aqouta
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User ID: 75
aqouta
3d ago
People don't like it being harped on, and while I widely understand why a bunch of snakes pulling every get rich quick scam using it has given it a bad reputation. Crypto going mainstream is the only solution to this problem.
aqouta
2d ago
The other end of this liminal space between rock and hard place is that the same people who intend this rule also don't want shelters built.
aqouta
2d ago
It sounds like what Faceh is after is a presumption of innocence when handling transactions. The banks wouldn't need to prove the transaction isn't part of a crime, just process them. Now, how that squares with the normal fraud screening banks do is another question.
aqouta
7d 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.
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
3d ago
Dramanaughts don't really have an issue with this, dramatic people tend to get upvoted. And it's really probably upstream of them. Remember the Dramacode wasn't written from scratch, it's a customized Lemmy instance.
aqouta
11d ago
I think they spend the same or similar amounts of time, it's just the learning seems secondary to the selection and socialization. All colleges have been suffering through becoming more and more instrumentalized as they become a necessary Goodhart's check box for middle class life. I think this process is downstream of the internet bringing all the contours of the various credentialing systems and their bounties to the attention of everyone. You can see this in the sharp plummeting in the ivy league acceptance rate starting in around the 90s.. If you offered someone either the education they can get at Harvard or the connections and credentials which one would it be more rational to choose?
There is undoubtedly learning at Harvard, but is the point of Harvard the learning? And if it's not, if its primary purpose is as an exclusive club for hand selected elites to rub shoulders then the willingness to throw out merit to service political goals makes perfect sense. And also I'd quite like to burn it to the ground.
aqouta
7d ago
I'm not exactly sure where your disagreement with curious_straight_ca is.
It's not necessary that we have a huge disagreement, althogh I think there is something we disagree on with the underlying phenomenon.
But it's also an undeniable fact that some people just feel a spontaneous desire to be the opposite gender, even without prior exposure to pro-trans material.
This is kind of what I'm trying to examine. We live in a causal universe, I don't think there is such a thing as spontaneous belief. trivially if you were separated from humans at birth and never encountered someone of the opposite sex then I don't think you could develop a belief that you should be categorized on a binary you couldn't know exists. I do think that people exposed to no pro-trans material can still develop something that kind or sort of looks like trans because gender is a salient category and identity formation has some failure modes. I don't think this is a born this way thing, I think it's still social even if that doesn't make it a choice.
Corn/maize naturally developed through evolution in nature and this development tells us something about the corn we've bred/engineered to be giant and calorie dense. But it can't explain everything about our modern corn or our corn syrup products. They're something new of our creation and have tons of down stream implications that may end up being very harmful to society. It might be totally natural for identity formation to go awry sometimes and leave someone in a strange maize level trans predicament. But now that we have the meme we're seeing the corn syrupification of gender nonconforming identities, purified and mass produced.
aqouta
17d 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
11d ago
On the whole dysfunction of the schools and their criteria. It just seems like the age of the usefulness of higher education as a selection criteria for the elite should have passed a long time ago. It's too legible, too gameable. What we should do to fix them is the wrong question, we need a whole new pipeline. It's clear from the discussion that teaching people things is not really part of the elite college mission, it should be separated out.
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
26d 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.
I support an Investment bank department. To my understand analyst is more rank than role and can do a wide variety of things depending on the department. The group of analysts I work most closely with are looking at the developers that have successfully won bids to build low income housing for Low income housing tax credits. LIHTC pay out over like 10 years and developers don't want to be in the business of keeping assets on their books, they want to build and move on.
So the analysts I'm working with are trying to determine what a good deal with one of these developers would look like, Most basically we supply the capital and our org gets to put our name in the proper place that lets us get the tax credits but there are many different ways to go about it, and then bidding on those deals. In practice you have pricing analysts that try and find the best deal, usually with an eye for price per tax credit. There are underwriting analysts doing something close to building up pitch books for the deal, turning the data we get from the developer in a comprehensive document and looking into things that might impact occupancy like nearby crime rate and the kind of special needs populations that might be serviced in the area as well as the various guarantees and business stuff. There are risk analysts that I know less about and I believe to be looking at the whole portfolio to make sure we're looking good from a risk perspective.
AI isn't really threatening our department any more than us tech guys already are by building out tools to make the process more efficient. In the end of the day these deals have big dollar amounts of them and making labor more efficient probably wouldn't have us cut head count as much as make us willing to go after smaller deals that we currently don't think are worth the time it takes to underwrite them.
aqouta
14d ago
Your mistake is comparing it to nuclear. It's not replacing nuclear. We don't build nuclear. It's replacing burning fossil fuels. As for why we're subsidizing them, even if they were slightly more profitable to run than fossil fuel plants the upfront capital needed to build them is high and if you want to put the foot on the gas to build out more asap then offering better returns is a good way to do that.
Now one can also push nuclear. I'm in favor of it and there was some stuff in the IRA to push in that direction but it seems to have shaken out that there wasn't enough.
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
26d 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
26d 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
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
29d 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
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
1mo 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
1mo 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
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?
To my understanding the consumers of hypnosis porn are indulging in the fantasy of they themselves being hypnotized. Something about giving their ego the justification to fantasize about indecent acts with plausible deniability.
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