But now, society starts believing that learning to code is a secure path to having a high-paying career and the American Dream. It seems that only the sky is the limit in the digital revolution and the booming online sector. Young women come to realize that calling undesirable men ‘nerds’ just comes across as dumb and baseless to most people.
I honestly don't think this has much to do with it. I think it's like prison rape: feminists insisted that rape wasn't funny, and then everyone had to be consistent on this despite men unthinkingly making such jokes forever (I don't really think there's much of a material explanation for this shift). A general tendency to look down on bullying and slut shaming took hold (as well as a claim that men being judged by their attractiveness to women turned women into objects in male status games*), so feminists had to try to be consistent.
Of course, low-status is low status and, whatever people say, they need a way to recognize it or tar things as such.
Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies
The big flaw imo with "right side of history" thinking is not that parties don't generally think they're right, it's with the assumption that things will work out eventually (somehow). It's not defeatism or a rejection of your belief in your answers to be pragmatic or to hedge your bets.
Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland.
Yes, this is the sort of advice I'd expect the GOP to give Democrats.
Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate
This was also "Notorious RBG's" argument - she may have even been right. But, at this point, even the most fervent pussyhat-wearers have begrudgingly admitted that she erred. In isolation this argument works I guess but not if the comparison is with a potential Republican pick. Certainly not for Nate Silver's audience.
Rufo actually seems to possess brain cells still, unlike the weird degradation of Peterson and the embarrassing emotiveness of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck and other frothing conspiracists.
The problem with a lot of the former type isn't intelligence. It's a weird sort of...effeteness? Peterson might actually be better than most here, since his messianic tendencies make him disagreeable
But you see it a lot with the "IDW" - everyone in it is likely smarter than average - where they basically seem to see the dirty work of politics to be beneath them. Instead, they just want to...talk. Uncharitably, because it'd require them to truly break with their original tribe (who they disagree with on a pivotal but small set of issues). Charitably, they've been burned and it isn't really their thing.
On the one hand, that bridge was crossed and burned a long time ago, so I guess sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.
Or was it a "I give the Devil the benefit of law" thing? If the expected benefits never come in, behavior naturally changes.
But I'll bite the bullet: yes, a lot of the conservative opposition to "cancel culture" is at least partly dishonest because sometimes the issue is merely that they think X tenet of the prevailing view is just wrong and no one should be punished for violating it. It's not that it's wrong for a company to fire someone for X take on gender they had three years ago on Twitter based on some appeal to fundamental rights (surely cons have weaker tools here than progressives), it's just bad that the company culture has polarized so much from what conservatives consider correct thinking. Cancel culture is bad both because it involves inquisitorial behavior and what that behavior is aimed at.
But then, a lot of progressive appeals to safety or whatever are also self-serving lies. Everyone is trying to appeal to some overriding principle because the common ground is shrinking.
Tanista
1d ago
I am pretty sure that the school is for the underclass/lower class. In those cases, yes, in order for people to get along even to the point that they stop disrupting the learning process you practically have to beat the tribalism out of them.
Yeah, I went to a "multicultural" school mainly made up of the children of middle-to-upper-middle class people from across the globe. Russians, Chinese, Nigerians.
None of this shit was needed, because people mostly self-segregated and figured out a way to live within that* and teachers simply didn't tolerate shit, it's not like they couldn't find someone else to pay those extortionate tuition fees. My first assumption hearing this was this was a no-excuse school for the problem kids (I wonder if this is a "win" or not for Wax's model: the 'no-excuse' school still faced attempts to destroy it on grounds of difference, just as she claims income-integration schools do, yet it survived)
* Though maybe the next generation will lose the segregation aspect and have more conflict as a result...
I don't think they explain it past that in the books. I guess the BG were gonna massage it later but the implication is that's how they would get some peace (or at least preserve one of the lines)
In the films they do say that Jessica was told to carry daughters but not explicitly that they were to be wed to Feyd (like many things, there's enough to project the book canon unto it but not enough to recreate it). It is explicitly said in Part One that Paul is a boy because Jessica wanted to bring about the Kwisatz Haderach early and was willing to risk Paul's life to do so.
Casts all of her behavior in a very different light.
Present-day politics clearly present and accounted for. White people bad, the whiter the worse. Paul and Jessica are presented as outright villains, and Chani is the moral center of the story.
I wouldn't agree on Paul but it did occur to me that Jessica, due to the movies downplaying how much her going AWOL (and kicking off the deaths of everyone as a result) was about love , really comes across as vastly more malevolent not just in this movie but in the first one too.
I mean, that's exactly the problem with definition fights. What we care about is different
You're doing it again. I'm obviously aware. But I also said some other things like:
And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)
And:
In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category -especially if no superior alternative has been put forward
You cannot simply ignore explicit statements that show my underlying assumptions and then claim that my position is incomplete or simply failing to capture some points others care about (in the same manner you ignored elements of OP's post to better call his position circular) because it looks so without the underlying arguments. I know their position. I disagree and have provided reasons why.
I've made my position clear: it's not just what I care about, I find the alternate definitions less useful (in terms of the things we already know societies use sex-gender for like...sports and segregation - anyone can come up with "florgs" as an answer to "what is a woman" but non-private definitions obviously involve the inter-subjective) and even incoherent - and this belief is helped along by the fact that you never seem to offer this allegedly "meaningfully objective definition" that solves the problems I've raised about trans and its associated definitions like gender and woman.
You're not giving me news by saying people care about other things when they define things. I know, I don't care. I simply think it leads to problems and incoherence. I am not unaware that someone could define "life" as including the "joy of living" - nor would I consider it a productive conversation if someone ignored all of the reasons I gave for thinking this to remind me that people can come up with subjective definitions.
and when I say, "well in my opinion a woman is",
You haven't actually given us this "meaningfully objective definition", or any definition. I provided you with my definition of my terms and why I don't think some alternatives work. You mainly seem to want to knock down or critique definitions raised.
Which I admit is probably more fun but I don't see the point in playing this asymmetric game.
Popular youth figures Andrew Tate and Sneako became Muslims and made it a part of their media personality, which frequently gets millions of unique views with the audience mostly impressionable young boys.
This is just grifters recognizing the market.
Lots of Muslims, even if many of them are in poorer countries and so are harder to monetize. Muslims also love to be reflected (who doesn't?) in the media they watch so they lovebomb the youtube channels of Westerners that touch on Islam even vaguely positively.
What you're seeing here is no different than when a reaction channel suddenly starts doing Bollywood videos.
If a genuine Muslim upheaval was undertook in the west it would require millions of people to learn Arabic, something which is almost more ridiculous to imagine then swarms of white men wearing thobes.
I can assure you that people get by fine without learning Arabic. I honestly wonder if even the "high effort" types fully learn it (a lot of people burn huge amounts of time on phonetic memorization more than anything - the most annoying educational gauntlet with the least value).
In essence, it works on Harry Potter rules for most people: you don't need to speak Latin to cast the spells. The most important thing is to know enough to be able to pray and perform the common rituals. That can be a relatively light load (especially if praying in groups).
This can honestly be useful: you don't need to learn theologically problematic things directly.
There is also a strong semblance within Islam to have the government and religious system be thoroughly connected with one another, and even among most religious believers that does not seem to be a desire they have, and among secular people that is literally something i feel they would go out and die to prevent.
That is a real problem.
There's also the Problem of Mohammed. A person who actually had to rule combined with prophetic infallibility, so he cannot simply be hollowed out and worn as a skin by secular cosmopolitans like Jesus (who is basically just some hippie in modern Westerners' view), nor can he be treated like the fallible rulers and sometimes prophets of the Jewish and Christian tradition.
Tanista
12d ago
So would you say that Asian women's exogamy rates say more about how much it sucks to be an Asian man rather than them just being able to find white mates (as the stereotypes insist)?
Because I'm pretty sure it's the same dynamic with similar numbers (AA women also date out twice as much)
Tanista
12d ago
Also, if you're a strong HBD believer, remember to apply the policy uniformly - without such selection it's luck that you got to immigrate and your countrymen didn't, and would you want to live in America with another 400M Africans?
Shit, that is a good point.
However, as the tomboys and the androgynous and crossdressers already sufficiently demonstrate, some traits of the category have more separational power than others.
Under the biology-based definition, this is meaningless. Taking from societies I know: a girl doesn't get out of wearing a hijab after puberty because her sports-playing makes her more of a boy than a girl.
I would not look at genetics first if I wanted to demonstrate definitional issues of gender. And showing that the category is broken in some cases even on genetic grounds strengthens, not weakens, my case.
Not really. Because the gender ideology is hiding the ball here: they created this dualist version of "gender" stripped from sex, and then take every deviation (which is inevitable once you remove the backstop) as proof of their thesis.
Many traditional views and the biology-based view simply don't run into the most excruciating version of this problem that gender ideologues insist problematizes the categories enough to justify their radical changes. "Woman" is both a sex and gendered term, both normative and descriptive, and the sex element is the sina qua non under this view. A woman can act unladylike, but she's still a woman due to her biology. You remove this and then it's much easier (intuitively) to argue that woman is arbitrary or infinitely extensible.
But it is a rewriting of history to act like this is the universal definition. It is, in fact, very contentious. They created the problem by first assuming that gender is totally distinct from sex and then solve it with an even more imperfect definition than the one we have.
In any case, I think we've already agreed that edge cases don't defeat a category - especially if no superior alternative has been put forward. On that point:
This is only a problem for non-exclusive leftist politics though. I'm entirely willing to accept that there are people who claim that they are trans but aren't, "in fact", trans under any meaningfully objective definition.
And what is this meaningful definition?
I have given you my definition of "woman" and we've plumbed the benefits and downsides. Seems to me that we have to first define "trans" before we can actually settle whether this is a more coherent position than the activist status quo?
But none of this invalidates the point that you can't argue for group membership on the circular basis of a criterion.
I don't see the circularity. And, at the risk of repeating myself, a significant part of the debate on maintaining traditional and biology-based definitions is that they are simply superior to the alternative , they carve reality better at the joints and focus on what we care about (which is why there's so much trouble now in so many domains when it's abandoned)
So, until we actually define "trans" are we really having a fair fight?
Tanista
15d ago
As for immigration, I'd say "regardless of any arguments about regression to the mean, nobody in the West is giving race-based preferential immigration to Asians. If they're not going to do that, then they don't have the excuse 'we don't want smart black people to immigrate because regression to the mean'."
Can I translate this as "in an anti-HBD West, people don't cite arguments specific to HBD in their immigration policy"?
Tanista
15d ago
I don't think it's going to be good (because many normal people have their own spiteful ideas) but if we ever hit this hypothetical (re)acceptance of this theory, it won't be DR Twitter accounts running the show.
YMMV by region I suppose.
Tanista
15d ago
If you take migration to be about short-term goals like getting engineers, sure. If populations have different mean IQs and will trend towards them then no? Yes, your Nigerian quantum physicist is going to work great, what's going to happen in three generations? Especially given they might (almost certainly, in some countries like the US) assimilate into the existing non-migrant population of the same race...
That is the killer.
In any case, it doesn't need to follow in some absolute way. Historically what happened when the majority of Westerners had these beliefs is clear. That alone makes being concerned rational, and that alone makes the "focus on the individual" refrain unconvincing. People are not failing to understand individualism as the Harrisian-Hughesian argument goes. It's not confusion, it's experience.
It's just so unfair. It fills me with anger and sadness and rage and I can't stop thinking about it.
This is where already being a depressive is useful: I've become depressed about much less substantial things, so I simply told myself that this was just my latest excuse.
I'm still depressed, but I don't have this totem in my head I can blame. Tomorrow I may not be depressed, regardless of how we do on Raven's Progressive Matrices tests.
If the worst version of HBD is true (I believe some version is but am agnostic about how unfixable some problems are), if the "crazy" Lynn numbers that even some DR folks seem to be squeamish about are accurate...fuck it.
In a sense, nothing "changed". We all knew growing up that Africa had a disproportionate share of failed states, as kids we believed Asians were better at math and like the two Asians we knew were and I honestly think the older, less educated generation believed in HBD and would just nod along here.
If anything, all it means is that I don't have to spend time reading the huge "it's not HBD it's..." corpus or feeling like I have to do something about it (my father is still fighting the good fight and laments that his constant complaints* have made his children cynical about joining him and trying to help the old country). Just move on and live the best life you can. Even if it was malleable, I'd probably have a minimal-at-best role in changing fate anyway. If it isn't...why the consternation?
If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink. Not because it doesn't matter and we can all be individuals. But because there's nothing else.
* One of his confessions was he felt embarrassed because he goes to the Westerners and asks them to take African agency more seriously, meanwhile even basics don't seem to be done and I quote "our economy doesn't amount to a hill of beans".
because "push all the races apart and create bantustans for the inferior ones" is morally repugnant
It's morally repugnant socially (I can't speak on the roots of your personal belief) because we believe that the bantustans are the outcome of white neglect and oppression (even if we place the blame far back in the past or through some dubious logic : e.g. "white flight" where white people just ruin neighborhoods by...leaving)
If tomorrow we just accepted that Black neighborhoods aren't bad because white people took the secret suburb sauce but because low-IQ blacks (disproportionately large group compared to other races) ruin them in a variety of ways then the entire situation changes.
Even if white people were not inclined to abandon blacks, it would be a totally different relationship - certainly there'll be less apologizing for enforcing the law. And things like desegregation and white flight can now be reframed - white people were simply trying to escape the predictable consequences (violence, destruction of legitimately earned wealth) and so on.
White people are then victims, and the fact that the entire federal apparatus is causing excess deaths and loss of opportunity for white people for simply being genetically lucky is what's morally repugnant.
This is exactly the argument the DR makes.
"Black" is a statistical concept that emerges at the population level as an amalgamation of traits and individuals. The race doesn't make the people, the people make the race...HBD is not a unique cataclysmic injustice; rather it is just one more square in the patchwork of immiseration that is mankind's natural state.
I think these are the sorts of things Westerners say because they have an atypically low focus on group honor. No man is an island, we all have a tribe and that tribe and its success matters.
"Someone died of cholera" is very different from "my tribe is, essentially, fucked for the foreseeable future" and this difference matters. Both in that the first affects individuals and that we can easily see it being otherwise. We know how to vaccinate groups, we don't know how to raise IQ.
All of this Coleman Hughes "focus on individuals" stuff is essentially an ameliorative tactic to save individualism and group agnosticism, but that only makes sense if groups are the broadly same. As the dissident right joke goes: "individualism and freedom for all (* obviously for 130 IQ Anglos)". On this view, "equality" and not caring about groups works because they just assumed power would be limited to those capable of handling it. And then everyone forgot range restriction and became optimists.
Once we actually accept that blacks can't be "130 IQ Anglos" all sorts of group judgments can flow from this that should concern any individual. For example: I'm African (my post history goes back so I can't be accused of being a troll - and you can probably find me on reddit with minimal effort too tbh). There's a legitimate argument against the immigration that changed my life measurably based on HBD grounds. That argument has historically worked against me (which is why Western nations mainly took white people and didn't even consider African migration) and may again, if people come to believe it again.
Am I supposed to go "well, as an individual, this is not my concern"? Are my opponents supposed to say "oh, okay then"? I cannot escape my race except under the very system HBD destroys.
"man and woman are not actually clean natural categories"
The answer to this is that this argument proves too much. If we go by the pre-trans, biology-based definition based on biology and the type of gamete a body is geared towards producing, there are edge cases - but it's the intersex (it's telling how the intersex and language associated with them , "assigned sex at birth" , have been appropriated by trans activists) - but this small minority doesn't render the category meaningless or most biology-based categories - as a start - have to go.
With transpeople being exactly the cross-boundary cases
Going by the biology-based definition it's easy to see how intersex are an edge case (which doesn't vitiate the category). It's much harder to see how transpeople as a class are given that there is no concrete definition - it's not based on dysphoria since some deny that (and lack of comfort with your body doesn't change your sex in any case), not based on intersex-style biological ambiguity since most trans are not intersex, you don't need any brain scans to fit your claimed gender so it's not based on that, you don't need to transition - and then what of women who're non-conforming? Where do they fall? It's similar to the "Trans-Inclusion Problem" and "woman":
Every proposal so far has failed to draw the boundaries of womanhood in a way acceptable to the Ameliorative Inquirists, since not all those who identify as women count as women on these proposals, and some who count as women on these proposals don’t identify as women.
You complain about the inherent fuzziness of the biology-based definition of "man" and "woman" but you run a worse issue with "transpeople". You cannot say "transpeople are the edge case" when defining trans in the first place in a concrete way is a problem.
Oh, wow, look: we've basically circled back to OP's original complaint. Like I said: compact not circular.
Tanista
16d ago
OP does go on to say:
Because without that there's no binary boundary to transit. A woman cannot be a transwoman.
Seems to me the argument is not circular, just compact: without a concrete definition of man and woman, there is nothing to be "trans" in comparison to.
This sort of argument is not new - a common variant is to argue that trans and non-binary are inherently in tension for this reason.
Tanista
17d ago
I’ll go further; sex is not a private matter even if you don’t let other people see you doing it. It’s a matter of concern to the entire community because it just is
The Christine Blasey Ford thing came up again and all I could think was "if the entire nation is going to have to relitigate decades-old teenage parties filled with drunk kids maybe people should keep a tighter handle on them, cries of tyranny or no". Because clearly it can't help but be everyone's business.
That is a particularly extreme example but still.
Likewise, Bill Cosby's blackness has not saved him from having his reputation in shatters. In his case perhaps the most damaging factor is the seemingly callous, premeditated, and repeated nature of the acts.
Insofar as blackness shields you, it's because the mainstream defers judgment to "your" community: Kanye got a pass on things like "slavery was a choice" and the Confederate flag because he was already getting criticism from black people and it was seen as an internal thing (then he crossed state lines). Same with rap's misogyny, despite this making no sense. Allen's community meanwhile is not just white, but likely to be disproportionately turbolib.
Cosby is an interesting example in that there was a simmering resentment towards him for his conservative lecturing and his attempt to act like a grandee to enforce this in the AA entertainment industry. His "pound cake speech" has a whole Wikipedia page. And the things he was saying...well:
But these people, the ones up here in the balcony fought so hard. Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca-Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and are outraged, 'The cops shouldn't have shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? I wanted a piece of pound cake just as bad as anybody else, and I looked at it and I had no money. And something called parenting said, 'If you get caught with it you're going to embarrass your mother.' Not 'You're going to get your butt kicked.' No. 'You're going to embarrass your family.'
And:
We are not Africans. Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damned thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Shaligua, Mohammed and all that crap and all of them are in jail.
Can't have made him popular.
It's pretty interesting that the first domino was Hannibal Burress getting frustrated and basically pointing out his allegations due to his behavior towards other black people.
And then we were off to the races.
I've seen that said but I can't actually find her stating it in response to Obama's light pressure.
She was asked to resign before the 2014 midterms , I doubt she was defending not doing so by saying she'd wait for the allegedly inevitable next Democratic president. I think the above take might have been cope after they lost the Senate and it was clear the GOP wouldn't confirm anyone.
I think people like her honestly just don't want to retire and the rest is just posthoc rationalization. Look at people like Feinstein.
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