FtttG
User ID: 1175
Many experts serving on governing bodies for their respective sports support trans women competing in the female divisions.
FtttG
4mo ago
In my local Slate Star Codex WhatsApp group, one guy recently advocated for technocracy over democracy, arguing that our society would function better if educated experts made all the decisions. I strongly disagreed, arguing that a) expertise in a given empirical field doesn't qualify you to make normative decisions - these are separate magisteria; and b) within their own narrow domain, educated experts may have a more accurate model of how the world works than the lay person, but educated experts are also disproportionately likely to endorse a range of deluded beliefs that most uneducated people do not suffer from. When pressed for examples of what deluded beliefs I was thinking of, the first I offered was "the idea that the delta in athletic performance between males and females is narrow enough that it can be fair for a trans woman to compete in a female sporting event".
Unsurprisingly, some people in the chat pushed back and insisted that there was no way this belief was a delusion, thereby proving my point.
where one third of population of Gaza believe that Israel has less than 500k inhabitants.
The apparently widespread belief among Palestinians that Israel could ever be defeated militarily (or indeed completely exterminated) suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Away on holiday from the 15th-18th, then sick as a dog from the 19th-22nd from which I haven't fully recovered even this morning. Girlfriend said it was the sickest she's seen me since we started going out, and she was right. No fault of mine I made essentially no progress on my NaNoWriMo project since this day last week.
FtttG
4mo ago
More than halfway through Kiki de Montparnasse. It's okay. I don't like any of the characters though.
FtttG
4mo ago
Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.
I described something similar here, a Straussian reading of a novel I haven't read and don't intend to.
FtttG
4mo ago
The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.
I saw more than one meme claiming that Adolescence was Netflix's adaptation of the Southport stabbings, but assumed that couldn't possibly be the case given how recent it was. Good to know I was right.
FtttG
4mo ago
By "playing the hits", I mean repeating the same talking points he made during his first campaign and his first term.
FtttG
4mo ago
Sure. But on the other hand, Trump has a propensity to verbalise every stray thought that crosses his mind unrivalled in politics domestic and foreign. He suffers from terminal logorrhea. It's hardly an original insight to say that he's a showman first and a politician second, and every good showman knows you can't just play the hits over and over again - you have to spice up your act with new material. Maybe he never discussed this in his first term, but there were lots of things he talked about doing during his first term (and beforehand) that he never got around to. Lots of the things he's done have been outrageous, but I don't think you've presented a very convincing case for why it's likely that invading the US's neighbour will be one of them.
The biggest mystery to me has always been why corpos bent the knee in the first place. An angry twitter mob consisting of people who will A) Forget about the story in a week no matter what you do
After a decade of Twitter mobs exploding at the main character du jour, we know how it plays out now. But in 2014, thousands of people suddenly coming out of the woodwork demanding that you fire employee X was a relatively new experience, and one they were obviously struggling to grapple with: there was an obvious fear that failing to capitulate could gut their brand reputation and share value. After a decade of these blow-ups, companies have started to cotton on to the fact that these mobs are ultimately impotent. The mobs can kick up a stink on Twitter, they can get journalists who use Twitter to publish sympathetic articles damning the company - but I'm not aware of a single instance of a Twitter mob eventually snowballing into a genuine boycott from consumers at large (except Bud Light, as noted by @FCfromSSC below - and even then, that wasn't a case of "one of this company's employees said something dubiously offensive in their private life, therefore we're boycotting the entire company").
FtttG
4mo ago
I was halfway through the comment before I looked up at the username. He strikes again.
FtttG
4mo ago
As we've seen in other areas, Trump 2 has already been radically different than Trump 1.
I think this proves too much. Just because Trump's second term is different from his first doesn't mean his past behaviour is of no use to us in predicting what he'll do next. If I said that I expected Trump to begin a massive campaign of carbon divestment starting in 2026, you said that nothing in his political career to date suggested that was likely to happen, I don't think you'd be very impressed if I countered with "well, Trump 2 is radically different from Trump 1".
I also notice that the argument directly contradicts point 5 of your post - why is Trump's past as a real estate developer of greater relevance to what he'll do next as POTUS than the last time he was POTUS?
A thing he did not do before, and especially not this much.
How many times has he publicly floated the idea of annexing Canada since assuming office?
Hypothetically, if Canada did become the 51st state, would I be right in saying it would be the largest state in the union by landmass by quite a huge margin? Or am I too Mercator-projection pilled?
Seems like a terrible idea from a Republican standpoint: adding ~30 million new voters to your electorate, 80%+ of whom can be assumed to be reliable Democrat voters.
Also worth pointing out that in his first term, Trump became the first POTUS in decades not to start any new wars, so his track record is pretty respectable on that front at least. Unless we're talking about peaceful annexation, whatever that might look like.
I got my swivel chair from JYSK (https://jysk.ie/). It was a model called Dalmose which appears to have been discontinued, although they have others that are similar. It only cost me €60. My girlfriend uses it more than I do as she's fully remote and she's always found it very comfortable. Mesh back like you requested.
FtttG
4mo ago
Out of interest, why are you linking to an archived version of Scott's post? The article is still up on his old website.
FtttG
4mo ago
This article by Richard Hanania is very relevant. He argues that when comparing net inward migration across the fifty states, Americans' revealed preferences consistently show that they would rather live in more economically libertarian states than not.
FtttG
4mo ago
Here I go feeling smug again.
Out of curiosity, what was the content of the comment you were replying to? It's been deleted.
FtttG
4mo ago
Religions, and society, absolutely gatekeep religious affiliation wherever you accrue benefits from that religious affiliation. Traditionally, vaccine exemptions and Conscientious Objector draft status required a showing of genuine religious faith that had been consistently practiced for a period of time. Getting married Catholic requires you to submit your baptismal paperwork and go to pre-Cana classes.
Fair point. I was thinking more of e.g. a celebrity who announces that they are Buddhist after reading an article about it in a magazine.
By and large, the only people who are familiar with the tenets of gender ideology are affluent Westerners (and only a subset of them endorse it). For the overwhelming majority of female people outside of the West, the question "do you identify as a woman?" would be an incoherent question, analogous to asking a medieval peasant if he stores his documents locally or on the cloud. I think a significant proportion of people, when asked a yes-or-no question they don't understand, would simply answer "no".
Is your position then that the category "woman" affirmatively includes all males who describe themselves as such, but affirmatively excludes anywhere from tens of millions to hundreds of millions of unambiguously female people around the world who don't consider themselves "men" but who are simply unfamiliar with the concept of "identifying" as anything?
Socially corrosive is putting it lightly. "You must have read this much Judith Butler to be considered a sexed individual, others need not apply" is a hell of a hot take.
FtttG
4mo ago
Just under 79k words on my NaNoWriMo project. I was away from Saturday to Tuesday so wasn't able to do any writing. At this point a first draft will probably run to 100k words. Funny to think there was ever a time in which I thought this story would fit into 50k.
FtttG
4mo ago
This mysteriously isn't a problem when we need to convey that people are called William.
There are no athletic competitions ringfenced only for people named William, because people named William are systematically weaker and slower than people who go by other names. Williams do not get their own bathrooms, prisons and changing rooms because Williams are at vastly elevated risk of sexual assault compared to people who go by other names. There are no academic scholarships or grant programs ringfenced for people named William, in recognition of the historic discrimination they have endured at the hands of non-Williams.
Elective membership in a category only makes sense if there are no consequences associated with membership in said category. Which is obviously not true of the category "woman". Which is why so many trans-identified males want to join the category.
Right. Woke people in the UK are constantly appealing to the BBC, Channel 4, Netflix and the British film industry to improve "representation" for BAME (black, Asian and Middle Eastern) actors in British TV and film productions (see the perennial demands for the next James Bond to be played by Idris Elba). Then someone ran the numbers and found that BAME actors and LGBT actors are dramatically overrepresented in British TV compared to their respective shares of the population - nearly double, in fact.
If you watch a lot of TV and notice that about a quarter of characters are portrayed by BAME actors, you routinely read editorials about how the BBC and Netflix aren't doing enough to improve representation for BAME actors (the implication being that the current rate of representation isn't commensurate with UK demographics), it's perfectly reasonable to assume that more than 25% of the UK population is BAME, if you haven't yet learned that people sometimes go on the internet and tell lies.
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