InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I'm not sure what Dreher's Law is - searching with DuckDuckGo suggests it's something to do with a Nazi prosecutor - but if defying it means trans women convicted of sex offenses will be put in male prisons, then while I would consider that a win, I wouldn't say it's completely out of the woods. Trans rights activists will almost certainly campaign for that trans woman to be put back in a female prison and may even end up reversing the decision.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Screwing up the dating market, for one. China has the opposite problem with vastly more men than women as a result of their former one-child policy, and that leads to a ton of men being unable to find a partner. Analogously, an excess of women would leave a ton of them unable to find a partner. Of course China has more demographic problems beyond that (namely having more old people than young) but you get the point.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
I wish they would take this definition to its logical conclusion and charge the phone book and people finder sites with doxing, but they never do. (Of course, they added the "with malicious intent" part which could be used to conveniently absolve said people finder sites of wrongdoing.)
It's absolutely staggering how people will blame anything and everything but data brokers for doxing. The United States is an unreasonably easy place to dox people. If you reside in the US and give me your legal first and last name, I can very likely find your home address in seconds by going to one of these sites and typing them in. That's absurd. I hate to play the "this only happens in the US" card (and to be fair, equivalent sites exist for Canada and possibly other countries), but this genuinely seems like a US-specific problem. Nowhere else will governments just release what should be private information to any party who has enough money to buy them.
If there were any laws against releasing that sort of information to data brokers, and people finder sites were forced to be shut down, 99% of US-based doxing (and subsequent "online harassment") would disappear overnight. But of course, there's a huge financial incentive to keep things the way they are, as having data rakes in huge revenue for companies (it's digital oil after all) and they're not liable for their information being misused. And modern journalism isn't suited to actually rocking the boat, so they will never publish a news article on how easily people can be doxed in the US because of these data brokers, and they will never challenge this state of affairs.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Apparently it was pulled but probably not for his politics.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Not to defend the mod decisions too much, but I'd imagine that they would've banned the replier for a longer length if the replier had more of a history of antagonizing people in this way than the original poster. Though, I'm not a mod and don't have access to the notes they have on each user, so I can't say for sure that's why they banned Westerly for longer than MeinNameistBerd.
Remember how back in 2016, there was a funny meme going around about how you could text to vote for Hillary? A man named Douglass Mackey was behind that, who has been found guilty of election interference by a jury in New York. The argument goes that this effectively deleted a bunch of votes that should have gone to Clinton. Okay, so how many?
Leading up to Election Day, at least 4,900 unique telephone numbers texted “Hillary” or something similar to the 59925 text number, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
...I'm not an expert on the 2020 allegations of election interference, but come on now, I'm pretty sure those allegations were more than just thousands of votes. And they were dismissed on account of not likely having affected the election. Regardless, the meme was clearly a joke; that 4,900 number seems absolutely paltry and criminally charging him is making a mountain out of an anthill.
More importantly, it's not hard to interpret this in the light of Trump's recent indictment for a matter that also transpired in 2016. Now, I can understand the argument that the reason they didn't try to charge him then was because he was the president, and it would be pretty hard to try to bring charges against the president while he's in office, therefore they waited until he was out. Or, they didn't know that he paid off the porn star until recently. But this? Douglass's tweet was very public and they could've easily charged him all the way back in 2016 if they wanted to. Why are they doing it now?
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
I am confused at how the above comment is promoting hate upon vulnerable groups and would like to see this claim elaborated on.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
That's because many proposals for improving the quality of life of non-car owners, such as building pedestrian bridges, are ridiculed by urbanists for improving the quality of life of car owners too.
InfoTeddy
3mo ago
Bad moves from both sides here. Coach literally livetweeted that he was going to cross at a specific border checkpoint with Hungary hours before he actually did so, and surprise surprise, he was caught and jailed. Ukraine should've kicked him out instead of keeping him because it's not like he could do actual harm to the war effort.
I don't know if this will have significant material repercussions for Ukraine. I was under the impression that Ukraine funding was slowed if not dried up entirely due to the focus on the new hot thing, the Israel-Palestine conflict.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I wouldn't call the Watergate dismissals a massacre either, and I would much prefer to use the word "massacre" to mean killing rather than broadening and overloading its meaning, which would make it less useful (i.e. you would learn less about the world from hearing the word "massacre"). In any case the severity of what Elon Musk did is in no way, shape, or form equivalent to what Richard Nixon did. For starters, Nixon didn't un-dismiss the special prosecutor afterwards, and what Musk did isn't illegal.
No one understands that to be a claim that they are equivalent in any way to actual killing.
I mean... I did. And that's not how it works. If I didn't know anything about Watergate and you told me something called a "Saturday Night Massacre" happened, I would assume that Nixon killed someone or something like that. This is what I mean when I say that overloading the meaning of a word makes it less useful, because if I accept that "massacre" could mean not killing, then if I didn't know anything about the Chiquola Hill Massacre I would wonder if it was just people getting fired or people getting killed.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Well, they do in fact acknowledge this, and that is why they don't want to sell their house and become the rich equivalent of a hermit. Nothing you said in this comment has addressed your interlocutor's comment in any way. I find this move of attempting to turn your interlocutor's argument against themselves to be logically confusing.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
There is, however, violence involved here. The arms race making vehicles larger and taller means that every life saved by an SUV costs four lives outside of the vehicle. Pedestrian deaths are steeply rising after falling for decades. I think that's worth caring about as well.
I don't care what your noble goal is. This is not a valid legal or moral justification for vandalism and deflating people's tires.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
This seems very uncharitable. Are you seriously suggesting that "car-dependent" places don't have a culture and people are obese in them? I've seen obese people in all sorts of places; it doesn't seem particularly correlated to "car-dependency". What does it even mean to not have a culture anyway? Culture is simply the way humans do things; it seems impossible to avoid having a culture, even deliberately.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
I think "transphobe" is a hugely overloaded term that communicates almost nothing of value. The only thing you know for certain when someone invokes it is that they are referring to something negative, and something to do with trans people. That's all the information it conveys. It's frequently used to describe everything from the tiniest, object-level objections to certain trans positions (don't put biological males convicted of rape in biological women's prisons) to extreme, hateful rhetoric that genuinely wants to see trans people genocided (and not the "soft" form of genocide that entails detransition; actual murder).
It reminds one of calling Martin Luther King Jr. a criminal.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
I think that a large part of it has been downvotes affecting your participation. If you get downvoted too much, you're restricted from commenting, so you're always incentivized to say whatever gets you upvotes, which will always be what the majority consensus is. This is also where the judginess comes from, because if you have a differing opinion, people don't want to seem like they are the ones with a minority opinion, so they will attack you to keep the consensus afloat. Contrast that to TheMotte where downvotes don't affect your participation at all.
InfoTeddy
8mo ago
I mean, yes. But arguably even if you do link your real-life identity, it's still a digital simulacrum, because typing text is different than saying words in real life. Is there a standard by which if you reveal enough details on a pseudonym, it's no longer considered a "digital simulacrum"?
It's like the man himself says
The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!
I've seen this "gotcha, you're a hypocrite!" tweet linked every single time someone has brought up this new policy in a discussion space I'm in, and at no point has the argument (implied or otherwise) gotten any better. Social media platforms are not socioeconomic systems and this is not a "wall" that Elon "built" to "keep people from escaping". At any time people are free to choose to leave Twitter without much consequence, which is not remotely the case if you're, say, looking to move to the US from Mexico, or if it's the 1960s and you're living in the USSR. Yes, yes, you can gripe that you'll lose all your followers or tweets or what have you, but that is not remotely the same as needing to uproot your entire life to move across national borders or needing to go through the US's complicated immigration system, nevermind the risk of death if you tried to do the same in the USSR, and to pretend that they are the same is... to put it politely, a category error.
This sort of hyperbole seems to be the norm around anything Elon Musk does. If Elon bans a bunch of journalists (nevermind all the journalists that were banned before he took over which didn't receive this sort of outcry), it's suddenly a "Thursday Night Massacre" and deserving of its own article on Wikipedia, alongside other actual massacres that took place on Thursday such as:
Bloody Thursday, Thursday Massacre or Thursday Night Massacre may refer to:
- "Bloody Thursday", on March 28, 1918, during the Battle of Tampere
- "Bloody Thursday" on July 5, 1934, during the 1934 West Coast waterfront strike in the United States
- The Chiquola Mill Massacre, on September 6, 1934, during the 1934 textile workers' strike in the eastern United States
- The Kossuth Tér Massacre, on October 25, 1956, during the Hungarian Revolution
- "Bloody Thursday", on May 15, 1969, during protests at People's Park in Berkeley, California
- "Bloody Thursday", on February 17, 2011, during the fourth day of the Bahraini uprising
And just to be sure, let's look at the Chiquola Hill Massacre:
Violence broke out when Dan Beacham, the mayor and magistrate in Honea Path as well as the superintendent of the mill, ordered an armed posse of strikebreakers to fire into the crowd. As the crowd fled, six strikers were shot in the back and killed, one mortally wounded, and thirty others suffered less than mortal wounds.
Beacham obstructed court proceedings against himself and the other strikebreakers, and ordered some of the strikers arrested. Dozens of unionized workers were fired or evicted from their company homes, and after the defeat of the larger strike on September 23, the unionization effort in Honea Path largely came to an end. Until the 1994 publication of "The Uprising of '34" and the subsequent journalistic work of Dan Beacham's grandson, Frank Beacham, the events of the massacre were largely undiscussed in Honea Path. Today, the event is memorialized by a stone marker in nearby Dogwood Park.
Yeah, that's right. People literally getting shot and murdered and evicted from their homes is placed on the same level of importance and described in the same way as some people being unable to use their accounts on a certain social media app. Nevermind the fact that they still have a huge massive platform to publish their views because, you know, they're journalists and they work at giant media companies, so really this didn't do anything, and to compound the amount of nothing this did, Elon ended up unsuspending them anyway.
I would say something to the effect of "touch grass", but I know everyone's already been told that and clearly it's not working. So instead I will just reiterate that the internet is not real life and Twitter is a platform barely used by less than 5% of the population. It's really not important. Whatever stupid shit Elon Musk does is not going to be the end of the world, and not even the end of Twitter for that matter. If Twitter ever does get run into the ground, life will go on and things will continue as normal.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
This is not that surprising, considering not only the group that the person(s) who trafficked and kidnapped women belongs to, but also that people nowadays don't take physical, material violence seriously and put far more weight on to emotional "violence" (i.e. opinions they do not like) despite the fact that words have less material impact than, you know, actual physical action.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
So how do you refer to someone who’s straight, but in a wheelchair? Or a cis autistic person? You can be “normal” in one axis but not another. Surely it’s handy to have a word that refers to the default attribute?
I don't see why the first can't be referred to as "wheelchair user" and the second as "autistic person". There is a convention in communication where if you leave out an attribute, it is assumed to be normal, or at the very least, not currently relevant to the conversation. Especially since "wheelchair user" does not necessarily mean that they are not straight and "autistic person" does not necessarily mean that they are trans.
If you feel denigrated being called straight, do you also feel denigrated being called right handed (assuming you are)? Or would you want to be called normal handed?
This is very different from "cis" for a few reasons.
-
Estimates of the proportion of right-handed people in the population varies widely from 70% to 90%, but whatever it is, the actual number is far from 99.99%, in contrast to the proportion of non-trans people. So it would be incorrect to say right-handed is "normal-handed" (unless one is joking, of course). It may be the majority, but not the norm.
-
The accommodations for people of a certain handedness are very understandable and very reasonable. E.g. talking about manufacturing left-handed or right-handed computer mice. So there's plenty of innocuous reasons to use the term.
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Most of the time that "right-handed" or similar is used, it is used neutrally and without a negative connotation. E.g. this isn't about the actual hands of people, but talking about how to drive on the right-hand side of the road with a vehicle that has a steering wheel on the right-hand side of the car. (I say most of the time, though, because I just searched "right-handed" on Twitter to look at the usage of the term, and there are a few recent tweets mock-arguing that it is a slur in response to Elon Musk's tweet, which I can decidedly say means it is being used in a negative context.)
To me your argument just sounds like the same language policing that the left is oft guilty of, but with a right wing flavour.
If you mean language policing as in "don't say the n-word", then I guess so. But I agree with that policing insofar as I don't really think it's productive to let people say the n-word all the time, although at that point it's more about behavior, not language.
If you mean language policing as in "say 'people of color' instead of 'black people'", I don't think that's the same thing, because "black people" is definitely a neutral term (and as a minor point, "people of color" is just more awkward to say).
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
Is Twitter finally dead yet?
Usually, I'd be the last person to ask such a provocative question. I used to be one of the people who rolled their eyes or otherwise ignored sensationalized media stories surrounding Elon Musk and his takeover of Twitter, stories which have plagued the news cycle for the better part of almost a year now. It felt like you couldn't go a day or two without an article on the most mundane of things that were only remarkable because of Musk, like him going to the bathroom in the middle of the night.
But I have to - reluctantly - admit, maybe all the media's negative hype had a point.
The latest decision Musk has made is to rebrand Twitter to "X". The URL X.com will automatically redirect Twitter. Twitter is changing its logo from the iconic blue bird into a white "X". Apparently a tweet should now just be called an "X".
The obvious question is: Why? Musk's answer seems to be that he wants to change Twitter into some sort of "super-app" where one can do everything on it, similar to the WeChat app in China. This only raises further questions, like why people couldn't just use other apps, or why it had to be done in this why, or why they couldn't even just go the Meta approach where the company is renamed X (in fact, it's already been "X Corp." for a while) but Twitter gets to still be named Twitter and keep the blue bird logo.
The one thing that everyone in the Musk-Twitter discourse seems to agree on is that Twitter has significant value in its brand. Now, it might not even have that. Who really wants to talk about "'X'-ing on X" when it's far more idiosyncratic to say "tweeting on Twitter", which people have done for the better part of the decade?
But to answer my own question: No, I think it's the wrong approach to look at each change as potentially an outright Twitter-killer. I think the bigger picture should be looked at, and that in the long run, the demise of Twitter will be a death by a thousand paper cuts, where each change isn't quite so negative to kill it entirely, but it keeps Twitter on a downwards and downwards trend. And there's already been several paper cuts - fleeing advertisers, ratelimits, restricted guest browsing, etc.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
Never. But I wanted to be a bit less anecdotal and a bit more charitable in my top-level comment.
InfoTeddy
11mo ago
A lot of these assertions come from Strong Towns, an organization ran by Charles Marohn that frequently makes up just-so stories about how suburbs will eventually crumble, based on fradulent "analysis", if you can even call it a coherent analysis.
One example is the claim that replacing parking spots at a restaurant with restaurant patios increases revenue, but this compares revenue from the parking fees of the parking spots to the revenue of the new restaurant tables, which is a blatant apples-to-oranges comparison that goes away if you actually compare the revenue of the restaurant as a whole before and after.
This claim is oft repeated by other urbanists like Not Just Bikes. I've yet to see NJB or even ST retract these faulty claims.
Personally, I don't think it even matters how representative it is. What matters is that many in the movement don't call out their own for bad behavior like this. And this extends to every time someone in the trans movement has committed some form of bad behavior.
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