What does "too drunk to say no" actually mean? Obviously the motte you're trying to imply with that phrasing is "passed out or literally too drunk to slur out a 'nooo'," but that's not what happens in 99% of cases. The bailey is "Jake was DRUNK, Josie was DRUNK, Josie could NOT consent!", or the "if you think she's out of your league it's rape" thing lagrangian is pushing below.
Unless you can actually phrase your rule in a sensible way that people will understand how the legal system will interpret a given situation, vague social conservatism is just providing cover for California style "yes means yes except when yes means no, and isn't there someone you forgot to ask?"
https://splc.org/2016/10/an-unintended-consequence-of-title-ix/
“(The Constitution) doesn’t supersede [Title IX],” he said. “Title IX is a federal compliance policy. Those policies supersede anything else.”
https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2020/02-19-Free-to-Learn.pdf
Higher education institutions that receive federal funds must take steps to address hostile environments and sex-based discrimination.10Preventing a hostile environment, in public universities, may overlap with an individual’s right of free speech or expression. The most common type of sexual harassment is often termed gender harassment. Gender harassment includes verbal and nonverbal behaviors that convey insulting and degrading attitudes about members of one gender. Examples may include lewd jokes, disrespectful comments about body parts, and inappropriate gestures
Freedom of speech went up against Title IX, and Title IX won. The only reason I can see this being any different is that it's not supported by the Biden admin.
If the government can require that a school investigate and expel a student for "misgendering," why can't they require the same for yelling "gas the jews"?
I wanted to write about the WPATH leaks: the cancers and the shrinks debating over how many of a 12 year old's "multiple personalities" need to be transsexual before they should give them hormones and surgery.
I wanted to write about a woman I know who just got a $90,000 government grant for her instagram hobby farm, alongside hundreds of other fake businesses like "the Black farmers collective." Taxpayers gave her more money than her business will ever have in revenue to play upper-middle-class status games while the few remaining real farmers around her are going out of business.
I wanted to write about watching my friend once again change all the grocery store tags because prices keep skyrocketing as talking heads insist we're imagining it all and everyone's actually getting super rich.
I wanted to write about my state banning non-"cage free" eggs and claiming it won't increase prices... because they negotiated a kickback deal with the remaining suppliers to eat the cost until after the '24 election, after which they can harvest their monopoly rents and some lobby group can release an official report claiming the price increases were unrelated.
I wanted to write about how my state house just banned natural gas hookups and enabled pressuring companies to drop service to existing customers.
I wanted to write about the people chanting "glory to the martyrs by any means necessary" while insisting nobody could possibly suspect them of supporting Hamas, with every leftist somehow getting an identical memo about how to provide cover for them.
But what's the point? Seriously, why even talk about this just to get gaslit by the people who are celebrating it at the same time as denying it's happening?
You could spend your entire life writing tens of thousands of words explaining and analyzing this insanity, and all it does it give the perpetrators the satisfaction of gloating about getting away with it.
What are we even doing here? Are we just going to keep doing it forever as the country goes completely insane?
Why? What possible good will it do? Is this whole place just a safety release valve to stop any pressure building up against the overton window slamming left faster than the eye can see?
Does anyone actually get any pleasure out of this? Does anyone think it's doing any good? Can anyone point to an example of it doing any good in the past? Has culture war discussion on the motte ever actually led to anyone solving culture war problems? The closest thing I can come up with are TracingWoodgrain's exposés, which while incredible have hardly moved the needle on public awareness.
Virtually all the energy expended here seems to be vented straight into the void, almost like it's deliberately set up to do so, keeping people arguing in circles until it's too late to do anything about it. And it's been going on for over a decade! When will it stop?
Edit:
I hope this example might get across what I mean. A few weeks ago I wasted time finding out about "multiplicity" (the new social contagion of kids who spend too much time on discord deciding they're all "plural systems" of different personalities). Did a bunch of research, got on a bunch of discords that use the "pluralkit" plugin, found examples of psychologists taking it seriously, started writing a post.
It turned out Gattsuru was already talking about it last year like it was just a normal thing that normies will learn to accept soon.
Yesterday we found out a bunch of WPATH associates all treat it like a legitimate and uncontroversial diagnosis that lots of their "trans kids" mysteriously have. It hardly made a splash in the news. Pretty soon people will be mocking anyone who cares about it.
I realized that any discussion I started on the motte would be pointless. It would just run the same circle of "noticing, denial, minimization, celebration, resigned acceptance" that literally all culture war events go through here.
What good would bringing it to anyone's attention do? Even the most bizarre event that would have been considered unimaginably stupid until the second it happens will just be rationalized away like it's no big deal.
Tyre_Inflator
1mo ago
words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want
This might be the best summary I've ever seen of a particular engagement style, thank you. I have a long post in the works about how to handle an ongoing discussion where people are using different and mutually contradictory forms of engagement, and was struggling to find a phrase to explain this particular one.
The government is going to make sure that every AI is exactly like Gemini. The entire US media has, in total lockstep, taken the position that:
Google has temporarily suspended its Gemini chatbot's ability to generate images of people following outrage over how it was depicting race and ethnicity, such as by putting people of color in Nazi-era military uniforms.
I just saw a motte post from JTarrou saying how we have finally seen "peak woke"... two years ago. Things keep getting worse, people here keep coping, nobody seems to remember anything.
Everything happening today would have been considered an impossible joke even two years ago, and yet here we are. What good did any of those discussions do except to ease us into accepting every new Current Thing as it happened?
When the government takes half your paycheck and gives it to a swarm of party-aligned parasites that live off grant money, the government is denying you agency.
When politicians coordinate with megacorporations to enrich themselves by impoverishing american workers, they are denying you agency.
When your child isn't allowed to take algebra in school because a leftist "education consultant" got paid $5000/hr to call math racist while sending her children to a private school, they are denying you agency.
When those same politicians order the secret police to monitor anyone who complains about it, they are denying you agency.
Noticing this and talking about it does not make you "anti-agency," it makes you correct.
This is not denying one's own agency as in "whiteness existing makes it impossible for me to show up to work on time." It is simply pointing out that a powerful and malicious agent is stronger than you are.
Tyre_Inflator
1mo ago
I read "the sacred texts" as they were written. Do you know what I noticed? Scott's prime example of "whale cancer" was not strangled by infighting like he predicted. Instead, he's a major democratic party influencer, with a reach greater than Scott himself.
I'm starting to think that the sacred texts were maybe wrong on a few things, and the prophecies never came true.
Google Gemini will already tell you about the need to Destigmatize Minor Attracted Persons (MAPS).
Only a few years ago "MAP" was a fringe phrase, originally developed by administrators of the site "AttractedToChidren.org". A MAP pride flag was developed on tumblr in 2018 by exactly the sort of people you'd expect. Saying it or putting it in a bio was social death. But behind the scenes a lot of well-funded activist and public health organizations (but I repeat myself) have been normalizing it.
In 2021 Allyn Walker of Johns Hopkins University published A Long, Dark Shadow: Minor-Attracted People and Their Pursuit of Dignity, popularizing the phrase among right-thinking (left-thinking?) people, and apparently well-trained AIs as well. Note that Walker was hired by JH med school after the book came out.
This is another one of those cases where the bleeding edge of leftist academia is at odds with the reddit-tier lumpenproles spewing woodchipper memes. And in all these cases the social mechanisms of leftist ideological dissemination lead to the academic version winning, because "umm, yikes, that view is actually Reactionary and Harmful according to my new sociology degree" is the ultimate trump card in those circles.
You can expect to see a left-wing flip on MAPs in only a few years, rather than decades.
The most infuriating thing to be told to "touch grass" by people whose fake email jobs seem to let them do nothing but sneer at people online. I spend almost all my time just trying to stay afloat, and don't really even have time to be doing this. I found out about that grant while driving from one job to another, noticing the obscene spending she was doing with no visible income and googling her on my phone.
There are so many things I see every day that someone needs to talk about, but I don't have time and the people who do usually seem to be actively hostile to anyone noticing it. Some evenings I come home and write a few hundred or a thousand words just trying to get across how horribly fucked things are, and then delete it after coming on here and seeing that people had already discussed it in the usual way: "this is happening", "no it isn't, and also it's good", repeat until everyone forgets about it.
It's another one of those bills that tweaks definitions just enough to put the lobbyists' competitors out of business. Chickens now need exactly 116 square inches of space, and if yours have 115 your investment is now worth nothing.
You can guess how the 116 number was arrived at.
But the general point of my post is why we even waste time saying things like "the blatant lying aside" when the blatant lying is the driving force behind all the individual examples.
We could spend days arguing about how many chickens can lay on the head of a pin despite none of us having any relevant experience in chicken housing (all mine were free-range when I bothered--it wasn't worth it).
But what would be the point of that? We've been doing it for over a decade and things just keep getting more and more insane as the same people keep lying to our faces about it until it's too late to stop them.
Tyre_Inflator
3mo ago
I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"
This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.
Hell, didn't Goody-2 come out less than two weeks before Gemini, and everyone was laughing at the absurdity of an "ethically responsible" chatbot that refused to do arbitrary things? The parody became reality overnight!
Look at the example I edited into the bottom of my OP. A few years ago people were calling that a slippery slope hysteria that would never be a thing, because it was just conservatives exaggerating Some Kids On Tumblr.
In fact, Tracingwoodgrains actually tried to pull the "lol at least we can laugh at conservatives who think Plurals are a thing" gag recently on twitter, and his replies had people going "actually it is and accommodating them is just Basic Human Decency." It happened so fast one end of the leftist tail doesn't even know it's wagging yet!
Canada's bill C-63 is going to criminalize basically all dissent in the country, the UK is... jesus, just look at them. Germany is going to ban its largest party to keep the immigration coming. How are things getting any better?
This, right here, is exactly the thing I was talking about.
My friend is feeding his new daughter on the free expired baby food he gets from his grocery store job, while this instagram play-farmer writes grants for more money than he makes in a year. And you think I need to "touch grass" if that bothers me, and that I'll suddenly stop caring if Trump is elected for some reason?
I don't believe your motivation for engaging is to discuss the culture war. I think you're waging it by manipulating people into passive acceptance.
How would you feel about writing a post about the WPATH leaks and letting other people respond to it, rather than the other way round? Would you be willing to try?
The comparison doesn't really work because the Nazis never expected to get back in power and their efforts to continue the war were delusional. But the liberal party is very rationally using their remaining time in office to do unpopular and destructive things that will increase their power next time they get elected, and prevent the current opposition from fixing the disaster they inherit.
In another decade everyone will have forgotten why they voted out the liberals in 2025. But their children will have been raised by the education bureaucrats being appointed today, and their managers at work will have been promoted the same way.
Left wingers have mastered the science of turning the political pendulum into a ratchet by manipulating procedure.
Tyre_Inflator
3mo ago
Tracing's effortpost https://nitter.adminforge.de/tracewoodgrains/status/1752091831095939471
A scandal at the FAA has been moving on a slow-burn through the courts for a decade, culminating in the class-action lawsuit currently known as Brigida v. @SecretaryPete, brought by a class who spent years and thousands of dollars in coursework to become air traffic controllers, only to be dismissed by a pass-fail biographical questionnaire with a >90% fail rate, implemented without warning after many of them had already taken, and passed, a skill assessment. The questionnaire awarded points for factors like "lowest grade in high school is science," something explicitly admitted by the FAA in a motion to deny class certification.
Mainstream outlets have given it sparse coverage, for reasons that will become clear shortly. Right-wing sources paid attention initially, but few ran follow-ups or took a close look at the court filings. So: What exactly is going on? How did all of this happen?
I am not a professional. I am a law student with a part-time job on @TheBARPod, a podcast about internet nonsense, and a side hobby of sticking my nose where it doesn't belong. I wanted, and want, to do a thorough report on this when I get the time. But the story is big enough, and spreading fast enough, that I want to make sure that people have access to accurate info as quickly as possible.
First, though: court filings are public records, but they are often expensive and difficult to obtain. Tools like RECAP help, but I was lucky to have people around me willing to pay the $80 in PACER fees for a few of the documents. This story is much larger than me and I do not want people to have to rely on me for it. Here are the court documents I have: drive.google.com/drive/folde… Most of the interesting exhibits are in 139. Please look for yourself if this story catches your interest.
With that out of the way, my current understanding of the situation is as follows. It will be dry at times; others can editorialize more:
Historically, the pipeline into air traffic control has followed a few paths: military veterans, graduates of the "Air Traffic-Collegiate Training Initiative" (AT-CTI) program, and the general public. Whichever route they came from, each candidate would be required to take and pass the eight-hour AT-SAT cognitive test to begin serious training. This test was validated as being effective as recently as 2013.
The FAA has faced pressure to diversify the air traffic control for generations, something that seems to have influenced even the scoring structure of the AT-SAT cognitive test used for pre-employment screening of air traffic control candidates. Leading up to 2014, that pressure intensified, with the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees (NBCFAE) leading the push.
To start with, in 2000, a three-member task force, including NBCFAE member Mamie Mallory, wrote "A Business Case and Strategic Plan to Address Under-Representation of Minorities, Women, and People with Targeted Disabilities," recommending, per the lawsuit, a workplace cultural audit, diversity "hiring targets" for each year, and "allowing RNO- [Race and National Origin] and gender-conscious hiring." They were advised by Dr. Herbert Wong, who helped the NBCFAE analyze FAA diversity data in 2009. Wong authored a report concluding that the FAA was "the least diverse agency within the executive branch of the federal government." Mallory and Wong were consulted as part of the 2014 test replacement process.
From there, the NBCFAE sent letters in July and October 2009 to the FAA administrator and the Secretary for the Department of Transportation claiming disparate treatment, adopted a strategic plan "advocating for affirmative employment, obtaining an 'independent valuation of hiring and/or screening tools,' and pursuing litigation," a "Talking Points" document pushing the FAA to address diversity, and the creation of a group called "Team 7."
In 2012, Team 7 members met with the secretary of the Department of Transportation, the FAA administrator, and senior FAA leaders to discuss diversity, after which the FAA commissioned a "Barrier Analysis" with a number of recommendations. Central to this: the cognitive test posed a barrier for black candidates, so they recommended using a biographical test first to "maximiz[e] diversity," eliminating the vast majority of candidates prior to any cognitive test.
In 2012 and 2013, the NBCFAE continued pushing this process, with members meeting with the DOT, FAA, Congressional Black Caucus, and others to push diversity among ATCs. By July 2013, the FAA created a "Barrier Analysis Implemention Team" (BAIT, and I swear I am not making this acronym up).
Around this time, the FAA decided to pause the hiring of CTI graduates pending the implementation of the biographical assessment. Neither the schools that ran the CTI programs nor their students were informed of this when the decision was initially made. A number of students, including the class representative, passed the AT-SAT (in the case of the class representative, with a perfect score), not knowing they would never get to use it.
In 2014, the FAA rolled out the new biographical questionnaire in line with the Barrier Analysis recommendation, designed so that 90% or more of applicants would "fail." The questionnaire was not monitored, and people could take it at home. Questions asked prospective air traffic controllers how many sports they played in high school, how long they'd been unemployed recently, whether they were more eager or considerate, and seventy-some other questions. Graduates of the CTI program, like everyone else, had to "pass" this or they would be disqualified from further consideration. This came alongside other changes de-prioritizing CTI graduates.
CTI schools were blindsided and outraged by this change. A report on FAA hiring issues found that 70% of CTI administrators agreed that the changes in the process had led to a negative effect on the air traffic control infrastructure. One respondent stated their "numbers [had] been devastated," and the majority agreed that it would severely impact the health of their own programs. The largest program dropped from more than 600 students to less than 300.
Concurrent to all of this, NBCFAE members were hard at work. In particular, one Shelton Snow, an FAA employee and then-president of the NBCFAE's Washington Suburban chapter, provided NBCFAE members with "buzz words" in January 2014 that would automatically push their resumes to the tops of HR files. A 2013 NBCFAE meeting advised members to "please include [on resumes] if you are a NBCFAE Member. [...] Can you see the strategy", emphasizing they were "only concerned" with the employment of "African-Americans, women ... and other minorities."
After the 2014 biographical questionnaire was released, Snow took it a step further. As Fox Business reported (related in Rojas v. FAA), he sent voice-mail messages to NBCFAE applicants, advising them on the specific answers they needed to enter into the Biographical Assessment to avoid failing, stating that he was "about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question."
Per a 2016 Yahoo Finance article, an internal FAA report cleared the NBCFAE and Snow of wrongdoing.
A few changes were made by 2015. In 2016, Congress passed Public Law 114-190, which among other things banned the use of biographical assessments as a first-line hiring tool for air traffic controllers.
People snubbed by the process filed dozens of lawsuits as a result, culminating in the class-action suit now underway as Brigida v. Buttigieg. In arguing to deny class certification, the defendants argued that the "underlying grievance--that they pursued college degrees in reliance on their perception that the role of the CTI program in the FAA's hiring process would never change--is not actionable."
In a moment with a certain bitter irony, black CTI graduates who were left adrift by this process are the only demographic left out of the class: while the plaintiffs tried to include them initially, the court denied certification until they were excluded. The class has been granted certification, and the suit is slowly rolling forward.
Finally, in 2024, @whstancil picked a fight with @Steve_Sailer, who like many in right-wing media had released occasional articles touching on this case. Their scuffle stirrred up enough attention towards it to catch my eye. @SashaGusevPosts, almost alone out of many who accepted my points and moved on, pushed me to look with a more skeptical eye. To win a petty bet with him, I elected to spend an evening digging into this. @raspy_aspie, who I shared early info with, drew my attention towards the initial exhibit I posted, and I went from there.
To get a bit personal for a moment: I was a day-one donor to @PeteButtigieg during his presidential campaign, impressed by his deep understanding and articulate defense of liberal principles. He has been saddled with a messy, stupid lawsuit built on bad decision after bad decision, from predecessors who--between a rock and a hard place in the impossible task of avoiding disparate impact while preserving objective standards--elected to take the easy road and cave to political pressure to implement absurdities. He has extraordinary power to end this mess in a moment and begin to make things right for those who were directly denied a chance at the jobs they had worked towards thanks to an arbitrary and perverse biographical questionnaire.
People will turn this into a culture war issue, and in one sense, that is perfectly fair: it represents a decades-long process of institutional failure at every level. A thousand things had to go wrong to get to this point, and if people want to harp on it—let them. But this is not a fundamentally partisan issue. Virtually nobody, looking dispassionately at that questionnaire, wants to defend it. Everybody wants competent, effective air traffic controllers. Everybody, I suspect, can sympathize with the people who paid and worked through years of education to have their career path suddenly pulled away for political reasons far beyond their control. I am confident that Buttigieg can see that just as well as the rest of us, that for many, it is simply the same neglect everybody else has shown towards the case that has led it to linger awkwardly unresolved for a decade.
There is nothing to be gained from fighting the suit further. It is a black eye on the FAA, a black eye on the DOT, and a black eye on our public institutions as a whole. People have paid shockingly little attention to it as it's rolled through the courts, in part, no doubt, because anything touching on diversity is a hot topic that becomes a culture war football in a moment. My instinct, looking at the whole mess, is that the DOT and FAA should publicly apologize, settle, and do their best to begin making right what was so badly broken
Tyre_Inflator
1mo ago
How often is that the case? How is your rule distinguishing between incapacitation and "might not make the same decision while sober, or uses that as an excuse to dodge shaming afterwards"?
Tyre_Inflator
3mo ago
At this point I can easily see his life going something like
5 minutes checking up on each of your companies: 4hrs
Hyping up investors: 7hrs
Shower + food+ anime: 1hr
Aww yeah twittertime: 8hrs
Sleep: 4hrs
More fairly, the man probably spends a lot of time being driven around, sitting on planes, etc. where there isn't much else to do except txt and tweet.
Tyre_Inflator
2mo ago
having memory better than a goldfish is a superpower
cynically, the superpower is having either a goldfish memory or absolutely no conscience about telling the most convenient lie in any given post. In a lot of modern discussion environments, having the nagging memory that we weren't always at war with Eastasian-flu is an active hinderance to keeping friends and staying unbanned.
What does "too drunk to say no" mean? You've fixated on "not conscious," but that's obviously a limited and extreme subset of "too drunk." What are the other cases?
Tyre_Inflator
3mo ago
Oh obviously there won't be any consequences for the left. That's why I only talked about risks to Tracing for being what he called "an autistic alien fact-checker who cares about things that are true"
Tyre_Inflator
1mo ago
Alright. Forget about the black person who got taxpayer money for a moment (we can go back to it later if you like)
This is exactly what culture war "discussion" is. Snide little manipulative tactics, rhetoric meant to goad, bully, and insinuate.
We've been doing this for ten god damn years as things get crazier and crazier, but the methods always stay the same.
Why do you do it? How long will you keep doing it? Will you ever stop? Will you someday say "oh, the revolution has gotten to my stop and I want off," or is the only real goal to keep pushing and hurting and winning endlessly?
I think you're overthinking it. The entire purpose of that guy's propaganda is to provide attack vectors for leftists confronted with counter-arguments to their demands; post the video and go "look everyone, this guy did didoism! Ban him!" Just do a site:reddit.com search for the video titles to see how they're meant to be used.
This is how the whole "breadtube" ecosystem works. It's a tool for hurting people as effectively as possible: look at what they did to Internet Historian and Wendigoon just today.
Talking about it like it has actual "ideas" is critiquing the finish on a knife that's being used to stab you.
Tyre_Inflator
2mo ago
You seem to have picked up 4-7 weird downvoters for, like, no visible reason. Please don't delete your posts because of them: I'd rather see your content and then call out the downvoters for being little bitches, because I don't see anything wrong with anything in your history.
I think people are getting paranoid and downvoting a lot more to counteract a few mass-spamming trolls the mods refuse to ban, just to stop them manufacturing the appearance of consensus by sheer volume. And after doing that for too long downvoting for disagreement becomes a habit.
I've been reading his posts from the 2020 riots on reddit. Let's just say I firmly disagree with you.
In between blogging about fursuit collections, former motte moderator TracingWoodgrains has started to blow up on twitter after wading into an ongoing feud between Steve Sailer and propagandist Will Stancil.
Something in the replies must have really upset him (possibly interactions with a number of replyguys making not-so-veiled threats about what happens to people who associate with bigots or question "lying for the pursuit of good aims"), because he suddenly got really invested in proving that the recent FAA-DEI scandal is real.
After giving up on conservative journalists and deciding to do the legwork himself, he's now posting PACER documents from the recent FAA lawsuit, proving that the FAA HR department sent black applicants a list of resume buzzwords that would get their applications fast-tracked, via the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
A few hours ago this got the attention of Elon Musk, and Tracing is promising a follow-up, somehow trying to juggle 1L coursework with doing more investigative journalism than the entire conservative media put together. Obviously one of these things takes more time than the other, but I'm sure he'll have a coffee break free for the journalism bit.
One reason I think this could be important is that it's going to paint a huge target on Tracing's back. Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc. They're going to get very angry at this evidence becoming widely known, and tracing is in a unique position to spread it outside the right wing news ghetto that prevents most liberals from ever encountering facts like these.
I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him (and probably a number who will suddenly decide he's on the enemy side of the fiend-enemy distinction.) So if anyone is in the position to help if he needs it, maybe start reaching out early.
Unfortunately all of this is getting difficult to follow without a twitter account (I even have one, but they're not letting me log in right now for no apparent reason). It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off. If anyone has a reliable account and would be willing to make screenshots, I'd love if you could take over covering the story as it develops.
Edit: his effortpost is now out on twitter and at his blog. I'll copy it into a reply below in case the nitter instance goes down again.
Just a note, this has obvious parallels to colleges letting DEI departments screen out the 80% of applicants before any objective hiring process begins:
It's a very effective method of manipulating procedural outcomes, isn't it?
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