Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Folamh3
1yr ago
I'd say the side that thinks they need as many men with as many guns as possible patrolling the streets patting down anyone who looks suspicious are more frightened of crime and less confident in their ability to deal with it than the side that thinks you can deal with it via social workers and suchlike. That's absent a judgment on who is right, or what the correct level of fear is: when I'm scared of things I want to deal with them violently and immediately, when I'm not viscerally scared of things I talk about long term root causes.
That's a fair characterisation and a point that I'd overlooked. I'd be curious to see what hard-libertarians' preferred approach to crime is.
Sure, but map the spectrum onto either a binary or the spectrum or left-right and it doesn't come out with "Rightists are confident self-defenders" and "Leftists are nervous weaklings."
I think my comment may have unintentionally presented this theory as a be-all and end-all theory when I viewed it as more of a contributing factor which might assist in leading one down one garden path or another. I'm not denying that there are strong, confident people who nevertheless support authoritarian policies, or vice versa.
Which is my point about libertarianism: people adopt libertarian and constitutionalist talking points when their tribe is under perceived threat from the government, and ignore them when their tribe is in power.
Agree.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Which does not automatically imply that the (accurately) self-perceived fragility of an older person is necessarily greater than the inaccurately self-perceived fragility of a younger person.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Yes, in retrospect suggesting that men only support leftist policies because they're physically weak was rather poorly phrased.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Rather, those on the left are hostile to certain types of speech, while those on the left are hostile to other types of speech
Freudian slip? :P
I take your point though.
They want speech policed according to their obviously correct values.
Just because your values are "obviously" correct, doesn't mean you can rely on a majority of the population agreeing with you. In every human society prior to ours (and most likely including ours) a majority of the population believed in things we now know/believe to be false. I find it staggeringly arrogant to think "My values are obviously correct, therefore I never have to worry about them being suppressed or censored at any point in the future". I think it's arrogant to believe that even if your values are ones which have never been at serious risk of suppression or censorship for your entire life.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Seconded. I believe that gender dysphoria is a real medical condition, but also that some people may misidentify as transgender either out of honest confusion about their gender identity, or maliciously in bad faith.
A society in which self-ID is the legal standard has collapsed that distinction, and sees no difference between a trans person who has suffered gender dysphoria since childhood and who has been taking hormones for years vs. a person who gave no outward indication of suffering from gender dysphoria, only "realised" they were transgender immediately after being convicted of a crime, and who has no taken no steps to make themselves more closely resemble a member of the opposite sex.
Now you have to accept the bad actors as members of your own group. You made this bed, now you have to lie in it.
Ask someone a series of questions, like "how worried are you about being attacked by a stranger?" or "if you were attacked by a stranger, do you think you would be able to defend yourself?" You could pair this subjective polling with objective data like "how many guns do you own?" or "do you have a black belt in karate?"
My half-baked hypothesis is that, all other things being equal, people who don't own any guns, don't practise martial arts, don't think they would be able to defend themselves if they were attacked by a stranger etc. will be more likely to support authoritarian policies than the converse.
I do care about formulating sound public policy, which is precisely why I think that a) making self-ID the legal standard is a policy which will backfire horribly for the trans movement and b) I don't support allowing any male convict who identifies as a woman to be housed in a female prison, without any guardrails being imposed at all.
My point is that you can't have it both ways. Trans activists demanded that anyone who declares that they are a woman must be legally treated as a woman. That's the policy they sought. Having succeeded in having that policy implemented (at least in certain jurisdictions), they cannot then turn around and say "No no, Karen White is only pretending to be trans!" The policy they themselves called for draws no legal distinction between a person legitimately suffering from gender dysphoria and someone like Karen White.
Folamh3
1yr ago
you are advocating for intentionally using incorrect data... Would you advocate ignoring the fact that those inmates are lying when trying to develop anti-crime policy?
If "autistic person" was legally defined as "a person who claims to be autistic, no diagnosis required", then the only data we would have would be the data obviously skewed by bad actors.
I acknowledge the existence of people who falsely claim to be transgender (or falsely claim to be experiencing gender dysphoria). The law in the country in which I live explicitly does not acknowledge their existence. The legal concept of "self-ID" makes it literally impossible for a person to lie about being transgender: declaring it makes it so.
Again, everyone knows that Karen White isn't really transgender. Before self-ID became law, anyone who pointed out that the proposed legislation created a perverse incentive and a honeypot for bad actors was smeared as transphobic. Now that the (foreseeable! foreseen!) downsides of self-ID have become too obvious to ignore, trans activists are trying to turn around and say "but those people aren't really trans!"
Sorry, not having it. Anyone who was in favour of self-ID has to take the L and admit that it's their fault that malingering sex offenders are now housed in female prisons. If you support a policy which defines transgender people as "anyone who claims to be transgender", you don't get to pick and choose who will make such a claim.
Folamh3
1yr ago
All well and good, but the law in the country in which I live currently permits no such exceptions. Any male person who identifies as a woman is a woman in the eyes of the law, for all intents and purposes.
Folamh3
1yr ago
As a result of Scott's review I'm reading The Last Psychiatrist's book Sadly, Porn.
It's one of the most impenetrable books I've read in my life and is an absolute chore to get through.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Freddie deBoer's take on it.
Folamh3
1yr ago
Interestingly, Ryan Holiday interviewed all of the relevant parties for a book about the Gawker trial Conspiracy (well worth a read even if you don't read a lot of non-fiction). Peter Thiel, who bankrolled the case, is explicitly quoted as saying that his goal was never to send Denton to the poorhouse.
Folamh3
1yr ago
most of the covid restriction have made very little sense at best, and starting from somewhere in 2021, they were basically a lunacy
The reason I keep bringing Covid up is because so few people seem to recognise the lunacy of Covid restrictions. The consensus in my social circle even today seems to be that "lockdowns/vaccine mandates/[insert restriction here] were unpleasant, but a necessary evil to stop the spread". No matter how much data I offer demonstrating that there's no way that these measures pass a cost-benefit analysis (or even do any good at all), they seem married to this worldview.
I'm not worried that these restrictions will be reinstated in reaction to another strain of Covid, that ship has sailed. I'm worried in a few years' time when the next pathogen comes along, and everyone thinks "Well, lockdowns and vaccine mandates worked last time, better do it again." So I'll keep on banging this drum until a majority of the populace is actually saying "never again".
Folamh3
1yr ago
I accidentally posted the comment before finishing typing it, meant to delete it and start over, but apparently deleting it didn't take. Silly me
I don't know if such a person in fact exists, but I can certainly imagine a hypothetical person who literally does not experience sexual arousal until they have formed an emotional bond with a prospective sexual partner.
Are some people calling themselves "demisexual" when they do, in fact, experience sexual arousal towards people they have no emotional bond with, but nonetheless prefer to hold off on actually having sex with them until they have formed an emotional bond?* Probably.
Are demisexuals "oppressed" in a manner comparable to the treatment of Alan Turing, or gay men in Saudi Arabia? Obviously not.
Were they ever so oppressed? Obviously not.
*i.e. are they using "demisexual" as a description of their preferred sexual behaviour, as opposed to their inner sexual life?
the way you act is contingent on the hormones in your brain
If it could be experimentally demonstrated that certain males experiencing gender dysphoria do in fact have unusually high levels of oestrogen in their brains compared to the cis male baseline (e.g. a comparable mechanism to how prenatal endocrine influences sexuality), would this provide a biological underpinning to the transgender paradigm, in your view?
Folamh3
1yr ago
It isn't a hypothesis which is hard to believe. I just haven't conducted any research into it, so I'm not in a position to comment on whether people meeting that description do, in fact, exist. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that they exist.
Folamh3
1yr ago
With you on points #1 and #2. You lost me on point #3. I don't believe that every neuroscientific study published in 2022 is automatically garbage, even if many (or most) of them are.
Folamh3
1yr ago
I am strongly opposed to all cosmetic surgical alterations of a child's genitalia. At least with gender reassignment surgery there's an argument to be made that by modifying a teenager's genitalia you're alleviating their emotional distress. We can debate the efficacy of the method for attenuating distress until the cows come home, but at least the method itself is actually defended on utilitarian grounds.
The same cannot be said of circumcision (male or female), which is justified on the basis of tradition and religious ritual alone. (Or occasionally with the explicit aim of attenuating sexual sensitivity and thereby reducing an individual's quality of life).
Folamh3
1yr ago
Also to note: I can't remember the entire demographic profile of the old place, but there are quite a few people here (myself included) who are neither American nor resident in the US, and whose political allegiances hence can't be cleanly mapped onto a Democrat-Republican axis.
Which would fit with my theory, if married women feel that, unlike single women, they don't need the government to protect them from harm when their hubby has his Smith and Wesson handy.
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