Folamh3
User ID: 1175
Lies, damned lies and the Washington Post
Substituting a common-sense statistical metric for a less obvious and intuitive one is almost always a red flag for deceit and obfuscation
With the introduction of its Notes feature, Substack appears to be making a pivot towards being a Twitter X competitor, the management perhaps having detected a gap in the market following the Elon Musk takeover. While one can question the wisdom of that decision, I commend them wholeheartedly for differentiating themselves from X in one key respect, namely avoiding the echo chamber dynamics which plague it and essentially every other major social media platform. Given how social media algorithms usually work, one would expect my Notes feed to be a nonstop deluge of gender-critical posts and anti-woke one-liners. On the contrary: in addition to plenty of nature photos and boomer dad jokes, I see the full spectrum of political opinions represented, from beliefs I wholeheartedly endorse to ones I would never consider in a lifetime. This is good, because being exposed to contrary opinions is healthy (“he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that” and all that), but also because I'm an argumentative, pedantic “to play devil's advocate” type by disposition, and find it hard to resist the opportunity to pull someone up on a weak argument or erroneous factual statement. (In a previous post when I described leftists as “ornery, confrontational types”, I meant it as a sincere compliment. It's possible, even common, to get so good at “reading the room” that you forget how to write.)
One such Note shared the graphic below, which claims that there has been a sharp increase in hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ community in schools across the United States, and that states with “anti-LGBTQ” laws have seen larger spikes than states without. The graphic was accompanied by a couple of paragraphs expounding that such an increase was both foreseen and intended by the homophobic, transphobic lawmakers behind the legislation.
The graphic itself is based on an article in the Washington Post from a few weeks ago. It features interviews with LGBTQ teenagers and their parents, describing the bullying and harassment they’ve experienced at their hands of their heteronormative peers, and contrasting these anecdotes with public statements from conservative politicians and lawmakers. The journalists more or less explicitly claim that LGBTQ people living in states with these kinds of legislation are at greater risk of being victimised because of their identity than LGBTQ people living elsewhere in the US.
I have a lot of thoughts on this article. The number of column inches dedicated to implying that Dagny “Nex” Benedict died as a direct result of transphobic bullying is unseemly (even if the article begrudgingly acknowledge that Benedict’s death was ultimately ruled a suicide).1 Some of the laws the journalists characterise as “anti-LGBTQ” are farcical. The most common type are those which “restrict trans student access to sports”, which is just a roundabout way of saying “forbids male students from competing in female sporting events”.2 Given that male athletes competing in female sporting events is manifestly, transparently unfair to anyone with even the most passing familiarity with sexual dimorphism, I support such laws without qualification. Oklahoma passed legislation in 2020 requiring that schools “teach that ‘a person’s sex is an immutable biological trait’ that cannot be changed”: given that this statement is unambigously true, I find the law no more objectionable than bans on public schools teaching creationism or geocentrism. The journalists clearly expect me to be horrified about a Virginia law requiring schools to notify parents whenever the school uses sexually explicit instructional material. Guys, seriously: if you want people to stop throwing the “groomer” accusation around left and right, you’re going to have to meet them halfway.
But my biggest problem with the article is its core thesis, as represented by the graphic above. I’m always deeply suspicious of statistical claims about “fastest growing” or “biggest increase”. Of all commonly quoted statistical observations, it seems like the most susceptible to random noise: if you’re measuring a value that started at a low baseline, some noise within normal variation can be truthfully (but misleadingly) claimed to represent a massive increase when it may be indicative of no such thing.
It also strikes me as a uniquely bad metric for the specific task of comparing which of two regions is the more dangerous. Imagine two neighbouring countries A and B, each with a population of 5 million. Last year, there were 100 murders in Country A and 5 in Country B. This year, there were 110 in Country A and 10 in Country B. It's unambiguously true that Country B’s murder rate increased by 100% year-on-year, while Country A’s “only” increased by 10%. It's also plainly true that you're 11 times more likely to get murdered in Country A than in Country B. If you were planning to book a holiday in either Country A or Country B and you were wondering which was safer, “murders per capita” will tell you far more than “rate of increase of the murder rate year-on-year”: there’s a very good reason that the term “the murder rate” refers to the former metric rather than the latter. In light of the above, if I read an article which tried to make Country B look bad by pointing out that its murder rate had increased by 10 times as much as Country A’s, I’d immediately wonder if the journalist had any undisclosed financial ties to Country A’s tourism board.
My suspicions thus raised, I decided to carry out a deep dive to check how accurate the narrative presented by the journalists was. Conveniently, the journalists based their statistical claims on FBI hate crimes data, which is a publicly available dataset. I downloaded the data and filtered it to only include hate crimes targeting the LGBT community and which occurred in the years 2015-22 (excluding 2020, as the journalists did). I then sorted these hate crimes based on whether they took place in a school or elsewhere, and whether or not they took place in a state with restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues.3 Armed with the necessary data, I was ready to jump in and test the article’s key claims and suggestions.
It will come as no surprise that what I found departs from the narrative presented by the article rather sharply.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools
To back up its claims, the article divides the fifty states of the union into those which have restrictive legislation concerning LGBTQ issues and those which don’t, which I shall hereafter refer to as Restrictive States and Non-Restrictive States, respectively. While you could be forgiven for assuming that all the Restrictive States are Republican strongholds (a misconception the journalists do little to discourage), the category includes a number of states with Democratic governors, including North Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota and Arizona, the latter two of which voted for Biden in 2020.
The article then sorts anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools (hereafter referred to as School Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes or SALHCs) based on whether they took place in Restrictive States or Non-Restrictive States. This is where they derive their headline claim that Restrictive States have seen a larger increase in SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States since 2015
That specific claim appears to be true. But at a glance, you’ll notice that Restrictive States report significantly fewer SALHCs than Non-Restrictive States in absolute terms, in both 2015-19 and 2021-22. (The authors are honest enough to acknowledge this, with caveats, which we’ll come back to later.)
I presumed that the higher rate in Non-Restrictive States was an artifact of the differing population sizes between the two regions, and that the two regions would have similar rates of SALHCs once you controlled for population; I even thought that Restrictive States might have more SALHCs per capita. But apparently not: according to the 2020 census, the two regions have a conveniently symmetric share of the total US population, with a difference of less than three million people. When taking this into account, not only are there more SALHCs in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States in absolute terms, but Non-Restrictive States have significantly more SALHCs per capita as well: 0.052/100k versus 0.037/100k, or about 40% higher in the former than the latter.
But maybe this is a population artifact of a different kind. Intuitively, I would expect that a higher proportion of the population openly identifies as LGBTQ in Non-Restrictive States when compared to Restrictive States. If anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are only reported as such if the victim openly identifies as LGBTQ, it stands to reason that regions with a large LGBTQ population will see higher rates of such hate crimes than regions with a smaller LGBTQ population, all things being equal. The journalists themselves gesture at this interpretation: “In addition, it’s possible more kids are public about their identities in more liberal states, creating more targets for bullies, said Lanae Erickson…”.
To check this, I looked at this report from UCLA’s Williams Institute, which estimates the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) living in each state. This is an imperfect metric, as SALHCs includes anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in kindergarten all the way up to 12th grade, and therefore most likely includes some number of hate crimes in which the victim was under 13. It’s also likely that that some of the people who were victims of hate crimes in a school were not themselves children or young adults (e.g. an openly gay schoolteacher’s car gets vandalised by homophobic students). The report is also from September 2020, and I imagine the number of young adults openly identifying as LGBT has changed significantly since then. These caveats aside, I think the estimate is good enough for our purposes.
Unfortunately for the journalists, not only do more LGBT young adults reside in Restrictive States than in Non-Restrictive States (a difference of about 50,000 individuals), but Non-Restrictive States still report more SALHCs per capita than Restrictive States. The gap is even wider than in our previous table: 8.866/100k versus 5.969/100k, a difference of 49%.
I really don’t know that I’m saying anything terribly controversial here. Put yourself in the shoes of the parent of an LGBTQ child. Obviously you’re going to be concerned about your child getting bullied in school, and would prefer to send them to a school where they won’t be bullied on account of their sexuality or gender identity (or at all, for that matter). When assessing which school to send your child to, which of these two metrics would be most important to you: the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying at the school per capita, or how big an increase the school has seen in the rate of homophobic or transphobic bullying over the last few years? I find it hard to imagine any circumstance in which a sensible, caring parent would prefer, all things being equal, to send their child to a school which had a high rate of homophobic bullying over a school which had a dramatically lower rate of homophobic bullying, but which had recently seen a significant increase.
In fairness to the journalists, the article isn’t quite as one-sided as I’m making out, and they were balanced enough to include one interview with a California teenager who’s been bullied because of their gender identity. But there’s something so dishonest about including this anecdote alongside paragraph after paragraph of editorialising about how cruel the legislation is in Virginia, Oklahoma and Mississippi - without even acknowledging that California reports about three times as many SALHCs per capita than Virginia, Oklahoma or Mississippi.
Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes more generally
Zooming out from SALHCs to hate crimes against the LGBTQ community generally is no more favourable to the journalists’ position, and here we veer sharply from the realm of “claims which are technically true, but misleading” to “claims which are outright false”. The journalists write “The FBI data shows serious incidents against LGBTQ+ people are on the rise, particularly in the more than two dozen states that have passed laws targeting LGBTQ+ students or education.” The word “particularly” implies that the states which have enacted legislation saw steeper increases in anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes than the states which did not. Note that, unlike the section above, this sentence refers to serious incidents against LGBTQ people in general, not just incidents in K-12 schools.
My analysis of the data shows the exact opposite: between 2015-22, states without restrictive anti-LGBTQ laws have seen a steeper increase in anti-LGBTQ hate crimes than states with such legislation. This isn’t just a statistical fudge, this is an unambigous falsehood.
For completeness’s sake, I will also calculate anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita in the two regions. In 2021-22, Non-Restrictive States reported more than 4 times as many anti-LGBTQ hate crimes per capita than Restrictive States.
… and per capita LGBTQ.4
To sum up:
When comparing states with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education with states without such legislation:
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, in absolute terms
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita
- The latter region reports more hate crimes against LGBTQ people in schools than the former, per capita that identifies as LGBTQ
- Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people have significantly increased in both regions of the US from 2015 to 2022, but have increased far faster in the latter region than the former
- However, hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people which took place in schools have increased faster in the former region than the latter
And what is the reader intended to take away from all of the above? That it’s uniquely difficult to be a young LGBTQ person living in a state with legislation governing bathrooms, sports and sex education.
Conclusion
I feel more than a little resentful for having to go to the trouble of carrying out all this statistical analysis, because I know I’m double-jobbing. I’m extremely confident that the journalists who wrote this story have already carried most or all of the calculations listed above. They pitched this great story to their editor about a surge in hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people following the passing of anti-trans legislation. They went into this dataset with high hopes, confident that it would back up their thesis, plain as day. Then they dug into it and found, to their horror, that the data painted precisely the opposite story. I can almost see their brows furrowing in confusion and panic as they go down their wishlist of statistical metrics in order of preference, discovering that none of them paint the desired picture. Hate crimes more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes in schools more common in Restrictive States - nope. Hate crimes rising faster in Restrictive States - nope.
But they can’t just kill the story, not when they’ve already written hundreds of words and secured interviews with an impressive collection of intelligent, articulate teenagers. Without hard data to back up the testimony of the interviewees, the story is relegated to mere anecdote - it’s not serious political journalism, it’s just a culture piece, a human interest story. So instead, they spent ages digging through this dataset, twisting it, contorting it, pleading with it to give them any relevant-ish metric which would back up their narrative. And this was the best metric they could find. Stories like this don’t exist because of honest mistakes: they only come into being through deceit and manipulation.
As I mentioned above, the journalists were honest enough to acknowledge that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes in schools are more common in Non-Restrictive States than Restrictive States, in absolute terms. They’re quick to explain away this inconvenient finding by claiming that it’s a reporting artifact. Hate crimes targeting LGBTQ people are more common in Restrictive States, they argue, but are more likely to go unreported because of a culture of silence, whereas LGBTQ people who’ve been victimised because of their identity in Non-Restrictive States are more likely to report it to the relevant authorities.
I’m sure this is a contributing factor to the differing rates of hate crimes reported in the two regions (although I very much doubt it’s sufficient to explain the disparity on its own). At the same time - come on. Does anyone really doubt that if the data had told the story that the journalists wanted it to tell - that anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are more common in Restrictive States than Non-Restrictive States - they wouldn’t be shouting that from the rooftops? No way in hell would they be claiming that a higher rate of reported hate crimes in a region is good, actually, if the shoe had been on the other foot. But the data didn’t give them the answer they wanted, so they’re forced to play this tiresome game of “Anti-LGBTQ hate crimes are higher in blue states than in red states - and that’s a good thing.”
Why does this article exist? Personally, I very much doubt that any would-be criminal hears a story on the radio about his state congress banning male students from competing in female sporting events, and immediately thinks to himself “Boy howdy, time to beat up some queers!” I doubt that even the journalists really think that any kind of causal relationship exists between legislation like this and the incidence of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes, so why use such a weak argument when the data don’t support your conclusions? I suspect that they’re practising what Scott Alexander calls fake consequentialism. The journalists obviously think that trans girls should be allowed to compete in female sporting events, but this is a very difficult policy to defend: doing so requires one to deny the very concept of sexual dimorphism and differences in strength and speed between males and females (something which is obvious to toddlers) - the denial of which makes you look like a crazy person. Instead, rather than getting into a debate over whether males competing in female sporting events is fair (which they’re sure to lose, because it isn’t), they shift the conversation to the consequentialist claim that banning male students from competing in female sporting events causes a spike in hate crimes against the LGBTQ community. But as I hope I’ve made abundantly clear, even this argument doesn’t check out.
Maybe I’m mind-reading, maybe this isn’t what the journalists are doing at all. But regardless of their motivations, they made at least one provably false assertion and a batch of true-but-misleading ones. This article is an insult to their readers’ intelligence, it’s bad, and they should feel bad.
1 A police officer interviewed Benedict in the hospital after the bathroom fight which was initially cited (erroneously) as the cause of death. The bodycam footage reveals that a) Benedict admits to having started the fight; b) Benedict freely responds to the name “Dagny” and seems entirely at ease being referred to with female pronouns; and c) Benedict never requests to be addressed as “Nex”, or referred to with gender-neutral pronouns. This bodycam footage was released several weeks prior to the Post’s article, making the journalists’ decision to use Benedict’s death as an example of the harms wrought by transphobic bullying all the more distasteful (particularly given that certain journalists working for the Post almost certainly knew that Benedict’s father is currently serving time for repeatedly raping her as a prepubescent child).
2 The journalists know full well that their readers will hear about laws which “restrict trans student access to sports” and will think “oh my god, trans high schoolers in Mississippi are actually banned from playing sports!” as opposed to “male students in Mississippi may not compete in female sporting events, regardless of how they identify”. No matter how many times I encounter “respectable” journalists brazenly attempting to hoodwink their readers like this, I never feel any less insulted or disgusted. Truly, have they no shame?
3 To ensure I was looking at the same basic dataset as that on which the journalist based their findings, I performed a quick sense-check by comparing the total number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes which were committed in schools according to my dataset and according to the figure cited in the article: the two figures were almost identical. Why “almost”? Well, the Post article asserts that 251 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2022. According to my dataset, the figure was 245. I don’t think the discrepancy is an error on the part of the journalists, and assume the figure of 251 was accurate at the time of writing. I think what happened is that the FBI’s database is constantly being updated, and some crimes are either removed from the dataset (e.g. the victim withdraws their complaint) or reclassified as something other than a hate crime (e.g. further investigation determines that the perpetrator of the crime was not motivated by homophobia). In other cases the figure in my dataset matches the figure cited in the article exactly e.g. I found 114 anti-LGBTQ hate crimes were committed in schools or colleges in 2018, just as the journalists did.
4 The figures in the third column are the sum of the number of LGBT young adults (aged 13-17) in each state, and the number of LGBT adults in each state. The latter figures are drawn from a separate report by the Williams Institute, which was published in December 2023 and is hence likely more up-to-date than their report on LGBT young adults. This report contained some surprising findings, particularly that, as a share of the population, more adults in the South identify as LGBT than in any other region of the US. Not surprisingly, California has the largest adult LGBT population of any state, so we don’t need to retire those jokes about San Francisco just yet.
Folamh3
23d ago
A British man named Dave McConnell was arrested, charged and convicted for misgendering someone, although his conviction was overturned on appeal.
Please don't move the goalposts and say "well his conviction was overturned, you're tilting at windmills". The process may not have been the punishment in McConnell's case, but it was certainly punishing.
Folamh3
10d ago
See also this article. TL;DR: National Book Award winners (and American novelists in general, by extension) used to come from all walks of life, but in recent years winners and nominees have been dominated almost to the exclusion of all else by college-educated novelists who have completed MFAs. This has the effect of making recent acclaimed literary novels insular and hermetic, with little of the grit, colour or life experience of literary novels from decades past.
she is very much a part of a faction that does use rhetoric of that level of extremity (including onstage at national political conventions), and she very much supports and promotes (through valuable social media links and personal defenses and endorsements on her hugely popular accounts, through partnerships and collaborations, and by selectively endorsing and promoting the rhetoric of) people who famously do express those extreme views.
Could you give some specific examples of people with extreme transphobic views who've been supported or signal-boosted by Rowling?
they are all part of building a worldview in which trans women are just perverted men intentionally trying to prey on women and destroy them,
All of them? No, of course not. Some of them, particularly bad actors taking advantage of the laughably short-sighted policy of self-ID? Yes, indisputably.
She wrote a whole book about a serial killer pretending to be trans to prey on women in women's spaces.
This is a complete falsehood. She wrote a book (Troubled Blood) featuring a cisgendered serial killer who disguises himself with a fur coat (and sometimes a wig) in order to appear unthreatening from a distance. The novel never suggests that the serial killer is trans, or a transvestite, or pretending to be trans. Nor does he dress as a woman to gain illegitimate access to "women's spaces": he abducts drunk women on the street and bundles them into the back of his van. The book isn't even about him: he's just one of many suspects investigated by the protagonist, and the real perpetrator is someone else. Even the Guardian acknowledged that this description of the book was inaccurate.
For years my assumption is that most of the people calling JK Rowling transphobic have just heard about it secondhand in a game of character assassination Chinese whispers. The fact that your descriptions of her writing are patently false is doing little to persuade me that this assumption is inaccurate.
if you actually want to know it doesn't take me to do the googling for you.
This sounds like you're worried you won't find what you're looking for.
It may be related to Geeks, MOPs and sociopaths. When video games were a niche interest, the only people making them were nerds who were passionate about what they were making and had a vision in mind. Over time, the medium swelled into a multi-billion dollar industry, which attracted a bunch of people who didn't care about the video games for their own sake and were only in it for the money/as a stepping stone in their careers/using video games as a vehicle to advance a social agenda/all of the above. I don't know if this is true of video games, but it is definitely true of video game journalism.
This is not to say that passion is a necessary component of great writing (no one is more passionate about their art than some dork writing Sonic fan fiction), but a clumsy story written by someone who cares about what they're writing at least has an endearing quality compared to a mediocre story written by someone who only cares about the paycheque.
Well, think of it this way. You leave your wife, and immediately start dating this glamorous and sexy Italian. During the relationship, your girlfriend becomes an outspoken #MeToo advocate, decrying a culture of silence in which sexual assault is entirely normalised. You support her in her activism (which has the side benefit of raising her profile dramatically, but whatever) - and take public pot shots against Quentin Tarantino. Meanwhile, largely unknown to the public at large, your glamorous girlfriend is facing her own accusations of sexual assault. She begs you to help her out, so you offer her the services of your lawyer and pay the complainant money to keep quiet. So now you have to cope with the cognitive dissonance of being a prominent activist around sexual abuse in Hollywood - while also paying hush money to an actor who claims to have been sexually assaulted (while underage) by a powerful Hollywood figure who was well over a decade his senior.
Everything's tipping away just fine, you try to put it out of your mind. But over time, you start to notice that your glamorous and sexy girlfriend is becoming more and more distant, missing your calls, won't put out half as often as she used to. Finally it dawns on you - she never really loved you, she was using you for your money so she could pay off this dude she raped. When public photos emerge of her dancing with another man and she doesn't even try to console you or tell you "don't worry baby, he's just a nerd" and essentially just tells you to fuck off and stop being such a big baby - well, I can't even imagine how he must have felt. He'd paid a victim of sexual assault to keep quiet, all to appease a woman - a woman who doesn't like him, who fucks other men behind his back and doesn't even respect him enough to hide it from him or from the public at large. The combination of cognitive dissonance, guilt, shame and humiliation could be enough to drive anyone over the edge - even someone without a history of massive alcohol and substance abuse.
ethnonations with a history of genocide (Kitos War) and who fondly remember their nation previously committing genocide in their Holy Text should be super extra scrutinized for potential genocidal acts
I agree wholeheartedly with most of the points in this post, but this one in particular seems like a bit of a reach. We routinely criticise woke people for holding white people personally accountable for crimes that their great-great-great-grandparents were maybe involved in. There has to be some kind of statute of limitations.
'Given that african savages are manifestly, transparently incapable of civilization and self-rule, it's dishonest to say that enslaving them is a racist policy'.
If you mean to imply that "the average male is stronger and faster than 99% of females" is as obviously ridiculous an assertion as "African savages are incapable of civilization and self-rule" - well, I don't know what to tell you. That you're wrong? That you're exactly as wrong as the last time as we talked about this stuff, when you offered some extremely weak arguments in favour of the hypothesis that "trans women have no competitive advantage over females", I pointed out (at length) how weak your arguments were, you said you were going to reply and then didn't?
Yeah these are anti-LGBT laws dawg. You can claim that they are anti-lgbt and justified, if that's the hill you want to die on. But writing a law with the sole purpose of restricting a right from a specific group is 'manifestly' anti-that-group.
To be pedantic, these laws mostly seem anti-T, not anti-LGBT. The only ones which maybe could be classified as anti-LGB are the ones about sex ed, and even then it's a reach. Good luck explaining to me how gay men are negatively impacted by bans on male athletes competing in female sporting events, or lesbians by bans on males using female bathrooms. There are quite a few lesbians who support laws banning males from using female bathrooms, if you haven't already noticed.
I'm curious where and when it was decided that everyone has the "right" to compete in sporting events which accord with that person's claimed gender identity. On the contrary: everyone has the right to compete in sporting events for their sex, and legislation of this type does nothing to restrict the ability of trans women or girls from exercising that right.
If commitment to being an "ally" requires me to pretend that there's no innate difference between male and female athletic ability, and all of the female athletes complaining about being ruthlessly outcompeted by male athletes who "discovered" that they're trans all of five minutes ago - those uppity women just need to stop whining and Git Gud: then yes, this is the hill I want to die on, thanks for asking. The idea that any policy which is marketed as pro-LGBTQ is automatically a good policy is such a silly and juvenile way of looking at the world.
And while I suspect it's just true that police in those state are actually less likely to punish you - or will punish you less harshly - for that type of crime, I'm confident that a good portion of the people who want to commit those crimes will hear about their local government passing anti-lgbt laws and take that as a sign that the law is on their side and will treat them kindly if they go ahead.
Curious, then, that states which didn't pass anti-LGBT laws saw far greater spikes in anti-LGBT hate crimes during the period under discussion than states which did. As I went to great pains to demonstrate in the post that you're replying to.
Folamh3
18d ago
Whenever I hear about the latest "scandal" about the use of generative AI in artwork, I'm reminded of how, in 1989, The Abyss was disqualified from the Best Visual Effects category in the Oscars because the effects were CG. We're going to look back in ten years and wonder what all the fuss was about.
As I said, and you quoted:
I edited the comment after posting, the relevant sentence in my comment reads "The novel never suggests that the serial killer is trans, or a transvestite, or pretending to be trans."
The narrative of 'people claiming to be trans are just perverts presenting as women in order to prey on women by getting them to let their guard down' is very much a major blood libel against trans women in general, and it's exactly the situation you describe as appearing in the novel.
Take the L. Your description of the content of the novel was inaccurate in many ways (it wasn't "about" a serial killer pretending to be trans, and the serial killer in question doesn't dress as a woman to gain access to women's spaces). It would be nice if you could acknowledge that.
Folamh3
29d ago
I mean, the Arabs do the same thing. Irish rebel songs are also a thing. It doesn't seem like it's that unusual.
Folamh3
10d ago
but I don't believe him.
Then your hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
The first example to come to mind is Chinatown, widely considered Roman Polanski's best film, which he himself said that he took on as a commercial project only, as a favour to Jack Nicholson.
Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo were paid by the line.
To quote TV Tropes (I've never read Pet Sematary but my understanding is that it's considered one of King's best novels):
Pet Sematary: While it was marketed as "the book so scary Stephen King didn't want to publish it," the real truth is that King wanted out of his Doubleday contract due to the publisher holding onto a huge backlog of his royalties. Doubleday refused to give the money back unless King delivered two more books. Having previously shelved the story for being too nihilistic for his liking, King threw the manuscript at them to settle half of the contract.
The Money, Dear Boy article includes the following examples:
- John Ford (6 Oscars, widely considered one of the greatest directors ever) 'repeatedly maintained over the years that moviemaking was just a way for him to make a living, which he stuck with because it paid well and he found it easy.'
- 'Don Siegel once said of his work "Most of my pictures, I'm sorry to say, are about nothing. Because I'm a whore. I work for money. It's the American way."'
- 'Anthony Burgess basically belched out A Clockwork Orange in a matter of weeks to pay off some debts. He regretted its glorification of violence and was annoyed by the way it overshadowed the rest of his work, causing quite a bit of Creator Backlash.' [I will grant that the film adaptation is more critically acclaimed than the source novel; on the other hand, the source novel is the only thing Burgess is known for in the popular imagination.]
- 'Orson Scott Card, a prolific author of fiction in genres ranging from science fiction to pious fiction, once answered the question, "Why do you write? What is your inspiration?" with the answer, "I write because nobody will pay me to do anything else. My inspiration is that from time to time we run out of money."'
- 'Thomas Hardy always wanted to be a poet and said that poetry has a "supreme place in literature". However, he wrote novels only because, in his early years, he would not make a living as a poet. With the success of Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure (not to mention the latter novel's very harsh reception upon publication), he returned to the less-lucrative career of poetry and spent the rest of his life writing poems.'
There are dozens more.
Folamh3
23d ago
Plus, Tyson admits wrong doing and did the time for it
Three years seems like a slap on the wrist for raping someone so severely they end up in the emergency room.
While Allen gets the 'it was a different time' treatment...
Really? In 2019, Amazon Studios cancelled their contract with him. In 2020, his publisher cancelled his memoir in response to public outcry. A year ago I was on a bus with my girlfriend telling her how I thought the allegations against him were unfounded (based on this article by Cathy Young), and a woman turned around in her seat and stared at me in shock. The consensus in my social circle is that he's a paedophile who escaped the long arm of the law because of his money and connections.
(and I do have a job and a family)
Fascinating how you have seemingly limitless time to expound your opinions, but the second you get any pushback on them, all of a sudden you're far too busy to spend time on something as trivial as defending the opinions and factual statements you voluntarily chose to make. And it's not even the first time you've fallen back on this excuse: "I've responded to about 20 long replies in the last 6 hours, and I also have a job and stuff."
Anything to avoid taking the L and admitting "you know what, maybe my synopsis of this novel I haven't read didn't accurately describe the plot and characters, mea culpa" or "actually I really was misinformed about the state of the evidence regarding the structure of trans women's brains, thanks for disabusing me of my misconceptions" or "oh, people actually have been criminally convicted for misgendering, thanks for pointing it out".
I frankly don't give a fuck about one person like this and what they did or didn't say
If you didn't give a fuck about Rowling and what she did and didn't say, it sure is weird to dedicate no less than six entire paragraphs in this comment and two in this one to her opinions and the motivations behind them. Like seriously, this comment is 650 words long, and 480 of those words are specifically about Rowling and hardly mention the broader gender-critical movement. Then multiple people point out that several of the factual assertions you're making in these comments are provably, demonstrably false, and you change the subject: "it doesn't matter what Rowling said, I'm talking about the broader faction - the point I was making wasn't even about Rowling actually". This is the same kind of facile goalpost-moving as "it doesn't matter if this specific hate crime was staged, it started a conversation!"
I took the OP's question as one of asking "among the subset of games which tell linear narrative stories with plots, characters, dialogue etc., have these stories declined in quality over time?" I think that's a fundamentally different question to the question of whether games without such narratives have improved or declined in quality. In Frostpunk, there is no "narrative": the narrative is the player's experience in the game, enabled by the mechanics. It's the difference between a novel and a DnD campaign. Everyone intuitively understands that Frostpunk is trying to do something fundamentally different from what Call of Duty is trying to do, at a mechanical and experiential level - it's confusing that "success" in game design is invariably described in reference to how "fun" the game is, when this descriptor hides more than it illuminates.
And maybe this is part of the story: maybe at the start of the PS4 era, all the smart game designers in the indie space collectively realised that trying to use video games to tell stories the same way that books or films do was a lost cause, and focused instead on crafting organic, player-directed simulations with more intuitive interfaces and better production values compared to their 90s forebears. This would mean that the last ten years of AAA games still doing the lame "Hollywood action movie but you're the main character" thing isn't evidence that video games have lost their way or are on the verge of another crash: it just means that the lumbering AAA game studios haven't cottoned to the new hot trend, which is intentionally narrative-light organic player-directed simulations. If this were the case, it would be a fascinating narrative to describe the last decade and a half.
The term "incel" is generally hurled at three categories of men:
- Men who are sexually frustrated (the literal meaning of the term), who may resent women as a consequence
- Men who are not sexually frustrated, but harbour lingering resentment towards women owing to past periods in their life in which they were
- Men whose political opinions depart from progressive/woke orthodoxy in key ways, specifically with regard to gender politics
I know because I fit into the third category (certainly not the first, and I would like to think not the second), and have had the "incel" epithet hurled at me dozens of times.
Now, obviously it's ridiculous to assume that any man who departs from woke/progressive orthodoxy is either sexually frustrated or harbours a lingering resentment towards women as a group. I don't think I hold the opinions that I do because of resentment towards women. But I'm also not going to deny the existence of men who fit in category 2: they exist, I've interacted with them, I've spoken to them in person.
And what's more, even if these men only arrived at their opinions because of their lingering resentment towards women as a group, that doesn't in and of itself mean that their opinions are wrong, or their grievances lacking in merit - that would be a textbook example of Bulverism. Bob's underlying psychological motivation for believing in X has no bearing on whether or not X is true. I'm not required to deny the existence of resentful misogynistic men in order to make the case for why e.g. female underrepresentation in STEM is not the moral outrage many feminists seem to think it is.
Spin it back the other way around: it could be literally 100% true that Alice is only a socialist because she feels resentful of how unsuccessful she is, and that in and of itself wouldn't tell us anything about whether or not socialism is a preferable economic system to capitalism.
I want to do a sense-check to see if I agree with your core hypothesis. Here are a list of video games which I consider particularly well-written:
- Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines (2004)
- Spec Ops: The Line (2012)
- Soma (2015)
- Max Payne (2001)
- Metal Gear Solid: 1 (1998), 2 (2001), 3 (2003)
- System Shock 2 (1999)
- BioShock (2007)
- BioShock Infinite (2013)
- Portal (2007)
- Psychonauts (2005)
- Detention (2016)
- Oxenfree (2016)
- Gone Home (2013)
- The Stanley Parable (2013)
- Bastion (2011)
- Silent Hill 2 (2001)
- Far Cry 3 (2012)
- Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (1999)
- Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (1996)
I count three games which came out in the past ten years, ten which came out in the ten years prior to that, and eight which came out in the ten years prior to that. This suggests that stories in games were finding their feet in the PS1 era, achieved a creative peak in the late PS2-PS3 era, and have been declining in quality since the onset of the PS4 era, with most of the interesting creative stuff happening in the indie space. However, this is a biased sample, as all of my gaming is done on PC and prior to a few months ago my laptop wasn't powerful enough to run any game which came out in the past five years.
I read that article, and the difference in skin tone as an explanation for differential treatment was the first thing that occurred to me too. (Less directly relevant was an example I've mentioned several times, wherein Michael Richards' career was completely and irreparably destroyed after yelling some racial slurs onstage; meanwhile, ten people were killed at a Travis Scott gig in part due to his onstage behaviour and disregard for the audience's safety - and he's still touring and recording music.)
However, Freddie cited some other examples of celebrities who evaded repercussions for bad behaviour, including Michael Fassbender (which was news to me) and Bill Murray. I thought also of:
- Charlie Sheen, who still enjoys a similar "lovable meme-y rogue" reputation despite numerous accusations of domestic abuse and almost certainly knowingly (or recklessly) infecting sexual partners with HIV
- Conor McGregor, who is successfully transitioning from sports into star-studded movies despite numerous convictions for assault, and rape accusations
- R. Kelly, who evaded legal and social repercussions for his crimes for decades
Also mentioned in the comments was Chris Brown.
Someone in the comments suggested a prosaic explanation: jocks (Tyson, Sheen, Scott, Fassbender, Brown, McGregor, Kelly) and class clowns (Murray) can almost always avoid consequences for their bad behaviour. Nerds (Allen, Richards, half the men on the Shitty Media Men list, that guy who killed himself after Zoe Quinn smeared him) cannot - even if, like Allen, they've never been convicted or even charged with a crime.
I'm struggling to think of counter-examples. On the "jocks who faced consequences" side, the only one that comes to mind is Armie Hammer, who's maybe a noncentral example purely because of how weird the allegations against him were (as opposed to the more prosaic accusations of domestic abuse and/or rape levelled against the other men on the list). On the "nerds who didn't face consequences" side, Freddie points to John Lasseter - unquestionably a nerd, but maybe being a director rather an actor kept him out of the limelight (and the accusations against him, while inexcusable, were small beer compared to Tyson). Rumours about Dan Schneider only finally seem to be coming to social fruition within the last ten minutes. Jimmy Saville and Rolf Harris were only exposed posthumously and in their eighties respectively, despite rumours circulating about them for decades in their lifetimes. Andy Dick has been known to be a creep, sex pest and druggy for decades, but maybe he's enough of a class clown to get away with it.
Folamh3
24d ago
Someone needs to do a proper detailed meta-analysis on this question. The evidence I've seen has not been remotely favourable to the idea that puberty blockers and/or HRT bring trans women's athletic performance down to within a typical female range:
the International Olympic Committee (IOC) determined criteria by which a transgender woman may be eligible to compete in the female category, requiring total serum testosterone levels to be suppressed below 10 nmol/L for at least 12 months prior to and during competition. Whether this regulation removes the male performance advantage has not been scrutinized. Here, we review how differences in biological characteristics between biological males and females affect sporting performance and assess whether evidence exists to support the assumption that testosterone suppression in transgender women removes the male performance advantage and thus delivers fair and safe competition. We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10–50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.
Agreed that I will never be persuaded that it's fair to allow males who haven't suppressed testosterone etc. to compete in female sporting events.
Folamh3
7d ago
This entails that men and women who refuse to live up to these ideals are disadvantaged in various ways.
I would substitute "fail" rather than "refuse". No man chooses to be 5'6".
Folamh3
23d ago
The New York Post has an article on it:
The book also chronicles his “last, painful days” when he saw photos of Argento, now 47, dancing with journalist Hugo Clément at a hotel in Rome, the last time they communicated.
“I am okay,” Bourdain texted Argento, who he began dating in 2016, after he viewed the photographs.
...
“I am not spiteful,” the text continued. “I am not jealous that you have been with another man. I do not own you. You are free. As I said. As I promised. As I truly meant. But you were careless. You were reckless with my heart. My life.”
“I can’t take this,” she messaged him back. To which he replied, “Is there anything I can do?”
“Stop busting my balls,” the Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things star responded.
“OK,” he typed.
Hours later, Bourdain hung himself.
Whenever I watch a film directed by John Carney, I'm left with this very unsettling feeling. Watching his films makes me feel like he's never actually met another human being in his life, that his entire knowledge of what people are like comes from watching other people's movies.
This wasn't always true of Christopher Nolan (the performances in Memento are remarkably naturalistic in spite of the contrived plot), but has become the case over time. No one in Inception, Interstellar, Tenet or Oppenheimer talks or acts like a real person (particularly damning in the latter case, given that 95% of the characters are based on real people who actually existed).
Folamh3
24d ago
If you're so confident that cis women are handily winning competitions against trans women, it shouldn't be so hard for you to cite some specific examples of some to win me over. I notice that you haven't cited any, just like the last time this topic came up.
I remain unconvinced that the burden of proof rests with gender-critical people to demonstrate that male athletes do have an essentially insurmountable competitive advantage over female, as opposed to with TRAs to demonstrate that they don't. TRAs, after all, are the ones demanding that male athletes be allowed to compete in female sporting events. Normally it's the people who want to radically change institutions who are required to demonstrate that their proposed changes are good ideas.
Folamh3
24d ago
Strictly speaking, I called the idea that these laws are "anti-LGBT" farcical: only trans people are impacted by bans on male students competing in female sporting events, not gay men, not bisexuals, not lesbians. I moreover argued that describing such laws as "restricting trans student access to sports" is knowingly misleading: trans students are not being prevented from competing, they're just being prevented from competing in opposite-sex events.
When discussing pharmaceutical and surgical interventions in the treatment of gender dysphoria, the gender-critical among us often draw parallels with bodily integrity identity disorder. This is a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person experiences profound distress because of the presence of one or more of their limbs, and requests to have these limbs amputated to alleviate said distress (or tries to amputate them themselves). Colloquially, one might say that people with this condition are able-bodied but identify as disabled.
Given that no one thinks that surgical amputation is the correct treatment for this psychiatric disorder, we gender-criticals argued, it follows that surgical intervention is the wrong approach for people with gender dysphoria. If it's wrong to amputate a mentally ill's person's arm just because they say it's causing them distress, how can it be right to do the same for a penis or breast?
Sadly, one man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens, the medical establishment has noted the parallels, and it is coming to a rather different conclusion:
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured. It doesn't matter if the Tavistock is shuttered and there's a rash of lawsuits directed at youth gender clinics in the US: if you're a medic who's internalised (or been made to internalise) the gender ideology worldview, the implications of that worldview and the role of the medical establishment it affirms have far-reaching implications in medical domains unrelated to gender medicine itself. At this point I honestly can't rule out psychiatrists prescribing anorexics appetite suppressants to aid them in achieving their "bodily attainment goals".
*Other than why the fuck are Canadian doctors so keen to help their fellow citizens maim or destroy their bodies??!!
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