ThenElection
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User ID: 622
Aside from the economic component, I found the derivation of the lifespan component... well, not shocking, but very biased, in a very literal sense.
The index is explicitly constructed assuming an inherent lifespan difference between men and women of 5 years; if men live 82.5 years and women live 87.5 years, that's definitionally equal. That's an explicit assumption that that's just the natural state of the world and meaningless when it comes to trying to measure gender inequality. Among the top 1% of households in the US, women outlive men by only 1.5 years, and if you compare monks and nuns the difference is even smaller. Even if you're looking at entire countries, e.g. Iceland only has a difference of 2.9 years (and in fact is penalized for it in the index, presumably because it is sexist in denying women the healthcare they need to achieve their five years over men's 82.3).
Social factors play a significant role, and adding an arbitrary fudge factor to diminish them betrays an agenda.
One post I've always puzzled over: Ozy's Cis By Default.
I've never felt like I'm a man, nor have I ever felt like I'm a woman. Some would have it that since I don't identify as a man or a woman, that must mean I identify as agender! But that sounds just as silly to me as identifying as either a man or woman: I don't identify as anything. The only time I think of it is probably in the context of trans discussions, and I always come to the same conclusion: a shrug. Perhaps gender agnosticism? Of course, if a medical professional asks my sex, I say a man, but that's about communicating a constellation of physical traits to others to make interfacing with the world more convenient, not how I identify my self in my inner monologue. If tomorrow I woke up as a woman, I am pretty confident that my primary reaction would only be "damn, this is going to be a lot of obnoxious paperwork to deal with."
And so I'm Ozy's "cis by default." And if someone (cis or trans) wants to say they identify as something, my reaction is... okay, sure, I guess that's neat. I'd file away in my head that that person likes to be labeled as a Woman or Man or whatever, politely humor that label, and get on with my life. It's no different than someone saying that they're a proud Catalonian or a brony or a Yankees fan.
What I struggle with is that I get the sense that that's something many trans activists aren't okay with: there's a demand that gender be recognized as having some deep metaphysical reality (trans women are women!). And so when Ozy says
We simply have to explain to cis-by-default people what a gender identity is
I say... yes, please do. Because as far as I can tell, it's either completely undefinable or the desire to act out the opposite gender role, with the same person switching between those two options depending on what's rhetorically convenient at the moment.
And it makes me sad, because I've always wanted to see gender roles become less rigid, not more. What I fear is that people who deviate from increasingly narrow gender roles are going to be funneled into an increasingly narrow gender role of the opposite sex, which is every bit as much oppressive as a father who berates his son for playing with dolls.
ThenElection
5mo ago
In general, people don't actually care about gender or race swapping: put in the best actor/actress for the job, and you can do wonders. The issue is when people try to do a "modern" remake that lacks any artistic intention or execution except "we got rid of the white men!" That's what makes people grumpy.
Starbuck, in BSG, will always be Kara Thrace to me. She's flawed, compelling, and there is no Mary Sueing or girl bossing in her character. Makes me want to rewatch over the holiday break.
ThenElection
1mo ago
I dug up the actual serious report mentioned:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513816303907
It's not the greatest study (surprise, surprise), but not terrible for the field. What gets me is just how warped the Independent and Vice articles are in how they cover it. It's like they saw it and dug through it looking for any one statement or finding that could be twisted into something as ridiculous and inflammatory as possible, ignoring the layers of caveats, dropping mention of findings that contradict their preferred theory, and taking a weak correlation and turning it into a strong causal claim.
Neither link directly to the article, though Vice does to the university press release (which itself commits all the same sins, albeit to a lesser extent). It's a big chain of laundering a somewhat interesting but weak (and contested) correlation into an explosive claim.
The critical mistake here is taking any of this media reporting as reflective of any part of reality, instead of just being fiction written to belittle perceived enemies. The only question is why the media wants to paint having agency as some kind of evil.
ThenElection
6mo ago
I expect the most immediate affect of this would be a strong disincentive for anyone to seek medical treatment or opinion for sleep apnea, similar to how HIV disclosure laws (are theorized to, at least) disincentive people from getting HIV tests. I wonder if there have been fewer sleep apnea diagnoses in Maryland since this policy was adopted.
ThenElection
6mo ago
The Civil War was about slavery; the reasons people fought for one side or another, on the other hand, varied a great deal, with ending or supporting slavery not being a major individual motivation. The conflation of the two leads to errors on both sides, with some people defending the South because many of the individuals fighting for it had benign or at least understandable motivations, while others project institutional/systemic causes onto anyone who fought for the South. That conflation also provides a fertile ground for fighting contemporary culture wars via history.
Technical notes on the index from the UN:
https://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2021-22_HDR/hdr2021-22_technical_notes.pdf
See Technical Note 3, step 2, "Normalizing the indicators."
Their justification is that it's "biological" but offer no particular explanation of how they calculated that it was 5 years exactly. As far as I can tell, they just took the worldwide average difference in life expectancy and declared it to be biological.
I would also note that they don't make a similar calculation of average difference in labor force participation, declare it biological, and correct for it when calculating their economic indicators.
ETA: looking at the WEF Gender Gap full report, they explicitly cite the UN and GDI as justification for treating "parity" as a five year gap in favor of women.
ThenElection
10mo ago
Imagine you were a donor, thinking you were sending money to help refugees at the Thai border or women in Saudi Arabia. And then there's this.
It's probably not actually a huge burden in terms of financial resources, but the time and energy being spent to antagonize locals instead of something core to its mission is shocking.
ThenElection
1mo ago
By the same token, if a bunch of different American shows uniformly showed white men as heroes and black men as villainous brutes, with all of those casting decisions happening independently, would that be indicative of some kind of broader societal bias?
It appears that Prigozhin and Putin have negotiated a "oopsie doopsie, it's all been just a big misunderstanding."
https://www.cnn.com/europe/live-news/russia-ukraine-war-news-06-24-23/index.html
An absurd end to an absurd coup. Prigozhin can't be long for this world.
ThenElection
4mo ago
Trump is an unprincipled egotist who is unable to work with the Establishment: he'll do whatever he wants, and he has no incentive to work with the Powers That Be because they despise him and would never cooperate with him (and the feeling is absolutely mutual). No other candidate comes close to offering that.
It's not particularly likely to lead to anything good, I think, but if you're broadly anti-establishment, he's the closest thing to a sure bet to do things differently than how the Establishment wants things to be done.
ThenElection
6mo ago
Lolita was not in any sense a pro-pedo book. The entire point is unreliable narrators can obscure something horrific with a fancy prose style. Nabokov hits people over the head with this in the least subtle way possible, but somehow people still don't get it.
For context, I'm a Southerner who moved to the Bay Area for school and has stayed here (mostly) since.
One interesting wrinkle is that I increasingly find transplants to California insufferable, despite being one myself. With a native San Franciscan, I can shoot the shit and be genuine; with a transplant, be they from NYC or Des Moines, it's this constant thinly veiled status game, which I'd link with many of the behaviors you'd mention.
I'd be curious if most of the California transplants you encounter were born in CA, or people who made a pit stop there to make bank before colonizing peripheral areas.
Also, Chick-fil-A is infinitely superior to Popeyes and it's one of the things I miss most here, Waffle House edging it out.
ThenElection
30d ago
For better or worse, DEI identity slop is now considered left wing, and NPR has oodles of that, regardless of whatever other establishment propaganda it peddles.
ThenElection
7mo ago
To be more precise about that ruling, SF didn't have to merely have a place for an individual person to move to, but places for the entire estimated homeless population. I.e. it could have a space open for someone, but unless it had spaces open for every homeless person on the streets that night, it wasn't allowed to force that individual to move his tent. Given that many homeless refuse any offer of shelter, the ruling requires SF to have a substantial overcapacity of shelter beds before doing anything.
ThenElection
1mo ago
Men have duties. Women have rights.
It is as it ever will be, and no matter the rational arguments you muster for equal treatment, you will never convince anyone who's bought into this mindset. At best, you'll get a rhetorical concession, before the principle is promptly forgotten when the next discussion comes up.
ThenElection
2mo ago
It all comes down to Sergey and Larry, IMO. They wanted to try lots of off the wall things with their newfound power and wealth without being subject to market discipline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing (except to investors). One option would be to just start new companies, but that's a bit more complicated than just starting random projects within your existing company. So people were hired to enable those things, and the ads revenue not only continued but increased exponentially, so hiring continued.
ThenElection
2mo ago
In San Francisco, we got a homeless pedophile advertising free fentanyl to kids from pre-k to 8th grade outside their school:
(In fairness, he did end up arrested and convicted, but only after public outcry.)
ThenElection
5mo ago
Rationalists have the flaw that they assume anyone interested in rationalism as a movement will be well-meaning. Which is probably true when rationalism is a couple of nerds debating whether eating oysters is moral, but in a world where "rationalism" is worth money and social cachet, it attracts hanger-ons who are motivated by other considerations.
Any movement seeking power has to consider what will happen when someone who is less interested in their principles than attaining power tries to join it.
ThenElection
5mo ago
If they see public schools as a problem, they’ll do whatever they have to do to route around the problem.
At a party last week, I was chatting with a liberal couple whose kid will be starting public high school in a couple years. The place I live uses a lottery system: you can end up with your kid assigned to any school in the city, many of which are bad. I asked, what if you end up with a bad (academically failing, unsafe) school? Their response (after some throat clearing that no school is bad) is that they are committed to public schooling, and no matter which one he gets sent to or if he'd prefer a different one, they'll send him there.
I can get this mindset as a cope, if you don't have resources. But they do have resources and could easily afford any of the well-regarded private schools. My unsaid thought was "that's child abuse."
ThenElection
11mo ago
The "Poor Unfortunate Souls" change is odd. Ursula is a villain, and it doesn't take any leaps of insight to realize that she's not someone to be emulated. If anything, it'd be a more effective feminist message if her anti-feminist advice was shown to be a counterproductive part of her cynical ploy.
ThenElection
6mo ago
What it does is play on the idea that all indigenous Americans were living in perfect harmony in a single cohesive society, noble savages that loved everyone until disrupted by the colonizers.
Of course, they were no such thing. Consider the Aztecs:
Mexica law punished sodomy with the gallows, impalement for the active homosexual, extraction of the entrails through the anal orifice for the passive homosexual, and death by garrote for the lesbians.
The film is interesting because it's not a simple story abou a utopia being destroyed by dastardly men: it's clearly a pretty shitty experience for the Kens, it shows vectors of female power, and at the end it shows the Barbies mostly recreating the old shitty world instead of having learned anything, despite the talk of patriarchy and complaining of a single-sex dominated society.
Although I would agree that Greta Gerwig probably didn't intend for it to be some MRA rallying cry, death of the author and all that. The movie is narratively textured enough to support alternative interpretations, and the aesthetics and excellent acting by Gosling make it worth watching.
I guess what I meant by reading politics into it is that someone doesn't have to imagine Gerwig's politics, project them onto the movie, and be stuck in that interpretive box.
ThenElection
5mo ago
This wordsmithing is so enraging. I buy that Beff Jezos is now a public figure, his opsec was minimal, and journalists have the right to publish information about public figures that they can find out. So, dox him! But have the courage of your convictions and go with "yes, I'm doxing him, and that's a good thing," not whatever shit this is.
I present my sketch of Cat Woman, an entirely fictional story:
Kirsten Rubenyan is a lonely, struggling MFA student. At some point she has a fling with a perfectly ordinary and fine enough guy she thinks is a lesser-than (after all, she's working on her MFA and he doesn't even have a car) and eventually that goes sour. She is testy about how the relationship went, so she stalks the social media of an ex he mentioned and spins a tale intermingling lots of concrete identifying facts with projections of how she felt about him.
It turns out surprisingly decent with interesting subtleties and ambiguities, but she realizes that her stand-in protagonist is a bit too unsympathetic, so she tacks on a bit at the end where the guy calls her a whore so readers know who the bad guy is. It bursts onto the scene as an internet sensation, and everyone is able to identify the guy and thinks he's an abusive asshole. The guy falls into a neurotic depressive spiral wondering whether he was as bad as she depicts him, constantly rereading his texts with her to figure out what he did to deserve this fate as his life falls apart, until ultimately killing himself.
Kirsten walks away with a movie deal but vacillates between feeling she's the victim of a mean misogynistic society and having nagging doubts that maybe she did something wrong.
Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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