been around in the middle, and claim that you aren't waging the culture war. Out of all the replies to your post, how many were interested in an academic discussion about the finer points of the law being downstream of cultural values versus people wanting to bitch about Thing Blue Person Did This Week? I'd count one for the former, almost everyone else in the latter. While I'm sure my reading comprehension skills are subpar for the local community, everyone is responding to the 'hatejacking,' not just me. You just don't care because the other contrarian, totally-independent critical thinkers agree with your take.
I think I did, in fact, go to considerable effort to contextualize and steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
Your steel-man:
A major politician attempting, within their sphere of influence, to criminalize the way half the country raises their kids is not someone saying something wacky on twitter.
Wow, really? So your half of the country uses pronouns given at birth, which this law would criminalize, and the other half of the country calls their children ze/zir? Literally the entirety of blue tribe has trans children, and the parenting style of >99% of red tribe families with cis children will be criminalized? That's your steel-man?
But whatever. Like I said, the rules don't matter, and even if they did, nobody would care what I think.
My best summary of your argument, parts of which I agree with and have made myself:
Laws are irrelevant, what matters are the upstream values of the people writing them, the people voting for the people writing them, the people enforcing them and the people willing to obey them. A group of people with no shared values who hate each other and defect constantly who adopt the United States constitution and system will not become the United States; conversely, if we memory-holed the constitution and judicial system overnight, people in respectable communities here would still put back their shopping carts, mow their lawns, send their kids to school and so on and so forth. There's plenty of happy little enclaves throughout history who lived your Good Life without our laws, and plenty of shithole countries that imitate our system with poor results.
Our values have diverged so far that we can no longer have productive debates, discussions or peaceful coexistence. Life is now a zero-sum game dictated by how best to harm the outgroup. In short, Conflict Theory.
You've made this argument repeatedly with a different event du jour tacked on, usually a bad thing that you cite as evidence to support your worldview. Usually, if you'll forgive the armchair psychology and repeated assumptions about your state of mind, something you're personally incensed by.
Why would you respond to a claim that it doesn't matter if the law is passed or not by pointing out that the law probably won't pass?
Because literally everyone responding to you is hyperventilating about the government criminalizing the parenting of the entire Red Tribe. Because someone needs to pump the brakes, because someone needs to at least culture war in the opposite direction if we have to be waging the culture war in the first place.
Just for the sake of wild speculation, imagine for a moment that I am not actually attempting to radicalize other Reds, incite violence, or generally hate-jacking it over the idea of large-scale death and misery with my fellow rage-monsters. Imagine that I'm actually trying, very imperfectly, to convince you specifically that you're wrong about something really, really important: that some of the core assumptions you and people like you rely on for your political and social reasoning actually have a really big and very hazardous blind spot in them.
I reject what you're saying both because 1) I disagree, and believe in the decency and character of the vast majority of my fellow citizens, including you and your fellow rage-monsters and 2) even if you were right, I'm not going to accept it, shrug and go back to scrolling on reddit while my country burns. I'm going to rage against the dying of the light even as you laugh and say 'told you so stupid motherfucker' the same way I'm raging at you now, I'm going to enlist in the armed forces, run for office, start a goddamn substack, argue on the internet, have a family of 6 or whatever it takes to make the world a better place because we are not just passive bystanders, we are what makes this country what it is. There's always going to be freeloaders, cynics and rage-monsters. Spreading cynicism and conflict theory begets more cynicism and conflict; regardless of the truth value of your statements I believe that you're making the problem worse.
Do you remember what you said years ago when I asked why you still bother to post around here? Perhaps I'm insufferable, naive, self-righteous and overzealous but I prefer my answer to what I remember yours was, which amounted to 'it helps pass the time.' If only I could find it.
If a law like this actually passes and starts getting enforced, will you reconsider the relevance of the above post?
Hardly, and the inverse law already exists in Texas. I can fairly easily mentally model a steel-man where both Texan politicians and Guzman are doing what they think is best for the children. Also, the law doesn't matter, remember?
It would take some truly titanic event to turn me as cynical as you. Like concentration camps, civil war, a real coup or living in Russia.
Guzman is motivated by some combination of political ambition and desire to be a Good Person. For her, "good person" is defined by her tribe, which is Blue. Blue Tribe holds that Red anti-LGBT bigotry causes vast harm and suffering, and that preventing and/or punishing this bigotry helps make a better world, that the world will be a better place when Red hostility to LGBT culture has been eliminated, and that actively working to achieve that elimination is a good thing.
You flip between Guzman and Blue tribe as a whole depending on which is more convenient, and project the former onto the latter to justify you writing off half the country. You're rehashing this conversation. Again, you ignore the majority of values that we do share and catastrophize over the marginal cases of trans children with deeply conservative children. In a country of over 300 million, I have no doubt there are a few hundred cases of miserable trans children and angry parents that you could make a probative mountain to bury me under. I suspect you're less interested in the mountain 300 million people tall where this isn't the case.
Not to say I don't take your concerns seriously, or minimize the suffering of those people, or argue that they should be charged with a felony and thrown in jail. But I'm not about to lose my faith in western civilization or this nation because we don't have a great solution for this problem.
Okay. So what happens when they do dominate? Do you think this is all just posturing, and they'd never really do it because that would be crazy? What happens if they decide that no, actually, they're gonna try it?
I think there's a world where trans people face more acceptance than they do now, that surgery and medicine improve their ability to transition more seamlessly, and where people come around not because blue politicians rammed it down their throat but because they don't feel threatened by it anymore. If there are indeed people attracted to being trans for persecution complex reasons, the total number of trans people goes down. And this is congruent with what I think you were saying above; if trans people aren't viewed as a threat anymore values will change organically and a law like this will have broader majority support.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks for the earnest feedback. I'm not 100% certain I follow what you're trying to say, as I don't think I said anything about reds accusing blues of booing their outgroup. Unless you were referring to an older post?
I can try to take what you say to heart, but I suspect so long as I'm going against the grain the response will be fraught.
If you ain't complaining about woke people, you're playing on hard mode my friend.
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