aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
11mo ago
And if your idea of idea suppressing is one of these great bad ideas? Precisely how much do you trust that it'll be the wise government that chooses which of these ideas is bad and which is not? We have better ways to remember now than ever and technology is nothing else is moving us forward. Lets not bet it all that we'll pick the right ideas to freeze in amber for all of time.
aqouta
11mo ago
There is also the dynamic of movements that are composed of many contradictory cores, maintained by sanewashers who's arguments contradict each other, pointed in the same direction that all have their own sets of features. Feature sets that can't possibly be sane washed all at once but are all vaguely in the same direction and are all held simultaneously by some weak men. I think the trans movement has a lot of these and it makes it very difficult to argue against either as a whole or in detail. You have people who believe in sexual dysphoria to argue with whenever you go after whether transgenderism is even a meaningful concept but when you go after whether you should be able to gatekeep certain institutions you are met with claims that gender is a social construct that we can define any way we want. You may even get meta sane washing that can cover both of these two features at the expense of some other feature but the glue that holds it all together are the weak men that really don't put any effort into reconciling their beliefs into a coherent whole. This all leads to arguing against any movement like this feeling like moving through mud where you spend most of the time just hashing out the particular axioms the interlocutor is even operating on today which just so happen to be perfectly tuned for this one subject and totally incapable of defending a different topic.
aqouta
2mo ago
There is no rule of the universe that says we need to pay attention to race. No reason something like "the black professional class" when referenced needs to elicit anything but confusion the way that the "blonde working class" might. Why do people like Greene never have to answer the reverse question? When we enter our two hundredth year of affirmative action and the gap still doesn't close are the African Americans not going to ask the same question of why? If blank slatism is still the only option on merit then what possible conclusion could they reach besides a conspiracy among the other races? Why would this be a more acceptable answer?
What actual mechanism causes some poor black kid in a bad area of town to have any idea whatsoever how many black people are accepted into Harvard? If not told by people intentionally trying to stoke up racial animus would they ever notice if zero black people were in Harvard even after a hundred years? The solution is easy. Stop taking the statistics, make it illegal, or at least highly suspect, to ask for race on a survey not specifically for the purpose of determining health differences. This is the obvious and only stable way forward, we will find our way to it or suffer disasters.
aqouta
2mo ago
I mean they need a reasonable offramp and Trump isn't that. This is why the Democrats have, correctly, zeroed in on the strategy of just pointing out the wild stuff Trump does and not talking about much else. If the republicans want to be the party of normal they need to actually take up that mantel.
aqouta
4mo ago
You're on the verge verge of understanding the importance of 2A to the people you described.
And yes, I don't want to tell lies. They chip away at an important part of myself.
do HBD advocates equally call for recognition of intra-racial HBD between classes, or does it stop at skin color? To put it bluntly: every single statistic that HBD advocates point to as reasons why Blacks are inferior seem to be as or more severely accurate of poor people. Under an HBD lens, why should I regard poor whites as allies or brothers or anything other than vermin?
I don't view blacks of vermin either and I wish people would stop putting this liable on me. Whether you hate those less blessed than you is your own prerogative. HBD is mainly talked about skincolor because it's used as weapon against racial spoils and the blood liable of systemic racism. If you want me to explain why the whites in trailer parks are there, I'll be more than happy to do so.
Blacks are inferior
This is not what HBD says. You can't short cut it, you must say the whole thing out, yes every time. Blacks in americans on average perform worse than white americans on average. There are Black americans smarter than nearly all white americans, they are just rarer white americans who are.
Why not a colorblind meritocracy, where those who fail are harshly cast out regardless of race?
Why not indeed? I can think of no reason and thus don't.
If I accept its moral bases
There is no moral basis. It is a theory, not an ideology, not prescription, not a behavior. You believe it or you don't. I will never understand, besides uncharitable status signaling reasons, why people who obviously believe in HBD refuse to admit to it.
aqouta
28d ago
Sure, but that seems like a rather pedantic point to make in this context. If someone says they like eating tasty food because it's a natural spontaneous desire, and you say they actually like eating food because of government propaganda, then on the face of it your explanation is a lot less correct than theirs, regardless of what philosophical hangups you might have about the concept of spontaneity.
I pushed back in that way because you didn't engage with the mechanism explanation I put forward. I was trying to describe a mechanism that would apply to both the environment with and without trans messaging. I describe how it could come about naturally here:
In a trans naive environment you are still exposed to gendered binaries constantly and there is plenty of plausible cause to start that hardening process in a peculiar direction, maybe you made a friend of the opposite gender in kindergarten and when they care takers separate out their charges by gender the nubile mind recoils in being split from your friend and some part of the identity hardens in that you belong on that side of the divide. Maybe a million other things.
and you accused me of not describing that instead opting for putting everything under a low resolution "spontaneity" bucket. So I assumed you have some kind of weird philosophical attachment to spontaneity or did not read my post. I considered the weird philosophical attachment to it the more charitable read.
I would describe my position by saying that I endorse an HBD-type view for gender identity and sexual orientation rather than a purely social constructionist view, that's all.
Bringing HBD in will probably just confuse stuff. I fully admit that people can be born with different characteristics. One of those characteristics could even be predisposition to hardening identities in a trans-like way. But I'm talking about the identity formation itself.
I don't think people have fully built mental skylines from the moment of birth that they then explore like one would an ancient ruin to find buried truth. I think identities are the structures we build on the inbuilt landscape. Someone who loves the Dallas Cowboys and has Dallas Cowboys supporter as a major part of their identity probably had a kind of mental landscape with territory ripe for structures like football fan that in a different time and culture or even just if different life situations occurred could have hosted different identity structures. Certainly one could imagine if the fan was born in New York rather than Dallas at least the team would probably have been different.
People go around building things in their identity skyline in response to environmental factors, not directly consciously. Embarrassingly as a young kid for some reason I had built something like a "picky eater" identity structure. I identified with my picky eating, most likely in response to my parents trying to get me to eat something I for some fickle reason didn't want to eat. This identity seemed useful to me at the time, like a crude shack one might build hastily in minecraft as night falls. I've since dismantled it for good reason but I remember how hard it was to part with, how it was reinforced by others affirming it, even if doing so exasperatedly.
I think I could have built the trans structure in my head if things had gone differently. That's kind of what fascinates me about this subject and what I have a hard time getting across. I think my latent identity landscape was ripe for it. If a few different environmental factors had gone differently, if I had started down that path and been affirmed, I can see it and that terrifies me. In a no longer trans naive world where we have people surveying every young mind looking for places to construct that identity and handing out blue prints and construction advice. I don't think it's good to discriminate against people who have built the trans identity structure, but I do think it's a bad idea to encourage others to build it. It seems like a bad use of that identity space.
aqouta
2mo ago
Look, the problem isn't just that people who don't think gender essentialism is a coherent worldview think that we're sacrificing the wellbeing of many children and adults needlessly. That's a problem of course but it's secondary to the point deer make horse dynamics. It's deeply unsettling to have what seems like plain reality not just denied but the denial to have in many cases incredible force behind it. There is a troubling kind of argumentation, where one is made out narratively to be a victim and then a huge chunk of the country will blindly support them while being not just immune to argumentation otherwise but actively against it. This feels like an autoimmune response, I don't know if a country can survive this kind of unreasoning in the long term. It's mildly terrifying to consider how easily nearly anyone can be framed as the oppressor against a new invented victim. There does not appear to be any limiting principle.
aqouta
3mo ago
I take freedom of speech pretty seriously. I'm tired of people trying to dilute it into describing the process through which state runs schools decide how to apportion the limited space they have in school libraries and school curriculum. No one is banning books, that's a false framing. People are saying they don't want the state to use their tax money to buy books to make available in buildings their tax money spent constructing for the purpose of indoctrinating their children. If I write or love a book I have zero right for the state to put that book in public schools and I don't have any idea where the belief I might have such a right comes from.
The exact right process to decide which books go in such a building is the local government and that precisely the process these people are lobbying. How else could it possibly be?
Excellent write-up, I agree with much of it nearly exactly. Including liking but being perplexed by deBoer. It's like one of those What english sounds like to non-english speakers videos. The underlying tone and analytical thought is there but he somehow manages to sprinkle in some moral mutant level different values in so he ends up veering all over to places I wouldn't have gone.
aqouta
5mo ago
Is it possible anyone could actually believe that anyone would go through the extreme risk and effort to abduct a child and transport them for 4 figures? It doesn't even pass the smell test.
aqouta
8mo ago
Scott's star has never shined brighter.
At what cost?
When was the last time he wrote anything people here bother quoting anymore? Besides "Scott wrote a thing which is a good opportunity for my more interesting post on the topic" type deals.
aqouta
10mo ago
Sure, if you want to use them as training, they work fine, but unless you're already so gifted you don't need any advice, you won't be getting much in the way of dates out of them!
If you're willing to spend the untold hours I believe practically anyone can at the very least get a match that will respond occasionally and eventually set up at least one coffee date. We're talking many hours here - thousands and thousands of miserable swipes. It worked for me, and the pretty tangible increase in hit-rate as the gym slowly paid its iron dividend gave me a latter I could feel.
It does get mildly aggravating when some of them well-intentionedly give advice that might be accepted by naive men, who think that surely words straight from the horse's mouth are of any help when you're trying to ride it.
It's very striking how bad the advice tends to be and it has caused me to introspect on the advice I give to women about men. I now try to keep my commentary to simpler things and be extra critical of any opinion that could be subconsciously trying to frame male behavior as pro-social. That said, unlike with women society at large is already pretty suspicious of male behavior.
aqouta
10mo ago
But the fact that it is on the parents to control what and with whom their children and adolescents spend their time on is a highly successful vehicle for mass producing extremely sheltered and dysfunctional soys (for the lack of a better term - autists works too, if you prefer). These undersocialized products of isolated plots are everywhere, and they are often the primary cause of a lot of problems facing the society at large.
Some problems perhaps, but as for violent crimes and abuse... Do you care to hazard a guess what the nature of the upbringing of our very worse has been? I've lived downtown for quite a while now. I make an effort to know my neighbors and find roots but it really is quite easier when the breadth of possible neighbors is constrained to a density more comparable to our ancestral environment. There is a kind of anonymity that comes with dense living, 95% or more of the people who pass by my home are not people I recognize and would not stop what they're doing to share an anecdote.
I'll confess this isn't the critique of the middle class I was expecting for all the invective there just doesn't seem much there that isn't already contained in a scene or two of fight club or office space. That all these middle class people are dead inside is a trick of the light and your ego, a kind of faint hope that all these other people must be wrong, not you, your interesting life with the ever rotating, really in a constant state of disintegrating, group of friends dumping booze soaked trauma on each other must be giving you something that the squares can never have. Or else what was the point?
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
5mo ago
Retailers get that giving you credit is the real way to sink their claws into you.
If it's zero interest and you're responsible there is not reason not to finance everything at 0% interest. I understand this is bad advice to dumb people who are not responsible but I've done very well just off inflation before opportunity cost into investments for financing many things.
aqouta
5mo ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Christianity is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as transgender ideology. Believing that a certain man 2000 years ago was the son of god and rose from the dead is at least as unbacked by evidence and reason as believing that a man can become a woman by calling himself a woman and doing surgeries. But many people here on The Motte give Christianity a pass because it's really old and really popular and so it seems "normal", because they like its cultural/political connotations, and probably in some cases because they were raised Christian.
I'm always baffled when this accusation comes up. We understand that there are Christians among us and we don't poke that sore spot unprovoked. But it's absolutely not the case that we let reasoning from religious conviction go without critique. There are trans people here, when they argue topics that aren't about transness I don't, or at least attempt not to, let the fact that I have some disagreements on one topic come up in the other unless it's invoked.
Can you actually point to instances where someone used their belief that Jesus was the literal son of god when arguing for some policy without brooking opposition?
aqouta
9mo ago
Does this only apply to women's attire? i.e. is a man dressed sexy (whatever qualifies as such for this context... shirtless and showing muscles, wearing an expensive suit, etc.) in public also advertising himself as open to advances from any women he might encounter while out and about?
Sure? I mean men don't usually get advances from women at all while out and about. If being approached by women while out an about was something men genuinely wanted to avoid I think there would probably be signaling behaviors, such as avoiding provocative clothing(which may itself be a category of clothing that would need to be worked out in this hypothetical world), that men would be expected to engage in. But we don't live in that world so the turn around seems pretty toothless.
aqouta
9mo ago
We've bumped into each other about this a few times but it's difficult to articulate the problem I have this this position, possibly because it sounds like a reasonable take but it is jarring unrelated to the actual question at issue. Trans people and the trans movement are not reasonable transhumanists that think it'd be neat if they could grow breasts/penises or satisfy whatever aesthetic/explorative impulse they have. These people are making actual claims based on a worldview that is very different to the one you've expressed here. You don't agree with the trans movement at all, to put it in another peculiar view you have, it's like if when debating whether a teleporter kills you or not there was a faction claiming that people who want to use teleporters are actually already at the destination not just that they'd be better off if they were able to get there.
Gender segregate k-8 schooling, preferentially hire new mothers(ideally married) and expectant mothers as the girl's teachers and co-locate state sponsored daycare for faculty mothers with the girl schools. All mothers at the school are given significant amounts of breaks to be with their babies and infants during the day comingled among the students. The girl's schools have an elective period where the students can help care for the children with some kind of status attached to it. You want this to be paid well enough to be a very attractive option for young couples that would normally be right on the edge of two income households being viable. Don't skimp on the math and career useful subjects, this is not a sham school, it's just infused with high status instances of maternity while at the same time making motherhood look communal and safe rather than isolating and scary.
Fashion the boys school such that the boys start a year later and are put in a much more competitive upbringing, really go wild with the ability to tailor a school experience that helps young men excel and be prepared to take on responsibility. This part doesn't really matter as much, as long as they enter integrated highschool a little older than their female classmates.
Honestly I don't think this would cost you call that much and I think it would have the largest impact of anything realistic I can imagine.
aqouta
11mo ago
Many, APIs aren't exactly unusual. It is kind of weird for a social media site in particular though. The main issue is that the third party apps predate the first party one and the first party one is actually awful. I think people will read this and think it's an exaggerated complaining about a slightly interior product but no, it's really that bad. It isn't a hollow threat that many people simply will stop using reddit rather than use a third party app, I'm among those people.
aqouta
11mo ago
A woman is one of the two natural categories that humans develop into if they don't have a very rare disorder or spend significant effort to specifically and intentionally to emulate men. Women are the thing that trans women are attempting to emulate. For trans woman to be a meaningful concept at all you must acknowledge that 'women' is not a null pointer and that the subset of people who you define as 'trans women' are some delta away from the core concept of "women", follow the vector of that delta back and you intersect "man".
It's maddening because while the actual concept is simple there is this shell game you can play. Where you pretend to not know about the thing you have to know about in order for transgenderism to even be a meaningful concept and then poo poo any simple definition with the weirdest edge cases imaginable because your strategy is just to discredit the concept of categories entirely. Oh yeah, "who are we to guess at how many limbs a human has?" or "we can't even decide if left handedness is variation or abnormality". As if the fact that no one has to time to write a definition that can cover 8 Billion cases at every possible intersection means we should give up on the entire idea of categories and just use whatever is politically expedient. Oh yeah, and by the way those things you called "women's sports" instead of "unaltered natal female sports" - that linguistic difference that no one ever considered before? We're going to go the direction opposite of what was the original intended purpose.
there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.
Normal doesn't mean "accounts for all cases". There is little doubt that those with very unusual disabilities or those that put substantial effort into mimicking the opposite sex are not normal. And that can be fine, people don't have to be normal. Abnormal doesn't even strictly mean bad. I do not understand this impulse some have to destroy the concept of normal to spare obvious outliers the small pain of accepting the obvious truth that they are not normal. Or at least the reasoning that does make sense for this impulse is very uncharitable.
To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?
Sure, being left handed can be abnormal. It is either a, very slightly, unfortunate mutation or maybe a, very slightly, fortunate mutation in some rare cases like fighting or tennis where it can throw your opponent offguard. No one is surprised when a tennis couch says "normally when the ball is here and your opponent is here you'd expect it to come back in so and so way, but with a lefty so and so". These sexual mutations are much more straightforwardly unfortunate as they carry practically no benefit and quite a bit of downside.
We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."
In some cases sure, but being sterile is very clearly not how the body is supposed to work. The purpose of the reproductive system is to produce offspring, if it can't do that then it is defective. Being defective is about as dead center of a sound basis for declaring something not working correctly as I can imagine. If you can't rule this as abnormal then I question what you actually think normal could possibly mean.
Normal has a purpose, it lets us treat special cases as special cases and suspend normal treatment as necessary. Which is, possibly uncharitably, what I think is behind this whole shell game. You want trans people to be treated not just as normal, but as normal for their desired sex. Those of us objecting to this want to be able to treat trans people as abnormal members of their natal sex. And I think we have tremendously better reasons to do so. I think you want what you want for laudably empathetic reasons, you see them as suffering and that they deeply want to be treated as normal members of the opposite sex. But this violence you're doing to the concept of normal to try and force them to fit is ridiculous and cannot stand. It is wrong to enforce an incoherent worldview, even if done out if empathy. It can't even stand in its own legs, the norm of cis female needs to exist in order for trans women to even emulate it.
aqouta
8mo ago
I think that most of the binary polarization around public schools depends on whether you were a 'cool kid' in school, or not. I made a bit of a transition from cool to uncool during my high school years, and it was like being on a totally different planet.
I really wasn't anything like a particular cool kid, I had a couple social groups but frankly in retrospect a kind of an outsider complex that made me feel like a victim even though I probably wasn't. I was a bit of a geek, more into wasting time in video games than much socializing. albeit most of the time was playing those games with people I knew so socializing in a way.
I definitely had some social complaints but talking about the schooling itself? My teachers were professional and seemed happy and engaged in teaching the subjects, with one exception or my chemistry teacher that I think had to do with a last minute replacement for someone who quit. My fellow students mostly weren't disruptive and did what the teachers asked of them without much question. By highschool we were given quite a bit of freedom and had access to a wide range of elective options at either a community college or a career and technology center that many high schools shared(I took a couple CISCO certification classes, a video game design class and an mobile phone programming class).
People are talking about above and beyond improvements like better sleeping hours and even more accelerated options. These might be worth considering in their own right as an improvement on something that already works. But as far as doing all the basic stuff right I think I've personally seen it work given you have the right student population.
But yeah, the separate question of whether schooling itself is oppressive or the tyranny of teenaged social interactions ring somewhat true. Making young people going through puberty not be total assholes to each other constantly as they figure it all out just doesn't seem like it could reasonably be in scope in a discussion about improving schools in a country where, just to pull the first depressing stat I could find, 63% of high school seniors can't read at grade level.
This is wrong I think. The apps truly are a painful, soul crushing experience. But if you are not very picky they will give you the chance to very quickly practice pitching to women. And there are few things that motivate sticking to the gym more than hour after hour of hard rejection.
Genuinely awful advice. Women have no such radar and that they think they do it very bad for them.
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