Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
28d ago
From the statement:
But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families...
That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply (see Google trends here. This is just absolutely wild to me how quickly this term has taken hold and how quickly people seem to have come to believe that this is something they pretty much always thought, that it's a good and normal thing, that this is medical care, and only a bunch of hateful extremists could think otherwise.
But pause. What exactly are "trans kids"? On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender. I don't understand how people are capable of holding these ideas in their heads simultaneously and that they've adopted these ideas that are so new, so utterly untested consequentially as not just right, but obviously morally right and opposed only by a bunch of bigots. My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.
I am disturbed.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15d ago
The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:
When possible, wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants and skirts, which can provide protection from UV rays. If wearing this type of clothing isn’t practical, try to wear a T-shirt or a beach cover-up. Clothes made from tightly woven fabric offer the best protection. A wet T-shirt offers much less UV protection than a dry one, and darker colors may offer more protection than lighter colors. Some clothing is certified under international standards as offering UV protection.
Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
Listening to a recent episode of the Meateater podcast on the ecological impacts of renewable energy and thinking about it afterwards, I formulated my issue with the core premise into three-legged combination of why it doesn't seem like a great idea to build offshore wind, but that may also apply to standard wind and solar installations:
- These seem much more complex than one might expect initially. The details of implementation when it comes to land management, environmental damage, load balancing, and so much more seem to require multidisciplinary experts and an enormous amount of planning and study. A question like, "what do we do with the rotors afterwards?" is an example of this. Alone, this isn't necessarily a big criticism, but...
- They are quite costly. I don't actually know the numbers, but I do know that we're massively federally subsidizing these, and I wouldn't expect that to be necessary if they were actually competitive without those subsidies. If I'm wrong, and they're actually quite affordable, I would like the federal government to stop creating new handouts for companies that can compete on an open market.
- Given the complexity and cost, they must be necessary. This is the one that I have the hardest time actually evaluating. I'm personally skeptical of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions, but setting that aside, I am unclear on why I should prefer the complexity, ecological footprint, and cost of massive wind and solar installations to using the proven, small footprint nuclear power solution.
I don't claim any actual expertise and I'm pretty neutral about the whole thing, but I haven't really seen anyone addressing this head-on.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7d ago
On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line.
I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent. In my experience, the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports. If your proverbial skill points were more intellect than charisma, you might get shit from your buddies about it, but I really doubt the framing of the highly competent being routinely bullied.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8d ago
I think you're overfitting different phenomena into a limited number of buckets. All of the following are true (IMO, of course):
- The self-immolator is probably schizotypal and connected a lot of dots that aren't connected.
- There are many schizotypal conspiracy theorists that believe very weird things about the world as a result of their lack of reasoning ability and overly aggressive pattern matching.
- Some people lean towards conspiracies because randomness bothers them.
- Some people lean towards conspiracies because humans have a tendency to pattern-match and attribute causality. They're not bothered by randomness, they're just not very good at understanding it, so they see intentionality everywhere.
- There are substantial conspiracies that actually exist, including those by intelligence agencies, big corporations, non-governmental organizations, and more.
- Some of these conspiracies will include trying to discredit people that notice what's going on.
- There probably isn't a shady cabal that secretly controls everything - the most powerful people are probably the people that appear to be the most powerful people.
This set of positions allows plenty of space for some pretty wild conspiracy theories to be true without needing to add unnecessary moving parts to my understanding of the world. The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty...
My proposed solution is to pick an absolute standard of what "poverty" is and try to solve that. When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved. I believe this is intentional, but it doesn't really matter to the point whether this is just a mistake or not. If we can define "poverty" by absolute standards of access to the basic necessities of life, I think we will find that the United States has already solved poverty or needs to do very little to fill in the last couple gaps.
If, instead, "poverty" just refers to having less than the median, well, the poor we'll always have with us, I suppose.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Relatedly, eliminating corporal punishment in favor of just modulating the length of prison sentences is one of those things that strikes me as a solution someone could only like if they're basing their policies on squeamishness rather than genuine care. There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
15d ago
Yes. Seatbelts are an excellent idea and I wear mine. Demanding that everyone do so is stupid and intrusive.
Opposing safetyism doesn’t mean ignoring risk-benefit, it means that you’re against treating safety as an overriding priority in all cases.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9d ago
I know being tall has been incredible for me, I have my charms regardless, but even average men are often hard countered by women setting 6' in their bio, or even implicitly in person or social settings (though women are certainly not the best at gauging it, hence so many guys who are 5'10" getting away with, they just recognize "tall").
Anecdotes being anecdotes and all, but I my personal experience makes me believe this whole thing is just wildly overrated. I'm just a bit over 5'8" and this has literally never been a problem with women. I have never met a woman I was romantically interested in that seemed even remotely put off by my relative shortness, including a couple hookups that were a shade taller me than me. Height is certainly an advantage, but it seems more like an advantage in the same way that social status, income, good looks, and physicality are rather than just a categorical one. I'm sure my predilection for dating petite women has helped on this one, but I really do think that treating height as an insurmountable obstacle has more to do with coping and excusing other personal failings than anything else.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
On the one hand, one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance.
I have trouble with this sentiment, not because I disagree with it across all parameters, but because someone's physical appearance reflects real elements of someone's personality and character, it's not just something completely exogenous to who you love. The woman I love is fit, she was fit when I met her, she got more fit during our time together, and we like doing physical things together. Her fitness is reflected in her appearance - she's toned, slender, tanned deeply in the summers, carries herself with the posture of an athletic woman, and so on. You can see this at a glance, the same way that you can see that someone is sedentary from their chubbiness, lack of musculature, slumping posture, and uncoordinated gait.
Contrary to the saying, there's a lot you can tell about a book from its cover.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
Why not just buy this little guy instead? Same price, low miles, only ten years old, intentionally designed to be that size, and it's even kinda cute. Come to think of it, I ought to buy my wife one of these.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
24d ago
Are they a reliable narrator on the matter? I can certainly imagine a bunch of constraints on how endowment money is used, but it also seems true that there's just always going to be a lot of pressure to just acquire more no matter how rich they already are.
In any case, I still think it's super weird that middle-class people give even a penny to their schools. I understand if you have enough money to get your name on a building or an endowed professorship or can swing the politics of a department, but I genuinely don't get what someone gets out of giving a few hundred bucks to a school.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
I remain surprised that there aren't more people that want Israel to win, but don't want to give them $26 billion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
Of course, this brings us full circle to whether it was a good idea to add a country like Estonia to NATO when they offer almost nothing in return. The reason to add Estonia isn't to improve the alliance, it's to put a thumb in Russia's eye and attempt to create a definitive anti-Russian border rather than keeping the buffer-state model in place. Is that a good idea? I don't know, that's above my pay grade, but it's definitely a stupid idea if you're not actually willing to bleed for Estonians. Any time you lack the resolve to keep a commitment, you should not make that commitment.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
Every now and then, I'm reminded of how absolutely ridiculous the treatment of "medical cannabis" really is. While I can buy that there are a variety of maladies where people are able to mitigate symptoms by using weed, these often seem to be along the same lines as someone saying that their arthritis bothers them less after a nice dram of whisky in the evening. Strictly true, they're not lying, but not really something that rises to the level of needing to come with the trappings and verbiage of medicalization. There's something both hilarious and depressing about governments needing to maintain the facade that marijuana bans were actually a pretty good idea and very justified while also providing a trivial path to workaround the bans and get weed anyway. That this has become a somewhat normal position for politicians to state openly that they support "medical marijuana" but are against recreational use is just one of the absolute dumbest aspects of American politics despite there being a veritable see of stupid things to choose from.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
I have to confess that I simply do not care about the day-to-day litigation of whether such-and-such attack or finding constitutes a "war crime" or not. The present conflict is the direct result of choices made by Gazans. The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership, they're simply unwilling to accept the terms of surrender. Arguing about whether a given incident is an example of Israelis behaving badly seems about on par with someone in 1944 arguing that the American response to Pearl Harbor has been wildly disproportionate, and they've sank way more warships than Japan ever sank of the Americans, and it would be terrible to hurt any innocent Japanese civilians. Anyone arguing this would rightly be seen as an anti-American agitator. By all means, sort out whatever you can when it comes to conduct of your soldiers after the war, but I just do not care about the claims of the side that picked a fight that they can't win, particularly when that side's chief tactic is trying to get civilians killed to create international pressure. I am completely fine with Israel inflicting misery until their enemy surrenders.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
While it doesn't cash out to legible living standards outcomes, the waste and fraud in government spending is meaningful. The illegal alien might not be who receives that $350 per day, but someone is getting $350 per day and they like it that way. This should cause some hesitance in proposing government spending as solutions to problems more broadly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8d ago
...the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders.
While I don't expect a total fix anytime soon, this is why I'm hoping for rollback on Chevron deference and related doctrines. To oversimplify, I want to shift from a position of tie goes to the government to tie goes to the private party. If a court can't figure out whether the regulatory body is correct and the regulatory body can't providing compelling factual evidence for their assertion of power, they should just lose, not get to claim that they have special expertise that's just too special for a non-expert to understand.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9d ago
And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.
This is one of those things that actually playing any sport at all really shifts your perspective on. Guys that are D1 scrubs are still really, really good at their sport. Guys that are capable of having one shining moment on the biggest stage of their sport in college are a whole other level.
As it fits with the Supreme Court, I've had this argument with a few conservative friends that think KBJ is "stupid" because she's an affirmative action appointment and couldn't answer the "what is a woman?" question cogently. They're wrong, just plain wrong. I could give a lengthy rant on how much I dislike her, how utterly dishonest I think her jurisprudence is, and what a mistake I think it is to explicitly promise a SCOTUS seat to a demographic group, but it remains true that if you listen to an oral argument that she's participating in, she's obviously a smart person. Listening to the recent Missouri v Murthy case made me genuinely angry, but it wasn't like Jackson was struggling to keep up with the conversation or doesn't understand the relevant law - she's just wrong. As off-brand as it is for me, I am inclined to think that insistence that she's actually stupid has quite a bit of racism built into.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9d ago
I agree with so much of this, but want to offer one piece of gentle pushback - there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis. I'm someone that absolutely despises Sotomayor and the view that the Constitution should be highly malleable to current-year preferences, and what I want is absolutely for her to keep her seat for the moment. This is my preference for purely strategic reasons - if she stays, she may well die and be replaced by someone that views the law much more like I do. If she retires now, it'll be an incredibly stupid spectacle with people insisting that we need another Wise Latinatm and it'll probably be some crank for the Ninth Circuit or something. Regardless of whether you take a Moneyball approach or a trad gut-feel approach, you should generally not give your opponents what they want.
For me, the best argument for her not retiring cynically would be that the goal should not be to game the institutions and that you should stand on the business of insisting that this type of institutionalism should be taken seriously. The problem there is that the left already views the right as having defected from that equilibrium by refusing to confirm Garland and then replacing Ginsberg almost immediately on death.
Your argument for the growth and influence of justices over time makes sense, but the problem really does come down to the object-level justice in question - it doesn't seem like anyone, left or right, sincerely believes that Sotomayor is an intellectual giant that's going to change hearts and minds. I'm sure there's a spin on this from her fans, that it's just that her detractors are a bunch of stupid racists, but it doesn't seem like there's any real disagreement that she's never going to be treated like an important intellectual figure in shaping future courts. This argument would work much better for Kagan, who generally is treated as a serious and influential colleague with incisive perspective by both friends and foes.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
Sure, those stipulations make sense, but they don't lead to agreeing with the statement that "one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance"; evaluating what caused that degradation of appearance is showing regard for their physical appearance. Ailments and disfigurement are tragic and it is obviously the morally correct thing to maintain your love for your partner through them. Aging is not only acceptable, but something that we should do our best to look on with some degree of dignity and appreciation. Neither of these is similar to having a spouse that just decides to stop dressing nicely, stop eating reasonably, or otherwise shows disregard for their own appearance.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
If I could find a bottle, I'd be drinking Old Forester 1924, but alas, I cannot find a bottle.
As it is, we're headed for the first really warm weekend day of the year and I strongly suspect that's going to entail an afternoon on the porch with some Foursquare rum (I think I have a few pours of Nobiliary left) and a cigar.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
I'm not arguing that a ForTwo is a particularly good vehicle, I'm saying that getting a 30 year-old chopped up Geo Metro to simulate a ForTwo is a stupid idea.
With regard to a ForTwo relative to a Mirage, it is simply inconceivable that you're going to save enough money on gas to make up for the initial price difference. If someone wants a cheap, economical two-seater, a $4K used ForTwo is a legitimate option, a new Mirage isn't a competitor to that in any meaningful sense.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?
Supplemental poverty is the alternative measure that includes transfers.
Conservatives and progressives both seem to vassilate on what exactly they mean by poverty when it's convenient to do so. Conservatives claim that transfers don't work because they haven't pulled everyone up to a middle-class earned income, but they also note that America's "poor" are housed, clothed, fed, and have entertainment budgets. Progressives claim that transfer programs work and we can tell because supplemental poverty figures tell us we've pulled people up, but then insist that tens of millions are "food insecure". To the extent that the concern is actual material impoverishment, welfare spending works and we do a lot of it.
I do try to be consistent - I occasionally get annoyed by the size of these programs, but the reality is that spending $183 billion per year for the hungry instead of for space has resulted in Americans having entirely too much to eat rather than any issues of "food insecurity".
Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?
I am completely unsympathetic to inequality discourse. Part of the reason is that it's often couched in the language of poverty, insinuating that the relatively deprived are absolutely deprived. Really though, I just generally don't buy that inequality is a real problem. I'm fine with anger at specific elites for specific reasons, but some fuzzy claim that Jeff Bezos just has too much money because Amazon is wildly successful is just annoying to me.
You're missing at least one thing that's going on - some rapes (or at least rape-adjacent behavior) are genuinely dissimilar to other crimes in the lack of mens rea from the perpetrator. The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party. Sure, you can provide the admonishment that she shouldn't have gotten so drunk in the first place and you're going to be correct, but it's also plausible that it's feasible to shift the culture around hooking up with very drunk girls from it being funny to it being socially unacceptable. You're not going to convince Ted Bundy to not rape with a social awareness campaign, but you might convince some men that it would be a bad thing to take advantage of a girl that doesn't have her wits about her.
There are many objections to the above that can be offered, but my impression is that this is the type of thing that "teach men not to rape" is referring to.
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