Jiro
26d ago
'Rich person flaunts the law, confident they will never face consequences' is not a very unique or interesting story. It's certainly not 'brave' or anything...
"Rich person flaunts the law" implies that the rich person gets away with crimes because they can retaliate using their wealth and connections. Rowling doesn't have judges or lobbyists on speed dial, and she's not going to contact her friends in the banking industry or the Mafia.
"Rich person flaunts the law because they have enough money to pay for a good defense, and because if something absurd happens to them, the public will see how absurd it is" is a noncentral example of a rich person flaunting the law and is more like the rich person not being railroaded than it is like a typical rich person flaunting the law.
Jiro
10mo ago
"Pride is just a celebration, like Polish festivals" is the motte. Few places have month long banners about the Polish festival, and failing to support a Polish festival rarely results in a penalty.
Jiro
2mo ago
That is a mistake theory recommendation, and the Times isn't running on mistake theory.
Jiro
10mo ago
"Within a year" everyone got rid of Covid restrictions. That has nothing to do with the truckers.
Jiro
3mo ago
To anyone who says that my only beef with Freddie is that he won’t let me talk about this stuff in the comments of his articles about something unrelated, I would like here to reiterate: I have never complained about him forbidding people from bringing up trans issues in the comments of his articles, and completely respect his decision to ban people from doing so.
I think that's actually too charitable.
Replace "trans stuff" with some obviously negative thing like "misquoting sources". If Freddie decided "I won't let you post any comments about how I've misquoted sources", does he have a perfect right to do so? Of course. Can he be criticized for it? Sure he can. Yes, it's his blog and he decides what goes there. But it can simultaneously be something he has a right to decide, and bad judgment.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully invoked the Worst Argument in the World,
No, you haven't. If someone claims that everyone should be let out of jail, and you say "that means we'd let even murderers and rapists out of jail", they can't respond "that's the Worst Argument in the World, most prisoners in jail are in there for nonviolent crimes". You judge how bad the standard is by looking at the worst case, not at the average case.
While most transgendered people are not in cults, the left has no principled standards about how to distinguish between transgendered people in a cult, and everyone else. You're just not supposed to gatekeep at all, and the policy of not gatekeeping deserves to be judged by the worst cases that it enables, not the cases they would like you to think about.
Jiro
10mo ago
That might apply to some places. It doesn't apply to the hobby groups that are being discussed. You absolutely could participate in Battletech or video games without saying anything whatsoever about your private life.
Thanks. I try to be careful about specifying when I'm saying what I believe, steelmanning what some group or person on the left might say about the topic, or playing devil's advocate to stress-test a position.
Because a common dishonest tactic is to take a position that's an exaggerated version of your normal one as a test to see what you can get away with. Anything you can't get away with, you then label as a "joke" or "just getting you to think" or "playing devil's advocate". If you want to play devil's advocate, do it for a position that you don't directionally believe in. You've talked about steelmanning the opposition above, but a leftist playacting as a more extreme leftist isn't steelmanning the opposition.
Also, your "devil's advocate" position seems to contain flaws that are best explained by you sincerely believing in the position. For instance, someone taking a devil's advocate position wouldn't misrepresent Rowling's book--there's no incentive to be careless about something you don't really believe in. But a true believer has an incentive to be careless.
Jiro
9mo ago
Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you,
Yes, but it still can be criticized, because sometimes "my ideological enemies are building a weapon" amounts to "my ideological enemies get to fight fairly". Or to put it another way, the left is so used to privilege that equality looks like repression.
Movies and TV that are deliberately promoting some progressive bugaboo in an unfair way are too common for me to care that somehow, some conservative managed to do the same thing once.
Jiro
10mo ago
People have a way of sarcastically saying extreme versions of things they actually believe. It lets them probe how far they can go and gives them plausible deniability if they go a little too far since they can always claim to be sarcastic.
Jiro
9mo ago
Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?
"The law/the Constitution actually means what it says. Stop trying to twist it for policy reasons."
It was a manipulative question. It’s akin to, “does calling for the rape of women violate Harvard’s rules on domestic assault?” Of course it wouldn’t, because inappropriate statements against the values of Harvard are not in the category of domestic assault
To continue the analogy, this happened after Harvard claimed that calling for the rape of 10 other categories violates the rule. (It's a hypothetical, so pretend that those categories exist.) If the president of Harvard refused to answer when asked specifically about women after agreeing for everyone else, the question isn't manipulative, it's just exposing hypocrisy.
If you claim that calling for genocide is not harassment, that's fine by itself. But if you do it in the context of all the other things that Harvard does consider harassment, it isn't.
If Harvard said "calling for genocide of Jews isn't harassment or bullying because that's the wrong category," the next question would be "how about 'it's okay to be white', or anti-trans positions?"
Jiro
10mo ago
Does this actually match any experience you personally have with trans people?
It matches the experience with defenders of trans people in the media and legal system. If you're saying that trans people don't personally act much like this, and that the complaint should be about trans allies instead of trans people, I suppose that's a fair complaint. But that's different from saying that it just isn't significant at all.
Also, the backlash against FTM is lower than against MTF precisely because FTMs aren't claiming many things that cis men exclusively get, because there aren't many things that cis men exclusively get. What exactly can they shriek at cis people to do?
Jiro
10mo ago
I don't know if you're feigning ignorance, but you're saying the things that someone feigning ignorance would say. If pet dogs was an issue for a major political party , people had pet dog rallies that were specifically there to rub pet dogs in the face of people who didn't like them, if people routinely got fired from their jobs for their opinions on pet dogs, and if people's opinions on pet dogs--or even their refusal to speak about pet dogs--marked them as irredeemably evil and not fit for polite company then pet dogs would be political. Just "I have an opinion on whether it's okay" doesn't make it political.
Jiro
3mo ago
I think there's a trans analogy here. People are superficially asking you to not say bad things about their situation, but they actually want you to think their own perception of that situation is correct, not just mouth the words. And every so often they make a demand that doesn't really fit the former and implies the latter.
Jiro
8mo ago
Conservatives often defend jury nullification, so can't be shocked when it's used against them.
"Jury decides based on what someone did, that they shouldn't be punished" is jury nullification. "Jury decides, based on the jury being threatened with physical harm, that someone shouldn't be punished" isn't.
There are also tens of thousands of pieces of Star Wars fanfiction on archiveofourown.org and I think probably 80% of it is written by women and girls.
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This is distorted by the fact that most fanfiction period is written by women and girls, so it's not evidence of the gender ratio for the fandom itself.
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I wouldn't count "Anakin thinks it's a great idea to spend the day at an amusement park, also having something else up his sleeve. Confessing his love to Obi-Wan!" as being genuinely a fan of the series.
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The woke trend is clearly not what appeals to them about Star Wars. Look how few of them have Rey as a main character, for instance.
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Since many of the writers are kids, "I watched it as a kid" isn't ruled out. Are they still going to be fans come next year?
Jiro
11mo ago
I suggest that someone who does such things to animals is probably deluded in such a manner which indicates a propensity to harm actual people in similar ways.
Even extreme animal rights activists rarely think it's wrong to harm insects, but someone who likes pulling wings off insects just to see them squirm is probably a bad person.
Jiro
3mo ago
But other Christians are willing to say "the Westboro Baptist Church is crazy and we don't believe what they are saying is true". This doesn't happen for trans issues.
Jiro
4mo ago
Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists.
This is the kind of thing the motte and bailey phrase was designed for.
Meanwhile nobody cares about this Cade Metz creature except that he wrote about Scott.
We're in a bubble. Scott seems important only because of that. And Metz is a Times writer. This inherently means that a lot of people care about what he says.
That will probably be his epitaph: "Wrote a hit piece on a beloved and respected public intellectual".
Plenty of people told similar lies about Gamergate. It's pretty obvious by now that none of them will be chiefly remembered for those lies. We don't control the discourse, and in most places where it's relevant you can't even suggest that anything said about Gamergate was a lie. And yes, it still gets brought up every so often.
Jiro
30d ago
My rules > your rules, fairly > your rules, unfairly.
Free speech is "my rules".
Speech restrictions for conservatives is "your rules, unfairly".
Speech restrictions for everyone is your rules, fairly".
The best choice is still to be principled, bu the second-best choice is to at least apply the speech restrictions to some of the left as well.
Jiro
3mo ago
One might also question the morality of, say, a territory that was a net benefactor of federal aid for years then seceding without making up for it by paying for what it had gained through its previous association with the rest of the country.
This is easy to game by manipulating numbers.
There's a classic example where Democrats claim that the government spends a lot on red states when the truth is one or more of general infrastructure used by nonresidents such as interstate highways, military bases that protect the nation rather than the state, blue inner city areas in red states that eat up expenditures, and blues who move to red states to retire so the expenditure and revenue get counted for different states.
It also runs into the problem of "benefits" that are harmful, that can't be rejected, or both. "We paid police to enforce all those drug laws against you. Society benefits when drug use is reduced. You didn't pay us back for those benefits when you seceded!"
Jiro
8mo ago
"Living well is the best revenge", "don't let them live rent-free in your head", "you're just letting them hurt you even more", etc.
If your enemies tell you that you should do something for your own good that straightforwardly helps them and harms you, that's probably motivated reasoning or concern trolling. Some of the biggest proponents of getting rid of grudges are the people who are targets of grudges, who should be ignored for this reason. Someone who you have a grudge against probably isn't very interested in your mental health overall; why should you listen to them on the one subject where they have something to gain?
And combine this with sour grapes--when you can't have something (in this case, defeating the group you have a grudge against), you tell yourself that the thing you can't have really isn't all that great. Sour grapes is a form of bias, and it may be a coping mechanism, but it isn't rationality.
That's the same thing I pointed out a couple of days ago. The fact that more Palestinians were killed doesn't mean that Israel has been more aggressive. It just means that that Israel's defenses work better. Counting deaths this way is a bizarre standard which implies that the more you successfully prevent people on your own side from getting killed, the more immoral you are.
Israel shouldn't lose points for preventing more Israelis from being killed and this making this comparison look bad.
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