OliveTapenade
No bio...
User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
7hr ago
My understanding was that women attempt suicide more often than men, but men are vastly more likely to succeed, since they tend to prefer deadlier or more direct methods.
OliveTapenade
11hr ago
Aha, yes, that's exactly the sort of thing I was talking about below. It's easy to romanticise the other sex and believe that it's so much easier for them, but everything seems easier from a distance. You don't understand how hard it is until you've actually lived it.
Whether women or men in general experience greater happiness or life satisfaction is difficult to measure. Most surface polls show women reporting greater satisfaction, but that link suggests that women tend to use a higher scale than men and may actually be less satisfied. I don't want to make a general statement about which sex is, on average, happier, at least, not without a lot more research, but I would at least say that there probably isn't a vast difference.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
Sorry, that's been backed up for a while. I apologise if I came off as trying to tear down a novel you love.
OliveTapenade
15hr ago
The point about age is a good one - if you ask me to picture 'a man' or 'a woman' in the abstract, I picture a fit, attractive person in their 20s or 30s. Culturally I think we do tend to idealise 20-something women, even more than we do 20-something men. I can thus imagine the woman there being an appealing thing to become.
But ask someone, "Would you rather be a 50 year old man or a 50 year old woman?" and I'd bet the woman starts to do a lot worse. What about if it's age 60? More than that? Culturally I think we have a model for middle-aged or elder men still being charismatic, authoritative, and even attractive, whereas that is not the case for older women at all.
For what it's worth, I'm in the camp that, if I had a two-way button, would try it both ways around and see what felt better for me overall. If I had a one-way button, I would give it a lot more thought and I think would not ultimately choose to press it.
So, that out of the way...
Firstly, I suspect this does depend a lot on your bubble and your particular subculture. I'd guess the rate would be much higher among heavily-online or nerdy people, partly because being extremely online often detaches people from their body a bit more, partly because very thoughtful or intellectually-inclined people are more interested in hypotheticals or other ways their lives might be, and partly because nerds are often a bit bullied or have low self-esteem, which contributes to wanting to change themselves. I could imagine 25% of the kinds of people who play online games being interested in the button; I suspect that normies would be much less interested.
Secondly, this is inevitably a question that involves a lot of idealisation or romanticisation. It's a "the other man's grass is always greener" situation. You will imagine yourself as a fit and attractive member of the opposite sex, and you will probably overestimate all the ways in which being the opposite sex might be appealing, and underestimate all the ways in which it would be frustrating or difficult.
You mention MMOs, for instance, but in MMOs the choice is purely cosmetic. I play MMOs and have both male and female PCs, and the thing is, in an MMO they are entirely interchangeable. NPCs treat male and female PCs identically. Male and female PCs have the exact same physical capabilities. This is not like real life, obviously! If I had the magic genderswap button and pressed it, just on the biological level I would become shorter, weaker, and in general less physically capable. Well, that doesn't sound appealing. Then there's the cultural and social level. A huge number of things are acceptable for me as a man that would not be as a woman. Men's dress is both more simple and significantly more comfortable than women's dress. Men are almost never socially obligated to use cosmetics. Men don't have a menstrual cycle or suffer any of the inconveniences that implies. Just living and existing as a man, day to day, is cheaper and more comfortable than living as a woman. And then in terms of how other people treat you! People treat men and women differently; maybe people treat women with more courtesy in some contexts, but people are also more patronising toward women, or women are more likely to victims of various kinds of minor harassment. The MMO comparison isn't much like men or women in real life.
You see this sometimes from real trans people, right? I know I've read accounts from trans men saying that they didn't realise what it's like when people see you as a man and treat you as a man. Behaviours that were socially licensed for women aren't licensed for men, or at least, not in the same way (e.g. the ways you can display emotion). In general people care less about men; you have to assert yourself more, and I've seen trans men shocked and made uncomfortable by that.
In a world where the one-way button exists, I'd guess that a bunch of people would press it, both ways, and then stories from button-users would spread and social norms around it would quickly develop. In the hypothetical, we're guessing about what it would be like, but once qualitative data from real button-pressers is available, we'd be able to go into it with a lot more detail. Once real accounts of button-pressing exist, a lot of its allure would probably fade, as it becomes clear that it does not fix much of anything.
Not so much in Mycroft's head as irrelevant? The whole story is in Mycroft's head, and we have no way of sorting what's 'true' in the context of the imaginary world from what isn't. Mycroft tells us a lot of things, most of which are to some extent completely implausible, and often it's the non-magical parts that are the most implausible. Is it plausible that, say, a midget clone of Achilles pilots a giant robot magicked into existence from a kid's reading of some guy's awful Iliad fanfic in order to deflect a couple of nuclear missiles away from Mars? Well, no. But then, is it plausible that the whole world is run by a conspiracy of half a dozen people who all go to the same weirdly-specific brothel where people dress up in 18th century outfits, as part of some lady's attempt to control the world by addicting its leaders to a fetish for gender roles? If anything that part is less plausible! Who's more plausible, Bridger or JEDD? Bridger is the one to whom Mycroft attributes explicit magic powers, whereas JEDD is just an extremely mentally ill person, but nonetheless JEDD is the one I find harder to swallow. I can believe that a magic kid with the ability to rewrite reality exists, but I cannot believe that every world leader, much less the public, are willing to give ultimate power to a person so autistic that he does not understand object permanence.
But it doesn't matter because, well, Terra Ignota's world makes no sense. I think you have to take the whole thing as a glimpse into Mycroft's mind. Nothing here is plausible except insofar as it makes sense to Mycroft. And Mycroft is a lunatic.
(There is that part from 9A's perspective, but 9A's narrative voice is extremely similar to Mycroft's, shares all of Mycroft's values, and eventually 9A is turned into a Mycroft clone via Bridger-magic, so for all I know 9A doesn't exist and Mycroft is just taking the piss. It might just be that Palmer struggles to write more than one narrative voice, but there was one chapter from Martin Guildbreaker's perspective which was nicely differentiated, at least?)
My frustration with the books, really, is that Palmer tends to bring up big questions that she is either unwilling or unable to address. Is it about novel political systems? Well, she sort of sketches out the outline of one, but the system she sketches out makes no sense and she makes no attempt to answer even obvious questions about it. This goes for legal questions (hang on, how does crime work between people of different hives?), cultural questions (somehow Brillist mind-reading remains an exclusive Brillist secret, even though you can change hive at will, there are millions and millions of Brillists, and the skill requires no technology or assistance of any kind? no one has stolen this technique yet?), or economic questions (there's that chapter with the yakuza human traffickers; wait, why is human trafficking a thing in a world without borders? how is crime even possible in a world where everyone wears tracker implants anyway?). The idea of opt-in legal systems and non-geographic nations is interesting, but once you start asking questions about how it actually works, there are too many questions that Palmer just glosses over.
There's a certain type of science fiction author who comes up with an odd idea and then spends all their time trying to break that idea. Isaac Asimov is probably the most famous example of this type. He produces an elegant system and then repeatedly puts that system under stress. He pedantically looks for every place the idea might fail and then sees what happens when it does. Ada Palmer is the very opposite of this type of author. She throws out big ideas, does not bother investigating them at all, and then jumps to the next big idea. The result, at least for me, is a book that has the appearance of depth but not the reality.
One example, for instance, might be her interest in gender. She has a lot in Terra Ignota about the concept of gender and its cultural power. Gender and religion are both, in Terra Ignota, concepts that nobody is willing to talk about in public (gender is just crass; religion is actually banned), and yet the shadows of those concepts hang over the text. Gender and religion both matter even though nobody can admit to them mattering. This is interesting, except that the shoe never drops. By the end of the fourth book, the place the books get to on gender is, "huh, gender is interesting, let's have a committee to keep the conversation going". Really, that's the conclusion? The spectre of religion comes up repeatedly, but it never goes anywhere.
This is most obvious to me when it comes to the books' central conflict. By the end of Perhaps the Stars, the war is about two issues. (Three if you count "should we make JEDD unaccountable dictator of the world", but apparently everybody is in favour of that. It's bonkers.) The first issue is O. S., and the question I've often seen asked along the lines of, "Would you destroy this world to save a better one?" Does the end of preserving Terra Ignota's current political order justify a very small number of political assassinations? JEDD promises to reorganise the world's politics so as to make O. S. unnecessary, but refuses to explain how he's going to do that, or what his new constitution would be. The second issue is the trunk war - should the future of humanity be brain uploading or space travel?
But neither of those issues are actually addressed in any depth. JEDD does take over the world, but his new constitution is to just make some minor tweaks on the existing system, none of which seem like they obviate the need for O. S. How does making the Cousins into a strat, merging Mitsubishi and the EU into a super-hive, capping the number of Mason senators, and adding representatives from the Reservations to the senate address that issue? That seems just as unstable as the prior system. It seems strange that after a thousand pages and a global war over the issue of O. S., nobody actually answers the O. S. question. How does this world remove the need for O. S. again?
And the trunk war is simply bizarre. There doesn't seem to be any reason why the Brillist and Utopian paths are incompatible - heck, Faust himself says that there is plenty of time for space travel after digital immortality is achieved. This 'conflict' is two different research projects with different priorities; the only actual clash is that both parties think the other is being somewhat wasteful in the face of their grand dream. The Brillists believe there is a pressing global imperative to abolish death, and the Utopians believe... er... they never get to this part. But they think that going to space is very important. Maybe there's a contrived conflict because both groups want to study Bridger's relics, but... what, we're going to have a world war because NASA and MIRI couldn't figure out how to share? It makes the conflict seem bizarrely petty.
At any rate, the fundamental problem there is that no one ever makes the case for Utopia. Here I'm just recapping Balioc, but I think it bears mentioning again. All the narrators are passionately on the Utopian side, and portray the Utopian dream as beautiful and heroic, and the Brillist dream as contemptible and narrow-minded, but no one ever reflects on why Utopia's dream is so important. It just axiomatically is.
I guess the problem I have is that Terra Ignota is, fundamentally, a bunch of things that Ada Palmer thinks is cool, all free-associated together. It never really coheres into a world or even really into a story.
There are a lot of things in the series that are difficult to swallow, but make sense once you realise that it's not trying to be a realistic work of political fiction. Something that struck me was that Terra Ignota is a world of utter sincerity. There are no liars or cynics; no world leaders who just opportunistically cheat. The closest you can find to that is Perry-Kraye, and even he's deeply embroiled in romantic melodrama. The Mason hive is an absolute dictatorship constrained only by the leader's determination to hold true to an oath that nobody but himself has ever read, and apparently this works! But every single character is like that. No one is corrupt. Everybody deeply believes in this or that philosophy. Mitsubishi are a bunch of calculating corporate imperialists, and yet when JEDD questions them, every member of the board is able to wax rhapsodic about the spiritual value of land. The blacklaws come together and make this lovely idealistic city called Hobbestown, rather than being the sorts of poorly-educated low-impulse-control people you might expect to live outside the law. Moral suasion is an incredibly powerful force in Terra Ignota - this ties into all the incredibly ropey gender stuff about the power of women and seduction and Marie Antoinette. It's just a world without cynics; a world without pragmatists.
I suppose I'm just ranting incoherently at this point.
My point is that I think Terra Ignota is an interesting look into Ada Palmer's brain, conveyed by way of Mycroft's brain.
I don't find it particularly sensible as a story or as a world, though.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I have mixed feelings about Terra Ignota, because there's a lot of it that's good and interesting, and a lot that's garbage, and a lot that's somewhere in the middle.
In this case I think one of its flaws is that you can't really describe it without being incredibly misleading. You have to describe the setting, and the setting gives the impression that this is a story about what happens in a world where you can choose your nation, or choose what set of laws to live under, or what a world without borders is like but people socially define themselves by household and elective community, or what war looks like in a world that doesn't have geographic nations, or re-learning war in a world that has had no weapons or violent conflicts for a lifetime, or, etc., etc.
And Terra Ignota is not actually about any of that. Sure, it's in a world where there are no nations and instead people join elective 'hives', which define the laws of their society, but the books clearly do not care about that, and have precisely zero interest in interrogating how that system could possibly work. Sure, the story involves the hives going to war and then flailing about in confusion because none of them know what war is (I particularly loved a bit where people dress up in military uniforms and assemble in groups and march up and down in front of each other, and then just kind of look at each other awkwardly and disperse, unsure of what they're supposed to do next), but none of that is relevant to what Terra Ignota is about.
Terra Ignota is a story told by an extremely unreliable narrator, who is at least partly insane, who has a bizarre fetish for 18th century France. The story is about Mycroft, and once you understand that Mycroft is firstly batshit and secondly a LARPing pseudo-intellectual, you notice that the events of the story don't matter that much, and in fact don't even make sense. This is a psychodrama.
I don't know if I learned anything from Terra Ignota, other than "Ada Palmer be weird, yo". But Ada Palmer is definitely weird, yo.
Oh, and Utopia sucks. As far as I can tell responses to Terra Ignota are bifurcated along several axes, and one of the big ones is whether Utopia is the coolest thing ever and a beautiful dream you want to pledge your life towards (somehow Scott is one of these), or whether Utopia is a bunch of incredibly cringeworthy nerds who need to be given swirlies (this is the camp I'm in). There are people who seem to think Terra Ignota is a beautiful small-u utopia, revealed to us by brilliant and inspiring prose, and I do not understand these people at all.
OliveTapenade
2d ago
To be fair, this is, what, three examples? I want to at least venture another hypothesis, which is that America is a very large country and there's always going to be, in most demographics, some small percentage of people who are crazy. As populations have increased, the absolute number of crazies has also increased, but the amount of space in the media spotlight has stayed the same. (In fact it may have shrunk, due to media consolidation, and the increasing nationalisation of politics.) This makes competition for attention more intense. In times of elevated public interest in this or that issue, the number of crazies trying to get attention by exploiting that issue will be high, and the existence of YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, etc., allows for rapid dissemination of memes, as well as a kind of survival of the fittest optimising for the most shareable.
So it may be that nothing in particular is wrong with women in their 50s, but that nonetheless the spectacle of entitled older women yelling at poor service workers is very memetically successful. There could be plenty of reasons for that - I suggest that the power differential is a big one, with older middle-class people with money holding power over younger and poorer frontline workers - but I suspect you can colour in those blanks yourself.
It may be worth, after all, the reminder that both white women and over-50s are demographics Trump won all three times. The specific intersection of women over 50 just barely favoured Harris, 50-49 in 2024, and if you restricted that to white women over 50, you'd get a win for Trump. So white women in their 50s are not, by national standards, a particularly Democratic demographic. What's going on with 50 year old women right now? Plausibly the answer is - nothing special.
OliveTapenade
4d ago
Simple, straightforward, and correct.
My least favourite version of this is the "this isn't political" gambit. "This isn't politics, it's people's lives!" As if people's lives aren't the fundamental subject matter of politics! It is, in general, a transparent attempt to remove one's own positions from the arena of reasonable debate.
Your politics are politics. My politics are basic human decency. So it always goes.
Gay marriage is probably a good example of this - what was a matter for reasonable public debate and contestation became, as soon as it was implemented, something beyond mere 'politics', which is presumed to be universally accepted and will never be debated again. Speaking from Australia, our plebiscite on the subject was 60-40 in favour of SSM, and as a result, SSM is apparently locked in, even though two out of five people oppose it. By contrast, the Voice referendum was 60-40 against. Is that result as definitive? It doesn't seem like it. The losing side of that referendum seem to have vowed to continue the fight. Well, why not also the anti-SSM people? They would seem to have exactly the same justification for continuing the fight. The republic referendum was 55-45 against; the republican movement does not seem to have given up and gone home.
If the result is the result you want, you declare that result to now be sacred and removed from the realm of politics. If it's not the result you want, oh well, get 'em next time.
It is completely absurd. It's all politics. It is all up for debate. That is the point of democracy.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Add me to the chorus of people who don't like the name. I think the aesthetic the article is describing is real, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with either diners or goths.
I agree that what it's describing isn't a subculture, though possibly I'm using the word a bit restrictively and thinking of a subculture as something that implies a community or a scene. It's not necessarily 'the mainstream' because I think that implies a kind of universality, but I think it is a mainstreaming of a certain kind of low-effort, passive engagement with online culture.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Oh, I can see that. But all insults are objectionable in and of themselves - that's the point of them. This particular one is not an insult I would use myself. In this particular case I think that the punishment for the insult was grossly disproportionate, and even if you disagree with me, I came to that conclusion on the basis of looking at the insult itself and the context in which it was used, which are things that the news story strategically concealed. It's that concealment that I'm objecting to.
OliveTapenade
5d ago
I'll go on a slight tangent and say that I've had a similar experience in religious contexts. I was raised in a liberal mainline Protestant church, and as I grew older came to understand more of theology, more of the meaning of the Christian tradition I came to hold close, and this required developing practices of skepticism and resistance. The church I was raised in, on the institutional level, frequently erred, so I had to strengthen my ability to resist.
At times I have been tempted to become Catholic; if nothing else, there is more, proportionally, that the Catholics are right about than that my original church is right about. Proportionally, they do a better job of holding to the gospel.
But - they demand a kind of total submission of the intellect, a "free choice to trust in the Church's religious authority". A probabilistic judgement that on balance the Catholic Church gets more things right than such-and-such Protestant church is explicitly not enough.
I feel a bit of the same tension here. Let's grant that my resistance against the institutional authority I was raised with was justified. Boy, isn't it convenient that this other one is the perfect, correct institutional authority, against which resistance is never required? How wonderful for Catholics to be part of the one tradition wholly devoid of error, confusion, or misrepresentation. How amazing that the erring heart of man is present everywhere but among the doctrinal pronouncements of the magisterium!
All right, so, the Catholics have an answer to that one - the Holy Spirit infallibly preserves the church from error. I am Protestant enough in my bones that I don't think it works like that, or at least, not nearly so expansively as they think it does.
But to return to the secular - His Majesty's Government is not infallibly defended by the Holy Spirit. It's even less plausible that they are the one authority that must never be questioned or resisted. They don't even claim some sort of divine thumb on the scales. So why is it heroic to follow the demands of conscience and in every case but this one? What makes them the exception? Is it some naive faith in historical progress? Modernity or secular rationality functioning like a kind of revelation? That sounds more like the liberal optimism of a century ago. It is something more deconstructive or postmodernist? But then why should any one authority be immune to deconstruction? Whence comes the certainty lurking beneath the surface here?
OliveTapenade
5d ago
It definitely reminds me of one of my journalistic pet peeves, which is the one you describe in that Substack post. A news story will tell me that someone said something offensive, or made comments interpreted as offensive, without ever telling me what they actually said. This irritated me at first because I want to know what the person said so that I can decide for myself whether I agree that it's offensive. Later on I concluded that it's just because the outlet does not want me to decide for myself, but would rather I passively accept this judgement.
Sometimes this is relatively inconsequential. I'll use a local example. Last year a football player was suspended after using a 'homophobic slur' on the field. Notice how nothing in that article tells you what Rankine actually said. You can go and click all the links down the bottom to related stories, and none of them tell you what he actually said. Fortunately I chased that one up and what happened is that, during a game, he called another player a "faggot". That's it. That one word. I'd argue that what Rankine said was rude but not much more than that. It's on about the level of calling someone an "asshole" or a "retard". Given that AFL players are young men (Rankine was 25) in a highly-masculine competitive environment, I expect a bit of salty language from them, so I think this particular incident wasn't a big deal, and doesn't warrant much more than maybe the team captain saying, "hey, keep it under wraps on the field, okay?" But the news story does not report what actually happened, and it looks like the AFL wanted to signal how much it hates homophobia, so Rankine was punished disproportionately.
Once you start noticing this sort of circumlocution, it appears everywhere. I think the policy that I've adopted is that if you want me to be outraged about something someone said, the first requirement I have is that you tell me what they said. You can censor it if you like - you can bleep it, or say "the N word" or "the F word", or whatever makes you feel more comfortable - but I don't get outraged on faith.
I'm sure everyone here has noticed similar. In this case, "hateful opinions on immigration" is a category that can cover everything from a person just saying "I think we need less migration and more border protection" to a person saying "I hate all Pakis, they're cockroaches and we ought to drive them all into the sea". What we know is that Amelia has wrongthink, but if we've come to learn that wrongthink is a category that covers everything from advocating mass murder to politely stating facts that someone else finds inconvenient, the category itself loses its force.
OliveTapenade
6d ago
It does, yes. The person is entirely able to obtain citizenship for the child by identifying as the 'father' of the child. It is, of course, a true biological fact that this person is the 'father' of the child, if by 'father' we mean 'the source of the sperm that contributed 50% of the child's genetic make-up'.
This is a purely semantic dispute. The person is the biological parent of the child, but wants to be referred to legally as 'mother' of the child rather than 'father'. No actual facts are in contention here.
OliveTapenade
7d ago
...the character of Amelia is, as far as you can tell from the game itself, a faithful friend, genuinely interested in Charlie's welfare and sympathetic to him, and never depicted doing anything bad outside of the symbolic realm.
I re-read my post due to the QC and it occurs to me to add, by way of completionism, that Pathways itself presents Amelia's friendship as valuable. Questions it asks you around whether to share her memes or go to the protest when she asks are framed as if continuing to be friends with Amelia is desirable. You can decline to share the post and risk your friendship, or share something you may not agree with and continue the friendship. The game's writing assumes that Amelia is likeable and that Charlie wants to hang out with her.
If you make the various friendship-risking choices, Amelia does end the friendship, saying that obviously Charlie doesn't share her values, and in context that seems like it should sting. If you make the 'right' choices in the game, you lose a long-term friend and she appears to feel betrayed. Setting all politics aside, that will feel bad to almost any reader. Yes, Amelia is being pushy and aggressive with her politics, which is somewhat obnoxious, but every child learns, while they're growing up, that it's important to stick by your friends, and to not betray people.
OliveTapenade
9d ago
I did say above that I think the protesters are behaving foolishly. That was my point 2, and my advice for the left was to find a better way to do this, because I think that throwing people into situations where shootings are statistically more likely is something they should avoid. I don't hold that it is categorically wrong to deploy people into situations with elevated risk of violence, but when you do so, that risk ought to be proportional to the good you hope to achieve, and in this case I don't think it is.
My overall position is that ICE (and other law enforcement agencies) should do all that is reasonably possible on their end to minimise the risk of bad shoots, that protesters and activists should behave prudently and avoid raising the probability of bad shoots, and that when bad shoots do occur, the agents responsible should be disciplined or punished.
One difficulty here is that it's possible to enforce professional standards for ICE, and it's possible to punish ICE officers who shoot, but it is not really possible to pass a law requiring that protesters always act in sensible, prudent ways. That part of my position can only be achieved voluntarily, through cultural change.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
I think that adopting a policy that effectively says that it's okay to kill people if you think they're bad is, well, abandoning the concept of civilisation.
What is your position here? That you (or people, or the Trump administration, or some other group?) ought to kill leftists (however that is defined, for you?)? Can you imagine that going anywhere good?
OliveTapenade
10d ago
Sure - I'm not claiming that Pretti was a good person, or pro-social, or anything like that. You are free to conclude that he was a person of poor moral character. I just don't think that matters to anything.
OliveTapenade
10d ago
The second point may well be true, and I think I just made the case that 'the left', broadly construed, is encouraging people to do things consistent with that point.
It just seems to me that if the first point is true, the second point is immaterial to the case itself
I've been trying to avoid the day by day of this argument, since overanalysing single incidents can't provide useful insights into a larger political context, but if we have to...
This is largely what I think. I think the OP is hypocritical - he's discovered a video that makes Pretti look like a horrible person, so he concludes that Pretti 'deserved it'. This is an instance of the behaviour he condemns, where 'feelings about ICE and Pretti and Good are mandatory'.
My opinion, held with low confidence, is basically: 1) Goode was probably a valid case of self-defense; Pretti was probably not, 2) Goode, Pretti, and others were behaving recklessly and foolishly, and 3) ICE is being deployed clumsily and without effective strategy, more as political theatre than as a plausibly effective method of slowing migration.
If I put on my very cynical hat, my reading of the broader situation is that there's a political battle going on, and the left are winning. The Trump administration has deployed ICE as a kind of show of force, hoping to encourage their supporters and demoralise opponents. This has not been very effective. The left-wing strategy is basically to follow ICE around and publicise ICE doing unsympathetic things, so as to undermine ICE's perceived legitimacy, and thus also the Trump administration's legitimacy. As such the left are putting sympathetic innocent people into situations where there is an elevated risk of chaos, perceived threat, and thus shootings. I do not think people on the left want ICE to shoot citizens, but they are contributing to situations with elevated risks of that, and from a purely cynical political perspective, every time ICE shoot an observer/protester/activist, the left wins.
My advice for the left would be to find a better way to do this, because chaos on the streets and people dying are bad things in themselves, and my advice for the right would be to become more effective. Deploying ICE to Minneapolis is thuggish theatre. There can be a place for theatre in border policy, insofar as it's a message to prospective illegal entries, but what they are currently doing is clearly not a well-considered, effective strategy to decrease migrant intakes and remove existing illegal aliens.
At any rate. You just can't draw conclusions from whether Pretti himself was a good or bad or anything else person - not about whether the shooting was justifiable, and not about larger political strategy either. It is just a red herring.
OliveTapenade
12d ago
I think I'm more generous with 'Bad' than I would otherwise be because the 'Deserves a Warning' and 'Deserves a Ban' options are there. I use 'Bad' for any post that I think is technically within the rules, but is, in a vague, hard-to-rigorously-define sort of way, the sort of thing that I would like to see less of around here.
I believe the instructions for the queue are to not overthink it and give your immediate response, so I try not to feel too bad about giving a vibes-based response.
OliveTapenade
15d ago
Where do you put a character like Dame Edna Everage on the chart of purple-haired women?
OliveTapenade
15d ago
This is all coming down to a simple question: does the state have a legitimate right to a monopoly on violence?
Shouldn't that be nuanced somewhat? I'd suggest narrowing it down to a legitimate right to a monopoly on the initiation of violence.
Most people would, I would guess, say that there is a legitimate right to individual self-defense. If someone is trying to do violence to me or my property, I have a right to respond with violence myself. This isn't a communist position, and in general the right or conservatives have been more supportive of an individual's right to use defensive violence.
If we limit the state's monopoly to the initiation of violence, we allow for defensive violence by individuals, and I think that better captures most people's intuitions.
In the context of the United States it's a little more complex than this again, because the American political tradition in particular grants that there is a right for the people to organise themselves and overthrow a tyrannical government, by violent means if necessary. Sic semper tyrannis is not merely a slogan. Here there is, I think, more overlap with communists, since both liberals and communists accept that in principle it can be legitimate to engage in revolutionary violence. In that case the dispute is more about in what circumstances that kind of violence is justified, and I think American conservatives, borrowing from the just war tradition, would have a lot to say about that. Revolutionary or rebellious violence must be proportional to the level of tyranny, must have a reasonable chance of success, must conform to some sort of jus in bello in terms of legitimate targets, must happen under the aegis of some sort of revolutionary organisation or authority, and so on. 'Revolution' is not a blank cheque to just go and shoot anyone you associate with the oppressor, but rather, legitimate revolutionary violence must be organised, strategic, and proportional to the threat posed by a genuine tyranny.
(Disclaimer: this is all on the abstract, theoretical level. I'm talking about political philosophy, not current events.)
OliveTapenade
15d ago
...that might just be because I'm a sucker for Shakespeare.
I do think that the median Amelia meme is garbage, and many of them are being pushed by obvious political junkies or grifters. Something like this is utterly worthless, and obviously made by an American anyway. And that account is trying to sell a memecoin!
My realistic prediction is that in a week or two nobody will remember Amelia. I'm just silly and easily manipulable enough to enjoy a day or two of patriotic British memes.
My favourite Amelia meme so far, actually, is Amelia sharing fun British Empire facts. I wasn't familiar with James Prinsep before I read that post, but it is true, and Prinsep is a genuinely interesting and impressive person. I would prefer more content like that to, well, MAGA-brained Americans LARPing as Brits.
Yes, I notice this with both trans women and trans men. In the normal course of development, you're socialised into your own sex and you learn a whole array of tools for how to be an adult man or an adult women. Trans people, even if they pass very well as their preferred gender, usually don't have all those tools. It's one of the reasons why they often look a bit uncanny-valley-esque, or can make natal members of that sex uncomfortable.
In the case of the person in that video, I think part of the issue is not knowing how men make friends, or how we express close, deep friendship. We don't do it the same way women do. There's a seemingly-endless genre of observational humour about how men and women have different languages for this sort of thing, and while the jokes are silly, they get at something real. Trans women have the reverse issue - they don't know the script for how to behave in female spaces. Thus that joke about how if a trans man is devastated, he hides and cries in the bathroom, and if a trans woman is devastated, she kicks a hole in the wall.
Anyway, resilience is definitely part of it. As a young man you learn things from your father, other older male relatives, role models, and so on, and one of them is how to suck it up when times are tough. When you've been a man your entire life, you probably don't realise how many things like that you do know. And the same for women in reverse.
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