InfoTeddy
1mo ago
I will agree that it is a problem if one reflexively disagrees with a contrarian and doesn't elaborate on why the default hypothesis is better. But, provided that one actually gives a specific argument, I think there is value in arguing against a contrarian hypothesis in support of the status quo. It tends to reveal what I like to call silent successes - the places where you don't even realize something is working well, which you only realize when a new solution is tried and fails in said places. Chesterton's Fence is a good formulation of this phenomenon.
For example, I appreciate pieces like this one by Yassine Meskhout which pushes back against some of Aella's position on polyamory (itself a contrarian position). While I don't agree with everything in the piece, it's much more valuable for it to exist than to not because it illuminates some of why monogamy (the default position) is actually good.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
That's true, but I see this as a form of evolution, the same way that 99.99% antibacterial soap ends up producing superbugs through natural selection. It's just a matter of consequence that trans activists' deplatforming efforts would end up hitting on one guy who just happened to have the smarts, wits, etc. to figure out how to effectively resist censorship and would want to dedicate enough time and effort to doing so.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
It really does strike me that Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Aella et al are putting on the kid gloves tight when it comes to the proposals of transgenderism.
Take Scott, for example, responding to the 4chan post about trans-Napoleonism. He basically says "just let him wear the silly bicorne hat" and points to "Emperor" Norton of San Francisco as a happy-go-lucky story of just going along with what a trans-emperor says because it's easier. But he doesn't ever adequately address the hardball arguments - a Napoleon-gender that demands absolute power over the French Empire and its satellites in Europe (as the 4chan post said), and a Norton that demands the head of President Rutherford B. Hayes (as you, Zack M. Davis, point out). As far as I can tell, Scott's response to people pointing out the demands for a French Empire and Hayes's head - although he doesn't explicitly state this - is "lol, that just doesn't happen".
This is a very troubling dismissal, because there are a lot of Rutherfords in transgenderism. The reason why people point out President Rutherford Hayes and demands for a French Empire is because transgenderism affects others - it has externalities - and attempting to cure someone's distress by agreeing to their false map of reality is not a cost-free action and is not something with no meaningful consequences to other people (hence, the story about putting the hair dryer in the passenger seat is simply irrelevant). In other words, "just be nice" is a really bad argument.
For example, the inclusion of trans athletes in women's sports, or the inclusion of trans people in women's bathrooms, or the inclusion of trans people in women's prisons. Everyone seems to agree that it would be a very bad thing if a trans-Napoleon today gained control over the countries that used to make up the former French Empire, or if Norton was given the head of Rutherford B. Hayes, so they just... dismiss those and say it could never happen. They say they would never demand Rutherford's head and that it's absurd to even consider the possibility that Rutherford might be decapitated to fulfill the desires of an Emperor Norton.
And then when those externalities do happen, and a male-born trans person wins against a female athlete (inherently, unfairly), or a trans person assaults a woman in the bathroom, or a trans prisoner impregnates a woman, those objections are at best handwaved away and dismissed as outliers or discredited, or at worst labeled "transphobic" and censored.
In my opinion, the refusal to honestly engage with these arguments reflects poorly on the leaders - or otherwise influential figures - of the rationalist community. To put it lightly, it's unbelievable how they make a simple mistake - that their own foundational writings (the Sequences) warned about - and how they have failed to correct their own mistake (at least, they haven't corrected it yet, although I'm not optimistic about their chances of doing so).
InfoTeddy
1mo ago
Java Edition mods are in Java. Bedrock Edition is in C++ and I'm not as familiar with their modding scene but it appears to be much more difficult, so the vast majority of Minecraft mods are Java. Even still, that doesn't mean they can't be malicious. There was an incident last year where a Fediverse instance got compromised because the owner ran a malicious Minecraft mod on her computer.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Kiwi Farms isn't a monolith; there are some people on there who are sympathetic to transgender concerns. That said, the overwhelming majority are definitely anti-trans. I'm not implying that this means that the site is deliberately anti-trans or anything; it's a combination of their thread subjects being disproportionately transgender (as previously mentioned), but also the fact that many other gender-critical spaces elsewhere on the internet have been shut down thus funneling many would-be GC Reddit/Tumblr users onto the site, as well as the fact that many don't even care about trans issues and just want to laugh at weird people but have essentially been forced into caring due to the many attacks on the site (no doubt by the same activists shutting down anti-trans thought on the rest of the internet). If they were left alone, half of the anti-trans sentiment would disappear overnight.
InfoTeddy
3mo ago
While I sympathize with the argument that it's tyrannical to require crypto exchanges to adhere to KYC, I would imagine that the immediate and obvious objection from Pornhub's side would be that this would substantially cut into their bottom line, from the principle that providing stuff for free paradoxically increases the revenue of it (look at how piracy of video games boosts their sales). If they can't provide free videos, then they'll get less money.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
I don't know anti-car people who want to totally abolish personal cars.
This must be a selection effect or something (cf. Scott Alexander comparing conservatives to dark matter), because when I think of anti-car people, my mind immediately recalls the various people who have stated in no uncertain terms that they do in fact want to abolish cars (e.g. BritMonkey). And then I don't know what to make of the movement as a whole because they seem reluctant to disavow their more radical sections and/or improve their messaging to be more palatable to the average person.
To be fair, this isn't anything special to urbanism; I have similar problems with the trans activist movement too. At least white nationalists are honest and don't hide how radical they are.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Indeed. Caroline Farrow is a great example. She is (was) being harassed by a trans woman, but for the crime of tweeting unfavorably about a trans person, police showed up at her house and arrested her in front of her children, rather than the person who was harassing her. This is on top of her being socially canceled.
In general, nothing about government prosecution of cancel culture precludes private, social prosecution of cancel culture. Unlike the laws on monopoly of physical, men-with-guns violence, there's no law saying that only the government can deal consequences to one accused of wrongthink. It would be great if there was, but for now, we're in the uncanny valley of half-measures where we have the downsides of both implementations and neither of the upsides.
InfoTeddy
2mo ago
Not completely dead yet. Many instances have essentially died but some instances have resorted to directly using accounts for scraping and are buying in them in bulk. Of course, this is expensive as those accounts will eventually get banned sooner or later.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
An interesting tweet from Elon Musk: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1671370284102819841
Repeated, targeted harassment against any account will cause the harassing accounts to receive, at minimum, temporary suspensions.
The words “cis” or “cisgender” are considered slurs on this platform.
My initial reaction to this was that "well, aren't you already allowing slurs on Twitter, Elon?" But then I realized that there's a distinction here - slurs may be allowed, but harassment is not. After all, he used the words "cis" and "cisgender" without any censorship, much like many would censor a typical slur such as "nigger" as "n*gger" or "n-word". You may be allowed to use "cis", but you're not allowed to directly call someone "cis" on the platform.
More to the point, I think it's very valid to describe "cis" and "cisgender" as a slur, insofar as a slur is something you call a group of people who don't want to be called that (similar to the "'TERF' is a slur" debate). Certainly, "cissy" is definitely a slur (which the person Elon Musk was replying to was called). So why don't people want to be called "cis"?
I think it's because labeling the vast majority of the population (something like 99%) and making them have to use a qualifier to describe themselves is a systematic effort to make them seem more different from the norm than they really are. For the vast majority of human existence, a woman would be described as "a woman", until suddenly (around the late 2010s or so), she would now have to be described as "a cis woman", to distinguish her from "a trans woman". The implied argument seems to be that "a woman" is now suddenly ambiguous and one does not know whether one is referring to a woman in the classical sense, or a trans woman.
I would agree with this, except that I still see many instances of "women" being used when it's really being used to refer to trans women. If a qualifier is needed now, why not just keep saying "trans women" all the way through? So the "cis" terminology seems to just be a ploy to redefine "woman" to by default mean "trans woman", thus making the "cis" qualifier necessary to refer to a woman in the classical sense. But this would seem to contradict one of the supposed goals of the trans movement, that trans people should be treated the same as non-trans people. Why not refer to trans women and "cis" women equally, without the qualifier?
And it's not like it's impossible to refer to non-trans people either. I've seen many terminologies used that are much more acceptable, such as "biological women", or "non-trans" as I've been using. There's also "assigned female at birth", but I feel like that's much more of a misnomer, as it implies that gender/sex is something you're "assigned" rather than a fundamental property that is immutable (at least with today's primitive technology).
InfoTeddy
3mo ago
Why do people who want to scare women with pictures of trans-identified females always go for the photoshopped ones, and not for a more realistic one that shows that Buck Angel is actually pretty tiny and nonthreatening compared to her male counterparts?
It's a crucial tactic that trans rights activists use. Many of their arguments derive from a foundational assumption that the trans person passes as the gender that they want to be (I've heard the bathroom argument turned in favor of the trans people by arguing that there's just as much danger if not more to a transgender woman being in the men's restroom than a man in the women's restroom), but much of the evidence to substantiate this assumption are photos taken using very specific angles and very specific lighting, if not photoshopped entirely. Candid, unaltered photos almost always show the trans person looking weird and out of the ordinary, if not failing to pass entirely.
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
4mo ago
I always roll my eyes when people's idea of debate is to use a Bingo card and immediately discard one's argument if they vaguely fuzzy pattern-match to an item on the card. It's why I'm not a big fan of simply citing fallacies, like "that's an ad hominem", at least not without elaboration on how exactly what their interlocutor said is fallacious in that manner.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
Not to be uncharitable to Freddie, but it seems to me that he's toeing the line here because he's blood-related to a trans person and trans activist. (Giving details about this person is probably against the rules, so I won't.) So, he simply doesn't want to be cut off from them. It's why every time he writes something about trans people, it just seems so intellectually hollow, like he's fundamentally refusing to question any of his assumptions and preconceived notions about trans people and trans activism, and just wants to go along with the flow to keep them happy. For example:
I also just don’t agree with the conclusions drawn from some kinds of evidence. For example, it’s entirely possible for clinics that specialize in adolescent transition to be mismanaged or otherwise imperfect. That’s simply the reality of medical care at scale. What I don’t understand is why this would be uniquely disqualifying; there are no doubt dialysis centers and radiology labs and pharmacies that have serious operational problems, but no one thinks that this discredits those kinds of medicine.
No, it doesn't discredit dialysis centers, radiology labs, or pharmacies in general. But, the first objection people take here is to the existence of adolescent transition in the first place. Ignoring that though, the bigger objection is that there's no feedback mechanism to root out and address these mismanaged clinics, and not only is there not one, people are discouraged from doing so and branded as "alt-right fearmongerers" if they ever attempt to call them out. It's a self-coordinating conspiracy (prospiracy?) that Big Pharma can only dream of. Big Tobacco is wishing people would've done the same for any anti-tobacco talk in the '90s.
And in general, it's like this for any proposal of the trans movement. You ask, what if men take advantage of trans identification to creep on women in the bathroom? You're told that that's not going to happen and you're just repeating a scenario that only originates in the minds of alt-right Nazis. Okay, then some men end up doing exactly that, so you ask what will be done about them, and then you're told that you're just making up lies and that they never actually creeped on women. Or, my favorite, that man is actually just a right-wing psyop to discredit trans people... so it did happen, but it doesn't reflect bad on the trans movement. Which is a really convenient way to avoid any blame for any of your implemented proposals. How about another one: You object that normalizing policing behavior against anyone deemed anti-trans (i.e. being a cop) is simply harassment and bullying that is legitimized under the guise of trans activism. "Well, uh, we tell them not to harass people, we don't condone harassment!" Okay, so a VTuber announces her intent to play Hogwarts Legacy and is immediately dogpiled to the point that she quits streaming. "All those harassers are just right-wingers in secret trying to discredit and kill trans people!" and "She deserved it anyways." You point out that detransitioners exist and go over why they detransition, and then:
Worse, right-wing fixation on detransitioners has had the ugly side effect of making some people who are supportive of trans rights suspicious of them, when they should be treated with respect and understanding.
Sigh. Should I go over how trans activists treat detransitioners in the first place? (Spoiler alert: Very poorly.)
Trans activists always react like this when something bad happens. Every single instance of trans policy producing bad outcomes is ignored, dismissed, or discredited under the fear that this legitimizes opposition to trans people and will threaten their lives. There's no mechanism in the movement itself to stop bad behavior, proactively or reactively, so the brakes are ripped out and the foot is pushing the accelerator to the floor. If that doesn't give you pause at agreeing with shibboleths like "trans rights are human rights", then I don't know what will.
I don't really want to blame Freddie, because no one is perfect at everything and there will always be some blind spot they'll miss. Still, for all his dissident writing, it's a shame he fell in line on the trans issue. For some far better dissident content on the excesses of the trans rights movement, I recommend Sophia Narwitz's video "Trans Activists Are STILL Their Own Worst Enemy".
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
It's their thinly-veiled attempt to be loftier, paint themselves as descending from the ivory tower to do a good deed, and aren't just another lowlife doxing someone on the internet, when in reality, well, that's exactly what they are. They're going to stoop to the level of the people they accuse of doing "online harassment", but they're going to do it in a way that makes it seem like they're not doing it at all.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
(reposting because new thread)
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
4mo ago
My immediate objection is to the lopsided gender ratios that this would produce. As seen in China, lopsided gender ratios are not good demographics to have for a country.
InfoTeddy
4mo ago
Furthermore, the biggest target of the video was actually someone ostensibly on Hbomberguy's team (Somerton).
I doubt that this is Hbomberguy just acting without bias, since he more-or-less gives Hasan Piker (and other react streamers) a pass despite react streamers committing arguably worse plagiarism, and Hasan is another BreadTuber friend. Around the same time his video came out, a couple other videos attacking James Somerton also came out. It's really hard to not see these videos as coordinated.
InfoTeddy
10mo ago
I've never understood how people who are, essentially, less than 0.01% of the population have gained a comparatively much higher proportion when it comes to their representation in the popular conscience. Trans rights activists don't like the 0.01% argument, which is fine - but then they turn around and use it themselves by saying that a people that is 0.01% of the population is harmless. Which, besides being not how things work in any capacity, is having it both ways.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
The most disturbing thing about all this to me is how easy it is to prop a blatant falsehood via "citogenesis". Multiple reputable sources have claimed that KF drove three people to suicide, therefore it's on Wikipedia as established truth. As far as I know, this is false.
Just a primer for those not in the know (since the primary source for these is, well, down right now):
-
Chloe Sagal self-immolated as an act of protest against the sorry state of mental healthcare. She repeatedly tried to go to other people in the LGBT community for help and housing, but for various reasons (it's a long story), they did not provide it to her. She was holding a manifesto but it flew away when she set herself on fire. Many people blame her death on the Farms despite there being no evidence for this (besides her having a thread), and doing this cheapens her death while letting systemic societal issues go by without scrutiny.
-
Julie Terryberry was abused for years by her significant other. Notably, Julie was not trans, and anyone reporting her as trans is spreading misinformation and should not be trusted. As a result of the abuse, when her S.O. left her, she killed herself. This is tragic, but pinning her death on a website (just for having a thread) is a disgrace to those who are in abusive relationships and does nothing to combat the true cause of her death.
-
Byuu/Near emailed Null and threatened to commit suicide if his 13-page thread that had been dead for months wasn't taken down. He did not take it down (and anyone doing the tiniest of game theory should know that if he did, it would have set a precedent incentivizing more people to threaten suicide to take threads down). Shortly thereafter, he posted a suicide note, and then his death was "confirmed" by a claimed friend of his (who no one knew was his friend) who claimed to have direct contact with the Japanese police, despite Japan having strict privacy laws and that no police department in the developed world would ever willingly give out information to people who are not close family members of the deceased. There remains no proof of his death except for a statement by another third-party claiming to be his employer. And yet despite the outrage there hasn't been much evidence of him ever being harassed by the site (no, criticizing him on your own forum is not harassment). Every time people claim this, they speak in general terms and vague vibes, but never give any specific details as to what happened, and certainly don't provide enough substance to link the Farms to it.
The most infuriating part of all this is that it is trivial to point to actual instances of the site acting against the subjects of its threads, or in their terms, "poo-touching". All one needs to do is point to any of the many zoosadist threads on the site (zoosadist meaning a zoophile who has abused animals) who have ended up in jail. But that would paint the site in a good light, and they don't want to do that.
InfoTeddy
1yr ago
EDIT: Lmao we're such pedants around here. I'm only the fifth person to just have to correct the life expectancy thing
That's a good thing. If there are five different comments pointing out the same basic, fundamental error that completely invalidates someone's conclusion, that's a sign that this person really messed up in their reasoning. It's like Twitter ratios but in Motte form.
InfoTeddy
9mo ago
Agreed. I'm always skeptical of people, like Aella, who focus endlessly on what the data is and trying to interpret grand conclusions from statistics, bigger conclusions than one should. There's a reason "lies, damned lies, and statistics" is a saying.
For example, police statistically pull over and ticket more black people. Does this mean that police are racist? No, it just means that black people commit more traffic offenses. Indeed, black people statistically commit more crime in general. (Noticing this is only racist if you come up with racist explanations for this. There's perfectly innocuous explanations you could argue like black people being historically disadvantaged, being in poverty, etc.) People will argue that speed cameras are better because they can't be biased, and then once speed cameras are implemented, will allege that cameras are racist somehow just because they, statistically, ticket more black people.
Most people don't think in terms of data and statistics, and quite frankly, it's not really the best policy to implement something from "well this number is lower" or "this line is going up and to the right". So what if Meghan Murphy is wrong, and, for the sake of argument, a lot of people in the sex industry have a positive view of it (as proven by statistics)? It does not necessarily follow that the sex industry is ethical or positive for society as a whole.
(Silly Aella surveys are unhelpful and probably worse than nothing.)
Just so we're on the same page, there's already articles defending Aella's surveys as things you can draw big conclusions from, rather than things that only apply to Aella's audience.
InfoTeddy
3mo ago
Website with large library of pro final exit material. According to OP, PDFs do count as books :P
The site is controversial mostly for frequent accusations that it facilitates suicides; the standard formula is a suicidal person seeking methods joins the forum, posts a few times getting help, and then successfully carries out their suicide, then their family goes to the news media and an article is written about their plight blaming it on the forum. Arguably if it was just a library of suicide method PDFs it would get less heat because there's no interactivity (with other humans) with PDFs. At least, that's the way I see it, but it's entirely possible that people would still dislike the site just as much even if it only contained PDFs and had no interaction. Then again, I don't see this level of controversy over sites like LostAllHope (although there was a Change.org petition to shut down LAH that, surprisingly enough for a Change.org petition, resulted in the host terminating services, although the site just moved hosts), so I could be right.
This thread?
Yes.
The War on Kiwi Farms: The Kiwis Fight Back
I'm sure everyone here knows of the controversial site Kiwi Farms, which has been endlessly accused of facilitating online harassment, and endlessly deplatformed. The site's defense has always been that it doesn't do that, the content is completely legal in the United States, and it's just a neutral observer, and with very limited exceptions (namely protecting Chris Chan until 2021, and interfering with zoosadists), I've found that to largely be the case. But I always wondered if this attitude left them vulnerable to just being attacked endlessly like this. Like, if bad actors know that this site won't actually fight back in any way, wouldn't you expect that they would just relentlessly attack it, since they're more-or-less free to do it?
Well, recently, they've actually started doing it. They're using the tactics that have been most effective in deplatforming them, and turning it on others. Namely, filing abuse complaints with upstreams and accusing sites of violating their AUP (which stands for Acceptable Use Policy). Their first target, thematically enough for an anti-trans site, is DIY HRT, as in HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) that isn't dispensed directly from a licensed pharmacy, often homemade and imported in to the country from shady international sources.
DIY HRT sites exist in a very legal gray area, because they more-or-less undeniably facilitate the sale of unlicensed pharmaceuticals. There have been credible reports of the drugs being manufactured in really unsafe and unclean conditions, leading to issues like clearly visible human hair in a vial that's meant to be injected into your bloodstream. Furthermore, the demographic they serve raises child welfare concerns - children are the demographic most likely to be unable to access legal HRT and/or want to keep their HRT on the down low from others - and some of the marketing/labeling on the items is quite blatant (in one case, text reads "Keep away from parents" and the image is of a childlike figure). Naturally, these are the reasons Kiwi Farms uses to file abuse complaints with upstreams. And they're doing it quite openly - there's a public thread on the site where they coordinate and give information on filing abuse complaints. So has it worked?
Looking at the DIY HRT wiki, they list several DIY HRT sites that have been taken down by complaints, so certainly looks like it has. It's gotten to the point that I had to look through an archive of the DIY HRT wiki, because I couldn't connect to the live site. The irony is that, just like Kiwi Farms themselves, the sites haven't actually been taken down for good - they just hop to another web host, domain registrar, email provider, and they're back in business. And the biggest irony of all is that the DIY HRT camp don't have any recourse for this. On their subreddit, one person asks "What is stopping doing the same to KF?" and the answer is "It has been done to KF already." What are they going to do exactly, attempt to take down a site that has spent years hardening itself against being taken down? One is reminded of the Chinese parable where the penalty for being late is death. They can't be more mean to Kiwi Farms, because trans activists have already spent years being as maximally mean as possible to Kiwi Farms, kicking them out of almost every single web host and domain registrar in the world, and all that has resulted in is a horde of people pissed off that their site is being taken down by trans activism, now radicalized against the trans movement. They've been put in a situation where they can either lose, or lose but also take down others with them, and in that respect I don't blame them for finally, finally, starting to fight back.
More options
Context Copy link