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Chrisprattalpharaptor

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joined 2022 September 04 19:07:21 UTC

				

User ID: 80

Chrisprattalpharaptor

Ave Imperaptor

9 followers   follows 4 users   joined 2022 September 04 19:07:21 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 80

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

Well, whatever, the rules are made up and the points don't matter.

Remarkably absent from both your post and the replies are the fact that Republicans control the Virginian house of delegates and the governorship, so this has about as much chance of passing as the Illinois bounty law. Even if Democrats had slim majorities in both houses and the governorship, I'd be shocked if something like this could pass. The far end of trans rights is generally a losing issue for democrats and, by extension, taking children out of their parents control makes the majority of people in both parties uncomfortable.

The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of.

The virtuous cycle of Conflict theory:

Step 1: Find blue person doing bad thing

Step 2: Equate blue person with entire Blue tribe

Step 3: Claim entire Blue tribe wants to hurt me and mine

Step 4a: Spend a lot of time on the internet talking about igloos <- You are here

Step 4b: Hurt blue tribe

It may be difficult to believe, but some people genuinely care about the wellbeing of Trans kids and think they're happier living as their chosen gender. I would be absolutely shocked to find that Guzman is so monstrous that she's primarily motivated by a desire to cause you suffering, and even if she were, the idea that the broader Trans movement was conjured up to harm you both beggars belief and smacks of hubris. Your attraction to Conflict Theory isn't for the truth value, rather you need it to justify your own behavior and hatred:

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'll reject any arguments I make to the contrary that Blue tribe is Out To Get You while ignoring or defending any Red tribe transgression. You've surrounded yourself by yes-men who will trip over themselves to fellate you regardless of what you write, and be outraged that my reply is anything other than happy seal noises.

According to your model, half of your fellow citizens represent a serious and immediate threat to your children. So, what comes next? No more AEO excuses for hinting darkly rather than speaking clearly.

A great man once said feeble minds discuss people, mediocre minds discuss events, and great men discuss feeble and mediocre minds. As befits my station (see: flair), I will endeavor to do the first two.

Yesterday, Ron Desantis proudly shipped 50 illegal immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. See Breitbart and Fox News’ takes as well. The individuals were supposedly offered a plane ticket to Massachusetts, without being told they were being sent to a small, isolated island unprepared to receive them as part of a political stunt. Amusingly, not sharing a border with Mexico, Desantis actually had to source his illegal immigrants from Texas. I suppose rustling up 50 of the 772,000 homegrown illegal Florida Mans was too difficult, or may have upset some core constituency, who knows. The only shelter in Martha’s Vineyard has room for 10 and is obviously not equipped in the way that Boston, New York or DC would be and the plane ticket to those places would have been much cheaper.

Also of note: see the Fox News article for the Florida legislature’s $12 million ‘immigrant relocation program’ Own The Libs/Desantis for President fun.

I can stomach a border wall and even see the necessity, despite disagreeing with what it represents. I can sympathize with people living near the border and dealing with crime and drug cartels. But manipulating impoverished people seeking a better future and treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points and ‘own the libs’ absolutely turns my stomach. Which, judging by the Breitbart comments and replies I expect here, laughing at my pearl clutching is absolutely the point. You want me to be mad, you want me get up on my soapbox and bleat some self-righteous Soyjak lines about muh poor illegals so you can get mad right back and it feels good.

So I guess I won’t do that, although I never know what to say instead. I’m sorry that you hate Obama and Clinton (see: Breitbart article) so much that the thought of them having to deal with poor third worlders is amusing. I’m sorry that you’re so angry about illegal immigration and the libs that we’ve come here. Please, let’s all try to treat our countrymen better and do what we can to dial down the hate.

Send your kid to an all black school in Baltimore or a suburb of Paris then and then report back to me if your opinion has changed.

So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.

You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.

I'm sorry you feel that way, my friend. I wish you the best.

Accordingly I sympathize with @naraburns for not wanting to cross that bridge either, and there does come a point where calling a spade a spade is the most charitable course.

Ah, we're doing the call a spade a spade thing? Will you defend me saying this forum is populated by 'yes-men tripping over themselves to fellate [FC]?' And will you defend my right to call out people for being racist, fascist misogynists in the future, if these are the rules you want to live by?

Joe Biden is clearly the greatest president of our era. America's enemies (and allies!) tremble before the might of Dark Brandon.

If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.

I said I'd be curious to see the results if someone else tracks down the rest of his stories. Compared to how inflammatory your OP was, my response was fairly measured and I'm trying to engage with you in good faith.

Here's a list of potential evidence you could provide, and how it would influence my thinking. I think you might find it disappointing though:

  1. Spicy, blatant erotica around orchiectomy from Johnson -> Dude's fantasizing about cutting his balls off and maybe has a bit of a...conflict of interest when it comes to providing guidelines for trans teens.

  2. Blatant pedophilic content from Johnson -> Dude's probably a pedophile. No bueno. I assume he'll get canned if you or others circulate those stories.

  3. All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.

  4. Survey (or other data) of WPATH members or other academics involved in treating trans teens that X% of them are fetishists along these lines -> X% of these people are fetishists and if X is > than...I don't know, maybe 1-5% depending on how bad the fetish is, I'd probably find that disquieting?

I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?

You're correct insofar as democrats aren't nonpartisan saints, also dislike outgroup media and have their own criticisms of red tribe media.

You're incorrect insofar as the politicians and base of one party are much more vociferous in their criticisms of what they call the mainstream media, of CNN and 'the failing NYT,' of fake news and the Washington Compost, sleepy-eyed Chuck Todd, the dying WSJ, 'Dumb as a rock Sour Lemon Don Lemon,' and so on and so forth. I suppose about 8 years ago I can remember people saying 'Faux News.' I can remember some measured comments from Obama bemoaning conservative media and echo chambers, but it really pales in comparison, doesn't it?

We can talk about why that is, and I don't think it's because my outgroup are moral monsters, but it doesn't change the fact that it is.

Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.

Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic, or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot? You allege that they themselves are fetishists:

As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case. This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration. The article you linked describes it as (bolding mine):

Reduxx reached out to the Anthropology Department at CSUC for comment on Johnson’s association with a forum hosting child sexual abuse fantasies

which again makes it sound like those usernames weren't actively posting erotica. I assume if they were, the news article would be pasting that front and center. I'm not personally going to make an account on that website myself to investigate (look at what happens to people who 'associate' with such websites 20 years later) but I'm curious to see the results if someone else does.

Well, she successfully signaled her opposition to conservatives, slagged off the nation (in their view), and now she winds up in prison for a minor drug charge in Russia, our geopolitical rival.

If our standards for 'deserving time in Russian prison' were 1) signaling opposition to democrats and 2) complaining about the state of the nation, there wouldn't be any conservatives left to post in the Culture War thread. Not to mention what she said:

"I honestly feel we should not play the national anthem during our season," Griner said. "I think we should take that much of a stand.

"I don't mean that in any disrespect to our country. My dad was in Vietnam and a law officer for 30 years. I wanted to be a cop before basketball. I do have pride for my country."

As far as 'slagging off the nation' goes, it's pretty anodyne.

Why wouldn't they be gleeful?

Dunno...some shred of human decency? The same way I'm not gleeful about red triber suffering. The same way that if I were, you would be outraged and calling me out for it.

An analogy might be Ben Shapiro going to Texas and getting a harsh prison term for something that was legal in California. You could bet your bottom dollar that Twitter would be physically heavier from all the glee-tweets.

And you could bet yours that you would be rage-posting about it to thunderous applause. That doesn't mean you need to carry water for people hating on Brittany Griner or that you or twitter are behaving morally in that hypothetical.

To be clear, people aren't laughing because they think you care about poor immigrants too much, they are laughing because they think your reaction proves none of it was sincere.

And how should I react in a way that would satisfy them? Donate money or time to organizations that provide aid to illegal immigrants?

I love the idea of stopping the madness, and treating our countrymen better, but trust issues aside, what specifically are you even suggesting?

I doubt I'm knowledgeable enough to give you a list of policy prescriptions that will solve the problem overnight, nor does this seem to be the place for that. I'm too lazy to dig up my previous comments on it, but I believe there's room for compromise on immigration and most other issues. The response I got from that was angry conservatives claiming they compromised in the 70s and 80s and why should they listen to me now when they know I'll be back in 20-30 years asking for more compromises?

For lack of a better word, always this: less culture war, please. We're all humans, not moral monsters, let's not cheer the people trying to stoke partisan division for political gain. You and I aren't so different and largely want the same things, yet in some perverse reversal, we spend 80% of our time arguing about the 20% of things we disagree on rather than finding solidarity in the 80% of things we do agree on.

by breaking the law. Wonder why you omitted that?

Because I expected you to be able to parse 'illegal immigrants' as...well...doing something illegal.

I've long theorised that the solution to ivory tower liberals virtue signalling about illegal immigration is to give them some actual skin in the game, instead of letting them escape all the negative consequences of their ideology inside their walled communities. It seems the governor agrees with me, and that the theory was sound. I applaud this action and hope that next time he sends 500. And then 5000. Until the message sinks in. You do not get to ruin our towns from your gated communities with no consequence.

Massachusetts has about as many illegal immigrants (250,000/7,000,000) per capita as Florida does (720,000/21,000,000). Neither share a border with Mexico. Tell me again what consequences Florida is suffering that Massachusetts isn't? Moreover, the majority of illegal immigrants settle in metropolitan areas which vote blue even in red states like Texas. The vast, vast majority of those voters obviously don't live in gated communities. Those that do, do not unilaterally decide policy; Obama and Clinton and so on respond to the desires of their voters.

The message won't sink in, because the hypocrisy that you think is there just isn't, not because you haven't shipped enough illegal immigrants to Massachusetts.

People need to be held directly responsible for the consequences of their advocacy. Foisting it off on border towns and other people far away, ensuring there's no cost to you directly, is immoral.

Our tax dollars (which I understand are still the vast majority of funding for border security) pay for federal agents and facilities in Texas, so I do indirectly bear that burden. If anything, blue states contribute more in federal taxes than reds.

I've said it's regrettable that border towns have these issues, and if there were a robust way to mitigate the effects on them I would support it. But as I've said, even under Trump there were still large numbers of illegal immigrants at the border. Your sponsorship proposal wouldn't stop illegal immigrants from illegally ignoring it any more than they do now. The only real solution I can see working is developing those nations to the point that they don't want to come here anymore; look at how the number of illegals from Mexico has dropped as conditions have improved, and those from other countries has increased as conditions there worsen.

How dare you actually read the paper abstract instead of participating in the circle jerk? Hilarious that the one comment actually superficially discussing the content of the paper gets fewer upvotes than a half-dozen substanceless posts.

We need to do better.

Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.

And with that in mind I think the fact that trust in the media seems to break pretty cleanly along class and partisan lines (70% of Democrats having a fair amount of trust or greater in the media vs less than 14% of Republicans) explains a lot.

They asked the wrong question. Conservatives have just succeeded in redefining the term 'the media' to only refer to outgroup institutions, but that doesn't mean ingroup institutions don't exist. It's safe to bash 'journalists' and the 'media' because to them it categorically excludes their preferred sources of news.

Conversely, if your question was 'Do you expect Libs of Tik Tok/conservative talk radio to report facts fully, accurately and fairly' your Democrat and Republican numbers would flip.

Would it be reasonable to sue/prosecute Ruth Sent Us or MSNBC into oblivion?

Yes. If, in fact, the Supreme Court had not struck down Roe v. Wade, but MSNBC repeatedly claimed that it had for literally years. Maybe if MSNBC repeatedly showed details of the Justices personal lives (as Jones did for the children's gravesites, parents phone numbers, etc) while claiming that they were deep state crisis actors or something. If the Supreme Court Justices were nobody private citizens who suffered their children being murdered instead of public officials who to some degree have sought the spotlight. For good measure, throw in substantial amounts of evidence that MSNBC knew what they were saying was false but said it anyways to sell snake oil penis enlargement pills. And then MSNBC just refused to comply with court orders so they received a default judgment against them.

I have to say if you're using that scenario to calibrate, we took a wrong turn somewhere. There's a debate to be had around publicizing addresses and other personal information of private citizens (all publicly available information if they own property - less of a problem when it was buried in filing cabinets, more of a problem now that apps can look up addresses in seconds), but that's a separate discussion considering all the other crap Alex Jones did.

Also, Alex Jones repeatedly admitted to shooting the children in Sandy Hook himself. Checkmate, conservatives.

Martha's Vineyard is a 45-minute ferry ride from Falmouth, and from there 2-3 hours bus ride from Boston.

Undoubtedly illegal immigrants have plenty of disposable income and familiarity with the Massachusetts transit system.

Regardless, ship them to Boston for 1/3rd the price instead of nakedly stoking partisanship for political gain. And why is the Governor of Florida concerned with Texas, and using funds his legislature approved for the state of Florida to ship illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts?

There has been over a decade-long and massive surge of undocumented immigrants into border states, almost none of which has particularly been focused on parts of the border which have had shelter capability. Federal ICE policies have, at the very least, minimized the ability, and drastically demoralized any interest in enforcement where it remains possible (cfe 'reins').

Border crossings, or at least apprehensions as a stand-in for crossings, from 2010-2020 were lower than they had been for the previous 30 years. The total number of illegal immigrants in the country flatlined in the same time. Moreover, there appears to be a limited ability for us to control how many illegal immigrants show up at our borders.

If by 'reins' you mean this story, it's not clear to me how the media mistaking reins for whips is related to federal ICE policy.

Which looks a lot like... this, just with different political goals, since in no few cases the admin just bussed the applicants to random cities, gave them provisional status, and then shrugged about things like shelter capacity, often to defang criticism about custody numbers. Which, as with other times in the past, people didn't seem to care about.

Your argument being that there should be a better federal support and/or shelter network to be certain that illegal immigrants can be humanely treated? Your terms are acceptable. Even if we tied it to border funding or some other carrot, I doubt Senate Republicans would care - Trump, at least, was offered border wall funding for protection for dreamers and wound up shutting down the government instead.

I'm not a fan of this show-boating from DeSantis, but I don't think "$12 million ‘immigrant relocation program’ Own The Libs/Desantis for President" is a very strong steelman.

The governor of Florida is paying to fly illegal immigrants from Texas to Massachusetts to score political points. I'm too stupid to rationalize how that is in the best interest of the citizens of Florida, so I'll leave that to my betters.

Meanwhile, the right bitches about NAFTA, free trade, globalization, trickle-down economics and military intervention abroad even as they pushed it in the 80s, 90s and 2000s. What? You don't want those things anymore? Huh. Funny how that works.

About 20% of the electorate was too young to vote during the Clinton era. Pretend population growth was zero and another ~20% of voters died in the last 25 years. So maybe 40% of the electorate turned over...and you're surprised that neither Democrats nor Republicans want the same things they did? The fact that you want the 90s frozen in amber forever rather than the 70s or 50s says more about you than the media or either political party.

But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.

Well, I've been asked to detail the evidence that would support a change in my beliefs. You (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) think that some significant fraction of academics have conflicts of interest based on their sexual preferences. What evidence would convince you that a robust majority (say >95%) of these experts are, in fact, coming from a place of wanting to do what's best for the youth rather than pursuing their own sexual fantasies?

I wouldn't go so far as to say 'disinterested' as the criticism that these academics believe in a broader trans rights agenda independent of their research or data almost certainly is true for a majority, and it's not clear to me at least that the data warrant some of the claims that are made.

No, get your local government to build adequate amount of shelter in your community, for a random, representative, and proportionally-sized group of immigrants to live with you, and go to the same school as your kids.

I'll do you one better: let's nuke the school system that ties property value/geography to school funding and mix everyone together regardless of class. Bussing but for SES rather than race. No more private schools while we're at it. Let's have the poor kids, immigrants, rich kids and my kids all in the same class and see what happens.

I'll point out that I can't vote at the local or federal level, but sure. I'd be fine with spreading them out as evenly as possible in the country and/or bussing towards that end. There are some thorny issues of consent where they may want to form their own communities but that's above my pay grade and maybe not worth arguing over for a hypothetical.

Like, what are you selling, and at what price? I go to the Breitbart comment section and tell them to chill out, and in return you try to get the FBI to not designate parents pushing against CRT as domestic terrorists?

Sure, although my pull with the FBI is more or less nonexistent so we'd be better off focusing our efforts elsewhere. You want to co-author a substack? Collaborate here? Run a presidential unity ticket?

You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?

Wait, but how did he know what would happen in 1984 if (as you claim) he was writing the book in 1948? How did he avoid getting in trouble for misinformation by, like, the 1948 version of facebook mods?

Naraburns banned me for making an argument she disliked,

See, I knew I wasn't crazy. I wonder if I got that from you?

Do you have any suggestions for comparable Red Tribe transgressions? From my perspective, Reds just look less invested in this part of the game, possibly from having a smaller "standing army", as it were, of professional partisans who spend all day thinking up culture war offensives to enact.

Either you already know the answer to this question, you'll say my response is categorically different (politics vs. social engineering) or that my response is just wrong, no? I doubt there's any huge culture war development I'm aware of that you remain ignorant of.

  1. False election claims, often knowingly false claims made by Trump et al to undermine faith in the election system for personal benefit. Recently elected Republican election official harassed by his own party for saying he hasn't found any evidence of fraud. Cyber ninjas debacle. etc, etc, etc. Explicit, unabashed gerrymandering. Power plays like this one.

  2. Roe v. Wade, Texas bounty hunter law, decades of unconstitutional abortion laws in southern states, assassination of doctors providing abortions, armed men screaming abuse at women walking into planned parenthood and a concerted effort to trick them into 'pregnancy crisis centers' instead.

  3. Nobody cares anymore, but southern states still push creation science and religion. Children are indoctrinated by whatever religious sect their parents choose for them. Children are inundated with things like the pledge of allegiance, armed forces propaganda and media glorifying the US military to an extent that you won't even recognize as weird if you haven't lived abroad.

  4. How about don't say gay laws? Or other anti-trans legislation? Laws banning discussion of [equity]9https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/heres-the-long-list-of-topics-republicans-want-banned-from-the-classroom/2022/02)? What about book bans? There's a lot of focus on lawn boy and it's ilk, but look at some of the shit people are using that as cover to ban. Oh no, a child might see a muslim person portrayed as anything other than a terrorist! The horror! The handmaid's tale is banned by a dozen states.

I'm sure if you cared more about the culture war you could make hay out of a dozen crazy bills proposed by some state legislators in the south.

You talk about a lot of reasons why Alex Jones is a terrible person

No, I listed some of the ways in which the hypothetical OP gave differed from the Jones trial.

whether or not angry rhetoric and conspiratorial thinking qualifies as inciting other people to criminal behavior.

If you're asking legally, I'm not particularly interested in LARPing a lawyer this afternoon and chasing tails with others doing the same.

If you're asking morally, I take a dim view of people doxxing private citizens (including Ruth Sent Us, fig leaves notwithstanding and posting their private contact info. There's enough radicalized people on both sides such that publicizing the private info of any polarizing figure virtually guarantees that some nutjobs on one side or the other will harass them.

Hey, people used to go to watch people being tortured to death for fun. The fact that cruel political actions now involve free plane tickets instead of dousing someone in tar or sending bombs in the mail is progress of a sort.

It is, and if someone proposed resurrecting gladiatorial combat you'd really see the pearls come out.

I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?

What's the rest of the story? Also, what about the other two accounts?