WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
I don't think @gafpromise was necessarily disputing the "immigrant" part, so much as the "illegal". You can certainly look around any major city and see that most DoorDashers are non-white and probably immigrants or descendants of recent immigrants. Bit harder to judge whether their papers are in order on sight. While the number may plausibly be high, I would be fairly surprised if >50% of immigrant DoorDashers were illegals, let alone 100%.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
I mean it all comes back to his trans kid, doesn't it? Who came out in 2020.
WandererintheWilderness
7d ago
The real mistake was the left wing's decision to alienate Musk.
It's all a bit chicken and egg, but I rather think he alienated the left, not vice versa.
WandererintheWilderness
8d ago
How's it a sign of virility?
In the most literal sense: it's associated with high levels of male hormones ("Men with androgenic alopecia typically have higher 5α-reductase, higher total testosterone, higher unbound/free testosterone, and higher free androgens, including DHT"). TMU it's a completely different phenomenon from hair loss in the elderly. In many young men's case, balding at the apex of the skull occurs concurrently with facial hair and body hair growth - in a very real sense it's another side of the same coin. The fact that we've come to associate it with old age and feebleness is just one of those things where cultural beauty standards have diverged from the biological reality of the human phenotype, like women having body hair, and I just think it's a bit silly in principle.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
have the hair of a 70 year old
Wanting to keep all your hair is perfectly fair, as much as dyeing your hair, shaving, or any other aesthetic change to how you choose to style your hair. But I dislike this framing/phrase. Male pattern baldness is natural, and not a sign of aging or decrepitude - if anything it's a sign of virility and maturity.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
I was thinking of the kind of infrastructure sabotage/collapse you describe as part of the "literal bullets-flying civil war" umbrella. Trying to starve the other side out is basically just siege warfare - it's not a different category of action from just opening fire to begin with, it's simply a different strategy. And one would pretty inevitably escalate into the other.
I certainly don't believe this is the only battlefield on which the tribal conflict can play out. But I was jumping off of "If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict (…)", where "playing by the rules Blue Tribe plays by" clearly means nothing more than "blatantly, openly ignoring the spirit or even letter of the Constitution whenever convenient" and similar chicanery. The Blue Tribe has certainly not made the first move on trying to starve the other side into total surrender, or whatever equivalently hostile strategy they have the infrastructure to pull off. The Reds doing that wouldn't, by any stretch of language, constitute "playing by the Blue Tribe's rules".
Civil war in America's not impossible (though I think it's extremely unlikely to come to that before something else that turns the axis of the world happens, whether that's AGI or something else). But it's not what we were talking about.
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender
How, then, do you explain the existence of large numbers of asexual trans people? (I mean, you could argue it's still a particular configuration of a single "sex-and-gender" neural knot in the brain, rather than two unrelated phenomena. But when people say "trans isn't a sex thing" they mean "it isn't a kink pursued for sexual gratification". Brain wiring isn't really the point.)
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
Gabby Giffords has never been President.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
If you mean to say that the Blue government have not passed a federal ban on all firearms
Yes, that is what I meant. The fact that they've only tried the thousand-papercuts tactic, instead of just going ahead and saying "no guns, ever", is exactly what the Constitution is buying you, and what you would lose if you tried to make it common knowledge that you can just ignore the Constitution.
WandererintheWilderness
10d ago
How dare they! Don't they understand that we have norms? Well, no, "We" don't, because those norms died here,
This is what I dispute. If we're talking about gun control - sure, the 2nd Am has been bent pretty badly to allow Blue states to effectively ban at least some arms that should clearly be protected. But no Blue government actually passed a federal ban on firearms. I guarantee you that in a world where everybody ignored the Constitution without a second thought, they would have tried at some point. The way I see it, your choice is between selective application of the second amendment, and it simply being torn down.
If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict, while our chances of surviving are excellent;
I don't actually believe that. The Blue Tribe has better liars, better loophole-finders, and above all else a much better social shaming apparatus. It has a nonzero ability to affect Red-aligned normies' worldview, while Red think-tanks are pretty useless at shifting Blue-aligned normies' Overton window. If everyone fights maximally dirty, then, all my personal opinions aside, I'm betting Blue.
(Of course, perhaps we're operating at different levels of metaphor, and you meant the Blues would lose a literal bullets-flying civil war? That's a very different conversation, and frankly one I'm not sure has very much to do with the issue at hand.)
What if the other side bends the niceties, but is still constrained by them to a point? You're better off with a devil who's compelled to keep up a facade of lawfulness than a devil who's acting completely unconstrained. Sure, it sucks to be stuck in this kind of asymmetrical equilibrium where you have to completely refrain from rule-breaking just because it compels your opponent to do less rule-breaking than he otherwise would. But you might still want to keep that equilibrium in place, if you have reason to believe the opponent has a sufficient advantage that a completely unconstrained version of them could squash you.
To put it another way, taking the blows is usually a better strategy than declaring all-out war. The fact that the other guy is feeling free to pummel you is a pretty good sign that they're confident in their ability to win (or at least ensure MAD) if you did, foolishly, fight back with lethal force.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
I'm against it
I gathered. And again, that's your right. My point is: "puberty-blockers are dangerous means of transitioning and need to be used far less" is an entirely orthogonal opinion from "having the goal of transitioning is a mental illness/otherwise undesirable". If you think the health hazards of puberty blockers are a bigger problem than whatever ills might come out of social transition, and if (as I believe) trans activists would be willing to dial back the puberty blockers on health grounds iff they were assured this isn't the first salami-slice to a campaign against social transition, there is obvious common ground here that could be reached. But it can't be reached if the public face of the anti-puberty-blockers campaign is also strongly against social transition.
WandererintheWilderness
13d ago
Gee who would have thought that raising a generation on this would result in every kid trying to indicate that "in fact I am a bisexual non-binary femme and not a cis straight girl, even though I've only dated guys and am married to one"
… so? Trans minors I can see the issue on, because of the health hazards etc. But who the fuck cares if girls are identifying as bi on a kind of flimsy basis? How does it have any effect on the world besides making it a little bit more colorful, a bit more fun to live in, a little bit freer? Imagine a world with a restrictive binary of registered Vegetarians and Meat-eaters, with a small minority of Omnivores. I think encouraging people to view being an Omnivore as cool, and register themselves as such in greater numbers, would be a generally good thing even if some of the new Omnivores still eat many more greens than meat. On the margins, it's encouraging them to experiment more, to feel free to try more things. They can still eat a mostly-veggie diet (ie date mostly men) if that's what they actually want.
Maybe you think "hurrah, a ten year old trans model!" (who is now thirteen) is an improvement for the world,
Not particularly, but frankly I'd hardly be less skeptical of any mother pushing a ten-year-old into a modeling career. The gender aspect seems very secondary to what's gone wrong here. And to the extent the mother might in this case have pushed the kid towards identifying a certain way, I'm not suddenly in favor of pushing people into a certain gender presentation just because you've flipped the polarity. I'm all about freedom. I'm against coercion whether it's enforcing birth sex or doing the exact opposite. The former is, I think you'll agree, a lot more common - there are many, many more mothers obsessively teaching their little girls to clean up nice and be pretty, than teaching the same thing to their hitherto-sons - but sure, to the extent the latter happens, I'm against it too.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
I'm sorry but "you don't need dysphoria to be trans" is an extremely mainstream position among leftists.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Disapprove of my attitudes, that's your right
And it's yours to disapprove of mine! But no one with your or Rowling's attitudes can be said to be in favor of transition, which is what I sought to prove. At best they are extremely narrow transmedicalists.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Well, various flavors of nonbinary, for example, where deliberately making oneself unplaceable and gender-ambiguous is the desired outcome.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
Not all trans people find that their body "disagrees" with them, and even those who do often celebrate their transness, eg this popular quote.
I don't know what to tell you. I think it's perfectly possible to be against something while tolerating it. For example, I would describe myself as "against religion", but I tolerate religious people, and I am willing to allow that for some people, they're probably happier for being religious than they would otherwise be. Nothing you have shown me disproves the idea that Rowling is against transition in this sense. And you certainly haven't proven her to be in favor of it in the sense that I argued would be necessary for a fitting advocate of the narrow puberty-blockers issue, which was my core point, not whatever semantic games about what it means to be "against" something.
This is a direct refutation of your "read" on Rowling
No it isn't. I read the essay long ago, and it is entirely congruent with my read of Rowling as willing to tolerate transition in certain narrow cases, but not actually in favor of it. Even assuming Rowling is telling the truth about this trans woman she "happens to know" (has she come forward and offered comment? I wonder if we're talking about a friend of many years as opposed to someone she's met once at a friend of a friend's baby shower), the essay only makes room for transition as a "solution for some gender dysphoric people", not a life choice people are free to make for any reason. She explicitly endorses the view that "candidates for sex reassignment" should go through "a long and rigorous process of evaluation", which is to say, that some adults who want to transition shouldn't be allowed to.
Moreover, she only seems to even care about medical transition. "A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law", she writes, as if that were inherently beyond the pale. I'm sorry but those just aren't the words of someone who approves of social transition for anyone, let alone for minors. Granted, it's possible to approve of social transition without thinking it should be recognized by law - but someone who held that idiosyncratic view still wouldn't start that sentence with "a man".
And again it's not that I want to crucify her for this or anything, she's entitled to her views. But it makes her a poor champion for the specific cause of "all else aside, puberty blockers are medically hazardous", a case which would be better made by someone who enthusiastically endorsed social transition, and indeed a theoretical risk-free perfectly-reversible sex-change procedure, while cautioning that we should be much more careful about the medical implications of the imperfect options that exist today.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
but they let the lessers attend school in the US because of the most fortuitous consequence of reducing opportunities for Americans.
How do you square this with the top level comment's economic argument that on net, foreign students' tuition results in over half a million more domestic students enrolling than in the counterfactual?
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
I think you misunderstood my post. I do not deny that there is a social spread of transgender. That's obvious. I object to the phrase "social contagion" because it implies that this spread is a bad thing we ought to stop, as opposed to a value-neutral - or even beneficial! - social trend like any other. I object to it for the same reason I might have objected, decades ago, to "there is a satanic plot to corrupt children into playing Dungeons & Dragons". Doubtless there were indeed marketing experts working very hard to convince more children to play Dungeons & Dragons! That is not in doubt! But playing Dungeons & Dragons isn't witchcraft and being transgender isn't a horrible disease, therefore the one is not satanic corruption and the other is not contagion. They're just neat activities propagating through populations that find them to be fun ways to spend their lives.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
I don't necessarily mean that she thinks social transitioning minors should be against the law, or that she wants all adult trans people rounded up in the streets. But it seems pretty clear that she's, like, not in favor. All else being equal she would rather there be fewer trans people in the world; she wouldn't want any children of hers to transition; etc. I think it's fair to describe this as being "against" social transition & adult medical transition even if she's tolerant of them despite her disapproval.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
If gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then it's not a social contagion. But also: if gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then there's not really any good argument that insurance companies should be required to pay for treatment.
I think the conventional way to thread that needle is that you can be transgender without having gender dysphoria (ie you have no morbidly negative feelings about your current gender, you just get gender euphoria from a switch). Thus, the spread of transgender itself is not the spread of a contagious illness; gender dysphoria simply develops organically in people who had become trans in the positive sense beforehand. If smoking becomes popular in a given population, lung cancer will rise, but "lung cancer is a social contagion" would be a rather odd way to put it; ditto "bone fractures are a social contagion" for a population that's gotten really into mountain-climbing lately.
That being said, if push comes to shove I think we should just bite the bullet that gender dysphoria isn't an illness. We just pretend it is because the government has yet to implement a decent UBI, so we unconvincingly pretend a transition budget is a natural part of healthcare. Perhaps we could see about creating separate transition grants, decoupled from health insurance? This is all pretty far out of the Overton Window, so we're stuck with the kludge. Still, internally, the trans movement takes it as implicit that you understand that much - that "transgender is a mental illness" is a convenient fiction for browbeating the government into giving money it wouldn't otherwise give, and shouldn't be taken as axiomatic in any other context.
But if a male wants to put on some womanface and call himself Tina, Rowling seems happy to "yaass queen" him
Sorry to reverse-uno you, but I'd like a source on that. I've never, ever seen Rowling say it's good to let minors transition or refer to a MTF as a woman. My read is, she might be socially liberal enough, in the true sense of the word, to tolerate social transition as a "live and let live" kind of deal, but she is still clearly against it in the sense that it wouldn't exist in her concept of an ideal world and she'd be very put off if any friends of hers transitioned.
WandererintheWilderness
14d ago
You are, again, assuming the conclusion. I happen to think the world is considerably better for having trans people in it, and that most people are happier transitioning than they would have been in a counterfactual world where they didn't. (Not because it was written on their soul in golden ink from birth that they were the opposite gender; just because gender transition is a fun thing to do with your life and imbues the transitioner with a welcome sense of purpose and fulfillment, like any other arbitrary self-improvement project.) It's a memetic something but I reject the term "hazard". I think it's a boon to human flourishing, and it needs to spread harder, so long as we can decouple it from dangerous medical procedures. We're halfway there. "Transmedicalists" are already viewed with suspicion by mainstream gender theory; "you can be trans even if you don't get surgery or hormones" is a very widespread meme which is looked on approvingly. Push it all the way to "at least if you're a minor, it's better to be the non-medicalized kind of trans" and you're golden.
No, your post had the opposite problem: you were criticizing a random Jew and acting as if that said something about Israel.
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