HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think there's really much evidence for this one though. I haven't seen anything convincing demonstrating that such a correlation exists and is particularly significant. Especially when considering that obesity is correlated with R voting.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
While that may be some kind of motive for some activists in that specific area, in any broad sense I don't think it's really important considering the aforementioned point that there is a positive (though not necessarily huge) correlation between obesity and voting Republican. I mean, here are the ten most obese metropolitan areas in the US.
McAllen-Edinburg-Mission, Texas: 38.8 percent
Binghamton, N.Y.: 37.6
Huntington-Ashland, W. Va., Ky., Ohio: 36.0
Rockford, Ill.: 35.5
Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas: 33.8
Charleston, W. Va.: 33.8
Lakeland-Winter Haven, Fla.: 33.5
Topeka, Kans.: 33.3
Kennewick-Pasco-Richland, Wash.: 33.2
Reading, Penn.: 32.7
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
What does?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Are you familiar with Steve Sailer’s Law of Female Journalism?
“The most heartfelt articles by female journalists tend to be demands that social values be overturned in order that, Come the Revolution, the journalist herself will be considered hotter looking”
This, along with related comments in the post above, is just so lazy and trite. For one, the actual evidence for this is quite limited; people sometimes cite one study from 2017, which mostly takes election results from the 1970s and so seems of limited usefulness for today. Other than that there doesn't seem to be much. As a wise man once said, if you cannot measure it your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.
In any case, the whole line of argument is just absurdly uncharitable. Republicans are much more likely to be obese than Democrats, but if I said something like 'Republicans only dislike public transit spending because they are fat fucks who can't arsed to walk from the bus stop' I would rightly be dismissed as an annoying twerp, which I am afraid is very much how you come across.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Not to disagree with the overall point, but often the decisions made sense in context, at least in terms of securing power for an individual or tribe. Modernisation would have ceded massive amounts of power to the Han Chinese, something that the Qing were running pretty low on after the Taiping. Resistance to modernisation, iirc, was often as much fear as it was traditionalism.
Perhaps, but worth noting that post-Sino-Japanese war the Guangxu emperor was generally rather reformist, and presumably many of the opponents of the reformers in the civil service were Han.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I did mean early 18c. I only meant to say late imperial China in respect of that part, I didn't mean to imply that this was in the late Qing (well the problem did persist of course, but it didn't start then).
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Eh, sort of, but that first quote (and more generally the problem of murder and robbery of long-distance travellers) dates back to the early 18th century, so this was still some way off the real crisis of the late Qing. In fact, state officials exerted enormous effort to stamp the problem out; towns in the most affected regions were supposedly plastered with appeals for help in murder-theft cases. They weren't always very good at it, of course.
institutions
Yep, this is it really I think, institutions.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
"political" is absurd
I didn't say it wasn't political, I said that it wasn't partisan.
In any case, simply because most people at the FDA will be Democrats that doesn't mean one can automatically conclude every decision they make on specific approval of specific treatments will be part of some partisan agenda.
"the admin state is a nonpartisan affair"
I think this is actually broadly true. Undeniably, Democrats are overrepresented significantly in civil service work, but the administrative state opposition that it was frequently claimed Trump would encounter never materialised.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think that the current low crime levels of many East Asian cities can be put down to some kind of long-running national culture, much less to 'biological heredity'. Late imperial China was quite a violent place; for just one example, the problem of laoguazei murdering and robbing travellers was thought to be endemic. An assessment of actual figures is obviously impossible to arrive at, guides on travelling published in the 18th century, for instance, often included warnings such as this;
[Rule no. 6]: When traveling, you must choose the right companion,
which might be helpful at times. If encountering someone unknown,
even if riding on the same boat or sleeping at the same inn, it is possible
that he has a different agenda from yours. All sorts of valuables should
be kept secret and guarded attentively. At night, be wary of theft. In
daytime, be wary of robbery.
[Rule no. 7]: No matter whether traveling via water or land, always
wait until the eastern sky turns bright before setting sail or leaving the
inn. If the eastern sky is still dim without any sign of sunrise, even if
a rooster has crowed, it is still nighttime. If one hurries to unleash the
boat or set off down the road, one must be wary of the danger of being
robbed by evildoers. When the sun starts to set in the west, one should
park the boat or find an inn. As the idiom goes, rest early instead of
late, better to be delayed than to be wronged
Likewise, William T. Rowe's study of Hankow in the late Qing period found that, while again we can't assess things quantitively, the public perception was the criminals were everywhere and that they were effectively free to commit crime as they pleased, and there were certainly 'bad' parts of the city where the more respectable citizen would not wish to find himself. As one newspaper observed in the mid-19th century, 'bandit-types from all over China find it easy to engage in violent crimes... the bad freely intermingle with the good'.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Chinese are ruthlessly value-optimizing. They hold fundamentally different values, because of course they do
This seems pretty heavily coloured by recency bias. It was only less than 150 years ago that the modernisers in the ranks of the Qing elite were arguing that China was too frivolous and insufficiently receptive to Western efficiencies. Indeed, as the Self-strengthening movement wore on some of its greatest advocates complained that most of the Chinese bureaucracy were more or less uninterested in modernising the military at all. Chang Chih-Tung wrote in 1898 that ‘Zuo Zongtang established a shipyard near Fuzhou… Shen Baozhen set up the shipyard administration… Ding Baozhen instituted arsenals to make foreign guns and bullets… current opinion cavilled at every point’ and in consequence ‘their establishments went to waste or operated in a reduced form, none of them could achieve any expansion’, something their licking at the hands of the Japanese had proved in 1895.
Indeed, the controversial Heshang documentary, shown on Chinese television in 1988 argued that Chinese culture was entirely deficient precisely because it privileged tradition and even backwardness instead of the science and progress that they considered to be paramount in the West.
In general I think these sorts of arguments about national character are almost always overwrought and fairly meaningless.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Such a compromise won't happen for several reasons; most Republicans do not share your low opinion of the importance of economic issues, and in addition that's just not really how politics works. Compromise tends to be intra-issue rather than inter-issue and that's always been the case.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Yeah but it's a bit different to online because it's harder to get hold of a random person's phone number (these were ordinary people, one was a holocaust survivor who gave a talk at a local school). And some were in person also.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
leadership
I meant leadership as well.
legislature
Where?
Does that sound like a good deal to you?
Well it would have to be within reason, but in very broad terms yes I would make social policy concessions for economic policy returns.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Oh I did mean in real life; there was a C4 Dispatches documentary about Combat 18 from a while ago and they frequently sent threats (usually phone messages but close enough, and in some cases it was written) quite similar to this.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think the average Democrat engages in much cancelling, or tries to While certainly they (and I) would oppose some (most?) of the measures Republicans introduce here and there, it still wouldn't, I think, stand as a great priority.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
How so?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It's the old taking from the youth.
Sort of, but everyone who lives to an old age benefits; you might well pay more in than you get out, but it exists as a safety net for everyone, so even if you find yourself impoverished at 65 you still have that security.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
LGBT issues did become a focus during the world cup itself, but not because no-one cares about anything else. Qatar doesn't get the flak Saudi Arabia gets for restrictions on political freedoms, partly because it is a bit freer, and the working standards/freedom of migrant workers had just had its time in the news cycle I suppose; for years after Qatar won the bid it was by far the dominant issue.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The FDA regulates what drugs we are allowed to take.
Yes, but that's not a partisan affair. The FDA should take whatever action they deem appropriate on transgender care and they don't need politicians to weigh in on the specifics of the decision. Politicians determine the broad remit of the FDA, they don't interfere with its functioning on specific issues.
You agree that this trans pandemic is out of control
I wouldn't go that far, certainly. As for 'asleep at the wheel', it's a question of prioritisation. Political capital and legislative time are finite, and I'd much rather politicians focused on any number of other issues than making ad hoc adjustments to the state of transgender medical care.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Eh. Death threats is definitely something far-right and neo-nazi groups have a history of doing, and you can sort of see why. Even if in reality the threats are empty, they can be quite troubling to the victim without the perpetrator having to do much or put themselves at much risk.
Almost certainly we'll never know who wrote it, yet it will be repeatedly used as if it was established that "right wing extremists" did
No it won't. 99.9% of people have no idea this happened and never will. It hasn't just dropped out of the news cycle, it never entered it. It only seems to have appeared in a few online pieces (like the MailOnline which churns out quickly put together stories basically constantly), and while there is a short BBC article if you want to find it you have to navigate to the UK page, then go to local news, look up London, and even then it appears very far down alongside such top news as 'foam pool appears near HS2 works'.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
threats to the target's accountant rather than, you know, the target directly:
Well, firstly it's possible that the perpetrator was able to get the address of the accountant (which in fairness could plausibly be easier to find out) and not Willoughby's home address. In any case though, surely by the same logic that it's odd for someone sending threatening letters to an accountant, it also would be odd for Willoughby to claim she had a letter sent there rather than her home if it was a hoax. Why add in that odd detail, especially when a letter to one's home would presumably be more troubling?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Those seem fairly normal? 'A dreg' is not as common as 'the dregs' but I don't think it especially unusual, same with the second example, maybe slightly stilted but nonetheless not remarkable.
In any case, what I don't get is why people think Dr Shola (who is an educated woman and can clearly write properly) would, if she were trying to create a hoax, deliberately write the letter with poor grammar.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
It is literally unthinkable to him that D's might be the baddies on this one
From my perspective, one that I imagine is quite similar to Singal's, the D's aren't the 'baddies' for three central reasons.
Firstly, for the average Democrat this is simply not an important issue. I could name literally hundreds of issues that are of greater significance than the trans debate, even for the average Democratic legislator I strongly suspect that the issue does not really occupy their thoughts very often. When was the last time Congress debated the issue? In state Houses and Senates it comes up more but even then only on occasion. The point is that this is an issue whose prominence on the internet and in vaguely left-wing popular culture is completely out of proportion to its prominence in partisan politics, and in fact its actual importance.
Secondly, where it does crop up in partisan politics its generally in the form of anti-discrimination bills, or culture war fluff like sports, rather than the specifics of transgender medical care; indeed, in general medical practices are not something directly intervened upon by politicians, so the issue is fairly left to the non-partisan regulatory state and independent medical bodies, and it's surely best that way. Even if you think the current state of affairs is unacceptable, I doubt that we'd be much better off with state or Congressional Republicans managing medical practices.
Finally, the Republicans are hardly any better. Singal is good because unlike most commentators on transgender issues (on the sceptical side) he doesn't come across as a deranged culture warrior with an axe to grind, which unfortunately seems to be the case for most Republicans.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I assume the median English football fan is a low to low-middle class man who couldn't give a shit about LGBT issues.
This doesn't really grasp the picture for a few reasons. Firstly, it's about way more than LGBT rights. Not only in the sense that 'sportswashing' concerna are about slavery/labour rights and political freedoms at least as much as LGBT issues, but also because beyond concerns about gulf nations' human rights problems it's about 'fairness' as well, the notion that oil money propels a team to artificial success rather than growing a club 'organically' without huge outside parachute payments. Man United are rich, of course, but got there without the huge infusions of cash that a City did.
Also, and slightly tangentially, I think the idea that working class men don't give a shit about anything to do with social issues or foreign affairs and just want to drink beer and watch football is a little outdated (or rather has never really been accurate). Sure, they don't care as much as the average young university graduate, and most people happily watched the world cup, but lots and lots of fans don't like gulf money in football, at least in part due to sportswashing, albeit the 'fairness' factor probably being more important.
Are the 'Moralists' even a sizable group, and not, say a tiny minority of woke social media obsessed football fan who simply claim to be speaking for a larger group?
So, no not really. This isn't just a social media issue.
My point is that the most obese places in America are smaller regional towns, not the large urban centres from which most activists hail and which are generally the most clearly liberal in culture.
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