FtttG
User ID: 1175
FtttG
1mo 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Out of interest, why are you linking to an archived version of Scott's post?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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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
1mo 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.
Thought experiment.
A female baby is born with a traumatic brain injury which puts them in a vegetative state. Not only is this child completely unable to move or communicate in any way, the child's brain activity suggests that they are minimally conscious and lacking in self-awareness. The child's parents are heartbroken, but elect to keep the child on life support. Eighteen years, the child reaches the age of majority.
Is the person a man or a woman?
FtttG
1mo ago
sometimes we're gesturing at features that do - norms of personal presentation, for instance.
I have it on good authority that "trans women don't owe you femininity", so I'm not even sure if this is relevant.
I think your example is really bad, because as noted by @FiveHourMarathon, trans is possibly the only subculture in which self-identification is the sole membership criterion. (In this regard it has more in common with a religion than a subculture, and even that's not absolute, as noted by @FiveHourMarathon below.)
In every other subculture (including all of the ones you gave as examples), membership is rigorously gatekept and wannabes will be derided as poseurs for any number of seemingly arbitrary reasons. This is one reason that some subcultures, like gangs, expect members to engage in costly signalling games to demonstrate their commitment to the subculture: all things being equal, a trap musician with facial tattoos or a punk with gauged ears will be presumed to be a more authentic member of the subculture than one without. The fact that there are no costly signals associated with identifying as trans is why it is so susceptible to entryism by bad actors (if one is charitable enough to assume that the bad actors are not the movement's raison d'être).
Trans women are women but shouldn't be allowed in female changing rooms is a perfectly coherent position.
Is there any other group of women who are forbidden from using female changing rooms?
I question the utility of changing the definition of words like this if you have to introduce additional epicycles to make sure the practical end result is indistinguishable from what it would have been if you hadn't bothered.
I don't really have much interest in the underlying psychological reason why people believe that "a woman is anyone who identifies as a woman" is a useful definition of the word "woman". I've spent countless hours immersing myself in these postmodern ideas trying to get my head around these concepts, and I've ultimately concluded that the relevant concepts are simply incoherent. Even if the trans activist movement was exactly as harmless and well-meaning as it purports to be, I still think their beliefs are incoherent and wrong. In much the same way that the concept of transubstantiation would still be incoherent and nonsensical even if no Catholic priest had ever behaved improperly with an altar boy.
FtttG
1mo ago
Happy St. Patrick's Day.
Anyone who posts the Dropkick Murphys will be shot on sight.
FtttG
2mo ago
Finished Orbán: Europe's New Strongman. Felt like I learned a lot from it, and it was accessibly written.
On to Kiki de Montparnasse, a comic book I picked up on a whim in a charity shop several years ago. Only about thirty pages in, don't really know what it's about yet.
Trans people talk a lot about "gender euphoria", and it clearly means more to them than just "the absence of dysphoria"!
Less charitably than your interpretation, it's a euphemism for "the sense of intense arousal autogynephiliacs experience upon fulfilling their sexual fantasies". I can't remember ever seeing a trans man describe experiencing gender euphoria, although I'm open to correction on this front.
Likewise, if you have any evidence of 'generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets' making claims that "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see".
- Washington Post: "Donald Trump just threatened to commit genocide"
- Foreign Policy: "This Is How Every Genocide Begins"
- Foreign Policy: "U.N. Genocide Watchdog Suggests Trump, American Hardliners Fueling Hatred of Muslims"
- Sky News: "Donald Trump warned of 'genocide' over threat to 'obliterate' Iran"
- Channel 4: "Trump’s foreign policy may be seen as ‘open invitation to commit genocide’, warns Turkish Kurd"
- Al-Jazeera: "The Muslim ban and the ethnic cleansing of America"
- Truthout: "When Trump Calls People “Filth,” He’s Laying Groundwork for Genocide"
- KCRW: "Is Trump Building a White Ethnostate?" (Betteridge's law of headlines notwithstanding)
- The Guardian: "How white supremacy went mainstream in the US"
- Vanity Fair: "How Trump Became an Accidental Totalitarian"
- Reuters: "Michael Moore compares Trump to Hitler in new documentary"
- Daily Commercial: "Yes, there are parallels between Trump and Hilter [sic]"
- Vox: "A leading Holocaust historian just seriously compared the US to Nazi Germany"
- MSNBC: "MSNBC’s Deutsch equates Trump voters to Nazi guards: ‘If you vote for Trump, you’re the bad guy’"
- The Independent: "Donald Trump using Adolf Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' playbook, says world expert on Nazi leader"
- Salon: "If Trump wins, say goodbye to your black friends: A modest proposal"
- Time: "The Billionaire and the Bigots" (which comes perishingly close to predicting that Trump will be directly responsible for the founding of a new white nationalist political party)
but being guilty of either makes Trump an extremely dangerous man and a massive asshole.
No argument here, but specificity matters. Rapists and murderers are both dangerous people, but if you're accusing someone of being a rapist, you need to present evidence that they actually raped someone; presenting evidence that they murdered someone is irrelevant. If opponents of Trump were only trying to convey that they thought Trump was extremely dangerous, I question why they chose to devote so many column inches to the claim that he was dangerous in this extremely specific and easily-refuted way, rather than just saying "he is an extremely dangerous man". As I said previously, Trump only benefitted by baseless accusations of genocide-mongering. A little message discipline would have served his opponents well.
I find it kind of staggering, that you apparently don't see any kind of causal link between a politician repeatedly asserting that the mainstream media is "fake news", said mainstream media producing avalanches of hysterical and overwrought predictions about the horrors that are soon to befall the world if he is elected, said predictions conspicuously failing to come to pass, and the politician getting reelected.
Though I will say that I am surprised to hear that how much ink you have spilled defending him and denigrating his opponents, and how strong your reaction was to my original post.
I hate this Manichaean arguments-as-soldiers worldview, in which if I point out that some factual claim about Donald Trump is false, the only possible explanation is that I'm doing so because I admire him and think that he's awesome. It couldn't possibly be that I just value factual accuracy for its own sake and resent being gaslit by people claiming never to have made specific claims that they did in fact make, repeatedly, for years, in public. Not everything is an opportunity for partisan mudslinging and nothing more.
FtttG
2mo ago
Weak men are superweapons.
Transparent false equivalence. Ostensibly respectable left-leaning newspapers of record spent years milking the "Trump = Hitler" comparisons for all they were worth. Russiagate was a nonsensical conspiracy theory elevated to the status of a federal inquiry. I'll grant that a lot of people who should have known better gave the birth certificate theory more credence than it deserved, but the only people I've seen claiming that Michelle Obama has a penis are extremely online far-right weirdos. If you have evidence of generally respectable and mainstream figures or media outlets making this claim, I'd love to see it.
as it is both impossible to fix (demanding that all those who oppose Trump have one unified coherent message, and also that none of them act histrionic or retarded is obviously impossible)
Of course it's not realistic to expect everyone who dislikes Trump never to act histrionic or retarded. However, I think it's perfectly reasonable to request mainstream, ostensibly neutral institutions to dial down the hysteria a smidge.
"see, Trump isn't genocidal! He's just flirting with the nakedly imperialist conquest of our longtime friend and ally" is not the repudiation that you perhaps think it is.
Why not? Last time I checked, genocide and imperialist conquest were very different things, and being guilty of one does not make one guilty of the other.
But what was fully predictable, and obvious to anyone who cared to notice it, is that Trump is unworthy of the post of President.
Agreed.
then you have to own making an amoral narcissist the most powerful man in the world.
I don't have to own anything. I don't like Donald Trump, I've never voted for him or supported his presidential campaigns in any way, I've personally attended at least one protest against a policy he enacted, and even if I had been eligible to vote for him in 2016, 2020 or 2024 (neither being a US citizen nor residing in the US), I wouldn't have.
Donald Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared
Over the last decade, the prediction/warning/whatever I've most frequently heard about a Donald Trump presidency has been that he is a white supremacist KKK neo-Nazi with concrete plans to transform the United States into a white ethnostate (optionally also a Christian theocracy), which necessitates rounding up anyone who isn't white, cisgender, heterosexual or Christian and herding them into concentration camps. I literally don't think there was a single day in 2016 in which I didn't see or hear the "Trump = Hitler" comparison at least once. A distant second was "Trump is a Russian asset".
After four years of Trump in the Oval Office, this accusation became increasingly untenable, so his critics abruptly changed course and started accusing him of being a crypto-fascist with no respect for democratic institutions. In this regard, his critics are on much firmer ground (I've been saying for a decade that Trump has far more in common with Orbán or Berlusconi than with old Adolf), so this pivot made a lot of sense.* What doesn't make sense is that his critics are now pretending that this was the only class of accusations they'd ever been levelling at him. (The "Trump is plotting genocide/ethnic cleansing, any day now, just you wait and see" thing still gets periodically trotted out, courtesy of slow learners who haven't yet gotten the message that we're no longer at war with Eurasia.)
This is the same kind of blatant goalpost-moving and historical revisionism Scott complained about when grading his Trump predictions. Throughout the run-up to the 2016 election, all I heard was a never-ending stream of "Trump is Hitler, Trump is going to round up all the Muslims, Trump is going to kill all the Latinos, Trump is going to round up all the gays and trans people, Trump is going to turn America into Gilead". After four years of nothing even remotely like this transpiring, the people who had made these predictions just cited a bunch of other random bad shit Trump and his supporters did (e.g. January 6th) and turned around and said "see? We warned you!"
It is transparently, facially untrue that Trump is showing himself to be everything his opponents feared. Show me the concentration camps, then we can talk. At least have the humility to acknowledge that careless accusations of genocidal ambition on Trump's part have only helped him: when facing more reasonable accusations of taking a cavalier approach to the rule of law and democratic institutions, Trump can quite reasonably defend himself by pointing out that his critics were crying wolf when they accused him of being Hitler, so why wouldn't they be crying wolf now?
I know when you said that he's showing himself to be "everything" his opponents feared, you were speaking figuratively, and you don't think that literally every criticism/accusation/whatever levelled against Donald Trump was well-founded. But I feel like there's some kind of Pareto distribution, where 80% of attacks/criticisms/warnings about Trump took the form "Trump is a genocidal white supremacist" (optionally also a Christian fundamentalist, heteronormative etc.), then "Trump is a Russian asset", then "Trump is a fascist with no respect for democratic institutions". I think honesty and humility behooves people to acknowledge that 80% of their predictions failed to come to pass. When 80% of your accusations/predictions fail to come to pass (90% if you include all the utterly baseless accusations of Russian collusion), I don't think you deserve a prognostication medal because some of the remaining 10% were accurate.
*Google Trends shows the precise point at which "Trump is going to turn America into Gilead" stopped being The Narrative, in favour of "Trump is a fascist authoritarian". The obvious objection to this interpretation of the data is that most of the searches for The Handmaid's Tale pertained to the novel's television adaptation (which, incredibly, is still running); the even more obvious rebuttal to that objection is that the only reason the television series even exists is because of hysterical scaremongering about the alleged parallels between the novel and Trump's America.
This occurred to me as well.
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