Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
No bio...
User ID: 1864
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Trans identity reifies the gender binary, so I'm not sure how it's a kludge in response to it, exactly.
In a world where none of these behaviors were coded as male or female, one could choose to land anywhere on the spectrum without being forced to identify as x, y or z. In my mind, the trans label is necessary insofar as we live in a society that does have the binary. I doubt this is a widely held view, although I also doubt that many people think that deeply on it without being pushed.
To, sigh, steelman that point of view: it was incredibly predictable, "we" were told that'll never happen, and then when it did it's just Shocked Pikachu.jpg. It's not (merely) trying to Chinese Cardiologist away the problem; it's "what are you going to do about this failure mode" and then being shocked and having no answer when that failure mode comes up again and again.
And to steelman the rebuttal to that, something like 80,000 prisoners are raped per year in the United States. Huge proportions of female inmates report being raped or harassed, correctional officers have storied histories of raping female inmates. Trans inmates are raped at much higher rates. When's the last time Tucker Carlson ran a segment about prison rape in general? When's the last time anyone here wanted to discuss anything other than the hyped-up rounding error that is men faking being trans to rape female inmates? It's easily possible that a policy allowing trans folks to transfer prisons would result in a net negative number of prison rapes given how often they're victimized in men's prisons.
Small comfort to the victims, I know, I do care and you are correct that those were fairly predictable mistakes, but to say that the sudden concern for the safety of inmates rings hollow would be the understatement of the year. Maybe I'll start to take your argument seriously when conservative politicians/electorates are interested in prisoner welfare more generally.
But there's this big strain in progressivism and liberalism that has this fantastic lack of curiosity, full of weirdness and contradictions, #trustscience (except when it touches on this one topic in a way we don't like), and that's... really concerning.
Fair enough.
Hinges a lot on the details. What does "no stigma and disgust" mean, exactly? What does that mean for gender-segregated spaces? Or sex-segregated? Or genitalia-at-birth segregated spaces, or however you want to define it? Would none of those exist?
A fair question, but a difficult one to answer. 'No stigma and disgust' at least is independent of gender-segregated spaces, as it's easy to campaign on simply being more open-minded and affirming to people who want to dress/act/present themselves in ways that society frowns upon. I don't personally think I have a good answer to your second question and to the extent possible would defer to what women wanted.
Dropped a thought there, hoss.
I knew it was you, with a blackpilled name and slightly different writing style.
Many people view MtF trans the same way, as self-advancement or Munchausen-like trying to enter the "women are wonderful" effect (or trying to escape the "men are guilty until proven innocent" effect).
This doesn't answer why FtM are now considerably more common, but I think MtF and FtM are explained by mostly different mechanisms and it's practically accidental they're treated as one umbrella.
Frankly? I seriously wonder if you're right, particularly given the eye-popping numbers of trans teens right now. But I also wonder if trans acceptance becomes widespread and normalized we wouldn't see a decrease in the number of trans people as being trans lost it's luster of rebellion/counter-culture/righteousness and was treated like being a cis-gay guy in 2023.
It starts off snarky, but I think the point in your quoted section is that Freddie does think anyone that disagrees is only motivated by dishonesty and bigotry, so he's not extending the same consideration that you will.
Fair enough.
Somewhere, quite a while ago, de Boer said his position basically boiled down to always supporting the underdog no matter what.
There are worse heuristics.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Are the left-leaning posters all riled up because it's Christmas and everything is plastered in Christian iconography or something? Or are you just a troll?
The reason they should be killed is to prevent them from harming more people, and to make sure that the bad genes that they hold that make them predisposed to bad behavior are not propagated into the next generation. Likewise, some people are born with an evil sense of morality that makes them predisposed to being fascists and reactionaries (yes, trad morality is illiberal and thus evil, it is a result of moloch) including religious ones (which is basically fascism except even worse because they scare people with made up notions about the afterlife, hence the term 'christofascist'), and other forms of anti liberal people.
So in the last 60 years has the decline in 'christofascists' been due to brave warriors like you exterminating them from the gene pool? I mean...those people are passing on their 'bad' genes at least as, if not more, frequently than secular folks. It's almost like...there's a strong environmental component!
Not to mention the hilarious lack of self-awareness behind 'My opponent's ideology is so toxic we must kill them before they can tell anyone about it or reproduce.' If anything, people like you who (if you aren't a troll of course) soberly cheer for conflict theory and ethnic cleansing are the true dangers to society.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Does the left care about solving these problems?
That's distinct from ideology, but I would hope so. Also a question that's impossible to answer without further defining 'solving' or 'trying to solve.'
The most progressive cities in the country have no solution to homelessness (maybe you'd say "at least they're trying," but SF's efforts do not look like they're trying to solve it so much as a bureaucracy trying to make sure everyone is able to skim a few dollars from the effort, in perpetuity
There are a large number of programs, which, as you've pointed out, don't seem particularly effective. And as you expected: at least they're trying.
The stories, though: Ruthless Shkreli wannabes jacking up meds prices, leading to mental breakdown and eviction! White supremacist patriarchy refuses to employ trans women of color, of course they have to work the streets! These people just need a helping hand to be productive members of society #latestagecapitalism
I don't profess to be an expert on homelessness, but I assume it won't be that easy.
The answer to drug use appears to be legalization and "freedom."
Legalization of less addictive substances. Probably methadone clinics, heavy investment in therapy/support groups for addicts, nationalized healthcare, etc for the heavy drugs. The ideology feels a bit lighter on this issue, but I'm not sure what people would say if you asked them.
The answer for social alienation? Crickets.
Probably true. I'm curious what people would answer if I asked them.
Assimilation is racism. Speaking of racism, is the left trying to fix that one or reinvent it?
Fix, by their definitions.
Spreading democracy is colonialism.
Depends. A righteous crusade to rescue trans, gay, women and people of color from the privileged classes probably wouldn't register as colonialism.
Frankly, yeah, "the right" sucks right now.
I'm not even trying to make a value judgment. I'm trying to make an argument that they need to think bigger, stop being reactionary and provide ideological explanations/solutions to problems in society.
When I think visions of the future, I think people like Dryden Brown and Justin Murphy. They have visions for the future; they are also, basically, nobodies.
Thanks for the recommendations!
"Believe in the righteousness of your cause, regardless of actual effects" is not exactly a glowing endorsement.
Well, of course they should do better at trying to actually trying to track down the effects of their policies. In their defense, a lot of these problems are fairly complex and intractable even for people who study it full-time.
What is their vision of the future? Does it make any sense? I have no clue what their vision for the future is. Maybe the Democrats have a vision for the next five minutes, they have a vision for the resistance or the revolution, but that's not comes to my mind when I think of a vision for the future.
Perhaps 'the future' is the wrong concept to use. It's fairly rooted in and focused on the problems of the present, more so than the utopians dreaming of metropolises on Mars.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
There's Cernovich, or Bronze Age Pervert, or dozens of smaller accounts.
Fair enough, I confess to not reading BAP and I've never heard of Cernovich. I'm surprised you wouldn't mention Joe Rogan or JD Vance, but I know the phenotype you're referring to.
Maybe you're thinking of Ben Shapiro and Cadence Owens and Hanania types
Well, also the vast majority of the Trump administration, people like Steve Bannon, Alex Jones (I guess he hawks his supplements) and other conservative talk radio hosts, red coded media (fox news, OANN, Breitbart), most of the local commentariat, most any public figure on the right whose schtick isn't self-help/redpill/MGTOW style. You know the rhetoric I'm referring to, right?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
But the content they object to is often political in its aims and coded blue-tribe. I don’t see how you can position your side as apolitical, when they proudly proclaim political aims for their own changes, endlessly purging curricula on grounds of sexism, racism, hetero-and-cisnormativity, etc .
I wouldn't claim it as apolitical, and I wish you wouldn't call it my side.
In some cases I'd agree with you, in others I would disagree. In still others we would get bogged down by semantics about 'making things political.' I could argue that children sitting at desks is a weapon of the white supremacist state to keep down PoC and that they need to go, and MFL would fervently oppose that. In this example I'd argue that the MFL position isn't political at all, it's just...keeping desks in school. The same way that for some of these books, I don't think it should be controversial at all that they're available in the library.
But all of that is somewhat beside the point. The comment I replied to was describing MFL as if they're some objective and principled group that supports liberty and freedom of choice. The reality is that they're anything but.
Lab leak is shorthand for half a dozen scenarios I've seen bandied about. Off the top of my head:
-
Secret Chinese bioweapons program inadvertently released.
-
Secret Chinese bioweapons program intentionally released to depopulate an aging population and wreak havoc in the soft Western countries.
-
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus study program that released it through negligence/misconduct (stuff like Chinese researchers historically eating research animals after experiments conclude)
-
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program that inadvertently made it more pathological via humanized mice or other experiments.
-
Good-faith Chinese Coronavirus program in some small part funded in collaboration with NIH (In which I've previously argued Fauci has little personal responsibility and you should primarily be upset with the study section which approved the grant).
-
Globalist plot by Fauci and NWO to [use your imagination lest I be accused of strawmanning or partisan hackery].
In the majority he bears no responsibility, in some cases he bears (I would argue) some small amount of blame relative to a number of other actors and in only one is he ill-intentioned. I maintain that even if you strongly believe in the lab leak and malfeasance, most of the animus towards Fauci is based on the fact that his face is on TV and telling people things they didn't want to hear while leaving most of the people who made those decisions to get off scot-free.
edit: fixing numbering scheme
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
People constantly conflate gender/sex preferences that are culturally/socially contingent and those that are universal (and thus almost certainly biological in nature).
I'm not going to deny that there are certain behaviors or traits that are dominated by genetic influences (if we dropped a pair of children off on a deserted island and they made it to adulthood, I'm sure they could figure out how to propagate the species), and I do agree with what you say generally, however I do believe that even in your post you overstate your case.
Men liking things and women liking people is an example of number 1. It is universal and biological, and reflects the biological division of labour.
What do you think the world would look like if from birth all the media men were exposed to showcased men as caregivers while women were out earning a living? Where their male role models were all stay-at-home dads taking care of the domestic duties and their female role models were breadwinners? To the extent that we're all exposed to this pervasive monoculture(ish) it seems to me that it's impossible to say just how far we could move the needle on what you're describing with (benign) environmental changes alone.
Sexual attraction to well defined, feminine hips might be an example of number 1.
From my other reply:
You sure about that? I'm obviously not in a position to offer anything more than hearsay or anecdote, but there are plenty (possibly a majority) of modern models with tiny waists rather than child-bearing hips. Ditto with variation in preference for ass size.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You sure about that? I'm obviously not in a position to offer anything more than hearsay or anecdote, but there are plenty (possibly a majority) of modern models with tiny waists rather than child-bearing hips. Ditto with variation in preference for ass size.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Have you considered that and are related?
Yes. I had written a long rebuttal, but maybe we'll let another comment wither on the vine and for today and I'll knock off complaining about the community for another 6 months or so until I lose my temper again.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Would you take any such argument seriously?
Of course not, I'm just a mindless Pelosi-bot regurgitating whatever normie talking-points the NYT and George Soros tell me to.
Because it's kinda hard to treat 'we're going to keep things the way they are/turn back the clock to the 1970s/1950s/1776!' from the guy who's gone whole-hog on "Do you want to drive over to my apartment and put a bullet in my head, or set off a bomb at my workplace?" as someone who would.
I don't see why those two are incongruent. The spirit of '76 is practically synonymous with civil war/violent revolution/boogie boys in some parts.
As for the actual violent rhetoric, it seems to have quieted down a bit. Particularly here, but I also think in the broader political arena.
((Even for this specific case. It's not like libertarians and the Gray Tribe haven't had long arguments over the scope of 'dangerous' or dangerous public information!))
So, if I'm understanding correctly, you're upset at the drive-by about 'libertarians slinking away' from Musk when 90% of the post was about conservatives? Okay. For all my very limited criticism of libertarians, I think they do have a fairly grand vision for the future. A Randian utopia where personal freedoms allow the ubermensch to throw off their shackles and accomplish wonders. I don't see this much on the right these days; they seem to want just as much government regulation and interference as the left does.
I'll note that this, likewise, doesn't look like an unusually Positive Vision -- indeed, even if Scott hides it, I'd argue it's more 'turn back the clock' than a lot of mainstream conservative ones!
Hardly. I used that as an example of Scott giving commentary or advice to Republicans, not necessarily the object level arguments themselves. I'm trying to express that my intention wasn't to put down conservatives but rather to point out a real deficit in their platform, and that I think filling it in would benefit the entire country regardless of political affiliation. Perhaps my position in this community just precludes me from making that argument, or I just don't have the chops. Who knows.
((And, uh, your tendency to ghost.))
I'm sure you have some lovingly nursed examples ready-at-hand, but regardless, this one misses the mark. I've written a novella-sized series of replies to your previous objections, 2-3 novellas to FC, another few for professorgerm, others that I can't remember at the moment. When I get 10 replies to something I write I just physically can't give all 10 an effortpost, and if I did anything less, you'd be sitting there smugly accusing me of low-effort posting.
Other times, I find people offensive or off-putting enough that I leave the conversation rather than say something that would get me banned. As you already know, I'm not particularly intelligent; you should add thin-skinned and poor impulse control to your list, and laud me for knowing when to leave the conversation rather than writing something that would get me banned.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
You're modeling the entire right here as a completely cynical enterprise with no goals beyond hurting their outgroup. I think perhaps you could make some sort of case for an individual, such as Elon himself, but to model the entire right that way is missing the point. And worse, it is inaccurate.
That's not it at all, although I can see how I communicated my point poorly. I don't think either side has any reasonable claim to moral superiority.
However, regardless of whether it's a better model of reality, the story the left tells itself for why it does what it does is much more compelling than what the right does. Particularly in these cases of 'tit for tat' where we're measuring winning or losing in who gets banned from a platform. Leftists wanted to deplatform people to avoid COVID misinformation to save lives. Elon wanted to stand for free speech until his ideals made contact with reality, and now he wants to deplatform people who fucked with his family. Maybe things will balance out, and it will turn into 'your rules but applied fairly' and all doxxers will get banned regardless of affiliation. But 'your rules applied fairly' is still not a particularly proactive or compelling vision for the future.
You could argue, with some merit I'm sure, that the greatest harm comes from the best intentions, and self-righteousness or believing too strongly in your cause is a great way for the left to coast down some slippery slopes towards making the world a worse place. But I'm not even convinced that the right cares about solving the same problems anymore. Is there a competing vision for dealing with homelessness, besides putting them on buses to San Francisco and New York? For drug use, besides being angry at PMCs/neoliberals/deep state traitors who sold out the country to China (maybe the law and order messaging? It's conspicuously absent in discussions about the opioid epidemic though). For social alienation, for assimilating immigrants, for spreading democracy in the world, for poverty? Please, if I'm ignorant fill me in, but to varying degrees I get the impression that these issues just aren't very salient to the right anymore. Nor can I discern any kind of cohesive messaging or worldview the way I can with Reagan or Obama.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
11d ago
When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved
I'm confused; wasn't there a brouhaha about this specific point just in the last year? Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?
I remember a number of articles like this one:
In the late 1950s, the poverty rate in the U.S. was approximately 22%, with just shy of 40 million Americans living in poverty. The rate declined steadily, reaching a low of 11.1% in 1973 and rising to a high of nearly 15% three times – in 1983, 1993 and 2011 – before hitting the all-time low of 10.5% in 2019. However, the 46.7 million Americans in poverty in 2014 was the most ever recorded.
Also articles like this. Apparently there's also absolute and relative poverty. Oh well.
Regardless, the fact that definitionally 49% of people will be forced to earn sub-median incomes isn't necessarily a reason to shrug away poverty and/or the degree of income inequality in society. As evidenced by the last decade of politics. Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
18d ago
It beat's not existing at all. Which is where Ukraine's demographics are heading after sending most of their men off to die in trenches and their women are finding new lives abroad. But I guess Zelensky can pat himself on the back, king of the ashes, when the TFR of native Ukrainians is 0.21 ten years after his "victory".
While I share some of your concerns around TFR, it isn't the sole measure of worth of a nation. Somalia has a TFR of 6.3, mid-19th century Ireland had a TFR of 4 while illiterate peasants slaved on increasingly small plots of land and starved. Continuity is important, but so is the right to self-determination. If the Ukrainians had rolled over and collapsed, I expect there would have been a lot of finger wagging and recriminations but we wouldn't be having this conversation. If they choose to fight and are willing to die for their country, if they choose to risk their country being reduced to rubble and their TFR being reduced to some arbitrarily low number you pulled out of your ass, I don't think it's your place to lecture them.
Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
Somehow I suspect Ukrainian affection for their 'coethnics' in Moscow is experiencing a bit of a dip at the moment.
But sure, "Ukraine" would still be an independent nation, even if no Ukrainians are left in it. Not sure why a Ukrainian today should fight for that future though, being cut out of it completely.
Again, that's not really your or my determination to make, is it? I'm not supporting pressuring them into fighting a war, I'm strongly against NATO troops ever fighting in Ukraine, but revitalizing our defense manufacturing infrastructure while arming Ukrainians to fight for independence strikes me as the best action we could take at the moment.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1mo ago
But I do believe it's possible for people to change their minds, even if just in small ways. Then small mind changes lead to bigger ones.
It's happening, just centered around the local Overton window. I admit to having my mind changed on a number of issues, although most weeks this place is a parade of events that make the left look bad while events that paint Red tribe in a bad light are largely ignored. If you want to see the future of the Overton window, look at the two recent threads on natural selection and epistemology. They actually generated discussion and genuine disagreement in ways that posts about Trump, trans issues, gun rights, police violence, immigration etc. never do anymore.
Cthulhu swims ever farther right. I have to say, it is interesting to have watched it happen over my last five odd years here.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
4mo ago
That was their screwup.
If the foundation of your worldview is that liberal Jewish elites run the show/elections are just Kayfabe (insert your favorite variant here so we don't end up quibbling over your beliefs) and you work your way out from there, interpreting data as you go, I can guarantee that you'll find a lot of data that supports your worldview. Flat Earthers have long chains of logic where no individual link is completely bonkers, but it's built on a rotten foundation.
From my perspective, Hillary Clinton was a fairly strong candidate who was done dirty by a combination of conservative media (proto-Qanon cheese pizza/adrenochrome/comet ping pong beliefs? Collapsing like a sack of meat showing that she was on death's door?), email server bullshit, bad feelings around the Bernie Sanders saga (were the Kochs involved???) and genuine dissatisfaction amongst working class whites towards the system and elites. With this framing, conservative media isn't so worthless after all.
There's this odd dichotomy in Conservative circles; Trump will rant about how the media hates him and he's the underdog, then turn around and brag about how Fox News is the most watched channel while CNN and the failing New York Times are hemorrhaging viewers because the General Public is on our side and hate being lectured about trannies. Dan Crenshaw is some Alpha Male soldier bro who releases ads of him obliterating the libs, but everyone in DC is a feckless RINO who drops their trousers and bends over anytime the White House comes knocking for more funding. The libs are a bunch of soyboy faggot snowflakes who REEEEEE at our dank memes, but they're also shadowy elites pulling the strings in Davos that we're on a righteous crusade against.
Just because they screwed up doesn't mean they don't have power. (And of course the Supreme Court and abortion are downstream of that mistake.)
Just because they have power, doesn't mean they're omnipotent or even (apparently) that they get what they want most of the time. Furthermore, blaming shadowy elites for all your problems is usually (1) cope and (2) easier to confront than the fact that tens of millions of your countrypeople genuinely believe what they say they believe and they aren't just being manipulated by the media or George Soros or whatever else you want.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
10mo ago
Consider instead that they don't arrest him with the information they have. Six months later, he blows himself up in a mall and takes a dozen people with him. Headlines scream: 'Mall Jihadist on FBI radar and they did NOTHING,' whichever political party not in control of congress spins up an investigation and media frenzy to score points in the next election, people hate the FBI anyways.
It's easy to just say the spooks are doing shady things again, but probably harder and more valuable to think about the systemic incentives we've given them to behave that way.
Does anyone know who this user is
Nope, and hopefully it stays that way.
what their current priors are?
There is good evidence that early in the pandemic when COVID was less contagious and our vaccines actually targeted the circulating strain that spread was significantly (though not completely) reduced in vaccinated populations. Here I wrote a brief summary of some of the evidence available in August 2021. I still believe the COVID-19 vaccines are very safe as written here, and reiterated in this space more recently. Overall I stand by most of what I've written, although I was too slow to update on how low-risk COVID was for younger folks and the implications that should have had on our public health response.
The other interesting angle to this that doesn't seem to come up very often is the idea that COVID actually was similar in severity to a cold/flu, but this is just what that looks like for a virus we've never been exposed to before. Namely, if you had somehow avoided exposure to influenza/rhinovirus/other coronaviruses before being exposed at the age of 70-80, would you have the same CFR as COVID-19 circa 2020-2021? Or did the evolution of COVID from 'less-transmissible, more-deadly' to increased contagiousness and decreased pathogenicity just happen on much faster timescales that we expected? My money is on mostly (1) with a small degree of (2), but I'm not an expert and I stopped caring about the literature over a year ago.
As for the vaccines, if they don't update them I'm not planning to bother unless forced to by my employer. Even if they do update them, I'd probably treat it the way I do the flu vaccine: If they run a clinic at my workplace and I just have to walk downstairs and wait for a few minutes I'll do it, otherwise not going out of my way.
Since @desolation asked: I still think Fauci is fine and well-intentioned. The public health response was bad at first due to obstructionists/defectors and bad later on in service of either stupidity or the gerontocracy - i.e. a fairly accurate reflection of the political factions with power in our system, and I likely made a mistake carrying water in support of it at least in some cases. Lab leak still seems like a toss-up, but China has acted fairly sus the whole time.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
From the post you replied to:
So, when Group A files a lawsuit and reaches a settlement, some other group which has not filed a lawsuit has somehow been treated unjustly? Perhaps you should wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens, before you get all outraged.
From your first post:
I don't see it. I'm not sure how the facts stated in the OP could have been expressed in a more dry and less outraged manner without outright sounding like (the old-school scifi stereotype of) an AI.
From your most recent post:
That's still a very very far cry from stoking outrage.
So, what's your argument? Is it that Gdanning is unfairly accusing the OP of being outraged/claiming that the J6 protestors are being abused? Is it that OP didn't use inflammatory language in their post? Or is it that OP isn't stoking outrage?
My reply illustrated how the facts could have been expressed in a more neutral and less outraged manner. I pointed out specific words that misrepresented the facts in an inflammatory way, and gross overinterpretation of facts to 'stoke outrage' (see section on argument about protesting being a net-positive activity). I conclude with ways we could have had a more nuanced conversation rather than angry, low-effort posts.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
(Maybe had a boring Friday?)
Occam's razor would suggest that I'm a loser eating cheetos in my mom's basement, arguing on the internet in between World of Warcraft raids.
Maybe sanity (like your clinics and therapy) can win out in other places, but the way ever progressive move slides towards Berkeleyism doesn’t give me hope for that.
Oh, uh, I definitely wouldn't call it my approach or particularly effective. The block hosting the methadone clinic at my alma mater had the worst reputation on campus and was always a mess. Then again, who knows what the counterfactual would be like?
I've only driven through San Francisco once so you would know better than me.
I’m going to keep picking at this, because I think asked a good question but your defenses of the left are so “damning with faint praise” that I’m still not sure exactly what you’re expecting to find.
“Tell a compelling story, regardless of reality” and “fix, by their definitions” is surprisingly effective for modern progressives, completely horrifying, and a cheer for nonsensical propaganda. I don’t think that’s actually what you want from the right or from a competing utopian vision.
You likely won't find much of substance after scratching the surface, I'm afraid. I identify with the left because they speak to the problems I care about; if someone had a realistic alternative that was more effective without committing atrocities (i.e. gassing the homeless to clean up the streets) I'd be on board. If rationalism could actually proselytize to the masses to focus more on data and results, we might get somewhere. Like, you say you care about black homeownership? How do you not know that it's largely unchanged in 50 years despite all the policies we've tried? Maybe we shouldn't hold such strong opinions about things we haven't seriously researched in any meaningful capacity...
“Tell a compelling story, regardless of reality” and “fix, by their definitions” is surprisingly effective for modern progressives, completely horrifying, and a cheer for nonsensical propaganda. I don’t think that’s actually what you want from the right or from a competing utopian vision.
Good, bad, it seems like reality, no? Many people are rabidly woke. People want to do the right thing, people want to feel good about themselves and many need ideology as a part of that identity. I'd like us to all have a nice dispassionate discussion about how to run society led by the relevant technocrats who haven't been captured by one interest or another, but that isn't the world we live in - and many problems are big and complex enough that even the people who study them 24/7 don't know the answer.
That being said, I don't think the liberal project has been a failure on every count. Poverty is down. Global poverty and death/disability from many preventable diseases is way down. 20 million fewer uninsured Americans from 15 years ago. Broad social acceptance of interracial and same-sex marriage. Sometimes you tell a compelling story and the world is a better place. Sometimes, you tell a compelling story that diverges from reality and you bonk your head against the wall for a decade or two before society finally lumbers back to the drawing board.
Really elaborating on my views would take a longer post than this.
then I’ll assume you’re an accelerationist.
Quite the opposite, I'm afraid. Although Kendi doesn't get my goat the way it does many people here - I'm not sure I agree with his worldview, but it's certainly an interesting one that makes me question how far I'd be willing to go for equality. I strongly support affirmative action and even quotas for some positions (largely political), but I'm not interested in Harrison Bergeroning society into homogeneity. Many of the quotes that do circulate (I mostly remember the 'white people are literally aliens' one) are cherry-picked to generate ridicule and outrage.
Don't think I've read the other authors.
Redefining evil as good, and telling a good story about it, should not be our goal.
Agreed.
Progressives have been able to tell themselves what is apparently a convincing story on racism, that it can only be answered by EVEN MORE RACISM- this has, to date, spawned a bunch of grifters, an increased murder rate, and more misery for everyone, making the world worse for everyone that’s not profiting from the grift. You can call it “at least they’re trying” if you want, but that just sounds like an action bias; their “trying” is actively counterproductive.
The failures are what gets highlighted, because we're American and our failure mode is to bitch about every single thing the government and opposition do endlessly (as opposed to China whose failure mode is the global times assuring me everything is fantastic until the day there's no food on the shelves and the condo I paid for is never going to be built). As I've said, I don't think it's all been negative. As for the actual, undeniable failures like the mess of a crime rate or vaccines ending the pandemic, I think they'll collapse under their own weight - as they should! Just always more slowly than I'd predict, the way I thought everyone would give up on mask mandates and lockdowns after widespread vaccination in summer of 2021.
And of course, some failures whose causes aren't so tightly connected to their consequences will slip through the cracks to plague us for decades to come. Such is life.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
He's butthurt about this one. I specifically said it'd be pretty unreasonable to get that kind of data:
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?
But he's clearly still upset about it. /shrug
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
2d ago
We'll see. Cell culture media isn't cheap though. For the time being, I suggest exercising a lot of skepticism about what the financial inputs for lab-grown tissue are if someone claims that it's actually quite cheap.
If you buy the individual components and formulate you own media, it's some like 1-2OOMs cheaper than what they sell you commercially. I looked into this awhile ago.
You run into problems (currently) with growth factors like IGF/FGF which is where the 50$ burgers come from. From what I've read in the literature though, fermentation of these would scale well once the demand is there and we could make them very cheaply in bioreactors. What I haven't seen a solution for yet is (surprisingly, to me at least) Albumin which increases the yields very significantly but seems to be hard to produce at scale. I'm curious whether people can break down the various functions of albumin into separate, easy to ferment at scale proteins or whether we need to find better production methods there as well. At least that's what I've been able to glean without having an insider's perspective into the industry.
More broadly, keeping the government out of many of these industries does seem ideal. At the same time, our car companies are about to get fucked by subsidized Chinese EVs (and, to be fair, often flat out superior products) without government intervention. America's rise to power in the late 19th and 20th centuries was hugely influenced by oil; if solar panels do indeed end up being 'the next oil,' well, Chinese government intervention has given them a near monopoly there too. In essence, they learned the lessons of the tech industry on a national scale - absorbing losses for a few years/decades is fine if you end up with a monopoly. It's not clear to me that we can compete without doing the same. Perhaps the winning move is subsidizing some of these growth factors for a few years and giving out some grants for replacing albumin and seeing if we can build some American (or Western/'friendshored') companies that can dominate the space.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
29d ago
Capitalism as a source of problems, perhaps, rather than an unalloyed good? There's likely a difference between textbook definitions in the communist manifesto or the little red book and the way people use these terms colloquially. If you want the former, I'm not your guy. I read both a decade and a half ago and that was about the extent of my interest. Reading Hayek now, it's interesting to see how much the meaning of the term 'liberal' has shifted in the last 70 years. Gives me a better understanding of the gap between the way my generation uses these words and the way I expect some of the older posters here think.
To turn the question on it's head - if I supported free markets, welfare and socialized medicine, am I a communist? It's advantageous for the right to say so because communism calls to mind Soviet Russia, gulags, starvation, stasi, etc. But I'd argue there's a very material difference between Canada and the USSR, and only the latter would widely be regarded as 'retarded.' I'd agree that many intellectuals on the left fetishize Canada (if Trump wins a second term, this time we're definitely moving meme), but the number who'd want to live in a USSR-style communist hellscape is much lower.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Since you have been asking questions and asking if it is fair for progressives to be calling others as white nationalists, let me ask my question in the same manner.
Brother, you can ask me all the questions you want. Generally I don't volunteer my opinions that often as they rub people the wrong way, but if you're polite I'll probably answer anything.
Do you think that progressives who have massive double standards and might in fact support making minorities or even the extinction of white people, are not racist? Couldn't such agenda be accurately labeled as anti-white racist supremacy?
I don't believe that progressives are calling for white genocide. You can probably find some people on twitter making jokes about how they hope all white people die in a fire, which I frown upon, but I don't think it's the same thing. Assuming you mean something along the lines of demographic trends and immigration meaning that white people will be a minority in America at some point this century, I don't believe it's an explicit agenda a la Great Replacement Theory. I agree that some people would cheer at those trends which I also find distasteful.
The phrase 'anti-white racist supremacy' doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But sure, if you come up with some other negative term to describe people cheering on white people dying or being outbred then I would likely agree with using said term.
Is someone who either supports or tolerates the existence hateful identitarian organizations, and mainstream organizations that promote the same agenda and large double standards and stigmatizes whites in particular, not in fact nationalist to an extreme degree for various progressive identity groups
No, I don't think they are 'Black nationalist' in a meaningful way. As far as I'm aware, the vast majority are not advocating for an exclusive 'Black America' based on race, they are advocating for equality of outcomes in (what they see as) a biased system. I also would dispute the language you use to describe them, although without examples (beyond the ADL) it's difficult for me to say.
But yes, I would denounce someone who supported the black equivalent of the KKK or stormfront.
Absolutely not. I think progressives calling others white nationalists as pejorative towards any legitimate white ethnic identity should be treated as an example of them engaging in extremist racism and this behavior ought not be tolerated. It is an uncharitable conduct that stigmatizes white ethnic groups in particular and their advocates.
The word 'faggot' was a pejorative for a long time, until it was reclaimed. Whether progressives consider it a pejorative is orthogonal to the actual definition of the word and whether you think it accurately describes the worldview you're describing. If you think 'white nationalism' doesn't accurately describe your views, then what view would constitute white nationalism and what would you call your views instead? But I assume you do agree with the accuracy and just object to the fact that most people think white nationalism is a bad thing based on:
If the term is used in sufficient number in a non charged and abusive context, then it might become more legitimate. But it is bad conduct to be used in this manner.
I had always been skeptical when progressives called conservatives and the MAGA crowd white nationalists, but here you are, espousing views that I think broad, bipartisan swathes of America would call white nationalist. I suspect that the vast majority of American conservatives disagree with your worldview, and in the old place, when this topic was discussed, the defense was invariably that 'no, conservatives don't actually believe those things.'
This framing of white nationalism can justify destroying all european countries/people. So if someone opposes it and think their people shouldn't go extinct and shouldn't become a minority in their own homeland they are just called a white nationalist under an one sided culture of critique.
I disagree with the base assumptions of this statement on multiple levels, as well as most of the rest of your post, but this is already getting too long for both of us.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
3mo ago
Thanks for taking the time to explain.
It is both moderate and right wing to think that white people have legitimate ethnic communities too. But in terms of identification, it tends to attract people who identify more as right wingers in certain countries. But is in fact the moderate position.
What, concretely, do you mean when you say white people have legitimate ethnic communities? As in, there are physical communities in the USA that should be able to exclude non-whites? Or even non-physical communities/cultural...events, or what-have-you that are necessarily white rather than race-blind mainstream American?
To lay some cards on the table, what you're arguing seems to be that most conservatives are some flavor of white nationalist. I assume at the mild end of the spectrum you describe, this is less blood and soil rhetoric and more 'it's okay that my tabletop game club is made up entirely of white men' or 'the president should be white as the USA is a majoritarian white country.'
While to oppose nationalism only for white people should count as the extreme far left. No matter how many people who identify with this want to frame their perspective as moderation.
I just don't think it is true that progressives or liberals oppose nationalism specifically for white people. Japan may be a fargroup for progressives in the US and as such doesn't receive much attention, but I've certainly heard people express discomfort at their attitude towards foreigners/non-Japanese and a national identity built on race. Any kind of nationalism built on race makes progressives and liberals deeply uncomfortable.
Furthermore, I don't believe that conservatives writ large support carveouts and national-identity/community building based on race. Perhaps I'm typical minding, perhaps my mental model is wrong and you're right - I'd honestly encourage you to tighten up your argument to something more concise and write a top-level post to see what people think so we can get more data.
If most conservatives do explicitly believe in nation and community building based on race, would you agree with progressives that call them white nationalists? And your argument is simply that being a white nationalist isn't a bad thing, because to you progressives are black/asian/hispanic nationalists?
Is it really so difficult to believe that she might just be a good person who genuinely cares enough about doing what she believes is the right thing despite her grief? You may typical mind her to the point that her speech and feelings can't possibly be genuine, but not everybody processes their emotions in the same way as you.
Tell me, when Fox News regularly interviews families with children murdered by illegal immigrants are you similarly disgusted? Do you cringe and berate them for giving speeches on national television rather than grieving alone at home? How about Trump giving a panel with Bill Clinton's victims?
Most people are fundamentally good and want to do the right thing. I think she's deserving of at least as much charity as you're willing to extend to your tribe.
As an aside, is this comment:
So unremarkable that nobody here even bothers to point it out? I know, don't feed the trolls and all, but that tweet is just funny and self-sabotaging to the point of satire. Not to mention the followup tweet 'Hitler! Hitler! Hitler!'
More options
Context Copy link