Tiber727
6d ago
I agree with this. I am not pro-trans, but I understand it enough I'd say. The entire "gender identity" idea starts with noting that some people have a condition that causes them to feel like they have the brain of a woman but the body of a man, or vice versa. Take the idea that said people feel uncomfortable being reminded of their sex, and work backwards to make sex as irrelevant as possible. With the exception of an extreme fringe, they won't directly insult you for not wanting to date a trans person. They just insist it be called "genital preference" and avoid pointing out that it's because they're trans, in keeping with never mentioning what sex a person is.
Though they will occasionally imply that "genital preference" is internalized transphobia conditioned by society, so they can tell themselves they aren't pressuring you to change, simply offering a helpful suggestion.
Tiber727
10d ago
It is a an argument about consumption as well.
A - To what extent does a child have to have their stop the worst moment of their life from being circulated?
B - That consumption of real CSAM is a form of demand, and demand leads to increasing supply to meet demand.
Tiber727
29d ago
To me, crime is to some degree a personality type. Your common thug is a guy who equates respect with fear, and he demands respect. Who thinks playing by the rules is a sucker's game. Who tends to not think ahead. Once you get higher up, crime is a business, just a horribly brutal business. Different environments tend to produce different personalities. Any traditional conservative will tell you a two parent home with loving but disciplined parents will usually produce healthy and productive kids.
Middle class kids generally do not become gangstas, because their parents drilled into them healthy visions of respect and success. The parents themselves share those values because those values enabled them to become middle class. You do the right thing, you get rewarded. You do the wrong thing, you get punished. A successful society does that, in part because it has the resources to reward people for doing good. A failed society is one where doing the bad thing gets rewarded instead, because bad people have power. In a successful society, even amoral people at least feign doing the right thing. Trump also loves respect and power, but even as someone who hates him, his vision of respect and power is very different than a cartel member. Even when committing crime, middle and upper class people usually commit white collar crime.
As far as the Mexican cartels are concerned, sure they can intimidate people into not opposing them. But I'm talking about recruitment. You can't intimidate someone into becoming a loyal thug. Would you join the cartel? No you wouldn't. Your moral compass and personality makes that life disgust you. A successful society isn't just one that has a lot of money; it's a high-trust place that produces fewer people in total that would have the personality that makes them want to go into that kind of life. And if fewer people want to go into that life, then by extension the cartel has less manpower, and less reach.
I'm not talking about 8 of 10 men who want to live middle class lives and whether they fear the other 2. I'm imagining 10 children, and how many of them would ever develop the personality the leads to them being willing to join the cartel, and how many of them could have parents actively involved in their lives, who can lead them to develop a personality that would be disgusted by the thought of ever joining the cartel.
Tiber727
29d ago
Stop the drug trade? I have no illusions of doing that. A hypothetical successful scenario is not one that stops all crime, it's one that turns the drug trade from a $10 billion/year industry to a $2 billion/year industry (numbers pulled out of my ass because it doesn't matter here). Instead of 10 people signing up to join the cartel in a given time, 2 do because the other 8 had middle class parents and lead middle class lives. Instead of the cartels being able to tell the Mexican government what to do, the Mexican government has the resources to push the cartels into the shadows.
Is this all pie in the sky? Absolutely. I'm embellishing things to make a point.
"Prosperity" isn't a switch that gets flipped and once it gets flipped everything gets fixed forever. It's a slider. The more the prosperity slider moves to the right, poverty reduces a little (and poverty itself becomes less severe), crime reduces a little, infectious diseases get treated better and spread less, and happiness increases a little. The more it slides to the left the more those bad things go up. In line with that, the idea of international aid isn't to end all the bad things. The aid is because without it, things can always get worse. Improving society is a matter of bringing the poverty rate from 10% to 9%, not the idea that you're going to get it to 0%.
That's the humanitarian angle. The government angle is that by doing humanitarian things they establish positive ties to another country, and positive ties mean influence. Influence isn't a direct quid-pro-quo, it's adding one more reason to choose X instead of Y where X is the option that benefits the U.S.
Not necessarily. The difference between textualism and originalism is the former rejects that you should even need to try and interpret their beliefs. There's also the idea that Congress is hundreds of people, therefore "what Congress believed when they passed a law" is not in fact a single answer.
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