Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If you make motherhood and career as incompatible as possible don't you run the obvious risk of lots of women choosing careers over motherhood? You'd end up with lots of educated women disincentivized from having kids since once they do their career is over/paused until their kids are teenagers since they can't hire a nanny affordably. Low education women are more willing to do that, but the issue is that people tend to marry people of similar education and you'd have to give pretty massive subsidy to young couples for a low education man to be able to support multiple dependents comfortably.
I'd be kind of worried about a society where all the high income/prestige careers are occupied by childless educated couples and low education married couples with multiple dependents where women can't divorce or else they're impoverished.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The main argument I can think of is from the "Jewish Lawyer" scene from Atlanta. The extent to which the talent is undervalued may not compensate for the extent to which they're excluded from/lack connections within important professional networks. Particularly when it comes to starting a business connections are really important and even if you're top tier at trading stocks that doesn't mean you're really good at organizing a firm.
Also, it's a big leap from, "x demographic is systematically undervalued" to "a firm composed entirely of x demographic would outcompete the field". Say you figured out that the NBA systematically undervalues players from Europe, should you attempt to compose a team entirely of European players?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The actual utility of determining who is the 'Fastest Woman' or 'Fastest Man' is non-existent and society's interest in elite sports is in entertainment and propagandizing physical fitness. Anyone who is an Olympic finalist at something like the 800m is the recipient of profound genetic gifts, and the concept of fairness between them and the average person is laughable. Excluding an extreme outlier in terms of genetic advantage for the benefit of a cluster of the far far right tail of the distribution doesn't seem to have much to do with 'fairness' for the general population.
Semenya differs in that her genetic advantage is larger, traceable to a single chromosome, and used to construct a category of social solidarity. If Semenya wins over and over XX women may be less inspired to participate in athletics since they cannot identify with her as an intersex person. Or if there is a single gene which gives massive athletic advantage among 'women' then women without that gene would be less inspired to compete. The carve out for women's sports is an acknowledgement that it is worth creating categories for people genetically disadvantaged at athletics so that even though they can never really be the best they can still be honored for fulfilling their potential, even if it's limited.
The fun futuristic version of this to me would be if we eventually develop some way of calculating genetic advantage from DNA and creating athletic 'gene classes' for different sports. If we're worried XX women will be less inspired to compete if someone with an identifiable genetic advantage like Semenya wins than shouldn't we be worried about short men, or people born with poor biomechanics not competing? In the short term something like height classes in basketball seems like an obvious starting point.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The argument there would be that amputation is such an irrecoverable harm that a child can't possibly consent to it, not that I find amputees aesthetically or philosophically revolting.
Then the argument moves to, well isn't puberty blockers irrecoverable harm to the child because of sterilization just like cutting off an arm? I'd say no, the issue isn't the loss of tissue it's the loss of capabilities. Prosthetic arms are nowhere near the capability of a real arm but a child born from stored eggs and sperm is genetically your child. You don't lose the capacity for fertility even if you lose some genital tissue. I also grew up in a church with many loving adoptive families and and I'm not inclined to view having to adopt a kid rather than having a genetic one as a loss of capability as significant as losing an arm. Reducing children to a means of gene perpetuation flattens one of the deepest and most transformative human relationships possible.
It also seems significant that many adults choose never to have children, where there are no adults I know of who spend their entire lives without using one of their arm. If there is human capability that a large share of the population voluntarily never exercises then I'm inclined to think it's okay for a tiny sliver of the population to modify their bodies such that they lose that capacity.
I'm not unsympathetic to the concern. There's clearly some level of social contagion going on and gender care providers need to move from a model where if a kid has any cross gender identification that must mean they're trans because there's nowhere in mainstream culture where they could have picked that up to one where they're far more skeptical of it. But I also think Gender Dysphoria is not wholly sociogenic and so I would prefer families be allowed how to approach trans children on their own rather than having it dictated to them by the state.
Minnesota's law says it will not enforce Texas's law which makes gender affirming care legally child abuse, strips parents of custody and potentially imprisons them. The idea that Minnesota would emancipate trans runaways is a conclusion posters in this thread have reached by assuming that a state claiming jurisdiction to do a custody proceeding also means it claims jurisdiction to terminate parental rights which is not in the bills text.
Yes, because the only way people ever get a sense of what the "good" and "bad" parts of town are is from GIS data and not by opening their window and noticing that they live in a beautiful neighborhood of detached single-family homes with carefully maintained lawns and not a graffiti-covered ghetto. Yes, he probably watched TV and local news with its inordinate focus on 'if it bleeds it leads" crime coverage. This horribly biased mainstream media may have misled him into thinking he was likely to be a victim of violent crime, and so he gunned down a black band geek (edit: in what would have been) the first murder in KC in 2023 to take place north of the Missouri River. Or he may have just been an addled old man who didn't consume much news and made a mistake.
Either way, the issue was not, as you asserted originally, that this guy watched society collapse around him. He may have watched society collapse on TV and become confused.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah no that would be amusing. It's more like let the people of London suffer because the Opium trade exists. They don't actually do violence they just stop preventing bad things from happening.
Imo part of the problem is that the author is Chinese and so her go to example of colonialism is treaty ports and opium. This is a lot less compelling an example of colonial atrocity than the Belgian congo or the good old fashioned slave trade. Give me some handless magic user from the Congo laying waste to Brussels on his way to King Leopold and I'd be more behind it.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Typically when people break into a home they're trying to rob or kill people, not interrogate them, as DePape confessed he intended to do with Nancy Pelosi. If someone's just trying to get your valuables and get out then yeah a conversation is unlikely.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I don't think the two situations are remotely comparable. Site owners removing accounts from a list of mods is much easier than removing protestors from a physical space.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Trump's conduct here is bizarre, what is the upside of retaining these documents? Why consent to being recorded and then say "hey rando, check out these top secret invasion plans I definitely didn't declassify." Why lie to your lawyers about moving the documents? If you're willing to not just "accidentally" misplace some classified documents, but defy a subpoena to return them why be so sloppy? Why not have Nauta photocopy them and return the originals?
I can buy that Alvin Bragg's indictment was a politically motivated hit job advancing a novel legal theory, but I just can't see that with this. They gave him an out when they asked him to return the documents and he lied to his lawyers about returning them all. This isn't the clever deep state ensnaring Trump, this is him agreeing to be recorded showing classified military plans to some writer. It's either idiocy or some genuine belief that he's above document retention law.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
What is the similar law? There is specifically a Virginia statute against burning objects on public property with the intent to intimidate. Show me the law against 'protesting with an intent to intimidate".
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yeah I don't think this interview added much evidence other than that other people on the car were scared. The fact that she brought up him throwing his jacket and not any other instance of trash throwing may suggest he wasn't throwing anything particularly injurious.
I'm confused about your reading of the Good Samaritan Parable.
The Samaritans aren't the friendly neighboring faith to Jesus's jewish audience, they're the heretical near outgroup. The Jews had demolished their temple in the previous century and in Jesus's time the Samaritan's profaned the temple mount by scattering bones on it. The parable is given in answer to a questioner asking 'who is my neighbor' that they should love as themselves. Before the heretical Samaritan helps the injured man, a priest and a levite refuse to help him, possibly because they value ritual cleanliness so highly they don't want to touch the man who may be dead. Jesus ends the parable by asking which of these is the injured man's neighbor.
Casting the hated heretic as the merciful unexpected neighbor rather than the high status fellow Jews suggests a broadening of the boundaries of who is a neighbor we are commanded to love, not a limiting of it to co-religionists.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The Right is allowed to say cities are hell hole slums, that they hate NY city values, and that people making less than 25k are lawless leeches who should be disenfranchised because they're the party of the real working class fighting back against elites who disparage deplorables.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They were arrested for kidnapping but they weren't charged with it.
You've brought up two examples where arguments escalated into impulsive shootings where the people were caught immediately and plead guilty. That's not indicative of a belief that you have a socially agreed upon right to do this violence without punishment. Your third example is a drive by with no details of how the shooter was caught. A drive by may be a poor attempt to conceal identity but it's still an attempt.
Bryant and Milam acted days after Till's alleged whistling and in a premeditated fashion and still took no action to conceal their identities from Mose Wright when they knocked on his door (except for threatening him) and asked him to identify Till. Till's family did not resist except to offer a bribe, because they knew resisting would bring greater punishment and because they expected Till to be whipped but not killed, as the prosecutor suggested was the appropriate punishment for Till.
Yes men across different cultures do violence to restore honor. The difference is that this was a caste system where there was a socially understood right for white men to restore their honor with violence against a black child without resistance from that child's family and go unpunished by the state or society. That's nothing like two guys shooting each other in the club over a girl and then pleading guilty and being sentenced to 25 years.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
An election with DeSantis it becomes about the issues.
And one of those issues is the six week Abortion ban he signed into law. If DeSantis had held the line at 15 weeks he would have had a really good shot but this will be the first post-Dobbs presidential election and there's no way for DeSantis to occupy a more popular middle ground position on abortion with any credibility after that.
The place where the comparison breaks down is that the audience for blackface was white people but the audience for 'woman face' is heavily female. It's not straight men who sit around and enjoy caricatured performances of femininity, it's gay men and straight women. This is partly anecdotal since the people I know who like drag are mostly straight women, but the RuPaul subreddit did a survey and it was 50% women and 38% men, trans men outnumbered transwomen ~2:1. Given that reddit's user base skews male that might understate the prevalence of women in the drag fanbase. A random masters thesis on James Charles I found on Google says his audience was 85% female.
Then there's Chrissy Chlapeka and the TikTok Bimbo movement which seems primarily aimed at women, though I can't find demographic stats.
The kind of 'Bumbly Bimbo' performances that appeal to straight men are well, porn. Belle Delphine is also doing an obvious performance of an excitable girl.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
In the Kindle Unlimited world there are really low barriers to entry for publishing. If someone could make a lot of money publishing books other publisher's wouldn't they'd be doing that.
I'd say it's a "publisher pull" effect where if you're a sci-fi publisher and you're looking at a world where women account for 80% of fiction sales you really want to raise the profile of works catering to women in your genre in hopes of attracting a larger audience.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
They could have put their money in larger more diversified bank subject to more regulations including liquidity stress tests that SVB successfully lobbied to be exempted from. The VC world and their startups weren't seeking maximum safety and unfairly barred from seeking it. They sought out a smaller bank with less regulatory oversight that specialized in their industry presumably because that offered benefits.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
DSA is an outsider to Dem party like Sanders is an "Independent" senator - formally it's true, but we all know what they'd be voting for. If they are "outside" it's the part of "outside" that the mainstream body can't venture to go without risk losing the independents, but not the part which they disagree with.
I think that's conflating national and local political dynamics. If you're part of the Democratic establishment in a solidly blue city your personal political career is never meaningfully threatened by Republicans, it's threatened by challengers from the left. If Trump wins by 1 point you're still gonna win by 19, keep your job and be paying your dues with the party establishment so you can move up over time. If the DSA wins you have to find a different job and all that time you put in at low low level functionary positions was for nothing.
This is anecdotal but I know a former city council member of a solidly blue small Midwestern college town who is still involved in local politics. He hates Republicans, but what he wants to talk about day in and day out is how bad the the local hard left student organizations and Sander's aligned groups like Justice Democrats are. It's a "heretics are a bigger threat then pagane" dynamic.
That's to say that If Pittsburgh election administration is controlled by a corrupt tight knit organization capable of casting fraudulent ballots en masse without any defectors; they're also going to use that power to consistently rig local elections in favor of their organization. If local candidates outside of the democratic establishment can win then either this group is deeply principled enough not to interfere in intra-left fights, or they just don't actually have the ability to rig elections.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yeah I guess the price is less why it's not consumer facing and just that most people won't have much reason to send things into space. Science experiments will be mostly institutional. Scattering grandpas ashes in space doesn't seem that different from say, flying to some natural spot to scatter ashes which doesn't have much culture war valence.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
NFL players take the Wonderlic test during the draft and as an avid NFL fan no one talks about it as a meaningful indicator in interviews or analysis. You can look up QB Wonderlic scores they vary wildly Peyton Manning got a 28, Mahomes got a 24, Brady got a 33, Harvard Grad and style icon Ryan Fitzpatrick got a 48.
I would expect the correlation between general intelligence and outcome to shrink if you're only sampling people who are dramatic outliers at a very narrow subset of intelligence. Which is to say that I don't think it's IQ rising to the top.
QB is an odd position where your chances to actually get experience in live reps is pretty limited. There are only so many snaps in practice and during games and only 1/22 people involved can practice that skill. You can get better at throwing and watching film but the key skill of reading defenses from the pocket is hard to acquire without organized large scale practices that require 21 other players to not be QB's.
For this reason it seems totally plausible to me that there's an early filter in QB development, where kids trying to play QB for the first time are going to be outcompeted for practice snaps by kids whose parents could pay for them to start playing football earlier or to attend football camps. Or who just had parents who could coach them up enough that they could win the initial practice snaps and improve.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
But you don't have to trust "the left" you have to trust that the SFPD didn't coerce an elaborate confession and continued silence from this guy.
If trans-men committed mass shootings at the rate of cis-men how many trans-men mass shooters would we expect?
The Williams Institute study says 1.3% of the pop 18-24 are trans and 0.4% of the pop 25-64. The shooter is 28, my guess is more than 0.4% of 28 year olds are trans. Education Weekly says there have been 157 school shootings with a fatality since 2018, though usually we think of a school shooting as a multiple fatality event. Cis-men commit 98% of mass shootings so just really rough back of the envelope math here 157 shootings * 98% done by men * 0.4% share of men that are trans, so there's a ~61% chance of a trans-masc shooter every five years? Given that this is the first trans-masc mass shooter I've heard of they probably do mass shootings at a lower rate.
That's rough math though, I don't have too much time right now but if someone has a better number for mass casualty school shootings that would be relevant.
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