Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Conservatives are quite capable of lawfare and they have a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court majority. If 'intent to intimidate' rulings were shutting down conservative political rallies around the country they're quite capable of funding legal challenges and appealing their way to a court where they have a sympathetic majority.
The cynical view is that Conservative legal elites are completely fine with having their embarrassing white nationalist fringe suppressed and don't expect the statute in question to be applied broadly. The less cynical view is that this guy was charged because he was part of a group that surrounded some counter protestors and is alleged to have menaced them with the torch, which means he's being punished constitutionally for interpersonal intimidation and not political speech.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
It's specifically a statute against intimidating people with burning objects written for the KKK and now applied to this Tiki Torch guy. I'm not sure how broadly that will apply given most political speech doesn't involve burning objects.
The civil rights takeaway is bizarre. Pro-segregationist southern states set the laws MLK and others were tried under not a vague, establishment. The whole point of the protests was to be arrested in order to produce news footage of well dressed non-violent black people being dragged away from lunch counters. If you look at cases like the 'Friendship Nine' they had the option to pay a fine and get out or do hard labor in prison and they did the hard labor and stayed in prison. King's most famous piece of writing was produced in prison. Jailing civil rights protestors for the six months this guy is set to serve doesn't look like a silver bullet that would kill the movement.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yes, and you can explain that as either a) the government is really bad at getting black kids to study and really good at convincing them to chop off their genitals or b) the state isn't actually very influential over either and culture/genetics is the driving force in both cases.
Ecgtheow
11mo 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
11mo 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.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
You can't argue about what causes someone to experience revulsion so it's not really a good basis for public reasoning in a democratic society. Especially if you're going to make the case that the state should do something to curtail someone's individual autonomy you generally need to ground it in the prevention of harm.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
You can freeze sperm and eggs before the transition and then have a surrogate bear the child. Let's say some billionaire has a trans kid and creates a massive free sperm/egg preservation service and covers the cost of surrogacy/artificial wombs in 2040 for all trans people. Is the issue resolved, do conservative parents suddenly become okay with their kids transitioning knowing their genes will live on? Who is a conservative parent more likely to keep in their social life, an unmarried childless cis straight son or daughter, or a trans kid in a T4T marriage with a biological child?
Obviously not, because the issue isn't actually fertility (which is massively declining among cis people too). It's an aesthetic/social/moral revulsion at transness.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I mean you could Google that and provide a source for it instead of asserting it. Throwing a bunch of half remembered claims out there and expecting others to provide counter evidence is basically gish gallop.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Well so far no one who actually is a father appears to have responded but a lot of people reported to the mods. That's pretty funny, though I expect eventually a father will respond. Has there been a demographic survey recently, does it ask about children?
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
Kids like wearing costumes. People who start cosplaying at like 11 or 12 because they like the costumes in the manga they read in the school library aren't in it to get simps.
It's difficult to fully disentangle any human behavior from social and status reasons, and anyone who has a hobby that's more popular with the opposite sex will have some dating advantages. Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I'm not sure going from being the Mayor to the third largest city or a District Attorney to teaching at a college is failing up. In terms of salary it might be, since Lightfoot only made 216k as mayor of Chicago and the average Harvard professor makes 190k she could easily see a raise. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect one term politicians to sink into ignominy. If you lose in a 70-30 landslide there's still going to be someone with a cushy job to hand out in that thirty percent. And if you look at what Happens to right wing Failures like Sam Brownback or Paul Ryan they usually end up at some Christian College or on the Board of a Major Company.
I'd say the incentive problem is on the other side. Being a high ranking politician is low paid compared to the other options available to those with the skills and connections to get elected, and attracts considerably more unpleasant scrutiny and stress. Teaching undergrads is probably about as remunerative and much more fun than being a prominent politician. That means elected positions attracts narcissists and ideologues and if you want to fix that you have to make retaining the position lucrative and pleasant, so that people do whatever they can to keep winning rather than doing one term, cashing out and kicking back..
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
It's nice that he just kept the war plans in his highly secure hotel bathroom and showed them to memoir writers rather than faxing them to our enemies but that's still obviously illegal.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Leonard Leo is a conservative legal activist with a 1.3 billion dollar legal fund. If he thought Virginia anti-cross burning laws found constitutional in 2003 posed a risk to conservative political power these people would have the most zealous representation money can buy. I'm skeptical that a law that bans burning objects for the purpose of intimidation on public property has a broad chilling effect on Conservative political organizations since most political rallies don't involve burning objects.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
"Let's sterilize all the Jews" is extremely different from "we'll let ~1% of the Jews voluntarily sterilize themselves".
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
How much is the actual lifespan reduction for a trans person? The 35 year stat that gets quotes a lot seems to be based on the mortality of black trans women who are disproportionately likely to be sex workers. What is the lifespan expectancy of a middle class white trans woman/man? A sterile kid with diabetes is going to get lifelong injections and have to adopt if they want kids but I wouldn't characterize that as a "vista of terrifying possibilities".
Is this really about outcomes or is it about regarding transition as fundamentally illegitimate? Would you prefer to have a cis straight sterile kid with the life expectancy of a trans person, or a trans kid in a T4T marriage and bio kids with the life expectancy of a cis person?
Elites and government leaders organize to influence cultural production in the private sphere, the cathedral strikes again!
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's funny how the "nature vs. nurture" stuff flips political valence when gay/trans issues come along. The right is skeptical of the state's ability to improve test scores and career outcomes for women and (non-asian) minorities but thinks the state is quite capable of convincing people to cut off their own genitals. The left thinks that representation and role models are hugely important in convincing women and minorities to enter male-dominated career paths, but can't possibly influence kids gender or sexual identity.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
We have had categories of speech that are not protected by the first amendment for a long time, obscenity, threats, incitement to lawless action. It's easy to imagine how these narrow restrictions might be broadened and abused, yet we've had them for a long time without degenerating into a censorious dictatorship. The fact that you can imagine a hypothetical slippery slope isn't significant, the question is if we're actually sliding down it. I'm asking you for evidence that we are.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The cancel culture debate isn't about whether people can have private conversations it's about people's rights to speak from various platforms. Speaking from a platform isn't a private transaction between person A & B, it involves the approval of whoever owns the platform. Consumers and employees play a role, as they can boycott or stop working for platform owners who use the platform to promote things they think are harmful. That's not physically preventing person A from Person B, it's just creating an incentive structure for the platform owner to deny person A from using their private platform to talk to Person B.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Why might trans people be worried about people who don't recognize them as the gender they identify with banning cross-dressing?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yes, plus you'd expect the personnel involved and the potential for whistleblowers to increase dramatically. You'd also need to avoid producing statistical irregularities by overstuffing in certain places so you'd have to coordinate between different groups. The complexity is just much higher.
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
The obsession with virginity is only a way to control women and their sexuality!
Isn't it though? Historically and presently in many central Asian societies they dramatically restrict womens lives in order to ensure virginity. High status men demand paternity certainty, and in order to achieve paternity certainty you have to restrict women's sexuality, and in order to restrict sexuality you have to make sure they're never alone with another man or have the mobility to go somewhere they could be alone with a man. Is there a society that does costly practice like seclusion/hijabs/foot binding to secure male virginity?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Could you specify where in the FBI reports they discuss this. Your link goes to a list of forty multi-page PDF's.
I think this is the part of Comey's statement where he discusses the issue
For example, seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters.
He says 'concern matters' rather than 'contain materials' which seems to imply a discussion of something classified Special Access rather than the transmission of the special access materials themselves.
I don't think you're wrong that the media is more favorable to affirmative action than the public but this post is a low effort restatement of what I suspect is a widely held opinion here and so doesn't add much value If you found a non-opinion article from a mainstream news source covering the opinion and demonstrated how the subconscious bias influenced their writing that would be a lot more interesting.
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