HaroldWilson
1yr 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
10mo ago
has values that are antithetical to the pilot values
China. Most Britons and doubtless RAF pilots would and do abhor their form of government.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.
Well, where you complained (not unreasonably I might add, that is a bit ridiculous) about an unfair upbraiding by your RS teacher for your privilege, ethno-religious oppression in China entails internment, sterilisation, forced labour and physical maltreatment (even torture) in those camps at the hands of state authorities. This really is only a comment someone living in the freedom and prosperity of the West could make. Young Britons have it bad? Hardly anywhere near as bad as toiling in a Chinese coal mine or electronics factory.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I think you could make posts identical to this with regard to almost any ideological leaning. So for every conservative that would cite released criminals murdering again, so could someone else cite the various cases of suicide after DWP withdrew their benefits of the depravity of their enemies, or Trump's pardoning of war criminals etc. etc.
I'm reminded of Amy Biel who went to South Africa to fight apartheid, only to be pulled out a car by a black mob which slaughtered her despite the protests of her black friends that she was on their side. And then her parents flew into the country to testify a the "truth and reconciliation committee" in favour of releasing her murderers. They then started a foundation and hired these murderers.
It's not like Truth and Reconciliation was entirely one-sided though, see for instance Brian Mitchell.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Surely whatever you think about the UK, any plausible faults are on a completely different plane to those of the Chinese state, especially if the complaints you're levying are the aforementioned ones about affirmative action or whatever. Most importantly of all of course is the total absence of any genuine democracy or appreciable freedom of the press in China. Certainly to the extent that assisting China militarily because you were hacked off at a diversity initiative is indefensible.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Because people who are not petty children don't stoop to that level. They were misbehaving in gaming the system, maybe, but that doesn't make it a mature response to try to take it after they have clearly indicate that they are about to use it again. Much as in a library, if someone was keeping out longer by returning and loaning it again, and if you asked that person whether the book they had placed on the table was going to be taken out and they said yes, it would still be an absurd and unbecoming response to snatch it up and take it to loan it yourself to forestall them.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
real mass participatory politics with the people consulted at least about major decisions
What does this even mean? Elections are that consultation, and the electorate gets to decide what the 'major decisions' are by the salience of any particular issue come election time. Any more specific consultation than that is hardly necessary for a meaningful democracy, hence why every successful democracy ever has been a representative one.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation.
FWIW I think the main problem with his article, as with many other similar ones, is that he frames the issue as about determining the Truth about gender and gender identity when in fact for all practical purposes the problem is actually a policy one. The right question is not 'are transgender men really men' (or in the case of Byrne's essay 'do Transgender people have gender identities that do not match their sex'/'does a mismatch between gender identity and sex cause dysphoria', or more broadly 'what is gender identity'), but 'does treating transgender people as their transitioned gender in X circumstance make those people happier with little damage done to the rest of society?' Because if the answer to that question is yes, then who gives a damn what the Truth of their gender is. Obviously there would still be arguments to had over the costs and benefits in every specific circumstance.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
The younger generation appears to be immunized against the transgender movement. The boys do not buy it. Mr Beast is a litmus test because he has a large, diverse fan base in Gen Z, the majority of whom use Tik Tok and have Mr Beast content algorithmically fed to them. These Tik Toks are as close as we will get to a “youth vote” on the transgender issue. They not only don’t buy it, but they think it is immoral and noxious.
The polling does not bear this out at all.
Britain: https://docs.cdn.yougov.com/ai3h3xvf7o/Transgender%20data%202020.pdf 18-24 range consistently most pro-trans, though margins aren't huge between them and the 25-49 group.
US: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2022/06/28/americans-complex-views-on-gender-identity-and-transgender-issues Same thing here, 18-29 group most liberal.
Unless you're going to say that for some obscure reason the Gen Z kids not yet of the age to be polled wildly diverge from the clear trend observable in the current data, and in that case you'd need much better evidence than reading comments on social media.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I believe that mass incarceration can explain most of the reduction in violent crime from 1990–2015 and most of its subsequent rise.
I just don't think there's that much evidence that harsher punishments actually do explain the crime reduction to a very large extent. For one, Britain (and probably most other Western countries) also saw a similar rapid decline in crime rates over the New Labour governments, and while Blair wasn't 'soft' on crime he didn't oversee anything like what happened in America. The prison population did increase, but that increase wasn't really sufficiently faster than the pre-1990s rate of increase to explain the enormous drop in crime. Same goes for Canada. While it may have played a role, I'm not convinced that it could be the central factor.
HaroldWilson
1yr 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
10mo ago
I agree they are defecting against the system, but that still doesn't mean it's a mature response to go very far in trying to stop him. In manners if not in politics, 'they go low, we go high' pretty much always applies.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
The usual answer would be ‘they aren’t voting against their economic interests, but they understand their economic interests better than CNN talking heads paid to sell books about the culture wars’.
What, then, in the GOP platform is supposed to benefit the economic interests of the working classes?
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Why would you update on any non-crime/policing issue on the basis of policing issue question?
HaroldWilson
1yr 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
1yr 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
17d ago
Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.
Well maybe but that's sort of the point. If this is simply a right-wing reddit that doesn't say a great deal for it really.
Got to say all of Caplan's arguments seem a bit ridiculous. To go through his enumerated list of reasons;
Endlessly complaining about alleged social problems. Poverty, the environment, racism, Covid, Ukraine, terrorism, immigration, education, drugs, Elon… Even if all of the coverage were true, the media is still - per Huemer - aggressively promoting the absurd view that life is on balance terrible and reliably getting worse.
Two problems here. Of course the news is going to have a slant towards bad news because notable events are usually bad things, though of course not always. What would Brian Caplan's news bulletins contain, reports on all the cities and countries were there were no terrorist attacks, wars didn't start and the economy was fine? That's not really news. Secondly, I don't think it's at all accurate that news promotes the view that life to terrible. While there is a slant towards 'negative' news if a viewer thinks that implies that things are in general bad and getting worse that's surely a fault of the viewer not of the coverage, because it doesn't imply that at all, it just as I say reflects the fact that newsworthy events are more likely to bad than good.
Spreading innumeracy. The media endlessly shows grotesque stories about ultra-rare problems like terrorism, plane crashes, police murdering innocents, school shootings, toddlers dying of Covid, and the like. They show almost nothing about statistically common problems like car crashes or death by old age. The media doesn’t just spread paranoia; it spreads inverted paranoia.
Again, while this is true this is simply the nature of news, not a problem specific to mainstream media. News is, by its nature, a record of events not an analysis of the general current state of affairs. Perhaps people should consume less news and more analysis, in fact they probably should, but again that's not really the fault of the organisations providing the news coverage.
Reasons 4 and 5 are basically the same thing, Caplan arguing that MSM puts everything in a negative light and places particular focus on whatever the 'current thing' is. Again I think these just complain about the nature of news, not the behaviour of MSM specifically.
Reason 2 is a bit different;
Painting government intervention as the obvious solution to social problems. Often the media openly asks loaded questions to this effect, like “Why isn’t the government doing more about this?!” with an exasperated tone. The rest of the time, they rely on heavy-handed insinuation, like “The people of Flint, Michigan feel like they’ve been forgotten.” Forgotten by who? Government Our Savior, of course. Mainstream media barely considers whether past government policies have worked, or how much they cost, or whether they have important downsides.
I mean who else is supposed to solve social problems? Clearly not 'individuals' or whatever, because manifestly absent government intervention they haven't been able to solve them, otherwise they wouldn't exist
HaroldWilson
1yr 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
1yr ago
Blank slatism to see a disparity and tear all of society apart trying to fill it with the racism of the gaps.
Blank slatism does not mean that all disparities have to be explained by racism. Now, I actually think that black underperformance in very large part is explained by the legacy of slavery and subsequent structural racism, but, for instance, in the case of Asian-Americans, the selection effects of the American immigration system appear to account for their above-average performance in education etc.
Furthermore, 'tear society apart' seems just a little hysterical. Where and how has this happened?
HaroldWilson
20d ago
The nice thing about sovereignty is that peoples get to define themselves
I don't see where this gets him. People do get to define themselves, and, say, Britons or Americans have decided to expand who is included amongst 'themselves'.
Anyway this is similarly amusing to the debates between the 9 different factions of Trotskyites which get played out in the pages of magazines with a combined readership of 8. The grandiosity of it all is utterly bizarre for a movement which is - thankfully - so powerless and marginal.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Raise Payroll Taxes - “even a modest change, such as a gradual increase of 0.3 percentage points each for employees and employers (or less than $3 per week for an average earner), could close about one-fifth of the gap.”
Yes, this is extremely important. Whenever people discuss Social Security they often act like the funding shortfall some irresolvable apocalyptic problem when really a moderate increase in rates can close the gap. From the latest trustees report;
consider that for the combined OASI and DI Trust Funds to remain fully solvent throughout the 75-year projection period ending with 2097: (1) revenue would have to be increased by an amount equivalent to an immediate and permanent payroll tax rate increase of 3.44 percentage points to 15.84 percent
Considering the possibility you mention of raise the cap, the actual tax increase needed without touching benefits would be decidedly moderate. And the above figure is all the way to the end of the century!
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday
I'm not settling on either side here, but this seems a little uncharitable. For one, in one sense even if no-one ever reads most of the stuff produced, and if (and I accept this may not be the case but nevertheless, if) lawsuits filed are on relatively substantive grounds rather than trivial procedural matters then the work is still important. Because, presumably, if a Title IX coordinator felt that a particular aspect of college administration did not comply the college would be anxious to make the appropriate changes, which if one agrees with the thrust of Title IX is a good thing.
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial. Now this seems very hard to assess given that presumably the ones covered in the media are selected for the most interesting and meaningful ones, but a cursory search does throw up lots of cases that do seem at least somewhat worthwhile. Plenty of cases on the need for a fair shake to be given to accused students prior to expulsion, one about a kid who died from alcohol poising following an initiation (the parents demanding tighter restrictions on such) and yes lots of cases about women's athletics. Not, I appreciate, a life or death issue but a 'real' thing in the sense that Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
This is completely pathetic. A pilot feels, perhaps not unreasonably, disadvantaged by this one policy, so that's grounds on which to throw your toys out of the pram and work for a state which, for most RAF pilots one imagines, behaves in a manner completely antithetical to your values?
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