aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
3mo ago
I don't understand how it's possible for you, or anyone, to believe this. Insofar as any conflict in Israel is a "war of choice," the people making that choice are, and have been, Muslim Arabs, whether inside or outside of Israel. For generations, now. If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel. The commitment of Hamas, its handlers abroad, and most of the people living under its rule is the eradication of Israel. They have never accepted any of the compromises offered to them for more than a handful of years, during which time they have always been sharpening their spears for their next attempt.
Agreed, There seems to be some kind of narcissism shared by both the left and right anti-israel contingent that if America withdrew support that Israel would need to come to some kind of agreement with the Palestinians. This is as strange a belief as that any of the other massacres in the region couldn't have happened without American involvement. Israel won wars before American involvement and would win them afterward, more brutally and with more casualties but they'd win them.
aqouta
2mo ago
I don't have an answer to the actual question you're asking besides you can't and probably shouldn't. People should be allowed to make decisions about their bodies and before they're old enough to consent to those decisions we can't do much better than relying on the parent's responsibility to act in their children's interests. Will some parents do irreparable harm in a failure of this responsibility? Absolutely. Does it mean that gating any treatment behind a doctor's evaluation is basically pointless for anything that could plausibly be granted? Also yes. But the alternatives seem worse. If we think a treatment is categorically wrong or wrong given objective criteria like age of recipient then we should write laws that do that. The fight is properly had on the ideological level and the motivation for such a procedure if it can't be won there then it ought not be won on these obscure proxy grounds.
aqouta
5mo ago
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
I think the cleaner reasoning is that the disease appears to be memeborne and validating the meme is part of its transmission. If the finger amputation thing catches on and 5% or more people start getting their fingers cut off then there is a real cost. The hidden cost in the treatment, especially the social aspects of the treatment, is that you're spreading the infectious meme. If people only develop the illness internally then sure, a case can be made for treating it it individually. But it's rather like approaching the flu as if it were a nontransmissible issue caused by an unfortunate accident at birth and encouraging people to hug and kiss people with the flu to show that we're all sorry for them.
aqouta
5mo 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
3mo ago
I don't disagree, but I'd argue that your position is not scientific/knowledge seeking. You want to protect white people.
What a trick this is! Ask why someone might be motivated to seek knowledge "why here, why now?" to imply racial hatred as motivation and then when some other motivation is reached for you say "See!? I knew no one could just value scientific knowledge!". From how you've constrained the options no path can lead to a genuine motivation.
If you're a supremacist you want to protect white people no matter what. If you're not, why protect white people when there are so many others in need? Surely whitey can wait. And if you want to challenge that aspect of progressive ontology you will be so far outside the Overton Window that they can easily just call you a racist nazi and move on. And I don't think they would be all that wrong in doing so, technically speaking. I mean, we did storm the beaches of Normandy for a reason, right? We depict those guys as heroic for a reason, right?
Being somewhat username blind it's not clear to me if you're merely trying to demonstrate how tightly hermetically sealed the progressive outlook is or if you find yourself caught in it. But in the interest of trying to unravel this nut either way. I will say I care about avoiding the pitfalls of impugning a people with the blood libel of unfalsifiable racism from the same parable the jews were famously put through and in a way that ought resonate deep in the western psyche. It is enough for me that it is cruel, unfair and a violation of our national aspiration to hold whites culpable for a crime they have not committed. But if I must appeal to the progressive stack, that loathsome concept, then I will say that it did not serve the nazis well to place the blame for all their troubles in the jews, nor did it serve Lysenko well to place the soviets on the other side of genuine scientific inquiry. History is replete with people and peoples who thought they could, this time, let resentment and catharsis take priority over truth and the hatred will not serve you. There is nothing to gain from this willful ignorance and much to lose.
BTW, thrilled to see whether you and the other people who reply to this will actually watch that video I linked earlier in this comment, or will offer some excuse not to.
We're here to have actual discussions, a multi-hour long video that can't continence objections is not at all what this place is about. If there is a smoking gun it can be shown with a single link and doesn't need three costume changes to express.
Linking a contrapoints video is not evidence, it's pointing to a whole different interlocutor.
aqouta
3mo ago
The main problem is just the source of new blood since leaving reddit. I've dropped a couple links to vault on twitter as a bread crumb and can't really know if we've caught anymore. Improving the vault, updating it with more links might help. I think more or less the moderators do an excellent job and I have very little criticism, I could give or take the hlynka ban.
Responding to a late response from last week's culture War.
I'm aware of this the various accounts of AGPs and I think back to Scott's musings on the anorexia and other culture bound illnesses. His conclusion didn't seem quite right either.
I think what's going on is that the human mind is capable of innumerable states. The uncharted territory of the mind shifts with great plasticity, but once examined begins to harden and harden in response to the type of examination. Like shining a bright on a photopolymer, call this the photopolymeme theory of identity.
The type of examination is dependent on the environment, which is not random. 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 the 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.
When you introduce the trans meme into the environment suddenly you go from identities lightly hardened by stray beams of light to precision directed lazers etching the face of the meme on kids at industrial scale.
It's generally accepted that reading webmd had a normal effect of convincing many people that they have whatever obscure disease they're currently looking at. Symptoms tend to be vague and our senses have difficulty differentiating between imagining symptoms and having symptoms. I'm convinced that when you ask every kid Ina generation to carefully examine whether they're really trans with a laundry list of symptoms that could just be normal cisgender experience you're going to be hardening a lot of plastic minds.
I like this theory because I don't think self described trans people are usually lying. I think they've examined themselves and found these features. I think trying to reshape that hardened plastic might be difficult, painful or impossible. I think adults are probably entitled to shape their identities as they please so long as they don't harm others in the process.
I also think that as @TracingWoodgrains has described before, when talking about frames and cages has some validity. Can we be sure that the Chesterton's gendered cages we're ripping down weren't vital frames that kids need to provide structure for their identity?
aqouta
4mo ago
I think you're onto something with underdog victory being a guiding principle among progressives. It's why they can't accept any framing that they are actually in power. I think shooting this particular victim complex is also one of the genuinely new things about the Trump right as well, it's a very useful combination of memes to have for motivating a group.
aqouta
4mo ago
This really does seem totally out of step with how corporate jobs work in my experience. The people who do the janitorial work in my mega bank are almost all contractor immigrant and there is no existing track for them to become direct employees, they'd apply through the external portal like anyone else. I don't know a single person who's career looks anything like what you're suggesting younger than 55. Furthermore the people complaining about having trouble getting a job have usually studied something and want to work in that field, you just don't take a finance degree through the mail room, which as far as I know doesn't even exist anymore, into an associate role, it wouldn't be seen as relevant experience.
aqouta
1mo ago
I fully don't even think it is bad. Agnostic on good. People stress testing your information diet is a kindness and a service a perfectly rational person might pay for in a red teaming sense. Hoaxes, as long as they ar published are unambiguously good.
aqouta
5mo 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
3mo ago
NATO forms a bright line that Russia knows it must never cross. Here is a map of NATO. Russia is encircled and powerless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_NATO#/media/File:NATO_32_Members.png
What on earth is the fear here? Are we seriously still entertaining the idea that the west wants to invade Russia? For what possible reason? NATO doesn't expand by rolling tanks into its neighbor's territory, it expands by offering protection from Russia which does appear fond of the whole rolling tanks in approach.
aqouta
3mo ago
heavy taxes on the parties who benefit directly from the loans over the decades.
I look forward to this meaning those of us who paid off our loans but are in the wrong industries get hit by this twice and those that didn't and are in the right industries get a double boon.
aqouta
1mo ago
justified in excluding black women, on the grounds they would be too dominant
If there was some racial group of women that somehow had man equivalent strength then I think and argument could be made. I'd imagine such a thing would have a lot of trouble practically because racial lines have a bad history of being drawn with malicious intent but in the hypothetical space I don't have a fundamental issue with it. Natal women is a naturally category and drawing it there rather than a genderless weight class has obvious winners in losers, natal women win, very light natal men lose and this is fine.
aqouta
3mo ago
I don't even really think that's the end of the problem most unstable. The gaps will continue to exist among people with the same background so we're really going to go ahead with the belief that in 100 years when progressive thought is no longer fought at all that we're just going to let the obviously discriminatory leaders continue to do their harm?
aqouta
6mo 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
1mo ago
wo particular and factual points. Recent polling indicates that in his "home region" which includes significant battleground states (that's Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin), CNN pegged him at -16 net favorability, which is dramatic. Especially considering that usually VP picks are chosen specifically for their help in swing states! That he's hurting them there instead is notable.
I'm not really sure I'd call Illinois and Indiana battleground states. ohio and michigan, sure. But Illinois and Indiana aren't particularly competitive.
aqouta
6mo 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
3mo ago
It's just not really reasonable to call people who support the defense of a nation "pro war". If someone attacks me after making it clear they want to kill me I am not pro-fighting when I defend myself. People who support me defending myself are not pro-fighting. It's unreasonable to demand I or the people supporting me should allow the person attacking me to merely severe a limb or two despite them at no point actually making any sign they'd stop after doing so. There is precisely one pro-war faction and it's the one that started the war and could end it at any time, attempting to frame it otherwise is an absurdity.
And yes, we do have some obligation here, Ukraine get rid of its nuclear capabilities under the promise that this would not be allowed to happen. Where Ukraine goes so does nuclear non-proliferation and frankly and kind of mantle of justice.
aqouta
7mo ago
The consensus building is both tiresome and against the rules but at least the readership very obviously leans liberal as distinct from progressive. The commentariat is a mixed bag of disagreeable people who will take basically any position besides main stream progressivism when the opportunity arises. The readership like more than anything novel arguments and novel arguments are what are reward by replies and upvotes, irregardless of the perspective. People appreciate Christian arguments that they've never seen before over arguments that more align with their beliefs but appear to be a dime a dozen. That doesn't change that there are what, six to ten regular Christian posters?
aqouta
3mo ago
And during the ottoman empire land ownership was created, given to Arabs, some of which became absentee landlords(often by tricking the people who lived there into thinking the land rights were a scam) and later sold some of that land to the jews who moved in and kicked the Arab tenants off the land they bought. Hundreds of thousands of jews didn't show up out of no where, that's not an accurate paraphrasing of what hat happened and the details matter. The ottomans were in no way the same people as the Arabs in the land that they ruled over.
I'm not even fully on the side of the zionists but your description is cartoonishly one sided.
aqouta
3mo ago
Then why the constant talk about appeasement and Hitler, if not to get people psychologically ready for a war?
The appeasement of Hitler is just the most recent example of appeasement not working and people keep suggesting that Russia should be appeased by letting them take over Ukrainian territory. You'll note that after Hitler was stopped the rest of the west did not colonize Germany and it still exists as an influential independent country in good standing.
The United States does many things that are not rational. The invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, for example. Both were unsuccessful in the long term and huge wastes of resources. But, nevertheless, the Americans reasoned themselves into doing these things.
These were not wars of conquest nor was proximity to NATO countries a major factor.
Maybe it will happen, maybe not. Maybe it won't go as far as hot war, maybe it will. But, when I see so many people calling here and elsewhere for dramatic escalation, saying Putin is the next Hitler, calling any move for de-escalation "appeasement", drawing maps of a partitioned Russia, yes, I think the west wants war with Russia. Even knowing it would be stupid.
I'm just not really interested on whether we've hurt Putin's feelings because after he invaded neighbors unprovoked in a war of conquest he gets compared to the last guy in Europe to invade his neighbors in wars of conquest. It doesn't somehow retroactively justify the whole invading your neighbors in wars of conquest thing. You don't get to act like an unhinged lunatic because you're concerned that people around you might treat you like an unhinged lunatic and then pretend your subsequent treatment justifies your behavior. when you escalate and have all the ability in the world to de-escalate you can't call the people you're currently invading unreasonable for not de-escalating, this isn't even behavior we'd accept in our toddlers.
All Putin and Russia need to do is get the fuck over themselves and step out of the 20th century. The whole high school bully act was lame after you graduated and decades on it's just pathetic.
This is one of those things that seems like a good principle but when not applied evenly is a weapon. If the Christchurch shooter's manifesto was suppressible do you think it would be suppressed?
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