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
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
1yr ago
Go on then, link to your examples of 'this exact thing' happening.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Well that's kind of what you get if you spend years trying to code everything high-culturey as something that only liberal elites enjoy. Indeed, the 'liberal' side of the culture wars are often accused of having no regard for history or culture, but in Britian, for instance, I am almost certain that those who fill the halls of the nation's museums, theatres, opera houses and especially historic universities are disproportionately Remainers, and probably future Starmer voters.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Hitler was perhaps the greatest case study in the power of a classical education and self-directed study, as well as its weaknesses (should have studied logistics and naval warfare (every other battle would have been decided if he’d won the battle of the Atlantic))
And to this day post war education is built around preventing anyone from learning the lessons he learnt (which now extends to 2+2=4 in some classrooms).
Of course no American, English, or German school boys learns anything resembling classical military history any more, no one studies classical languages, even geography is notably lacking —though there in the American case, its seems geography isn’t taught so that Americans might be compliant with their wars instead of concluding, as every generation of Americans did pre-1945… that Eurasia is entirely irrelevant to them.
The western world responded to the Nazis by burning down all the cultural institutions of western civilization, since some aspect of western civilization must have been to blame… somehow
Aside from other things I disagree with, I think this is a complete misdiagnosis of the causes of the decline of classical education. At least in Britain, the main driver in that regard was surely economic, not just in the sense that giving people such an education is expensive but more pertinently that in the post-war political environment education fundamentally became about preparing students for the modern economy, hence the tripartite system; a basic comprehensive education for unskilled workers, a technical education for those doing skilled manual labour, and grammar schools for managers and administrators (indeed, grammar school students often did, and to some extent still do where they still exist, get a fair amount of 'classical' education).
Moreover, plenty of the current British political class did have a firmly classical education. Boris was Eton educated and an Oxford classicist, but his speeches, while occasionally having some of the bizarre Trumpish quality are generally pretty rubbish, while for my money the best political speaker in 21st century Britain, Gordon Brown, was comprehensive educated. While I do think there has probably been a decline in the quality of political speech-making (though not nearly to the extent you suggest, and certainly not across the whole post-war era; see for instance just wrt Britain, in various decades, Heath's speech against the death penalty, White Heat of the Technological Revolution, Weapons for Squalid and Trivial Ends, Brown's famous conference speech and his speech on Scottish independence, Howe's resignation speech, Winds of Change and, outside of politics, Tim Collins' eve of battle speech), I don't think the decline in classical education is really the cause.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Just because HR etc. are the least productive of all employees, that doesn't actually mean the job they do is 'bullshit', just no longer economical in the current environment. I mean, corporations are generally not in the business of making frivolous expenditures. A comparable example might be agriculture. In favourable economic conditions for farmers, for instance if the price of bread rises, farmers/landowners will put 'marginal' fields to work; that is, fields which don't usually yield enough to be profitable except in good (for the landowners) times. When these fields are no longer profitable and fall out of work, that doesn't mean they were 'bullshit fields', it's just that they only operate profitably in certain conditions. The same could said of certain employees or even departments; they only make economic sense in good times.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.
I think the resolution here is that sex simply has a greater range of possible 'significance' than most activities - which is to say that I don't think there a reason one could not argue that some consensual 'transactional' sex is not vastly different to a game of tennis, where in other contexts (be that positive or negative) it can carry greater meaning. A potential analogy here is alcohol consumption - my going to the pub carries almost no significance, but if an employer forced a Muslim employee to drink that would clearly be unacceptable in a manner far more serious than compulsory tennis - we all accept that in different contexts the activity can carry different weight.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
So long as we are an empire, an emperor is inevitable.
On what time scale? For all the talk of the disenfranchised working classes, materially they have never had it so good. Liberal democracy brings home the bacon at the moment, why wouldn't it 100 years from now?
Also, if this is meant as a general statement then I don't think there's much evidence for it. Where was Britain's emperor? Of course the British empire did wither away but even as the empire grew in the 19th and early 20th centuries that was, if anything, accompanied by greater democratic participation, more process and bureaucracy and no consistent or continuous increase in public unrest and instability.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I think that the term 'government funded media' clearly takes on a negative implication that extends beyond the strict meaning of the words. If I owned twitter and slapped 'Murdoch owned media' on Fox twitter accounts, it would be indisputable but it clearly implies something about what I think about Fox and its biases. Similarly, Musk/twitter surely thinks that the fact that a particular outlet is government funded in some way impinges negatively upon its content because otherwise there would be no point putting it there.
I agree that there's nothing wrong with wrong with being government funded, but the label still carries unfortunate implications. After all, there are plenty of twitter users who will not be attuned to the difference between the Russian or Syrian regime shills labelled 'government affiliated media' and the state broadcasters labelled 'government funded media', and if not putting them in exactly the same bucket twitter does seem to be putting them in the same region, or at least that is the impression some people will take.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
That is a simply intolerable solution which would destroy the reputation of the United States, even if you don't mind killing thousands of migrants, and what is more it would be enormously dangerous for the surrounding border populations of both nations.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Open borders (those poor immigrants), street crime (those poor incarcerated people), social promotion in school (those poor kids), crap teachers (those poor teachers [the dumbest cohort in any college - look it up]), drugs (those poor druggies need free needles), homelessness (those poor people), able-bodied people on welfare (those poor people), trannies (those poor men).... and, of course, below-replacement fertility
To go one-by-one (and to be clear I don't agree that some of these are even big problems but even if you do think that linking it to women is still extremely silly);
Open borders
The foreign born population of the US peaked in 1890 and was consistently very high for the 1860-1920 period, and per this Gallup poll men are exactly as likely as women to support decreasing immigration. https://news.gallup.com/poll/395882/immigration-views-remain-mixed-highly-partisan.aspx
street crime
Crime levels are not too easy to assess really for any pre-war period, but murder rates tend to follow crime rates closely and there are better records from past eras on the basis of which comparisons can actually be made, and on that count there is no observable relationship between female enfranchisement and murder rates; they were very high pre-war, came down around from the mid to late-30s, went back up again and now are relatively low at least compared to the pre-war era (and obviously also compared to the 80s). And once again, at least as of 2015 women were more likely to say they had a great deal of confidence in the police per Gallup, the margin being two points.
social promotion in school
What?
crap teachers
Again somewhat confused here. Is the implication here that women make bad teachers of that they support policies which lower the standard of teachers; if the latter, what are those policies?
drugs
Women are more likely to be against marijuana legalisation. Can't find a poll with crosstabs available for questions about harder drugs but I don't why there would be a dramatic change.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/14/americans-support-marijuana-legalization/
homelessness
The policy which would do the most by far to alleviate homelessness is building more in urban centres; I can't find any specific polling with available gender crosstabs on specifically the question of should American zoning requirements being loosened in cities, but FWIW in Britain there was a Yougov poll asking about the classic NIMBY 'brownfield only' talking point, and on that score male and female attitudes were almost identical.
able-bodied people on welfare
On this one it does seem that there is a slight bias towards greater generosity in welfare among women - and I would say this is a good thing but nevertheless let us say that it is not for the sake of argument - but the gap isn't huge. On issues like a potential UBI the gap was 6 points in one Gallup poll, and on the semi-related issue of healthcare the gap on government provision was pretty similar. So even if you do think over-generous welfare is a serious issue the gender component is not huge; certainly not large enough to prompt shrill cries about the destructive effects of female suffrage.
below-replacement fertility
Again, which supposedly pro-natal policies are women thwarting?
100% - of these are traceable DIRECTLY to empathy and, hence, to women's suffrage
Yawn. A classic 'everyone who disagrees with me does so because they are too emotional and aren't sufficiently level headed'. Lazy and trite.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
And, most relevant perhaps, Florida voted passed the 2018 ballot measure restoring voting rights to felons. I'm sure Democrats will be quaking in their boots at being 'forced' to defend a measure the majority of Florida voters agree with.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat
I don't think your views on crime, though I personally wouldn't subscribe to all of them, are at all in tension with social democracy, indeed if one considers policing to be a public service which it surely is, then ample police funding is surely the 'more' social democratic perspective. Hence why in Britain, where policing has not been caught up in culture wars as it has in the US, even Corbyn attacked the Tories for cutting police funding.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Why would anyone normal care about other people’s genitalia or a war in a country they can’t find on a map and only became independent in 1992? Why am I, a relative nobody, worried about policing? And my suspicion is that the average person, because of the vote, is often forced to pretend to care, is policed for the ways they pretend to care, when they’d much rather spend time on kids’ education and sports, their jobs, their family, and whatever hobbies they choose to enjoy. I think almost everyone would actually be happier to never worry about cultural affairs ever again.
If this is true, why did the lack of representation for the working classes occasion such dissatisfaction in, say, nineteenth century Britain? The failure of what would become the First Reform Act in 1832 brought Britain if not actually to the brink of revolution then certainly to an acute crisis, over a bill that only expanded the franchise a little. The meeting of the BPU in that crisis supposedly brought out 200,000 people, an astonishing figure considering that it exceeded the entire population of Birmingham. These were people with far less time and energy to devote to political causes than most of today's people, yet they did so anyway, because they knew how important representation was.
HaroldWilson
1yr 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.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Because most of the literature points in the direction that a high chance of being caught and effective is by far the most important factor in determining deterrence rather than severity of punishment. Criminals are not paragons of rationality, breaking out their calculator to work out the expected returns before committing the offence. Quick and reliable punishment creates a much stronger link between offence and punishment in the mind than the occasional criminal being caught and spending years in the slammer. Which it to say that you cannot simply assume that in practice deterrence is sentence length x chance of conviction.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
The blue tribe has been importing a new electorate hand over fist for decades
And by importing, you mean advocating fewer restrictions. Isn't it just possible that people support immigration because they think it's good for a range of economic or moral reasons, not for some nefarious reasons regarding the partisanship of immigrants. I do, at least.
The media memeplex blares out left-propaganda 24/7 in an effort to manufacture consent
This is just silly. Not only does media coverage mostly just respond to demand - at the end of the day even MSNBC just want viewers, that's what they exist for - cable news is not the entirety of media in America. Local news and most print media (with a few notable exceptions), especially tabloids, don't 'blare of left-propaganda' at all.
Lawmakers just change the rules whenever they feel their hegemony slipping (e.g. Covid mail voting)
Sure, that's why famously liberal Kentucky, Montana, West Virginia, Indiana, Arkansas, Alaska and Missouri also expanded mail voting during Covid.
It doesn't matter whether the Reps or Dems win anyway because the politicians of both parties come from the same class stratum and are pursuing UniParty agreed goals anyway
Probably not the place for this discussion but consider that 'uniparty agreed goals' may exist because of genuine overlap in the preferences of both sections of the electorate, not some conspiracy.
And even if they weren't, the example of Trump proves that even if an outsider were to win, they'd just get stymied by the Deep State
Again, probably for another time, but I'd just ask on what specific issues wholly within the President's power Trump was stymied on.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
I think there's also, as usual, a case of diminishing returns here. If you're inactive, and you start exercising regularly and eating healthily, I don't doubt that's good for mental health (as well as physical health obviously). But once you pass the point of 'reasonably fit and healthy' I find it hard to believe gym-going is does anything more for you mentally than any other hobby.
I'm pre-registering a very optimistic prediction. If it was meant to really be act of war/do damage, why was the attack telegraphed in advance? Also, per Fars, only targets identified by government sources so far are bases in the Golan Heights and one in the Negev desert. This matches the pattern of the symbolic post-Soleimani response - remember when people start talking about ballistic missiles that those were used then too. Am I wish-casting? Yes, probably, but I do genuinely think this is probably not going to be disastrous.
Edit: just seen this tweet from the Iranian mission to the UN saying that 'the matter can be deemed concluded'. Thank god, though the danger not passed if some of the missiles/drones do get through and do some real damage.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Now what was that verse by somebody or other?
Well, two can play at that game.
Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night - she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question - "Is this all?"
A woman today who has no goal, no purpose, no ambition patterning her days into the future, making her stretch and grow beyond that small score of years in which her body can fill its biological function, is committing a kind of suicide. The feminine mystique has succeeded in burying millions of American women alive. There is no way for these women to break out of their comfortable concentration camps except by finally putting forth an effort - that human effort which reaches beyond biology, beyond the narrow walls of the home, to help shape the future
It's easy to portray a working life as drab and meaningless, but one can equally do so for the non-working mother. FWIW I think both are oversimple and overgeneralised.
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
So, there's two key points here.
Partygate was by far the most important thing that happened to get Boris removed. But general 'sleaze' in the party didn't help, especially the way it was handled. Look up the Owen Paterson case in particular.
More critically however, the Tories faced some awful defeats. By-elections in seats which had formerly been ultra-safe True-Blue constituencies were electing Liberal Democrats, and Wakefield, a former Labour seat (though not by enormous margins) that went to the Conservatives, returned to Labour in fairly spectacular style, the margin being a crushing 17%, not far off the 2001 figure. Boris' personal figures were through the floor, and voting intention polling, though better, wasn't great either.
HaroldWilson
7mo ago
We have survived most of history without them
Well sort of, but not very well. Peel didn't create the Metropolitan Police just because he felt like it, law and order in the early 19th century and before was a disaster, precisely because so much of the burden was placed on private citizens to bring cases etc. and they weren't very good at it. Violent crime in inner London dropped by as much as 40% on the introduction of the Met, with smaller reductions for property crime.
We also survived most of history without modern medicine.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
The PM is a party man the public did not vote for
Welcome to the Westminster system. The public did not vote for him, but they voted in the MPs that chose him as leader. A slight degree of removal but every action he wants to take (at least in the realm of primary legislation) must be voted upon by the people's elected representatives and those representatives could remove him and his government at any time should they wish to.
people are routinely arrested for disagreeing with government ideology.
Like with @Lizzardspawn before I respond to this I'll ask you a question; is it your genuine belief that the Chinese state does not restrict freedom of speech to any considerably greater degree than the British state?
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.
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