HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Scarcity is indeed a thing, but no student will ever get a complete and in depth understanding of every period of American history, that's just not realistic. So there are going to have to be some somewhat arbitrary decisions on what to cover and what not to cover, elective classes just means students are choosing what they cover in depth, which is fine.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This is rather silly. History education is not just teaching about the 'objectively' most important things in the world, otherwise British schools wildly under-study Asia and over-study British history, or at any rate certainly pre-Industrial revolution British history. Clearly, race and slavery has been enormously significant in American history, being possibly the biggest running issue in American politics for the first half of the nineteenth century, and certainly for a few decades before the Civil War, and of course being the cause of the Civil War itself.
The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.
It's so blindingly obvious you have almost no history education. Yeah, soul food and rap music is the sum total of the impact of race and African-Americans in American history.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Not sure this really works. The case for 'normal' no-platforming only needs to show that the cost of a particular event/speaker outweighs the benefit, because there is no 'collateral damage'; if a speaking event is cancelled by a university, the only negative consequences are those that arrive from the cancellation of that event. Even if one thinks that many/almost all cases of no-platforming don't meet that requirement, that's the bar. Whereas if you want to justify shutting down electrical substations, you have to show that the harm of that drag show outweighs all the potential consequences of a power outage for hospitals, businesses, schools, households, public safety (streetlights, for instance) etc.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Speaking as someone who strongly hopes for a Democratic victory in 2024 (and indeed in pretty much every election), I would probably be much more inclined to get whichever Republican was most likely to lose nominated rather than aiming to win it for the least worst moderate Republican.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
'Your vote matters' isn't really intended to mean 'your vote might decide the next President/Mayor/legislator', it (at least in my mind) is intended to convey the point that the result of elections matters in more ways than deciding the winner. The more crushing the margin of the winner, the less they have to worry about winning over voters other than their core base, or alternatively the closer the margin the more they have to appease their less enthused voters and potential swing voters voted for someone else.
Now, of course, one vote won't make an enormous difference to the overall perception of the margin, but it is basically true that ever vote matters just a little bit even if you almost certainly won't change the winner. This is especially true because not just margin in isolation, but margin also gets significant attention paid to it. In the 1970 UK election, which saw Heath replace Wilson in No. 10, the average swing to the Conservatives was only about 4% - now some seats only had about 30,000 votes cast (many even fewer), which means that a pretty small number of voters could change the swing significantly.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Your vote will probably never change an election outcome (though, you never know - see Exeter in 1910 and some other examples), margins do matter. A bigger margin of victory will obviously embolden a candidate to be more aggressive in pursuing their policies, and vice versa, so your vote does make an (albeit very small) contribution in that respect.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I mean the coverage is what is made for Western audiences, so of course they will use an example that's most recognisable and understandable to Americans, even if most of the protestors wouldn't (and didn't) use that American idiom. I don't find this particularly nefarious or 'propaganda-y'.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
The evidence for deterrence is that we are promptly executing the drug dealers in front of their community. If you can’t even attempt to reason from first principles why this might deter future criminals, I have no idea what to tell you.
You can't reason your way to a conclusion on a topic so impossibly complicated as deterrent effects of certain punishments. After all, it's surely intuitive that the existence of the death penalty for murder would deter murder, but it doesn't seem to. These are essentially unfalsifiable arguments, and therefore entirely worthless and unproductive.
have high catch rates
I agree with this part because it is well-evidenced that the single most important factor in deterring crime is the chance of getting caught.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
That’s much more than 1 in 6 million. It’s probably more than 1 in 100,000.
Well this is my point. 1 in 100,000 is still vanishingly small. Where would you draw the line for saying we can just chalk something up to statistical noise. 1 in 5 million? 1 million? 200,000?
This is different than a speedy public execution in the neighborhood of their peers, which I promise would have a deterrence effect.
Well, aside from what is asserted without evidence being able to be dismissed without evidence, the wrongful conviction rate would be to most people intolerably high. Executions are slow for a reason; the appeals process is there for a reason. John Grisham estimates the wrongful conviction rate to be between 2% and 10% - now, he isn't necessarily unbiased considering he works with the Innocence Project. So let's go with the lowest end of his estimate, 2%. In 2019, over 240,000 people were sentenced to prison for drug-related crimes, the most serious offence of whom was possession in only 3.7% of cases. But let's say your policies reduce drug crime by half - which is very unlikely - and then half the number again to be generous so we get 60,000. These are the ballparkiest of ballpark figures, but I think if anything I've surely got an underestimate, and that still leaves us with over a thousand wrongful drug executions per year, for apparent benefits in defence of which you can't even cite a single piece of evidence.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't think I was misusing it. With respect to questions of logic, imply generally means, as the Free Dictionary has it, to 'involve by logical necessity'. X implies Y means that Y is always a logical consequence of X.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
temper the high emotions with rational data
Well this is sort of the point. In what seems like a friendly sort of space, not some terminally online debate forum, it's not really good manners to respond to 'high emotions' with a lecture about probabilities and car crashes. He was right to make the point, but made it in the wrong way.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
if you look at any two variables and find near zero correlation, it implies they are not connected or "caused" by each other
Aside from this formulation just being entirely wrong, you definitely can have causation without correlation (https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/causation-without-correlation-is-possible/), if anti-gay sentiment only causes attacks in people with rare mental issues, then we would surely expect little correlation.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
teaching young women how to pick mates in teen years, teaching women to be homemakers which reduces total societal stress, banning degenerative media,
Can you show me a single instance of such reforms leading to a decrease in single motherhood? Aside from the merits of these goals, you are swimming against an irrepressible social and economic tide here.
publicly executing drug dealers
Well now you're just being silly. The overall body of research on capital punishment, though inconclusive, tends to lean in the direction that there is no deterrent effect. Moreover, considering how many drug dealers there are, the number of innocent people who would die under such as system would be rather large.
If the rate of anti-gay believers who become violent against gays is 1 in 60 million per year, or 1 in 6 million, I do not feel comfortable calling this anything but statistical noise. I do not believe his anti-gay beliefs (if they exist) are causal whatsoever.
Under this argument, you can't ascribe ideological influences to any terrorist act ever. Most fundamentalist Muslim aren't terrorists, so religious motives could not have been causal in Islamic terrorism? What a ridiculous argument.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I might well do, depending on the way you phrased your statements. But I should stress I don't have that much wrong with what he said; just a slight change in tone would have made it better received was all I was saying, and I'd say the same in the case of terrorism.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I think this is reading a lot into a comment of which you have only read a (not entirely sympathetic) precis. Seems most likely to me he was just engaging in the sort of hyperbole we all do on a daily basis.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Well, there’s absolutely no association between anti-gay belief and attacks on gays. Many millions of Americans are heavily invested in being anti-LGBT, but they don’t attack gays. Muslims and Orthodox Jews hardly have any interest in attacking gays, despite being anti-LGBT.
I'm not sure this is a valid argument. Just because anti-gay belief usually doesn't lead to attacks on gays, that doesn't imply that attacks on gays aren't caused in part by anti-gay sentiment. This ties into your second point. Definitely, shooters are going to mostly be people with other psychological issues, brought on in some cases by a traumatic upbringing, but that doesn't mean anti-gay sentiment didn't contribute.
Which is to say, it takes a confluence of factors to produce a shooter. The importance of upbringing does not imply that anti-gay sentiment cannot have contributed.
fixing society
Not a terribly useful contribution. 'Fix society'. How? Or how would you try to reduce rates of single motherhood?
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
While their response was maybe dressed up in very annoying language, and I agree that there's no reason to be especially afraid of hate mass shootings compared to other more mundane risks, I think your response was a bit tone deaf.
hold on, attacks like this are less likely to get you than car accidents or [insert whatever mundane thing] - yes they're flashy and scary, but you really shouldn't update based on them - they're statistically insignificant AND if you want to view them as terrorism then you living in fear is letting them win - you shouldn't do that"
This comes off as slightly, dare I say, smug, even though I'm sure you weren't intending to come across that way. It's a fine point to make, but a more conciliatory tone would have gone along way. Something along the lines of, 'it's certainly discouraging that attacks like these are happening more often, but you should be reassured by the fact that the vast majority of the public is broadly tolerant...' would, I reckon, not have elicited the same response. Just a question of tone and manners really.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Talking out of my ass here as someone with only a GCSE education in biology, but does this 'weakened immune system' thing actually make any sense? The whole reason why you can keep getting colds is that they are new mutations each time you catch it, so you haven't been able to develop any immunity to that specific mutation. So it would seem sort of irrelevant how many colds you've caught before because that won't help with the next one.
I've certainly never worn a mask voluntarily and I am almost never sick.
I mean, n=1
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
I don't live in Canada, I'm in the UK, but I've got to say the world you have described sounds fucking alien to me. I live in a very blue-tribe sort of sphere, but people who say that being trans has become 'cool' feel like they're on a different planet to me. Not sure how to resolve this really; I'm left thinking, if I, a very left-leaning person, have 0 experience with 'trans-trending', where are these trenders?
I mean, being trans sounds like a fucking nightmare to me.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans.
Broadly, I don't necessarily disagree, but surely got to be careful with selection effects here, and the direction of causation. It would seem likely that the kids who felt 'strongest' about their dysphoria would want to go on blockers immediately and those who weren't so sure watch and wait, and further that those kids who felt strongly would be more likely to persist in transition. Which is to say, it isn't that blockers make it more likely to continue transition, but that people more likely to continue transition take blockers.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
, what's the point?"
Concern for your fellow man? Maybe family and friends would be less critical if you looked just a little further than the end of your own nose. Hardly a terrible imposition being asked of you.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Back in the day such an approach was seen as just good sense,
But it didn't work. Look at the Goa Inquisition. The Portuguese went to every length they could to extirpate Hinduism in Goa and, while there obviously were lots of conversions, in general it didn't really work.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
Very true and very important. When colonists tried to extract taxation from colonies, it (usually) wasn't British/French/Spanish taxmen going door to door demanding payment, they just dealt with local elites at the top level who passed some of the proceeds from the payments they themselves obtained from their communities to the colonists.
HaroldWilson
2yr ago
This seems like a pretty ahistorical theory. To take just one example, indigenous Amerindians were, a lot of the time, pretty unhappy about Spanish rule throughout their presence, and they did resist, but in more passive ways that we don't remember because they aren't as exciting as open rebellion (though that did happen as well). They were certainly not friends of colonial administrators, indeed they did practically everything they could to stop themselves being administered effectively, deceiving them about where people lived, how many there were in particular places, refused to comply with requirements of forced labour, resisted Christianisation, etc. etc.
What I'm saying is that there isn't really such thing as 'objective' importance in history. Is the high politics of the early republic more or less important than, say, the experience of small farmers or urban workers or slaves in the same period? Who is 'objectively' worth more class time, Roosevelt or Wilson? Washington or Lincoln? There are no correct answers to these questions, it's just preference really.
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