Voyager
1mo ago
I'm a man, I would consider myself having high libido, and still I have noticed more than once that a female acquaintance becomes more sexually attractive as I get to know her better as a person. And from what I've heard, men in general are attracted to women they love.
Perhaps "romantic/personal attraction enhances sexual attraction" is somewhat universal for humans, and a lower baseline libido just makes the effect more pronounced.
Voyager
1mo ago
I wasn't really intending it as a steelman. I was trying to describe what I think are the actual motivations and mindsets of the donators.
Yes, it's emotive. They want to defend someone who's being attacked and stand up to "bullies". If my post gave you the idea it was a coordinated strategy motivated by cold calculations about cost-effective activism, that wasn't my intention.
Imagine them less like western leaders approving budgets and shipments and more like the people who donated to ukrainian forces to get custom messages written on grenades. (Notice the similarity to people leaving spicy messages with their donations?) It's about wanting to support the fight.
How do you prevent the people to get into similar situations just for the payout?
The desired outcome for the donators is that leftists see that trying to cancel people as racists no longer destroys them when the victim instead get lots of money, stop doing so, and therefore no one gets into those situations anymore (i.e. no viral shitstorm happens when people say "nigger"). Similar to how, althouth it strains the comparison, the West is hoping that Putin realizes that invading another country is not worth it because of the support they'll be getting.
Whether that outcome is achievable is of course a different question.
Voyager
1mo ago
No, you "deserve" wages for doing your job. Which is roughly ("deserve" still hides a lot of complexity here) the modal case for giving money to someone: You pay them for something you want.
My point is that this is a different situation: Hendrix isn't being paid to say this, she is being supported against an attack.
Voyager
1mo ago
DoDA works on everyone; as I think Sluggy Freelance points out, levitate someone out a high window (perhaps after disarming them) and they're as dead as if you used the killing curse.
This is even made explicit in the books themselves at one point: Harry defends his use of Expelliarmus in a broom chase by pointing out that Stunning them will make them fall from their brooms and kill them just as well.
"Harry, the time for Disarming is past! These people are trying to capture and kill you! At least Stun if you aren’t prepared to kill!"
"We were hundreds of feet up! Stan’s not himself, and if I Stunned him and he’d fallen, he’d have died the same as if I’d used Avada Kedavra!"
Voyager
1mo ago
It's a proxy war, and the donations are foreign military aid.
No one thinks Ukraine "deserves" billions worth of military equipment on their own merits. Western supporters believe that they deserve their independence or Russia's invasion deserves to be opposed (either idealistically, to take a stand against offensive wars, or pragmatically, to weaken the geopolitical rival Russia) and weapons shipments are the way to achieve this.
Shiloh Hendrix isn't being given $750,000 as a reward for saying a bad word, she is being given money to defend against the attack on her, which is perceived as unjust and/or as the frontline of a war between tribes. This is both practical ("if we give her money, they can't ruin her life") and symbolic (actual money is a credible signal of support against the moral accusation on her.)
The previous fundraiser for Karmelo Anthony is also revelant here as an initial escalation. If the Evil Empire sends weapons to the Evilist regime in Proxystan, the Coalition of Good needs to match that in support for the Goodist rebels.
Voyager
2mo ago
Wouldn't surprise me if lives were already lost from black parents losing trust in white doctors or similar effects, just not in a legible way.
If you are longer exposed to something (including an architectural style), it makes you feel better about it
That might be a true factor, but if it were the entire reason, it would predict that people make no distinction between buildings that were built before they were born - after all, can't be exposed longer than your life.
That would surprise me and doesn't appear to be in evidence.
An architectural example is the Eiffel Tower that was extremely controversial and hated by many when it was built. Now, it is perceived as an iconic and inseparable part of Paris.
The Eiffel Tower might an icon of Paris - but do Parisians actually consider it beautiful? Compared to, say, the towers of Notre Dame? Or may its impressive and skyline-dominating size, the imposing construction, and the utility as a vantage point more relevant to its popularity?
Voyager
3mo ago
It’s practically axiomatic that civilization requires (and arguably is) the control of young men.
Fundamentally, civilization is the control of violence.
Which naturally requires control of young men, both in that they're likely to use uncontrolled violence otherwise and that they're main tools for controlled violence.
Voyager
8mo ago
Jerking off in the shower is not sex for the purposes of this topic, because showers can't get pregnant nor impregnate you.
We were talking about abstinence for birth control purposes. Any act that can't produce a baby is still available.
Voyager
10mo ago
Should an entire ethnic group be held responsible for the actions of some of its members, many of whom are not even members of the present generation?
This isn't about "holding responsible". It merely means they* should get no claim on what was never rightfully theirs in the first place.
Aside from, as others have pointed out, this being a response to just the same argument in the other direction.
*"they" meaning "the ethnic group". This is assuming an ethnic group may have land claims, but if not, there naturally isn't a claim either.
Voyager
1yr ago
Yes, both of these are arguments against meritocracy in practice. The former is refuted by HBD, and while the latter is not, it's also weaker, because it relies on a moral axiom that is harder to defend and less shared in the mainstream.
Hence, HBD weakens the case.
Voyager
1yr ago
But the disparate impact doctrine is much harder to defend without "all races are equal", so it makes sense as a first step.
Voyager
1yr ago
More resentment than shouting from the rooftops that it's oppression? That seems unlikely to me.
Will it immediately fix race relations? Certainly not. But I don't think it will make things worse either.
Voyager
1yr ago
How do you think the Hausa or Fulani are likely to respond if an Igbo comes up to them and says that, actually, on account of his people’s average IQ being at least one standard deviation above the Nigerian average, they ought to be in charge of the country and occupy the majority of the top jobs in Lagos and Abuja and so on? How do antisemitic white nationalists respond if you tell them that actually it’s a good thing that Jews are disproportionately in positions of power because we are, in fact, significantly smarter than them on average and that effect is exacerbated in the long tail at IQ 160+ (so we deserve it really)?
But if HBD is true, the Igbo or Jews will disproportionately occupy higher positions, and you need to explain it.
Realistically, the alternative to "we deserve it because we're smarter" is "we don't actually deserve it, we're just oppressing you", which is clearly worse for racial relations.
HBD as a fact of nature is already leading to racial tensions via disparate outcomes. The Hausa or white supremacist are already angry because they don't have positions of power. Discussing that there's a good reason isn't the problem. Denying discussion of the good reason, leaving oppression on the table as the only potential explanation, makes it worse.
Sure, a politically color-blind world, where race is considered about as relevant as hair color and no one cares about racial distributions of anything, would be preferable in practical terms, but that's not the world we live in. And in such a world, HBD could simply be a nerdy niche topic that no one except a few scientists cares about. HBD isn't the problem here.
Voyager
1yr ago
Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting). HBD is a worse substitute than existing policy frameworks.
HBD isn't a policy tool. It's merely an observation about the world. Standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting are all compatible with HBD, it merely predicts that the results will be racially "disparate".
And since the disparate impact is one of the main arguments against merit-based policies, HBD is relevant as a defense thereof.
Voyager
1yr ago
Right, saying that 'Mens team' means 'Males team' is the conflation.
I explicitly made an argument as to why this is the case, without even referencing the term "Men". There's no conflation.
I also made sure to avoid terms like "men" or "women" when they were potentially ambiguous, so asking again for your retraction and apology.
Yes that is literally the thing that my entire initial comment was doing.
So to be clear, you are accepting that the burden of proof lies on the trans-inclusive position and conceding your argument of
Since no one has ever demonstrated a statistical advantage in win/loss records and we have weak priors about innate ability, we should assume then null hypothesis for now and let trans women compete. If that leads to gathering enough data to demonstrate an unfair advantage some day, then we'll have a legitimate reason to revisit that decision.
?
Voyager
1yr ago
Again, no, that wasn't my argument.
Fair enough, but I take it you understand now how @SSCReader's unfairness test measures comparative advantage, you just think comparative advantage isn't relevant?
Voyager
1yr ago
And you are the one playing rhetorical games conflating 'male' and 'man' with regards to that.
No, I'm not. I have consistently been talking about biology, and I have made it explicit where necessary (by pointing out that sports divisions, which use the terms "men" and "women", are about biology.)
I'd like you to retract that accusation and apologize.
Everything is always going to end up being an arbitrary semantic game, if you don't agree ahead of time on some empirical metric to use to settle the issue.
That's one of the arguments you made, but not the one discussed in this comment thread.
Respond to the actual points made. Don't jump around between different arguments when you can't defend the one at hand.
I've said repeatedly that we should default to a policy of maximum liberty and freedom until we find compelling evidence of a conflicting interest. That's a bog-standard libertarian argument that you are ignoring.
I'm not ignoring it, you're ignoring my counterargument upthread:
The proof is easily given though: We have male biology. The burden of proof now shifts to the affirmative defense of "in this case the effects of male biology don't apply".
We have good evidence that male need to be excluded from female competition. We would now need evidence that these particular kind of males do not.
Voyager
1yr ago
I am confused. Assuming men are better than women at these sports, wouldn't any woman competing against men rank lower than they rank against women?
Not if it's a transwoman who competed against men in a body with male advantage, but underwent a procedure that nullified the male advantage before competing against women.
Your claim is that transition is such a procedure. If that's true, we should expect the test to show no comparative advantage.
It's not an individual test for infairness like a doping test, it's a measure for judging transition as nullifier of the male advantage.
Voyager
1yr ago
I've been suggesting win/loss record statistics as an unambiguous and definitive empirical metric here, so we can ignore all teh rhetorical games and just decide the matter on facts.
Per your claim, the situation of fact is that we don't have good evidence, so we need to decide what to do as a default until we attain it, whether the burden of proof is on excluding or allowing transwomen in. You are the one who started rhetorical games about "women on women's sports", weaponizing the ambiguity of "woman", with regards to that.
Voyager
1yr ago
"That sounds like a you problem" is also the obvious rebuttal to trans people wanting different pronouns used for them. If (general) you don't respect my psychological comfort, why should I respect yours?
Voyager
1yr ago
But from the point of view of someone who believes that Trans Women Are Women, would this even be evidence of an unfair advantage?
Sports is about biology, and Trans Women Are Women is not true in the biological sense. Ex falso quodlibet.
Not at all. The situation is that women want to play on women's teams.
Sports divisions are based on biology, and the people in question aren't biologically female. I don't want to play semantics games about what "woman" means, that's missing the point.
Typically the onus is on the person wanting to penalize or exclude someone to provide proof, that's the concept behind 'innocent until proven guilty' and the like.
The proof is easily given though: We have male biology. The burden of proof now shifts to the affirmative defense of "in this case the effects of male biology don't apply".
We have good evidence that male need to be excluded from female competition. We would now need evidence that these particular kind of males do not.
I'm talking about 'unfair' in terms of 'not possible to compete against'.
You're talking about some kind of metaphysical 'fairness' where you have decided that being good at something because you were born male and then transitioned is 'unfair', but being born female and really talented at it is 'fair'.
No, fairness is a function of the game, and if the premise of the game is that male advantages aren't allowed, then any kind of male advantage is unfair. It wouldn't automatically be unfair for a male to compete against a female as long as it's in the open division, however.
They're not mediocre cis athletes. They're exceptional trans athletes.
If they were mediocre trans athletes, then the exceptional trans athletes would have broken their records by even more!
They were mediocre athletes, then they transitioned and became exceptional. This proves that they have an advantage from transition, because they're mediocre on their own talent. This is not just "personal intuition". It improved their ranking, so it gave them an advantage.
Exceptional trans athletes would be exceptional athletes who are trans, like Caitlyn Jenner.
It doesn't affect whether the women's division is a fair and competitive environment, and there's no obvious reason why we should care about it
Allowing certain mediocre athletes to perform exceptionally based on advantages that the division is supposed to exclude is not fair. Competitive is a separate matter.
And the reason we care about excluding it is the same we have women's divisions to begin with.
or, more importantly, why we should restrict people's rights based on it.
Like I told you, there are no rights being restricted, and if you disagree, you should explain which rights are restricted how, not just assert it.
Voyager
1yr ago
Since no one has ever demonstrated a statistical advantage in win/loss records and we have weak priors about innate ability, we should assume then null hypothesis for now and let trans women compete.
I disagree. The situation is that normally ineligible people are demanding special allowance, on the basis of arguing that they have a way to nullify the impact of the property that makes them ineligible. The onus is on them to prove that it's really nullified. If we don't know either way, we play it safe.
If they win every contest they ever go to and no one can compete with them, that's probably unfair.
Doesn't need to. If the transwoman only makes 3rd place, then the woman in 4th lost the bronze medal. If that's due to an unfair advantage, that's bad and she was treated unfairly.
There are a trillion local and regional sports records for a trillion things, records get broken literally every day by cis athletes.
But not by mediocre cis athletes.
Hubbard and Thomas perform better than before, by a lot. This shows that transition gave them an advantage.
If we took away entire demographics rights because of 2 anecdotes, we'd be in a lot of trouble as a society.
This isn't a rights issue, there is no right to compete in the women's division with a male body. Cis men don't get to, and no one has a problem with it. The question is whether transwomen should get a special allowance.
This isn't a steelman. A steelman defends a position on its object level merits and makes no claim on the actual motivations of the supporters. But this is "they oppose this because they suspect bad motives from Trump", explicitly framed in terms of motivations.
A steelman would be "here are some arguments for a principled immigration policy that would reject Afrikaners and allow [groups the episcopalians had no objection to]". But after all, this discussion isn't primarily about the object level policy, it's about double standards/racism. "They are actually objecting to perceived double standards/racism" on the other side is a defense of the people involved.
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