Tarnstellung
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User ID: 553
There's generally a clue when the shooter leaves behind a 'manifesto', but until it is released it's hard to be certain.
The shooter didn't call it a manifesto and some of the people who've read it have also objected to the term. It may well turn out to be an explicit call for violence against Christians in the name of trans rights, but it may also turn out to be the incoherent ramblings of a crazy person. Public statements from police officers who've read it imply that it's the latter.
But the entire message coming from the media in the wake of every other mass shooting is that white people/gun owners/right wingers are in some way responsible for the actions of one violent person.
So it's quite noticeable when the message differs from that.
My understanding is that the blame is not placed on gun owners as such, but on gun ownership as a phenomenon and, indirectly, on those who support it, who, yes, tend to be mostly gun owners and right wingers. The view of people advocating gun control is that reducing access to guns reduces mass shootings, hence those who support easy access to guns are actively preventing the prevention of mass shootings. It's not just a vague tribal association between them. In contrast, how does an ad featuring Dylan Mulvaney actively promote mass shootings by trans people?
Yes, because they want gun control. Which is a position that the right would not agree to and, likewise, is unlikely to solve the problem.
You see the problem here?
In the wake of a mass casualty event, if it is perpetrated by a white male, or anyone with possible right wing affiliation, then the message is "white males and/or right wingers are a dangerous threat that must be curbed, and we can do that by banning guns." They demonize outgroup, and demand gun control.
If it's perpetrated by a nonwhite person or someone who has lefty affiliations, it gets buried immediately, and then they demand gun control.
The message always demonizes one side, and the proffered solution is always a policy the right opposes fervently. There is no acknowledgement that the problem runs deeper than guns or that whites, males, and righties are not the main driving factors of violence in the U.S.
But they're made to bear all the stigma.
The right has noticed this for a long time. But in this event, it was a lefty shooting up a bunch of Christians.
And oh boy seems like we don't get to have any discussion on this issue because that would cloud the waters on who the bad guys and good guys are.
So the disagreement is on whether gun control will reduce mass shootings. As I said above, the reasoning is "we want gun control" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "gun owners are bad", not, as you are suggesting, "gun owners are bad" -> "gun owners oppose gun control" -> "we want gun control". This means that, if you could, theoretically, convince them to oppose gun control, they would no longer believe gun owners are bad. (The major assumption here is that politicians are sincerely trying to make the world a better place and aren't just playing tribal signalling games.)
The position of gun control advocates is consistent with the above. They're not trying to ban guns for their outgroup, they're trying to ban them for everyone, because removing access to guns prevents mass shootings, and then the discussion of who is to blame for mass shootings is moot because, even if the outgroup are violent neo-Nazis who want to massacre minorities, they can't access guns and are therefore unable to do so.
I don't know if you're really missing the context here but consider the following:
Biden didn't visit the town, he didn't talk to any of the victims' families, and as far as I know has not actually condemned the shooter.
Kamala Harris visited... but didn't meet the victims or their family, and instead met with the expelled legislators.
MEANWHILE, those same three Nashville legislators GOT INVITED TO THE WHITE HOUSE.
Please, can you possibly explain the difference in messaging and treatment between the victims of the shooting and the legislators, other than the victims being red-tribe coded and the legislators blue-tribe coded?
Do sitting presidents usually visit the site of a mass shooting and meet the victims' families? (Two randomly selected examples: in 2018 Trump visited the victims, in 2021 Biden didn't, even though the shooter was in the outgroup and apparently personally disliked Biden.) Do presidents usually explicitly condemn mass shooters, or is their belief that mass shootings are bad and the shooter is a bad person implicit in their order to fly flags at half-staff, their expressions of condolences, etc.?
Honestly, meeting the victims and their families seems like a pointless PR move. He'll say how sad he is, thoughts and prayers and all that, take a few photos, but will anything useful come out of the meeting? (This applies in general, not just in this particular incident.)
In contrast, from the Democrats' point of view (I'm trying to steelman here), the legislators are heroes who are trying to prevent this kind of thing from happening again and who are being persecuted for it. A meeting with them won't be used just to express condolences, it can be used to discuss political matters, to further their cause, to facilitate the enactment of policies that would prevent mass shootings. This is real, meaningful action, not just a PR stunt.
Tarnstellung
11mo ago
My beer consumption in general is small enough to not be a real market for brewerys. But for those of you who do, I encourage you to continue with the boycott. I'm far from the most anti-trans poster here, but I'm excited to see a big company brought to its knees when it give into corporate woke.
Did they really "give in" to wokeism? Given that:
The WSJ states that: "[M]any people, including bar and store owners, wrongly came to believe that Ms. Mulvaney's video ad aired as a television commercial or that the can with her picture on it was stocked on store shelves, wholesalers said." Because the content did not appear to people organically, they really didn't know what it was, and people assumed it was so much bigger than it was because the usual suspects of CW flame fanning amplified it. A throwaway insta video became a TV ad, Bud Light making a custom can as a joke became people fearing that the beer they bought on a store shelf would have a trans woman on it.
Would you not say this is a major overreaction to what was, objectively, a minor screw-up, which they, if I recall correctly, quickly apologized for?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Does that include the prime minister? Really then, who isn't an unelected bureaucrat?
To me at least, "bureaucrats" are usually non-political career civil servants, people who you rarely hear about in the news except in extraordinary situations, e.g. Fauci. Ministers are politicians, appointed directly by the parliament. They feature in the news regularly, their names are well known, and they get voted out regularly, albeit by the parliament and not by some kind of recall referendum.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
You seem to be assuming that the person you are replying to is Jewish, which their comment doesn't say.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Do American Catholics not network with other Catholics through churches and holidays, and even Catholic social organizations like the Knights of Columbus? Do Catholic parents not encourage their children to marry within the faith?
I don't see how American Jews have failed to assimilate beyond remaining religiously Jewish.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Two is weirdly overlooking how the US spent large amounts of ressources trying to convince Afghans to adopt Californian morality, gay acceptance very much included.
How much did they spend? I don't think the Americans ever tried to make Afghanistan into a progressive utopia. They just wanted a more-or-less stable country with a more-or-less functional government that didn't host terrorists.
The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan – that's the US-backed government, not the Taliban – had a constitution stating that "no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam". I don't recall the US ever asking them even to make a secular constitution, let alone legalize same-sex marriage.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
University systems now screen out 80% of faculty hires on "diversity" scoring before even passing the remaining resumes on to the hiring committee to be judged on merit.
This may be true for universities – I'm not sure about the exact numbers but I accept your overall point – but do we have any reason to believe this was also the case for Brinton? As I said, Brinton seems to be well qualified for the position. Does the US government regularly do this kind of screening? Do we know about other more qualified people who were automatically rejected for not being diverse enough? Someone with a PhD in nuclear waste management instead of just a master's degree? Without evidence, this is just assuming your outgroup did something bad and then getting angry about it.
That said, you brought up hiring at universities. In another comment, I dismissed concerns that narrow affirmative action would have a significant negative effect on the ability of members of the majority group to get hired, because situations where it may apply are exceedingly rare. However, this has made me reconsider. It is my understanding that, outside a few specific fields, getting an academic job is extremely difficult, and it is often the case that a large number of applicants are equally qualified. Narrow affirmative action could then make it straight-up impossible for some people to get hired. Honestly, as of writing this, I haven't quite made up my mind. But if we had deltas here, you'd definitely get one.
If the employer has whittled down the list of applicants to a group of people with similar qualifications, and more detailed information that might help the decision is impossible or infeasible to attain, then the choice of whom to hire will be arbitrary. In this case, I don't see how hiring Brinton because of his unusual presentation is any worse than rolling a die or flipping a coin to make the final choice.
To me, the phrase "hired for your identity" implies that standards have been lowered and the candidate was picked over someone more qualified but with a less-favoured identity. As far as I can tell, this is not true in Brinton's case.
One form of affirmative action that I've heard about is that, when two or more candidates appear to be equally qualified, and one belongs to a historically marginalized group, that candidate should be chosen. As I said above, when it comes down to this kind of decision, the choice is arbitrary, and I don't see any harm in the affirmative action method. Indeed, if the group to which the candidate belongs really does face some kind of disadvantage, picking them is the rational choice for the self-interested employer, as it indicates that the candidate has achieved the same qualifications despite more difficult circumstances. Of course, simply considering a few categories such as race and gender can never provide the full picture: for example, among two candidates there may be a woman from a rich family and a man whose family was poor growing up; overall, the man had it worse, but an application generally includes gender but not family circumstances, so applying the method here would lead to the wrong choice. It is just a heuristic, and no heuristic is perfect, but as I said, at some point acquiring more information about the candidates becomes impossible or infeasible; except for some very specific positions, an employer won't hire a personal investigator to carefully investigate the candidate's past: this is where heuristics come in.
The above method is very different from lowered standards for different groups, or straight-up quotas, both of which I vehemently oppose. Finally, it must be noted that:
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In the real world, "historically marginalized" groups have been granted various advantages, which might reduce the method's accuracy.
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Situations where several candidates are, in fact, equally qualified, and only one belongs to a historically marginalized group, are not actually that common.
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The heuristic requires that the candidates' identity not be considered until the final choice: a woman must be just as good as a man, without considering the fact that she is a woman. Otherwise, we would be adjusting for identity twice, which would result in a lower standard for women.
Edit: Sorry for the off-topic wall of text. I have reposted the comment in this week's culture war thread so that more people can see it. If you want to reply, perhaps it would be better to do it there.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Are people quitting their positions as volunteer coaches en masse to work more to donate to malaria prevention, to the point that the operation of children's sports clubs is seriously affected? If not, then it's not a serious concern.
Tarnstellung
3mo ago
Birthright citizenship shall be granted only to children where at least one biological parent is a citizen or resident having legally remained in the country continuously for a period of at least 3 years. Children may have no greater than two biological parents.
So even the children of citizens would be subject to a residence requirement? I don't think any other country does this and it's an easy way to get thousands of stateless people.
Tarnstellung
5mo ago
Are Iranians white? Are they Aryan? What about North Indians? Pashtuns?
I'm trying to understand your racial taxonomy.
Tarnstellung
9mo ago
"Any dude will be able to claim they're trans and walk into female toilets" is pretty much exactly what anti-trans activists said would happen. All the other details you mentioned are not relevant. Toilets are sex-separated, among other things, to help school staff to prevent horny teenagers from hooking up in them.
- The dude in question did not claim he was trans.
- He did not just walk into a women's bathroom and find a random victim, which is what anti-trans activists claimed would happen. The meeting was pre-arranged with the victim.
- How do you know trans-related policies are why school staff didn't prevent them from hooking up? Again, he didn't even claim he was trans, and "the school district’s trans-inclusive bathroom policies were approved only in August, more than two months after the assault". Given all that, a more banal explanation, for example that they just didn't notice, seems more likely.
You're playing language games. No one says that they're not trans, just that being trans doesn't change your sex, and that some facilities need to be sex seperated.
I tried to phrase that so as to avoid language games. That some facilities need to be sex-segregated, and that people identifying as trans should not be allowed to use such facilities under any circumstances, is what I meant by "all claims of being trans are illegitimate" and "none of their claims should be taken seriously".
It would make men feel better if they were put in female prisons too, why is happiness from affirmation more important here?
I tried to phrase that so as to imply that it is the typical argument, which means you have most likely already seen it and it is unlikely to change your mind, and I am therefore not putting much weight into it. Anyway, the specific claim is that it would make them feel better without making anyone else worse off.
There's also a case to be made that a trans woman will be a danger in a female prison.
A trans woman who has spent several years on HRT, or has had surgery, and is therefore unable to even get an erection? Again, I support having certain standards for trans people. All the cases of assault by trans women in women's prisons seem to be from prisoners who only realized they were trans after they went into prison and were promptly placed in the facilities meant for their claimed gender. This is a system that is very easy to abuse.
Has anyone asked them? I'd bet most women would be more comfortable around a trans man than a trans woman, provided they knew for a fact it's a trans man and not a cis man.
Well, I would bet that most women would be more comfortable around a passing trans woman than a passing trans man. But I admit I have no polling data on this.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
With emissions, the absolute quantity is what matters. With crime, it's the rate that the we care about. It's possible for the absolute number of crimes to increase while the rate decreases. As @Nantafiria said, immigrants may commit crime, but they may also be targeted by crime.
You're right that immigration of lower crime rate groups doesn't necessarily make the natives safer. The major assumption is that the victims of crime are random, or at least evenly distributed. If immigrants disproportionately target natives, for example, then even immigrants with a lower than native crime rate might make natives less safe. However, I am not aware of any evidence that this is the case.
Alternatively, if the crime rate varies geographically, immigrants might have a lower crime rate than the country as a whole, but higher than a certain city or region, and therefore may increase crime rates locally. This is what @CriticalDuty brought up:
It matters a great deal where these immigrants are and who exactly they're victimizing - it is small consolation to a murder victim in Boise, Idaho if the inhabitants of St. Louis, Missouri are more violent than the illegal immigrant population.
If the rate of violent crime in Boise, Idaho really is lower than the rate among immigrants, then yes, immigration would increase the rate. However, I would assume the effect is minimal, since immigrants, legal and illegal, tend to gravitate towards large cities, which already have high rates of violent crime.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
I actually considered using Chauvin as an example instead of Gacy. I opted for Gacy because his actions are much more unambiguously evil and indefensible. Given this site's bent, there was a possibility that some might believe Chauvin's actions were justified, in which case the example wouldn't work.
Anyway, White Americans are not responsible for Chauvin's actions either.
And that's setting aside that no one had the ability to stop Gacy from being in the country, since he was born an American. Mexican migrants, particularly illegal ones, are here as the result of deliberate policy decisions to do nothing about them. If a father who has just lost his daughter cannot even question the wisdom of those policy decisions, he deserves contempt. But my sympathy is limited, as I'm sure his daughter would have never questioned those policies either, even as the knife went in.
No one decided to deliberately let in murderers. Yes, if you let in millions of people, some of them are probably going to commit murder. But unless they commit murder at a higher rate, you are not actually increasing the natives' probability of being murdered. In that case, highlighting individual murders committed by immigrants is dishonest fearmongering.
The question then is whether immigrants do commit violent crimes at a higher rate. Apparently this is not the case and illegal immigrants actually commit less violent crime than natives.
One day about 'born in the wrong body', another day queer theory transgression. But the reality model doesn't allow both, either gender identity is an essential attribute or it's something that you can choose, that changes, you can't have both. So many contradictions, sex and gender norms need to be thrown off, yet it's sex appearance and gender stereotypes that define the desire for, and results of, transition.
Are different people saying these different things? Or have you actually seen a single individual with two clearly contradictory viewpoints?
**Eugenicists
Well less people can't hurt the environment really. If some people want to opt-out of reproduction all the power to them.
That's anti-natalism, not eugenics. And I seriously doubt that anyone is pro-trans because of anti-natalism.
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
What about the Irish?
Tarnstellung
10mo ago
Oh what do you know, it's actually biased in whites' favour somehow. You know, unless you are in the armed forces, or the police, or the media, or working for the royals, and so on.
The first article is about a case where an employment tribunal ruled the discrimination was unlawful and awarded compensation to the victim. The third article, unless I am misreading it, doesn't quite support your point, either.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Are children in daycares and schools prevented from socializing with their peers?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Looking up newer information on this, it seems it hasn't actually been adopted yet. Apparently, it is being stalled by the transport ministers of Germany and a few other countries.
The person I was replying to was claiming these sorts of regulations are imposed unilaterally by unelected Eurocrats. This is clearly not true given that EU legislation requires approval by a qualified majority of the European Council, consisting of ministers from the member states. As demonstrated in this case, they can in fact block legislation from being passed.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Also is it that the argument is poorly supported that bugs you, or is it because you feel that it puts down women?
Would it feel any less offensive if someone gave "objective" proof for this?
She said very clearly that the poor justification for the claim rather than the claim itself is the problem.
I definitely do not enjoy people claiming that India being colonised by the British empire was good for us and civilized us unwashed barbarians. (...) It wouldn't be any less painful for me even if someone threw objective proof at my face by ripping open a portal to a parallel universe where India never went through successive stages of colonization and is still a cesspit of suffering.
Really? So it's just an axiom that everything bad in India is because of the "Britishers"? That certainly helps to understand Indians' beliefs, though it doesn't make me more sympathetic to them.
I don't have a portal to a parallel universe – the only place with technology that advanced was India 3000 years ago – but I can direct your attention to Ethiopia. The country had a long history of written language and a centralized government, and was under colonial rule only for about a decade before and during World War II. After the war, Italy even had to pay reparations, so the damage that did happen during this period was compensated. (The Allies presumably decided Italy's conquest was an illegitimate war of aggression unlike the totally just and lawful conquest of everywhere else by Western countries.)
And yet Ethiopia "is still a cesspit of suffering", with a GDP per capita significantly lower than even that of India. That's because it was a cesspit of suffering before the Italian occupation.
I'm not going to argue that British colonialism was a net positive for India, and the British certainly committed many unjustifiable abuses, but I do strongly object to the common Indian nationalist claim that India was extremely rich and developed in the 18th century before the British showed up and stole everything. It was poor when they came and it was poor when they left. The reason India is still poor is the 75 years of awful economic policy between then and now, and that can be blamed entirely on Indians. The UK didn't instigate the farm bill protests.
You explicitly chose this example expecting it to be unobjectionable, so I apologize if my objection was unexpected. If it helps, I share your distaste for Americans' views on Indian immigrants in software, especially the rhetoric surrounding H1B visas. And I am not American, I'm just constantly exposed to American politics thanks to the internet.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Meat has a large environmental impact. Reducing our environmental impact "is seen as creating a better world". Modus ponens.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
What did Soros or his foundation do?
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
So that your predilections may not have been accepted in the past gives the information that something in you is broken from that equilibrium, and it might not have a monotonic effect, i.e., the biological, DNA, hormonal,etc or cultural, etc driver that is the root cause of the downstream behavioural manifestation may do other things too that we can't see. Or it is posisble that the non conventional behavior has second or higher order negative consequences in our environment thst wr are unaware of. All we know is that it is at best 50/50 beneficial to you, and might be actually very bad for us.
Or it is possible – and should be the default assumption unless you're some kind of ultra-reactionary who thinks the world has only got worse since the 18th century – that people in the past had irrational, unfounded, capricious prejudices, the elimination of which has resulted in a better society for everyone. With this corrected prior, you would have arrived at a very different probability from 50/50.
Yes, sometimes the fence is there for a good reason, but in many cases it's only there because if anyone suggests removing it, he'll get laughed at or ostracized or "all citizens [will] unite to kill that person".
I really don't understand this impulse, apparently relatively common on TheMotte, whenever someone suggests that some widespread belief or practice is irrational and arbitrary, to try to find a brain-genius-tier explanation for why it actually makes perfect sense. OK, fine, maybe religion is so universal because, as atheists fail to understand, it keeps society stable and is a good mechanism to promote pro-social norms and strengthen communal ties, and so forth; but why must a mammal both chew cud and have cloven hooves to be edible? Why is music haram? Why is a beaver a fish during Lent?
Sorry, but sometimes something that seems silly at first glance is still silly after a careful analysis that considers the possibility of higher-order effects and the broader historical and social context.
Tarnstellung
1yr ago
Are you familiar with the CDC's history regarding gun violence research, going back to the 90's? That was the "decades of history", and you don't seem to be aware of it at all.
Are you suggesting that the CDC has a history of political bias on this topic? It is my understanding that, between 1996 and 2018, the CDC was effectively banned from doing any gun violence research at all.
My point is that it is entirely possible to have consistent principles that result in treating trans people as their preferred gender in most cases, but not when it comes to women's sports. An example of such principles would be the basic liberal/libertarian maxim "let people do what they want as long as they're not harming anyone".
The article notes that the perpetrator had not yet transitioned at the time of the crime, so he would not have been allowed in the bathroom anyway. So no, this doesn't count.
I was referring to this case:
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