Iconochasm
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User ID: 314
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
27d ago
What is a woman?
I had an epiphany a while back and it's so obvious in retrospect that I'm mad about it. And I don't have anyone else to talk about it with, so you people can suffer this.
They actually don't know what a woman is.
Not everyone. I'm not saying there aren't any AGPs, or bad actors, or just people with extreme dysphoria. But a significant subset, including among the supporters? They actually just don't know.
Like, literally. They are not dissembling. They are not fucking with you. It's not Kolmgorov Complicity. They actually do not have a mental construct for "woman" that is a distinct referent class from a mental construct labeled "man".
I think this is the intersection of a couple of different things.
First, if a core conservative flaw is Othering, perhaps the core progressive flaw is the Typical Mind Fallacy. Think of the guy who can't even pretend to believe that fetuses have souls. Or the dude who looks at a religious extremist screaming "I love killing women and children in the name of my God!", and thinks "This person would adopt all of my beliefs about queer theory if they were just a bit less poor and uneducated and oppressed." Why on earth would that provincial fool do any better at understanding the alien category of "women"?
Especially with the elephant in the room, feminism, insisting that there are no meaningful between men and women that could justify any discrepancy in representation in any professional field. Women are just like men and want the exact same things, right? So, what exactly are the differences you're allowed to talk about?
(Writing prompt: explain gender variances in readership between romantasy and milscifi... to HR.)
And the cruel irony is that a lot of progressive men can traverse that minefield. Just blame the other men for gatekeeping and emotional immaturity. It's not a fair answer. It's not a true answer. But it threads the needle. There are plenty of people who can accomplish that task, because they have the mental agility and verbal IQ to mouth the platitudes while internally running logic straight out of a Hoe Math video.
It creates this doublethink world where everyone is supposed to know what a woman is and how to treat them differently, but never acknowledge the source of that knowledge, or openly admit to any real world implications. In fact, they have to actually deny that knowledge in a mass gaslighting. Remember Darwin? He was doing that all the time. A critical precursor to this epiphany was that time he pulled the mask down a little bit, and expressed his annoyed bewilderment that the rest of us spectrum-y nerds were taking progressive politics literally, instead of understanding it as a cynical exercise in tricking other men into acting like dumbasses.
Now what about the guys who aren't that mercenary cynical socially adroit? What happens when we combine the preceding socially-required doublethink with the common autistic struggle to model other minds? Remember that autistic-to-trans pipeline? Yeah.
So what the hell even is a woman, if you struggle to understand other people in general, and you don't think you're allowed to notice any impactful differences between men and women and all of the smart and successful people in your (blue) tribe sneer at the idea of any meaningful differences? The resulting rationalization is like a pastiche of the Jack Nicholson line: "I think of a man, and then add some cuteness and whimsey".
Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
How would you explain to an autistic teenage boy the differences between boy people and girl people? In a way that provides useful guidance and doesn't make T seem like a normal thing for any boy who isn't obsessed with sports? In a way that let's them successfully navigate the differences?
How do you teach them to actually understand the difference?
Iconochasm
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2yr ago
In a "what the fuck even is this timeline" update: Anderson lee Aldrich, the Q Club shooter, is apparently non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and already had an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing his career as a 15 year old "professional hacker", calling him a pedophile, and describing his absent father as an MMA fighter and porn star.
I'm feeling very vindicated in my impulse to hold off conclusions... but I would think that, given my biases, wouldn't it? The real test would be a tragedy that looks at first glance to fit my biases perfectly and allows me to cathartically Boo Outgroup. I suspect that differences in media ecosystems have that less likely... but I would think that too, wouldn't I?
Plus obvious, audacious narrative updates in real time.
And our first echo shooting, as usually happens in the immediate wake of a highly publicized mass shooting. No apparent political/CW element, disgruntled employee.
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2mo ago
Exactly what due process do people think was missed? The guy had multiple days in court, and had a standing deportation order, no? If the government managed to bring him back, sticks him before an immigration judge who says "Your asylum claims are no longer valid due to changed facts on the ground, assuming they ever were, it's fine to execute the deportation order to El Salvador", then is everyone who is upset about this going to nod sagaciously and be satisfied that due process was followed? If they get him out of El Salvador and dump him six feet across the border in Honduras, does that fix everything?
How much due process in general needs to be given to each of the 10-30 million illegal immigrants? There was certainly no due processes when they came in; can we hold the entire Biden administration and Democrat party in contempt?
Back to Garcia, what "options" remain after the government of El Salvador has declined to release him? Do the courts expect special forces to exfiltrate a foreign national from a foreign prison?
I'm honestly baffled how people justify this to themselves as anything other than naked "rules for thee but not for me". Does it actually feel, inside, like standing on principle and not just grasping at any procedural trick at hand?
This great man expressed his unflagging belief that "[t]he very basis of our individual rights and freedoms is the certainty that the President and the Executive Branch of Government will support and [e]nsure the carrying out of the decisions of the Federal Courts." Id. at 3. Indeed, in our late Executive's own words, "[u]nless the President did so, anarchy would result." Id.
Let whosoever among you has demanded prosecution for Blue State governors who ignore the clear and plain SC rulings on the 2nd Amendment be the first to speak up.
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27d ago
I'm eagerly waiting for all the deeply sincere civil libertarians who were minted on January 6th, 2020, to come forward and angrily denounce these insurrectionists. I expect calls for Palantir to have them all IDed and then rounded up and fed into a woodchipper of a prosecution storm, including random grandmas who just happened to be at the protest, but too close to someone obstructing federal business.
Trump sends in the National Guard, Newsome looks like a pussy.
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2yr ago
The trick is that when pressed, they say they're talking about suicide rates, and thus making a veiled threat to kill themselves. As a reminder, this is archetypal abuser behavior.
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2yr ago
Alright, folks, I'm out.
Consider me the first Motte casualty to AI. No, I'm not planning on any self-harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. But reading about this shit is so depressing and anxiety-inducing that it's giving me a premature mid-life crisis, so I'm going to do the reasonable thing and take the grill pill.
As part of that reevaluation of how I've been spending my time, I've taken a look at the 15ish years I've been "Very Online And Politically Aware". Since the financial crisis in 2008, really. And I have to conclude that the investment of 10's of thousands of hours of my life has been basically a wash. I don't think I can point to a single tangible benefit to my life, it's all just sunk opportunity cost. Maybe a few memes pushed out, but thinking I inspired them is probably just arrogance. My lazy, slacktivist involvement almost certainly didn't matter for anything at all. Being Politically Aware is arguably the worst thing I've done with my life; I would rather have played more video games.
Even the insight porn is getting stale.
So combining these two epiphanies, I'm going to block TheMotte and SSC, and ACT and Instapundit, and unsub from any remotely political or AI-interested subreddit and block /all. Anything else I can think of or that comes up, I'm just gonna dip. (I would like some advice on how to block websites on chrome mobile for Android. The recommended apps seem to not really work the way they're presented.)
Because if this is the beginning of the end, of us becoming either obsolete or all dying, I would rather go out in a eudaemonic frenzy than wasting my time whining and worrying. I would rather double-down on being an amazing dad, and son and brother. I'll double-down at the gym, and run the best D&D campaign my friends have ever seen. I've had fantasy novels fermenting in my head for decades, I'd like to write a couple before GPT-X makes human creativity obsolete (and then I can have GPT-X churn out countless sequels!) Maybe I'll even try dating again.
And if and when the nanite disassembler swarms come for me, I'll go down on my feet knowing that I was a pretty kick-ass human, back when that mattered.
If anyone has suggestions for other things worth doing or being, or that satisfy that "check my phone while waiting in the line to pickup the kids" nudge that avoids my new no-nos, I'm all ears.
I've enjoyed this community a great deal, and think fondly of many of you. Thank you for contributing to making this a place where I felt at home. Maybe we'll have a grand meetup if humanity wins, and spend a subjective eternity having AI-moderated arguments about who was right.
And if any of you are in a position to do anything about the future - godspeed. We're all counting on you.
Thank you again. <3
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to take this empty propane tank to ACE for a refill.
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2yr ago
'They enriched us.' Migrants' 44-hour visit leaves indelible mark on Martha's Vineyard
I encourage people to read the article before reading my impressions.
Incidentally, this article made me really wish for the Bare Links Repository back.
There is so much about this article that is just amazing to me. I don't know how to describe it. Maybe "witlessly mask off"?
First, I want to note the tic where every time the author notes an age, he specifies that the migrant in question looks younger. It's just so artlessly manipulative.
Second, the people patting themselves on the back for the casual, mild, one-off generosity. Wow, a Martha's Vineyard homeowner reached into his wallet and gave a migrant a $100 bill. Then there's the guy who spent $100 on candy for the kids, which is extra Wholesome 100 because he lives in his car because the rent is too damn high. It's like Ray Sanchez crammed an entire scathing allegory about life and housing in the blue zones into a sentence and didn't even notice.
Third, I'd really like to see the argument for how offering people a plane ride to a rich resort town is a human rights violation.
But the thing that really gets me is the detailed, yet uselessly vague, descriptions of the incredible dangers the migrants had to overcome to get to the US. Murderous mud and murderous cartels, and floods and cliffs. Coming from Venezuela, it's 2,684 miles by plane. Map software can't even calculate a route by land, I'm guessing it's something more like 4,000 miles, going through at least seven other countries. The article quotes the migrants clearly describing themselves as economic migrants, but repeatedly calls them asylum seekers. No one seems to notice that these people trekked, apparently on foot, halfway across the hemisphere, losing something like 2/3rds of their number to the assorted lethal dangers for exactly the storied rewards they want these people to get, quoting the article, "access to services including legal, health care, food, hygiene kits, and crisis counseling" along with housing.
The MV people celebrating themselves in this article seem to bear a large portion of moral blame for creating the exact incentive for people to take these risks and find themselves in these situations. Imagine if some billionaire was offering people a large sum of money to take their children and hike across a deadly desert. I think there would be mass outcry at how incredibly fucked up that was. And the few people who reached the other end are instead greeted with a king size Snickers bar and a crisp Benjamin to fuck off. Do you want people dying to get to you or not?! How many dead kids is worth a few hours of cultural enrichment?
I'm at a loss for how to categorize this, but it all just strikes me as appalling. This is the most cruelly champagne socialist shit I've ever read, and it's being presenting as flattery by CNN!
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13d ago
I was recently at a Faire type event and briefly saw a family I've known for a long time. The mother was a part of my college-aged social circle, and the older daughter is my son's age. They live down the street, and we have little contact for reasons that will be made abundantly clear.
The younger child, chronologically 5, biologically a son, was clad in a full Faire style Faerie Princess regalia, complete with wings. His long hair was plaited, and every article of clothing was not even unisex, but just straight up girl's clothing and sandals. Anyone seeing a picture of the lad would have thought him a girl, and anyone seeing him as I did, in the minute before I made hurried excuses and fled, would have suspected he was a boy by the way he reached insistantly for an ornate foam weapon, like the song in his blood knew his hand was made to grip a sword. He was stymied in his efforts by the gentle chiding of his blue-haired pussy cuck "father" (I use the scare quotes because I'd bet 5:1 odds that the kid is literally not his).
In the time I've known them, in all my observations, I've never seen the boy hold a ball. Pick up a stick. Have a single instant of non-supervised or mildly rambunctious fun.
I feel so bad for that boy, and so angry at his Devouring Mother, who homeschools both children because our Blue State curriculum isn't woke enough. That situation seems at least as bad as gay conversion camp, and I would call it flatly worse if and when it progresses to medical interventions.
And yet.
I'm not going to violently free the poor oppressed child. I'm not even going to call out his mother. I might say something to the daughter's father, a close friend. I feel a deep aversion to so overtly criticizing the way other people raise their kids, even when I find it abhorent. I might try to slip the kid some ball games, and maybe leave a few High Quality Sticks in his yard, but I probably wouldn't even risk a socially awkward conversation for the sake of it.
Where do you all draw the line? At what point would you intervene? When should the State intervene?
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2mo ago
Lucky for us that was provided "If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail in proceedings to terminate the withholding of removal order. See 8 C.F.R. See 8 C.F.R. § 208.24(f) (requiring that the government prove "by a preponderance of evidence" that the alien is no longer entitled to a withholding of removal)."
So if they do this tomorrow via zoom call, you're going to switch sides on the debate and boldly battle the people claiming that bad things have happened?
From a legal perspective, yes. There's a reason why the courts (including this Reagan appointed Bush supported conservative judge) have been so consistent here.
I'm excited just imagining all the consistency!
Due process applies to government taking action, it is a limit on the ability of government to do what it pleases to people in its jurisdiction.
The government took many actions that it pleased to people in it's jurisdictions in facilitating the 10-30 million.
One easy way to help for instance would be to stop paying El Salvador to hold him there.
Do we have any evidence that this is the case beyond Van Hollen claiming that the ES VP told him this? Given the TdA people we are paying for, that seems like a situation with a high likelihood for misunderstandings.
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2yr ago
This is the crux of the problem, and the crux of the strategic equivocations. Over decades of study, we have identified certain behaviors that people intent on harming children tend to use to enable that harm. Encouraging children to look at porn. Engaging them in sexually charged conversations. Pushing them to keep secrets, especially from their parents.
During the ruinous lawsuits against Boy Scouts of America, information from the records was released demonstrating the sort of things that had happened in the organization. One example in my local area was something like "Man becomes scoutmaster in 1984. In 1984, he takes 6 boys camping, and provides them with porn and alcohol," No act of pedophilia was even alleged. Phrased like that, it sounds like something The Onion's version of VP Joe Biden would do, roll up to the Jamboree with a keg and hand out some Playboys, haha what a wacky joke, what kind of insane prude freaks out at 15 year old boys getting access to porn and some beer?
And yet, that sort of thing wasn't tolerated even in the 80's (that scoutmaster was banned in 1985). And this was before the regulations and protections were seriously heightened in the 90's. Currently, any adult who wants to volunteer with BSA is required to take a Youth Protection training course. That course includes video demonstrating grooming behavior, including an adult man encouraging a teenage boy to look at porn, to talk about his sexual feelings and interests, and to hide those things from his parents.
Those are grooming behaviors. That is what grooming is.
And responsible organizations categorically ban those behaviors because it's just not worth trying to separate the adults who take the next step and actually molest a kid from the creepy wacky uncle Joe Biden who is just kind of inappropriate and unfiltered. It doesn't matter if they're not actually a pedo, they're wearing a pedo uniform. But the criticism is even more restrained than that; they're not being called pedophiles, they're being called groomers. Because they're doing groomer shit.
And frankly, the literal pedos are common enough. Stats for public school employees seem roughly comparable to Catholic priests, and far in excess of the Scouts. And that's not even getting into the people who have Typical Minded themselves into believing that some huge portion of the population is secretly sex or gender queer and they need to groom help kids understand that.
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2mo ago
Great. I'm sure you have a large backlog of posts making this same point at progressives, right? Are you familiar with the concept of an "isolated demand for rigor"?
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2yr ago
Then it would follow that they can't be afforded 100% agency.
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27d ago
Newsome is trying to pivot to look like a moderate in preparation for a presidential run. He needed a Sista Soulja moment here, and instead he's whining on Twitter about how Law and Order will only make things worse. Meanwhile protestors, his constituents, are slashing tires, breaking into federal buildings, and assaulting federal officers while they carry out their duties.
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2yr ago
So, there is another kind of dysphoria that I think is probably a closer metaphor, Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which people feel like they have too many limbs, and desire to cut one off. If someone presenting that dysphoria says "I want to cut off my arms, and you have to tell me it's a great idea and I'm stunning and brave, but also pretend forever that I never had any arms in the first place, or I will become so inconsolably distraught that I might kill myself"... would you go grab a hacksaw and fire up the gaslights? Or would you think that maybe this person shouldn't be allowed to make that kind of decision for themselves, and they need to be forced to get some regular therapy and evaluation by sane doctors?
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4mo ago
Medicare fraud is extremely common. There are entire companies that just ship wildly expensive, random "medical equipment" (which is usually some kind of actual equipment, like a back brace or something) to old people and charge it to Medicare on their behalf, and then just see if the octogenarians can figure out how to file a return through their Byzantine phone trees or website.
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2yr ago
I will lodge the prediction that this will prove to be a self-own. The optics here are already horrendous. 53 migrants dead in the back of a truck is a statistic, 50 getting a free vacation to Martha's Vineyard is a human rights violation. Whose rights? Why, the right of rich, progressive Sanctuary Citizens to not have to look at poor brown people, of course.
And now they're keeping this disaster in the news for months to come with the prospect of bilking thousands of billable hours from leftist billionaires and money laundered NGOs to engage in blatant lawfare over a free plane ticket to a sanctuary city, after refusing to pay for a single hotel room for a single migrant? The "Democrats want illegals to have more rights than you, and then charge you for making them look at a poor person" ads practically write themselves. This is "Umbridge as a comic book villain" territory.
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2mo ago
You seem to have strange assumptions about people's state of mind when the first thing you think of when someone engages in PR to help return a family member from a notoriously violent prison to the country they were illegally deported from is that they are "chasing a fat legal payout" instead of maybe wanting to help out their family member who had an injustice done to them. Of course her children having quoted "disabilities" is further evidence for this somehow, alright.
Did you miss the details where the wife in question filed a restraining order against him for repeatedly beating her to the point of injury? That seems to have ended in dismissal when she didn't show for the final hearing, so maybe she was just playing games.
Apparently it is "my brain on legalism" to demand due process and rule-following from the authority that governs everyone's lives and controls untold power. The founders would be seizing in their graves.
"Brain on legalism" is a nice way to say "I think a lot of people are full of self-serving shit". Are you one of the three genuinely principled civil libertarians who is also routinely incensed at, e.g., Democrat governors blatantly ignoring court orders regarding the 2nd Amendment?
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2mo ago
Ok, ES tries a different, more humane method, BUT, for every gang murder above the current base rate, one Humane Prisons Advocate gets executed. You first.
Would you accept this deal?
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2yr ago
Inspired by the CW talk about Rings of Power and Wheel of Time. Imagine you were an executive at Amazon Studios. Bezos just handed you two sets of One Billion Dollars, and the mission to make him two flagship, media empire founding fantasy shows. One is to be sexy and adult, the other is to be fun for the whole family.
Which two IPs would you want to go with?
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2yr ago
More specifically, they're creating a cultural environment more conducive to pedophiles raping kids in general. We have decades of accumulated knowledge of youth protection best practices. They are an enormous, bureaucratic pain in the ass, and we follow them anyway because they reduce child rape. Trying to ignore these rules and best practices (for example, prohibitions on sexualizing conversations with kids, or showing kids porn) is insanely suspicious.
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1mo ago
Hanania in particular. It baffles me that anyone takes that creature seriously.
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2yr ago
So imperfect, even shoddy transitioning may be the best option actually available.
I'd be more amenable to that if it seemed like therapeutic solutions had actually been tried and found wanting. Instead, it seems like therapeutic solutions have been deemed mean and politically incorrect, and not tried. And I get the metaphor with bipolar, but bringing this back to the original point, I am not responsible for someone else's behavior. If Kanye West doesn't want to take his meds, then he gets to deal with the consequences of his unhinged behavior. If you really want to transition, go for it. If you want to surgically turn yourself into a cat, or an orc, have fun! But when you threaten self-harm if I don't buy into your delusional framework, you're either too ill to get to make those decisions for yourself (and need to be committed and treated for general suicidal ideation separate from your gender issues), or you're an abusive piece of shit.
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2yr ago
A couple minor anecdotes about schooling, and some related thoughts.
Earlier this year I blew off Back to School Night, because it is just a litany of teachers slowly reading notes that really ought to be just a syllabus handout. One downstream consequence of that is that I commit to attending Parent-Teacher conferences so as not to seem negligent. My children are excelling (by the standards of high-tier blue state public schools), so the conferences were also a series of boring conversations in which I strove to appear Interested while teachers recited figures and handed me print-outs of details I already knew from the online system that tracks grades. No, there are no social or behavioral issues. Perhaps a lingering artefact of my own issues with diligence, the one thing I pointedly ask every teacher to confirm is the apparent total lack of homework.
When I attended this particular middle school in the 90s, the school day consisted of many 40 minute classes, with 3-5 minutes of shifting between them, and then an average of 2-4 homework assignments per night. These assignments weren't difficult but keeping track and on top of all of them was something I struggled with, especially bigger projects with distant due dates. There were token efforts to help with this, like every student being given a record-keeping journal, and teachers insisting that we make note of each assignment, but we were mostly left to our own devices as far as getting it all done and handed in. My parents made some effort to help, but they are blue collar types, and this sort of thing wasn't quite their wheelhouse either. I spent those years blowing out the competition on the standardized tests, and then getting Bs and Cs because I just couldn't manage to remember that tasks had been assigned, or worse, I'd do them and then forget to hand them in.
In retrospect, it seems probable that the only reason I got into college at all was because a certain PMC-princess developed a crush on me in high school, and drug me into social circles where people socially kept on top of assignments. This is a massive, often unnoticed privilege; if you had it, take a moment to appreciate it. This carried me though the first half of college, and there is a painfully obvious demarcation where my ability to wrangle the administrative parts of college vanished when that social circle did.
My kids, OTOH, in the new, post-pandemic set-up, have 75 minute periods for their main classes (math, science, English, history), and then repeat one of them at the end of the day in a mildly structured study hall, where they are encouraged to finish assignments. As a first note, longer classes and less time wasted swapping to different classrooms seem like obvious optimizations for the school day. But that extra period of guided study hall at the end of the day seems really useful for instilling the kind of mindset that recalls, organizes, and accomplishes tasks. Most days they don't have any actual homework, which is an improvement since it's mostly busywork. But even when they have an assignment that does spill over into homework, between those extra skillsets and the integrated technology for assignment tracking they are so much more on top of things than I ever was. As an HBD-disclaimer, maybe that's their mother's Jewishness shining through, but there seems to be a qualitative improvement compared to pre-pandemic.
I'd picked up a lot of scorn and skepticism for academic pedagogy over the last decade, to the point where I think the entire field is borderline hokum. It feels important to acknowledge sensible organizational changes that have yielded noticeable improvements, instead of just maximizing administrative cowardice. Maybe it shouldn't have taken decades and a pandemic to figure it out, but progress isn't obvious, and it's certainly an improvement.
And on the topic of administrative cowardice, the other anecdote. My son is one of a few dozen boys who stay after school most days to play pickup games of basketball and football using the schoolyard facilities and fields. There is a nearby playground that usually has small children with parents, but these boys (ages range from 9-13) are mostly unsupervised... until now.
There is a boy in that cohort who is diagnosed as autistic, the sort where he probably wouldn't have been diagnosed with anything 20 years ago. At one of those recent pickup games, he was beaten up to some unknown degree, and his mother happened to see the whole thing from her car while stuck in traffic. The mother approached the administration, and was essentially told "This is unsanctioned, after-hours play, we have nothing to do with it and will do nothing for you." So, she went and filed a police report. That kickstarted some action, specifically a ban on kids playing in the yard after school without parental supervision.
Now obviously, I feel for the boy. I wish he hadn't gotten assaulted; I am sure that was a horrible experience. But I also wish that a few dozen other boys hadn't gotten effectively banned from convenient exercise, independence, and peer socializing. And I can't even really fault the administration; they're probably justifiably worried about lawsuits. Or... at least that's how other parents are interpreting it. Reading the email that was sent out about it, all that's really said is a reminder that students are "expected" to leave the premises if they don't have a sanctioned activity or parental supervision. It's not phrased as a hard requirement. It actually seems like a fine needle-threading that absolves the school of responsibility, without actually accepting responsibility for enforcing the ban, the exact sort of "take responsibility for your own choices" that I would have insisted they should do instead of some cowardly, heavy-handed ban.
So, for a second time, I feel that this organization I have heavily criticized deserves some praise for responsible decision-making. Credit where it is due. I'd send the principal a congratulatory email... but that seems like the sort of autistic idiocy that might force his hand.
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2yr ago
Is taking a child to a strip club abusive? Is encouraging a 9 year old girl to get up on the stage and twerk around the pole while grown men throw dollars at her abusive?
We might quibble over the term "abusive", but does anyone want to argue this is an appropriate activity for a child?
I have a very smart friend who is also a talented decoupler, who could easily be a very quality contributer here if dealing with Culture War issues didn't make him bleed from the eyes. He is literally the only person I know whose Facebook posts about politics did not make me lose respect for him. Over the years, we have had a number of conversations about contentious CW topics that flirted with the border of Adversarial Collaboration, long detailed discussions handled with fairness, civility, and mutual respect.
Until the topic of student loan forgiveness came up. That discussion was unusually heated. He seemed almost frantic, heated about PPP loan forgiveness hypocrites and just not giving the expected degree of decoupled consideration for arguments about how the loan forgiveness was an overall terrible policy. He seemed personally invested, felt personally attacked, in a way he hadn't in conversations about abortion or gun control.
The thing is, my friend is a teacher. Education is a big factor in his identity. He has taught maybe a thousand students who might benefit from the forgiveness plan. Attacks on that plan are an attack on his class identity. Politics is the mind-killer, and it is a sad fact that a rationalist's Art is most likely to abandon him when he needs it most (or, rather, he will fail the Art). And so my arguments sparked an uncontrolled emotional response that was missing from other, less identity-laden topics.
The second thing is, I've been on the other side of that coin, back when we had our multi-day deep dive into the gun control literature. Gun control hits me emotionally as an attack on my class identity. When I hear a gun control proposal, before I hear a single specific detail or spend a second considering merits, some lizard part of my brain interprets it as "Fuck you, your father, your father's father, and your father's father's father". (Does the word "father" still mean anything to you?) I've begged off having spontaneous discussions about it in person, even with close family, because I don't want to spike myself into rage and other unpleasant feelings. During that deep dive, my excellent friend was so calm, fair and rational that he overrode that concern, and I ended up learning a lot and having a great time.
And I'm thinking about this now, because I notice a similar reaction to the trans discussion downthread. The idea that my children might be brainwashed into taking evolutionarily self-destructive choices, and I can't even attempt to oppose it without facing the full wrath of the modern State, kindles a pre-rational, animal panic/fury response. I find myself getting heated to an unusual degree just thinking about it. I don't think I'm particularly "anti-trans". I was willing to be accepting two decades ago, when I first learned it was even a thing. But something about the thought that the phenomenon might hit my kids triggers an atavistic survival instinct. That reaction doesn't trigger when I consider my son dressing like David Bowie, or my daughter playing sports. It doesn't happen when a peer goes trans. It triggers at the thought of one of the two corporeal incarnations of my DNA and memes getting sucked into a fraught psychological memeplex, and particularly at the thought of them being medically sterilized.
Imagine an alternate world where any time a kid expressed suicidal ideation, government employees would firmly nudge them towards euthanasia, and would jail you as a parent for protesting. That's roughly the level of emotional hit - some part of me considers this an existential threat.
But what are the odds? 0.3%? That's not that much worse than the odds of childhood cancer, or other kind of unexpected death that a healthy mind doesn't overmuch worry about, and deals with gracefully if it comes. But now it's apparently something more like nearly 2%? That hits me in the Papa-Bear-Who-Wants-Grandkids-In-Space-Forever. And it seems very likely that a lot of that is social contagion or could otherwise be wildly reduced with a minimal degree of skepticism towards youth fads.
So, two points. One, I think it might behoove activist types (assuming we're not in pure conflict theory) to try to notice when one of their pushes is hitting this sort of reaction and figure out a path to undermine or alleviate it.
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify? What CW issues feels like molten hot war to the hilt, where your instincts fight to throw aside all reason and charity? Any thoughts about why?
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