Shakes
30d ago
While I know this is possible and is widely perceived as plausible by many, I think the chances of this are overrated. In order:
- I cautiously rate it likelier that Republicans win in 2028 with Vance than Democrats reacquire power
- By the time 2028 rolls around, SpaceX will be too important for American military dominance to be simply disentangled. A lot of military and business norms that are ostensibly beyond politics would have to be blown up for Democrats to purge Musk.
- Any campaign to purge Musk would necessarily be capable of purging other American billionaires. Many will quietly defect from the Democrats. Many will loudly defect.
Destroying SpaceX would be among the most dramatic uses of federal power in American history, it would be like creating the Chinese system out of whole cloth overnight. I think a likelier scenario is that Elon is personally targeted in a kind of Trump-like show trial that avoids really destroying him but gives lots of politicians lots to say. Or that SpaceX is targeted by hostile and bad-faith investigations that make it bleed but not bleed out. Because, ultimately, actually destroying SpaceX would damage the foundations of American military power and American capitalism. I guess it's always possible. But this is such a bad outcome that I think people are severely underestimating how much power the Democrats would have to have to pull it off.
Shakes
30d ago
High on hype? Come on, make an argument. My argument is bounded by the theory that the US Government will bail out SpaceX in the worst case because it's important to a generation of American military power, and that SpaceX will be extremely economically productive in the medium case because -- blah blah blah I'm repeating myself. Did you even read what I wrote? It was actually pretty measured.
Do you disagree that continuous satellite imagery and communications servers (already proven technologies) represent huge industries? Why does an email from five years ago give you the impression that Elon thinks it's all going to collapse? (And despite the real problems they are having, they are producing more Starship Raptor engines now than they were at the time of Elon's email.)
I've given you a get-out-of-flail-plea card by noting that Elon could bet the company on yet-unrealized tech that becomes vaporware. You could have just agreed with that. The point you raised instead is a prediction from Elon that SpaceX would go out of business if something that wouldn't happen, didn't happen. SpaceX still hasn't gone out of business. In fact, quite the opposite recently.
Make a specific prediction within a reasonable time frame, as in the past, I'll be happy to put my name on the other side of it.
My bet is that SpaceX is undervalued and its stock will rise. Tell me where you think it will be in ~2 years.
Shakes
30d ago
The only company that remotely fits your description is SpaceX itself
Which is the only company that I was describing.
Which is the same trajectory, Elon is willing to double down on black. SpaceX isn't down $41.3 Billion because they have failed to invent fundamentally productive technologies. SpaceX is down because Elon is leveraging previously-unimagined technological success into hither-further unimaginable giga-tech. It's possible that this blows up the company.
But Elon did invent the cheapest and most reliable rockets in the world, and this is a trillion-dollar industry at worst, and SpaceX has a huge moat it will take competitors years to cross. This is not la-la-land, even something as simple as continuous real-world weather monitoring and crop data is worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars. How much is the internet worth? How much is it worth to have a near-monopoly on access to servicing ~3.5 Billion people? The entire world can be connected now, you don't have to build and maintain physical cables in inaccessible locations, you just need a few hundred dollars for a Starlink receiver. What's the bear case? That the schizos were right and global population is dramatically overestimated? That there's no economic value in putting the rest of Africa on the net? It seems to me like the market is so large that not even xAI could sink it.
The best argument remains that perhaps Elon is too unstable and his competitors will reap the boring rewards of actually making money while he chases a car he can't catch. But that case has to confront the fact that -- we somehow got here, didn't we?
Shakes
30d ago
This is a little more than the Kavanaugh accusations. Nobody could prove that Blasey Ford had ever even met Kavanaugh! The accusation was 30 years old and even Ford's friends couldn't remember it having happened. At least here the accuser is verifiably someone everyone knows knows him.
Shakes
30d ago
But the Democrats aren't going to stomach an abrupt about-face in terms of values, even if Platner was mercenary enough to do it
Why not? They stomached Platner before now. He has a Nazi tattoo, he has already been accused of sexual impropriety towards women. The difference is that before the Democratic tastemakers decided Platner was in, now they've decided he's out.
Shakes
30d ago
"Consent accident" is kind of brilliant actually although I'm struggling to imagine many other use cases in which it would carry the same meaning you've given it here.
Shakes
30d ago
I believe that SpaceX is extremely undervalued. At a minimum, SpaceX is going to form a core part of the next generation of American hegemony as military tech is put in space. In a medium case SpaceX is going to create a multi-trillion dollar space economy around telecommunications, computing, and satellite sensors at a scale previously unimaginable. In a maximum case...
The general tendency of SpaceX is that Elon wildly overpromises impossible deadlines that he fails to meet, and he still ends up years ahead of what everyone else in the industry thought was even remotely possible. For this reason I don't consider it dispositive that SpaceX misses all its deadlines and you've won all your bets.
The best argument against SpaceX, I believe, is that Elon likes to double down on his bets and he is going to continue to risk the entirety of SpaceX to reach the next run on his ladder. He could always fail and the whole thing comes crashing down. But at this point SpaceX has created a potential multi-trillion dollar space economy and I think the upside is so enormous that SpaceX is now too big to fail.
What I mean by "upside" is: Elon's new cheap orbital economics are going to fundamentally change the entire global economy. I think it's more than a question of the American military wanting to put spy satellites in space and therefore keeping SpaceX on a perma-subsidy that scuppers their downside. I think that SpaceX is unlocking huge, real productive economic value. Starlink provides internet access in remote and expensive locations that can't be serviced by traditional cables and landlines -- mining operations in the darkest jungles, oil rigs, planes. Continuous satellite imagery is going to unlock huge economic value in real world productive terms -- weather forecasts, crop yield measurements, infrastructure maintenance. How much is a better weather forecast worth? How much is continuous monitoring of an Atlantic hurricane worth over sporadic discontinuous images? How much was the shift from photos to video worth?
SpaceX is going to create a global nervous system of bandwidth and sensors and feed. This is more than simply putting better research telescopes in orbit and redirecting government monies based on taxing the productive earthbound economy. I think what SpaceX has already produced represents trillions of dollars in real wealth. Valued still at just one trillion -- a sale!
Shakes
30d ago
Mystery Grove was the first name that came to my head too tbh. IM1776 is also good. Justin Lee at First Things. (Not to be confused with Justin Lee the gay activist.) Frontier Magazine. The American Mind?
What I would argue contra your perception is that MAGA is like the Bible, it speaks to both the high and the low. There's a version with ornamented deep explications and theory and there's a simpler hellfire and brimstone that speaks to the base. And actually, in a way, the simpler version is more important and it's often the intellectuals who don't understand because the beautiful elaborations are actually less powerful than the simple truth. As implausible as it sounds to many, I really think Trump is speaking at a deeper register of truth when he talks about hating communism than when the intellectuals dress it up with all sorts of abstractions and theory.
But if you want the elaborations, let's see.... A lot of the best stuff remains on twitter, you kind of have to just follow a few accounts and see how they play with and argue with the same ideas over time. Off the top of my head I would put a word in for Malmesbury Man, Covfefe Anon, Ben Braddock (of IM-1776), Bronze Age Pervert (yes, unironically), Jeff Clark, Jeremy Carl, Lomez... I don't know I could recommend all sorts of others but I don't think a normal man can really take too much of this stuff without starting to roll his eyes. For instance I like an account by the name of Kaiser Lohengramm (after a character from a TV Show called Legend of the Galactic Heroes) who writes decent longform but even I can only take so much of the character schtick before I start to tire.
I can console myself that a lot of the Founders wrote their best works anonymously as well and I don't think there's any shame in admitting that's the form we're still stuck with.
I do think a lot of the best content on Trump remains locked up in this form. I think there's a lack of "serious" writing about Trump. I've thought about addressing it myself, but I think there are too many people writing slop about Trump already to throw my hat in the ring. Maybe I could be cajoled into it. But if you're willing to tolerate this anonworld contentslop, the best actually comes from an obscure forum now locked behind a $20 paywall called "My Posting Career". Oldheads remember.
If you want more serious writers, let's see... Michael Anton is good, Victor Davis Hanson is a serious historian, Newt Gingrich has some decent content on Trump actually. (His best stuff is when he's been interviewed in his capacity as a historian about Trump, his books fall somewhat in the political memoir camp genre.)
There's another part of me that just wants to say actually watch Trump speeches and Trump interviews instead of the headlines and the press. Trump is much smarter than people give him credit for and I believe he's outperformed all his detractors and critics and everyone who imagines that they've conceived of a better way. I feel the same way about Steven Miller, who is usually coaching his arguments in terms that sound extremely partisan as red meat for the base -- but he's at least intelligent and you may as well drink from the firehose instead of reaching for the diet coke. But then sometimes I think that precisely because they're speaking at that register that their arguments and ideas bounce off most of the smart set and intellectually-minded as something less than they really are.
Shakes
1mo ago
America 250 had ten years to plan something, achieved nothing, and kicked out the Trump appointees who tried to get anything moving.
This is all just pretext. If Trump hadn’t created Freedom 250, there would be some other excuse for why Shapiro couldn’t participate. It’s politics short and simple.
Shakes
1mo ago
This sounds like a bad parody of something I’ve written. But I won’t back down from noticing that Trump is infinitely more successful than any of us, across a dozen dimensions. And that to a man the people criticizing him are far less impressive and far less successful. And he ends up being justified over and over again. And I don’t have an obligation to criticize Trump just to prove to your satisfaction that I can.
Sorry, internet poster, but backseat driving is not a real skill and I don’t care how many people who have never driven a car before are telling me I’m doing it wrong.
Will you admit that Shakespeare wrote some bad sentences? Or are you one of those pro-Shakespeare hacks who think Shakespeare did no wrong?
Will you admit that Michael Jordan missed a lot of shots? Or are you —— etc etc.
Shakes
1mo ago
I remember getting into an hours-long argument with Yassine where he insisted that Trump told people to drink bleach, refusing to be swayed despite all evidence to the contrary, going deep into the linguistic sub-branches of every sentence across pages of Trump’s remarks to find anything that could remotely prove his point.
The vast majority of Trump criticism has been like this. I was called a sycophant for not believing Trump colluded with Russia, then it will be fake rape accusations, then some claimed paperwork error, then some policy thing. And maybe Trump has been attacked unfairly, but he also makes mistakes, can’t we agree, why can’t you agree to that? Maybe I could have agreed with Trump’s approach, but, look! — a liberal judge just struck it down, it must mean that Trump didn’t prepare hard enough, because he’s lazy and not very good at politics.
I don’t want your pity. I roll my eyes when people who are never satisfied by anything proclaim that I need to work harder to win their good praise.
Shakes
1mo ago
I write in English because this is a forum with the norm of speaking English, you speak no other languages, and I'm willing to talk to you. It's a bit ridiculous to inflate your sense of importance on these grounds. Believe it or not I continue to exist when I don't speak with you or engage with any other American.
I do speak other languages and in fact even speak a little Chinese but I'm trying to make a larger point: China is supposedly on the cusp of global dominance, OK, where are all the people learning Chinese? Globally, who is actually adapting to a future of Chinese supremacy? Mostly people are continuing to learn English as their lingua franca, even though there are billions of Chinese people who could be unlocked by learning Chinese. It's not a small language. But you don't see people adapting themselves to a future of Chinese domination because in their bones nobody believes this is coming.
No, the "global economy" doesn't really depend on you, this isn't 1950s when everyone else who matters was bombed to hell or in a semi-colonial shithole condition.
Well again I'm making a bigger point that this is passing over: America invented the modern world (ok, America invented a lot of the modern world) and it is continuing to invent the world of the future. Planes trains and automobiles. Nuclear weapons and the power grid. Satellites and rockets. Cell phones and social media. Now it's AI and Falcon.
It's fine or whatever if China is going to lead in material sciences and building ships and you can draw the trendline and predict, China will overtake America in the future and America is decadent and gay. Ok, but America is still inventing the future, observably, I can see it. And if we're debating in these terms, it is not the case at all that China is obviously poised to take over the future and America can't do anything but sit in the corner and watch. It is very much open to debate. And it's very reasonable of me to notice that America is continuing to grow, China faces deep structural problems, America still leads where it counts, and nobody is learning Chinese.
Seriously speaking I don't really think either China or the US are "parasitic"; you started this.
Obviously I don't mean to call China "parasitic" in some kind of moral sense. I am noticing the fact that their industrial development was bootstrapped by the existence of Western economies that modernized first. They didn't have to invent the modern university system, or capital markets, or automobile factories. They merely had to copy what had already been done. In many (many) cases they stole IP. They used cheap peasant labor to arbitrage western economies that had modern labor laws and unions. This is not to deny China the incredible progress they have made modernizing, but to notice that at no point has China actually been in the driver's seat. They still have a tremendous way to go. This is the difference between what Peter Thiel called "Zero to One" and "One to Many". They have not provably developed a Zero to One culture. That's something that can't be copied. It has to actually be developed on Chinese soil on its own terms. And it's reasonable to notice that most of China's development is merely copying what the West has produced first. And it's reasonable to notice that Chinese science still has deep structural problems that have to be overcome.
At the same time sure yes China is starting to develop some culture of innovation and progress. But it isn't a given at all that China will successfully develop a true culture of science that surpasses what has existed in the West. It's actually an open question. And what happens when China's population begins to age and the economy stagnates and someone has to replace Xi Jinping? What happens when tariffs from the West and export restrictions eat into the easy margins China has enjoyed while industrializing until now?
For example, Meituan alone outperforms India, Japan and most if not all of EU in AI.
Right, so what? America also has companies that outperform India, Japan, and all of the EU in AI. Partly because more and more of the world speaks English (not Chinese) and anybody so inclined can move from Europe to America if they want to work at the cutting edge of Artificial Intelligence. The reverse, Europeans moving to China to work at the cutting edge, is much more rare.
Obnoxiously celebrating how you've never had a reckoning after Japan, rather than reflecting on how close it was with merely post-war Japan
It was never close at all. Moreover, Japan was even an ally. At the time that Japanese auto companies were disrupting Detroit, American soldiers were stationed in Okinawa. Japan competed with America because America allowed it to happen, because that is the global system America set up.
You proclaim that China is larger than America, but China is not larger than the global system at which America is the center. Yes, America is the center. It is a leaky system and there might be lots of cooperation with China i.e. German companies are happy to interface with Huawei instead of AT&T. But China has to begin to replace America in ways that are conspicuously not happening. I.e., people would still rather conduct trade in the dollar and not the renminbi. People would rather conduct business in English and not Chinese. People would rather hire graduates from Stanford and not Tsinghua. Nations rely on American ships to protect the global sea lanes, not Chinese ships.
China exists within a world which the Americans created and has not even properly begun to contest and replace America. It will take a generation or more for China to mature into this task, if it is ever ready, if it can ever be ready. On balance it is actually extremely likely they will fail.
and I think your, Shakes, information environment provides you with a diet of exclusively self-congratulatory spins.
Well I understand why people here would think that but my "information environment" is mostly panicans predicting that the United States is doomed, that Trump has failed, that America is declining forever, and reading lots of books. I promise that my views are actually bespoke and of my own creation and not merely the dumb talking points of whatever low-grade MAGA podcaster it is presumed I downloaded this week.
Shakes
1mo ago
Sure, I think that's a fair opinion. I guess my question was rooted in objecting to hearing my opinion implicitly called "partisan hackery" when 1) the 14th Amendment is extremely open to interpretation 2) The predicted outcome of SCOTUS functioning as a super-legislature has basically already long since come to pass.
Shakes
1mo ago
Because when trying to understand what someone wrote into law it's useful to read what they themselves believed was the meaning of the words they wrote. This is totally uncontroversial legal practice.
Shakes
1mo ago
At worst it's been symbiotic. Your whole economy is parasitic
Just having a heavily militarized industry is not much of a flex.
Are we still doing this Zeihanite nonsense?
Moreover you're now the primary cause of those sea lanes getting blocked in the first place. It's a pure protection racket.
I don't know, this really doesn't feel coherent to me except as anger about America. I don't think you don't understand how the global economy works, I think you're just denying it for some sort of quixotic reason. It's as if you need America to be the Great Satan. When America invented all of the categories we are debating in the first place. America has an insufficient talent pool? America invented the talent pool. America perfected university educations for working-class people while China was trying to starve them. How many Chinese are alive today because of Norman Borlaug? We can debate this in English on an American website built using American technologies transmitted across American cables built under the protection of American ships. You're speaking English because of America. Your webpages are speaking Javascript, because of America.
America is parasitic? You wouldn't even be here without America. This is like the pyramid complaining that the ground is beneath it.
If you want, it's possible to be critical or even very critical of American leadership, lots of people are. But when you step through the looking glass it's a little ridiculous. China's industrial rise doesn't happen without America creating the global market, letting China in, supplying China with energy and raw materials and capital and IP. China still sends a quarter of a million students to American universities every year. What's the harm in admitting that? You can still criticize America for fighting bad wars in the Middle East or prognosticate China's eventual supremacy. Unless your precis is simply that you hate America. Because, otherwise, it's not coherent to argue that America is parasitic on the world because all we have are our ships and China's ships are better anyways.
And as you say, they make vastly more ships than you do. They could escort their own ships if need be, which Trump admitted.
Notably, this didn't happen.
They helplessly lost several industries to a tiny island nation they had previously conquered, and instead of an existential crisis
Well, what happened next? What's the next part of the story? Did it work out for Japan? Does Japan rule the world now? Did America ever have a political reckoning over the economic policies that lead to outsourcing?
I'm telling you, this isn't enough. This entire list of rabble is just too small, they barely produce talent. Add India, add whatever, it's all just not enough smart people. The only real argument is brain draining China itself, which seems to be going worse lately.
America + Europe + Japan + whatever is larger than China. America + India is larger than China. You are failing to advance any consistent standard of analysis except that you believe America must be inferior.
Shakes
1mo ago
I won't even argue the facts again (China is about 5 years behind in space and 8 months in AI). On priors, why do you believe this is even plausible?
I think they’re a little further behind than that but let’s take this a step farther.
Consider all of the technologies that constitute global power, or that will. Nuclear, Satellites, rockets, rare-earth metals processing, silicon chip design, quantum computing, drones, artificial vision, robotics, energy dominance, etc. etc.
America is dominant or competitive in all fields. America was first to rockets that can catch themselves in the air. America was first to AI. America leads in biotechnology and robots. America leads in space.
China is still behind. They have developed with incredible speed but they have to maintain that pace to keep up. They have, to give them their due, genuine leads in a few fields. They are winning on rare earths and drones, they have the best solar and batteries. They now manufacture the most ships. But they are not producing bombers as advanced as anything made in America. They don’t yet have the rockets to colonize space. They can’t actually replace America’s role at the center of global security.
Not to mention that, fundamentally, China’s rise has been parasitic on America’s wealth. America protects the sea lanes that Chinese vessels rely on. China’s industrial rise doesn’t happen without America handing over the blueprint. Their genuine scientific advancements are still plagued by a culture of cheating and inefficiency that is worse than anything in the Replication Crisis.
China can grow out of this if they have the time. Do they have the time?
Maybe within five years they can replicate SpaceX rockets. But Elon is already pushing the frontiers again with data centers in space and AI. So in five years China might still be three years behind. Maybe in eight years they’re two years behind. Etc.
But China’s continued success is not assured. The fundamentals actually look quite mixed. China’s population is starting to age and even shrink. Capital continues to flee. Tariffs and trade deals are going to erode China’s marginal efficiencies in bulk manufacturing.
I think the likeliest outcome is a kind of China 1970s, or maybe like Japan in the 90s. Population turnover and changing economic fundamentals produce a decade of stagnation. Stagnation produces social malaise (if not unrest). And then China’s progress keeping apace with America stalls. This is already happening — American growth has started outpacing China these last few years. It doesn’t take much for China to stall.
I think this is much likelier than a dramatic shooting war or global conflict. I think it’s unlikely that America faces these same challenges. America is passing through a period of reform and is likely to come out the other side stronger.
Nobody else is even a competitor. Russia is too small to compete on all fronts. Europe is not going to begin building next-generation tech. India is not going to catch up. South America and Japan will be American satrapies. Europe too for that matter.
I keep coming back to space because it’s so stark: Because of SpaceX America is going to build dominance where no one can follow. If you run a mining operation in the Congo or an oil tanker at sea, you plug your operation into Starlink and everything runs through American computers. It’s better than the petrodollar. America wins again.
You must know that you have fewer people than China, fewer highly intelligent people, lesser talent allocation to STEM, less industrial capacity, less energy, less cutthroat markets, less… pretty much everything, except some legacy IP.
Yeah China has more people but so what? When has sheer numbers made the biggest difference? Besides, America has access to the smartest talent from Japan, Europe, Latin America, etc. Elon Musk was etc. etc. Everybody wants to live in America for its cities, its beaches, its money, etc. etc. etc.
We’re still having this debate in English. My Swedish friends all speak English. The Germans all care about Trump. Nobody is learning Chinese. Nobody cares about Xi Jinping. America makes the world, China copies America, not the other way around.
Shakes
1mo ago
whereas you are out of interceptors
I fear that I am going to be repeating, until the end of time, that just because you read something in a newspaper doesn’t mean it’s true.
What I mean is, knowledge in the fog of war is unfalsifiable. The real information about how many interceptors America has is classified. So is the information about how many of them we used. It would take a lot of scrutiny to prove that what’s floating around on the internet has any credibility. A lot more scrutiny that what I’ve seen on social media.
I remember, for example, when Russia was going to run out of bullets weeks into its invasion of Ukraine. Or when Hillary was so far ahead of Trump that she didn’t even have to think about him anymore.
So when we start factoring out these unfalsifiable rumors, it seems pretty obvious to me who won. America can threaten Iran at will and they have no meaningful way to retaliate. Their only recourse is to attack shipping on the Strait, which can strain the global economy but is not nearly as dramatic of a lever as had once been imagined. America is in such a different weight class from Iran that we have to start inventing hopes that maybe America’s super weapons ran out of ammunition and the Iranian rockets will definitely blow something up next time, any day now.
This gap will grow as America is the only power capable of building into Space and the AI frontier.
Shakes
1mo ago
This should get reposted in the culture war thread. My prior is that leftists believe, a priori, that everything Trump does is incompetent-corrupt, so any evidence that the reflecting pool really was sabotaged has to be fake, or, at least, not the first stone. But I think there's plenty of good evidence that the Reflecting Pool has been vandalized and not very much evidence that it's the contractor's fault.
Shakes
1mo ago
And what have the warmongers got to say for themselves? @Shakes? @Iconochasm? I'm not even mad anymore, after all you lost, contra my expectations. I'm just kind of curious: can you process that this was a terrible idea and many supposedly cuckoo people who pointed out that the US will lose the war (like Scott Ritter) were, actually, straight up correct, at least?
America won. America killed a generation of Iran's leadership, destroyed Iran's military industrial complex, destroyed Iran's nuclear facilities, and is now negotiating how to destroy the dust. Casualties, 13 killed in action, a plane was hit with an Iranian missile and landed safely, another plane was lost in an accident. An American pilot had to eject above Iran and America was able to infiltrate Iranian land space and build an airstrip to get him out while Iran couldn't do anything. Iran declared the straight closed and the Americans launched night operations to escort ships in the dark. America blockaded the straight and Iran started to run out of energy and food.
Months ago the war critics made all sorts of predictions about how America was going to lose. Iran would be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. They would toll the strait. America might suffer hundreds of casualties or suffer a dramatic naval defeat. America's allies would turn on it. Gas prices would rise so high that the global economy would collapse. Basically none of these things happened. War critics have simply continued onto the next set of predictions. Because the Iranian regime didn't completely collapse, and sanctions will be lifted as part of a peace deal, America is supposed to have lost. Whatever you guys say. I don't think any of you want to be convinced. I think you just want to hate America.
But I think the case is going to become more and more obvious as time goes by. America is building an economy in space. We have rockets that catch themselves in the air and wifi where there are no cell towers. We revolutionized energy, we export energy now. We are leading the AI superrace. We still have the strongest navy and the strongest planes in the world. Europe is falling behind. China can't catch up. We are building a next-generation tech stack the entire world will rely on and nobody else is close to catching up. It's an American century.
Shakes
1mo ago
It’s now being alleged in official court documents as well:
Shakes
1mo ago
So it's some kind of irrational bias?
I have a penis and this physical experience tells me that mutilating it would be extremely bad. I am so confident in my experience that studies and polls where people claim to have benefited from mutilating their penises are unconvincing to me. This is extremely rational.
Certainly there are perverts, according to any reasonable definition, in every letter of LGBT. What I object to is the notion that being trans (or LGB) is in itself a perversion.
Look, I'm gay, I get it. "Perversion" is a normative word. And we can all collectively decide that being gay is normal and being trans is normal and therefore not perverted. And this is a coherent definition and everybody knows what we mean. In fact, this is probably what most people mean at this point.
But also the biological "norm" is for man to reproduce with woman and for man to stay a man. Social convention can't change that. And by any reasonable definition what we're talking about is perverted. We are literally perverting normal biological sex.
Reasonable minds can disagree and this ultimately becomes a mere semantic point in a liberal society. Perversion is accepted, it's a liberal society. It doesn't really matter if we call it perversion or not. But I think it is a perversion. A lot of people think so. And when we try to deny that and act as though there's something wrong with them, that sounds like denial.
Shakes
1mo ago
Well, you appear to be saying that let's all be reasonable, let's all agree on something, can't we all let's agree that some trans therapy works for some patients. And I want to be reasonable, so I ask, ok, which trans therapy? And the answer seems to be all of them all the time.
I'm willing to concede that sometimes trans therapy helps some people. This doesn't seem to cost me very much. The standard is merely whether it makes some people feel better, which seems like something almost any treatment could achieve. I think sugar pills would make some people feel better.
But then, is this the most reasonable standard? There are some treatments I would never consider good treatments no matter how many people they made feel better. That's not me trying to argue as such, that's just me trying to be open about how much I'm willing to concede. For instance, I just don't think "having your dick cut off" or vaginoplasty is really a valid form of treatment. I'm not saying this as the result of any evidence about post-op follow-up studies. For me that evidence doesn't even register. You can call me retrograde for this, I won't mind. But I do observe that sometimes people enjoy things that are objectively bad for them. This is what I mean when I use the word "delusional" (which, with apologies, I am not trying to direct at transgender individuals in particular.) There's no limit to what people could convince themselves is good. So at a certain point I stop looking at their own evaluations of whether they feel better and I start substituting my own judgment of the world. Which includes my judgment against vaginoplasty.
But I'm willing to concede that the world is big and that there are a lot of people in it.
And all of the media coverage could have been avoided if people had just treated it as a curiosity and a medical condition, and not some kind of new woke perversion to be fought.
I mean, do you think that there is no perversion in the trans movement at all? Gay rights went through this in the 90s where a significant part of the movement was in fact made up of organizations like the "North American Man-Boy Love Association". And the movement kicked those people out and tried to present itself as "normal". And then the public started to accept it more. And there are still people who dress up in leather on the sidewalk and piss on each other in public. And there are gay activists who declare that they're proud to be perverts and that being perverted is good.
As in, you're trying to fundamentally change what people understand by the basic biological categories of male and female, and not only is that controversial by itself, but there is in fact a lot of deviance within the trans movement. And I don't say that to be mean, I'm sure there are a lot of trans individuals who are basically "normal". But acting as though everything in the movement is totally normal and it's the anti-trans activists who made everything toxic seems like denial as a strategy.
Shakes
1mo ago
Define "transition". If transition means teenagers receiving more mental health counseling and hormones that blunt part of the effects of puberty, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better. If transition means some soft boys and girls uncomfortable with their sexual development donning new clothes and personae as they settle into a community of support, I'm willing to believe that that helps some people feel better. If transition means having your dick cut off and turned into an open wound that needs to be constantly dilated, however... I'm not sure I can believe that that really helps anybody. I guess you can always find someone delusional enough to feel better after almost anything. Doesn't the term "Stockholm Syndrome" exist to diagnose a particular case where the objectively bad experience of being kidnapped can be seen by the victim as a good development? What are we being asked to concede here? It's not clear to me.
yet anti-trans activists have been the main publicists of transness for about a decade now – trans people really entered the mainstream with the North Carolina "bathroom bill". It used to be that you would only find information about transness if you went looking for it
... Is that really how you see it? That is not my impression at all. Trans activists deliberately made themselves subject to public scrutiny and public outreach as an attempt to re-enact the classic Civil Rights playbook. LGBT organizations deliberately moved to push trans rights as the next frontier after the success of gay marriage. Liberal activists happily complied and began campaigns to push trans equity groups in corporate spaces and pronouns in professional working environments. Bruce Jenner came out as Caitlyn in 2015. That was the point at which a generation of online debate about trans rights finally bubbled up into the mainstream. Then Jordan Peterson achieved notoriety for refusing to comply with amendments to Canada's Human Rights Act that would compel preferred pronouns. North Carolina's "bathroom bill" in fact was only a response to ordinances from local municipalities that passed pro-trans legal codes first.
Likewise, JK Rowling only started associating with TERF causes after perceived trans excesses that began the whole debate. It isn't as if conservatives woke up and decided that they needed a new scapegoat one day and the trans community was as good a target as any.
If anything, it seems to me like trans activists succeeded in their public outreach, then overreached by doubling down on trans kids. Now that the tide is shifting against trans rights, the movement is unable to admit that their own strategies had anything to do with anything.
Objectively, as a matter of fact, it's already scaling. The last five years have put almost as many satellites in space as the previous fifty years put together, and SpaceX is responsible for
50% of that. Starlink has10k satellites already and only 12 million customers. And SpaceX has been growing its launch capacity every year. This is already enough to make SpaceX an enormous pile of money.Because of Starship delays SpaceX configured the v2 Mini in 2023 and has since launched thousands of them on Falcon 9. v2 has ~4x the capacity of the old v1.5. SpaceX is not on the verge of bankruptcy but has grown its core business, and your information is five years out of date. This is a classic case of Elon promising impossible deadlines and catastrophizing doom if they don't materialize, failing, and in the process achieving huge success that is beyond what anyone else in the industry thought was possible.
So what?
I do acknowledge that Elon's companies have benefited from an enormous amount of hype. But this is priced in. There is a lot of money betting that this is all smoke and vapor and there is even more money betting that it's not. That's how markets work.
Name a different bet then. Satellites in orbit by 2028? Launches? Payload sizes? Cost per launch? Starlink capacity? Everything is going up.
Tesla is worth that much because it might disrupt the entire auto industry. Cars turned out to be worth more than horses. Tesla's valuation prices in the Expected Value of what would happen if fleets of self-driving cars fundamentally remake society.
But SpaceX is also different from Tesla because it has already demonstrated trillion-dollar technologies. SpaceX's valuation prices in its total dominance over an entirely new economic sector.
More options
Context Copy link