aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
1mo ago
The above poster had a clearly wrong understanding of what trans advocates believe if they think they can't justify the term 'trans kid', they can. Whether the rest of the world view is actually reasonable is a different question.
aqouta
1mo ago
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 have as much of a bone to pick with the trans activists as the next skeptical guy here but you're failing the intellectual Turing test spectacularly if you don't know what their answer is. In most of their their worldviews(there are several different factions with different answers) there is an intrinsic 'trans' quality that some people are born with. Every trans adult was once a trans child. The 'trans' quality frequently causes kids great distress around puberty because a central element of the condition is feeling as though they should have the body of the opposite sex and puberty greatly exaggerates these differences. If all of this was true and we could without error identify trans people in their youth it naturally follows that we should intervene and try to alleviate this condition through puberty blockers and cross sex hormones or at the very least allowing them to adopt the social social habits of the opposite sex. They further think that trans people are frequent targets of bullies and harassment.
I happen to be skeptical about the whole concept of trans as a quality and even granting it doubtful at our ability to diagnose it reliably in youth but their position and reasons for taking the stances they do are not mysterious.
aqouta
1mo ago
I am totally sure that knocking down the Chesterton's Fence of no-fault divorce will totally not have any negative side effects. Not.
Chesterton's fence is a fence that it's not totally obvious what the reasoning for construction is. No fault divorce is a chesterton's well documented power line. One can very reasonably argue about what the line powers and the downstream implications but there is no doubt on the original motivations.
aqouta
1mo ago
I don't even see a plausible way that this advances liberty. It's just a spiting of my enemy to no gain. The closest I can come up with is that a taste of their own medicine might make the left wake up to what they've been doing. But I find that justification very weak. Why help them build the weapon of a tyrant? I know how it will be wielded.
aqouta
1mo ago
We've had a decade of widespread attacks on freedom of speech, including popular public repudiation of the concept's core validity.
And before that your faction was the defectors from my perspective, do not claim this high ground, you've not paid the cost when it was dear. You being the conservatives it's not important to me whether you, @FCfromSSC were one of those principled libertarians. It's enough that you'd oppose us now on the side of those who opposed us then.
If you are willing to accept one side censoring
I am not.
If you want to argue that we should cooperate to secure free speech for everyone, I note that I am part of "everyone", and eagerly await the lifting of the censorship against myself and my allies.
Ground has been reclaimed. We feast wantonly in the valley of twitter. How much of a mistake it would have been to give control to twitter over to the bureaucrats in order to spite the social justice crowd only for them to cement control forever through the deep state.
If you want to help the people censoring me to not be censored in turn, with no actual plan for ending their own censorship, I am going to oppose you, because this is a conflict and you appear to have picked a side.
If it must be so, but should my side lost the ratchet will turn and it will be your own doing.
aqouta
1mo ago
This combined with an easy excuse to find the outgroup dishonorable allows you quite a convenient relationship with when you are bound by honor.
outside of a few truly principled libertarian types
I tire of this parenthetical being deployed to avoid grappling with legitimate calls to defend liberty. Yes, it's clearly not the prime value for some of the bigger ideological movements today. But it's deployed because it still carries weight and its call should be answered regardless of what slime blows the horn.
aqouta
2mo ago
I think the argument makes sense when you considered like a choice offered to society. If in the 00s we were given a choice to preserve TV quality in amber but they'd steadily become cheaper to where they're $50 today or let the price stay relatively stable but the quality improve to where they are today with far larger and clearer screens and more features then I think most, but not all, people would probably pick the second option. So when there are complaints about how we didn't get the first option as well it kind of feels a little ungrateful for all the improvements we did get.
aqouta
2mo ago
Do this but multiply the number by like 10x. That'd at least give the income to attract the most talented people and leverage up the effect enough that they'd meaningfully feel an improvement.
aqouta
2mo ago
Us talking. To be clear I don't think it's true that our democracy is a sham, but that's a very large subject and if it's the difference of our beliefs I don't currently have the time or interest to crack it open. For the most part it seems to me like the electorate gets what a large majority wants and is willing to loudly hinge their votes on. If the demand and anger was there to destroy the equal outcome status quo then it would fall.
aqouta
2mo ago
Except, of course, they don't need to convince you it's reasonable, they just have to have convinced EEOC bureaucrats, judges, DEI departments, and so on, and they'll force it on everybody whether you agree or not.
This is all technicality. We still live in a democracy, these people serve at our collective pleasure. All sorts of things have been the law carried out as written, been unjust and overthrown. Step one is to defeat the idea in the public arena, the rest follows.
aqouta
2mo ago
No worries about a ping, it's good to have another context to continue from.
I think @RandomRanger drawing some conclusions from HBD that make sense if you add some other values like that society's purpose is to do something like maximize capabilities that I don't really hold, or at least don't strongly hold. You'll see they don't even mention race, this is just the Idiocracy argument.
It does seem like our heavy investments in educational interventions could at least be better spent even going to improve the lives to those they're trying to uplift if we were a little more realistic and separated out the most gifted students with impoverished backgrounds for tracks and gave the less talents of all races something like a comfortable life. It doesn't strike me as particularly compassionate to spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to teach less gifted students subjects that they aren't capable of. In fact that seems quite humiliating, it makes the failing more personal if we assume that they're capable but some personal failing is causing them to fall short. Those resources could go towards making sure they have adequate housing and that their neighborhoods are safe. There is no reason our less gifted can't lead dignified lives. I suspect that because of HBD those living dignified but not demanding lives will differ in racial proportions to those living impactful lives. I think it will probably have different proportions of red heads and heights as well for much the same reason.
As for @Capital_Room's longer post, I find it pretty unconvincing. Yes, I know that those people are obsessed with disparate outcomes. No, I don't think that this is reasonable justification for racial discrimination. It's just the argument for Harrison Bergeron given without candor.
aqouta
2mo ago
With all the shitcoin pump schemes it really wouldn't be difficult to have some coin, dogeMoonDiamondCoinbirdDog2Coin or something created by the paying party. the recipient buys it on a decentralized exchange, the paying party fakes a bunch of trades back and forth at a higher price point, then the recipient sells their shares. Is it a little suspicious that you got lucky and picked the right moonshot coin? Sure. But people get lucky. Especially if you are smart enough to also have picked a bunch of duds as well.
aqouta
2mo ago
In case you think this problem is more intractable than it is. If you just block/mute these accounts when you see them after maybe 5 rounds the flood slows to a trickle. It's really not a lot of accounts doing it.
aqouta
2mo ago
I know you don't go for the rationalist memeplex but falsifiability of beliefs predates yud and should be an exception. Is there truly nothing I could do or say that would convince you otherwise?
aqouta
2mo ago
You know what angle I never see brought up in the "gamers are up in arms about X or Y" events? Most people who spend many many hours playing games aren't playing the traditional boxed story games that everyone talks about. The best selling game of the year might move 15 million copies and take up 80 hours of the average buyer's time. Meanwhile 151 million people will play a game of league of legends in the average month. Final fantasy 14(an mmo) and World of Warcraft have 2.5 million and 2.2 million active subscribers. Most hours played by games are not spent on these story games and yet it's all that is ever really discussed.
aqouta
2mo ago
I think it's possible, but to the extent that such people exist I do not believe that they are posting about HBD, or complaining about "blank slatists" on theMotte.
I'm not sure I've ever seen the "you don't actually exist" argument deployed before.
aqouta
2mo ago
I'm tempted to go point by point but am on mobile today so I'll be brief. There needs to be a way to describe the truth value of HBD without the baggage of the vile hateful racists and you describing the vile worldview with a portmanteau containing the word is not helpful. We cannot be this afraid of the truth. It's beneath us.
aqouta
2mo ago
Likewise, whether you're a race essentialist who believes in HBD or you're a race essentialist who believes in intersectionality makes little difference to someone who genuinely believes in a colorblind meritocracy because you're an enemy either way.
Do you think it's not possible to believe in HBD and not be a race essentialist? True or false HBD is an empirical observation. Race essentialism is a political orientation.
To bring in your Marxist example HBD isn't the belief in the proletariat siezing the means of production. It's the recognizition that compound interest causes capital to accumulate. A brute fact about the world recognized by anyone interested in the truth that can be put towards propaganda about the virtues of building businesses and endowments for your children or propaganda about how you need to kill the capitalists while you still can before they own everything.
You're like someone who has seen the Marxist propaganda and has decided to react by disbelieving in compound interest and refuse to differentiate between the Marxists and your allies on those grounds.
The dominant strain of the left and the white-identity right believe fervently in the inescapable importance of racial identity
If you and @HlynkaCG want to talk about the white-identity right I beg you, just call them that. There is nothing inherently tied to HBD belief that implies the importance of racial identity. That you think I'm a white identarian is exhibit A that your understanding of the whole topic is deranged.
HBD and white identarian are not synonyms. One is a belief about the cause of statistical outcomes and the other is ideological movement. If you assumed that HBD was true are you actually saying that you'd be committed to white identarianism? Surely not right? The only thing holding you back from pushing for ethno states isn't the really quite difficult to defend belief that there is no variance in average aptitudes between races? Can you actually say that? Say "If I were convinced that there was a statistical difference in outcomes between racial groups I think ethno states would be a good idea".
If you're not willing to say that please stop putting those words in my mouth.
If you think white identitarians and progressives are distinct, what differences in policy, action or outcome do you see as relevant? Is it something beyond which specific racial groupings should be favored and which oppressed?
I have long argued for race blindness. HBD is simply true and its truth is useful in counter arguing against the belief that different outcomes are caused by racial discrimination. I know this cannot be the first time you're seeing this position, why do you keep ignoring it?
aqouta
2mo ago
While this is true their borders don't seem to reflect reality at all. The dominant strain on the left is absolutely not HBD believers who oppose a color blind meritocracy on the grounds of believing in HBD.
aqouta
2mo ago
If you ask me "We didn't actually get away with it, so you can't blame us for trying" isn't much of defense.
The NFL is not meaningfully "we" and I don't understand why you insist that it is. You have this habit of assuming people who violently disagree with each other are on the same time and then arguing against the people we disagree with instead of us. It's like you making a some point about culture and then I spend reams of text explaining how young earth creationists are wrong and thus your real motivations are some version of backwards theocracy.
Did you overlook when I said I don't hold these beliefs? I don't want to go into detail on any of these individual critiques because 1) it's out of scope for pointing out that the original person I was responding to was totally failing to model their theory of mind and 2) there are several different groups of trans activists that would approach each of these critiques from a different perspective. A "born in the wrong body" explanation can cleanly tell you what a fluxberry is and define it but that definition is going to be pretty different to someone who sees gender as some kind of a fluid thing. I don't hold any one of these sets of beliefs so I don't have an affinity for one or the other and am not very interested in litigated them out.
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