ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
No bio...
User ID: 626
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10mo ago
I vote minor janny spanking
I vote "make him smoke the whole pack". If he makes one of those "at least he started an interesting conversation" threads, he has to answer to every comment addressed to him, or get banned.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
This is the sort of thing where I think "me too" actually makes sense.
It would make sense if we had any semblance of coherence in the rules governing the relations between the sexes, but you can't do this "all bets are off, only consent counts" free-for-all, bash people for "taking advantage of" inexperienced women, as you're declaring anyone claiming there are differences between men and women to be sexist.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
OTOH, this makes a mockery of conservative opposition to cancel culture.
How long do you have to warn people "don't do this or the same tactics will be used against you when the tide turns" before it's ok to make good on the warning?
Aww, you poor things, incapable of standing up in absolute terms, let's make a nice carveout for you so that you can say you tried.
This but unpatronisingly.
I'm far from an athlete, the only sports I do is for health, I never liked competing, and yet I find myself wanting to smack the living hell out fellow nerds who completely miss the point of sports. It is the least surprising thing in the universe, that the person saying the above is also a transhumanist.
In sports, the actual physical achievement is just the cherry on top, a certificate of accomplishment, a badge you can wear and show off, but which you only get for putting in the work, but the actual thing is about the work itself. It's about showing up for training every day, and persisting throughout all the failures. Virtually all benefits of sports, to the individual as well as society, come from the latter not the former, and it's blindingly obvious it should be encouraged in everyone, regardless of their level of achievement. But some people seem to be indeed blinded by it.
Are The Global Elites Coordinating to Push LGBT Acceptance And Gender Theory?
(1/2)
Last week @2rafa posted her comment about WEF conspiracy theories, concluding that the WEF is a mundane organization, pushing mostly boring neoliberal status quo stuff, to the extent they push anything at all. This post isn't necessarily a direct response to that thesis, but might be an interesting contrast to it.
I am a proud Deranged Conspiracy Theorist. It's a relatively new state of affairs for me, but some time ago I've tried the tinfoil hat on, and it seems to fit. This means when the WEF is in session, I browse their livestreams and videos, and if something catches my eye, I watch the whole thing. So when I saw the video titled Beyond the Rainbow: Advancing LGBTQI+ Rights, I knew I had to watch it.
It's a discussion panel featuring a diverse cast of LGBT (well, L and G as far as I can tell) speakers from around the world. We have
• Ben Fajzullin, an Australian journalist currently working for the German Deutsche Welle
• Fahd Jamaleddine, a “global shaper” from Lebanon
• Sarah Kate Ellis from GLAAD
• Tirana Hassan from Human Rights Watch
• Sharon Marcil from the Boston Consulting Group
This is in no particular order, to the extent there are themes in this discussion, they're rotated through the conversation, so going over it chronologically doesn't make a lot of sense.
The goal of the panel is to discuss success stories of the LGBT(QI+) community, and best practices on how to implement “this type of thinking”. They start off by bringing up how last year there were still 80 countries with sodomy laws on the books, and now we're down to 70. A reasonable point to start, if there's a steelman case for the global elites coordinating to push LGBT acceptance and gender theory, that would be it.
Would I have no objection if this was where the whole thing ended? I'm not sure, maybe @DaseIndustriesLtd made singletons sound too scary for me, maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid, and the idea of the Prime Directive ended up influencing me a bit too much, or maybe I just have an irrational fear of my elites betraying me for membership in a global club? Hard to say. During the Q&A someone in the audience brings up an example and example from the other side:
we can trace directly the sources the resourcing for homophobia in Ghana straight line to the U.S churches
I don't want to be Americanized by Evangelicals any more than I want to be Americanized by Progressives, so I find it just as wrong as Davos-aligned orgs going around the world and spreading their ideas. The only way I could hold my nose, and tolerate it, is if one side was clearly winning, and this was the only way of preserving some viewpoint diversity.
Either way, while the goal ending sodomy laws is something I agree with, Davos panels on how to accomplish that make me uncomfortable.
Singapore is one of the most recent examples that [has] decriminalized [being gay]. It's taking the legislation off the books but at the same time Singapore fortified the rules around same-sex marriage and so you know it's not always a win; and they did that because they were playing to the more conservative base which was agreeing to decriminalization.
This is still on the mundane side, because I also agree with gay marriage, but it raises red flags when you compare it to the western culture war. Many people already had their suspicions, but the pretty explicit “we'll get you next time” that the Singaporeans get to hear if they're paying attention, raises some interesting questions about the seamless transition from gay marriage to trans issues in the west, and about taking any future assurances about social reforms in good faith. Other then that, coming back to the point about singletons, even though I'm personally for gay marriage, different definitions of marriage are one of the central examples of what I think different cultures should be allowed to experiment with.
Later they make a point that this isn't something limited to the non-developed countries:
Marriage equality laws, all of these issues, are actually becoming signs of modernity. They are becoming signs of democracies and countries which respect rights for everyone, but we're seeing also that this has become a new battleground, and in particular this isn't something that happens in certain parts of the world and not others. Even in Europe we see Hungary and Poland who have really been using LGBT rights as a battleground, essentially to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society, and the government using it to put themselves up as some sort of hero of protector of family values.
Originally they name drop Poland and Hungary, so it might sound like they are focusing on marriage laws, but “using LGBT rights as a battleground to try and harness the support of the conservative elements of society” is a fully generalized argument. Later on they describe the US in similar terms:
May I just say one thing on that, because that is a Battleground that we're facing in the United States right now. It's really tough, I'll be honest with you, they're putting it under parental rights. I'm a parent I'm married to a woman and I have two kids, so they're talking about some parental rights, and they're excluding us, and they're targeting us, and they're banning books at a rate that we've never seen before. They're conflating these conversations about bodily autonomy and trans youth, and it's a really tough moment right now in education in the United States. I'm absolutely sure it's being exported globally this kind of framework that they've come up with, that's been really effective over the past year. They're legislating against it as well.
This is Sarah Kate Ellis describing the state of the controversy in the US. Everything you've heard about trans women in sports, placement in prison based on self-ID, concerns about the standards for diagnosing dysphoria in kids, the reversibility of puberty blockers, and their side effects, minimal ages for surgeries, eunuch fetishists promoting their fetish via WPATH, schools hiding children transitioning from their parents, Drag Queen Story Hour, and putting Queer Theory in school material have been reduced to the above paragraph, and it's made clear these stances are being deliberately pushed back on.
Someone seeing the WEF as boring and benign should also meditate on how despite gathering people from all over the world, they somehow seem confident no one in the audience is going to give them any push-back. They're not worried an American might say “you've misrepresented everything that's been happening in our country”, let alone that someone from a more conservative part of the world might proudly assert their values.
And of course, the part where she says ***they*** are exporting their framework globally, as she's sitting at Davos, talking to an international audience of some of the most powerful people in the world, is just... *Chef's Kiss* (there will be more of those).
So I'm playing historian. Emphasis on "playing", since I'm just retracing the steps from other people's work. Still it's pretty fun to look up the primary sources, particularly when they're mysteriously missing from internet archives. A few weeks ago I posted a hypothetical about trying to explain the magnitude of current Culture War issues, to someone in the far future, here I'm going in the opposite direction. This article is a small sample of a larger episode of decently-sized Culture War. It happened recently enough, that it's pretty easy to find sources on it, but since it hasn't really been preserved in collective memory, it's hard to judge how big it was. Big enough for a cover article of Life magazine, I guess, but it has only a paragraph on Wikipedia (oh wait, here's a few more), and much like in my hypothetical I find the description oddly terse. At least someone on wiki seems to think Vernon Mark and Frank Ervin deserve to have their own pages, but for some reason no one got around to writing them.
It's pretty wild to read stuff from the 70's, it's like going into some sort of Mirror Universe. As someone very anti-woke, I'm tempted to see the half-postmodernist half-marxist ideas pushed by our elites as the root of all evil. If only we could move in a more rational direction, I often think, we could actually solve the problems that afflict our society. And then I look at how people used to talk about social problems 50 years ago, and the vibes I'm getting are basically rationalist, and I hate it. Yes, let's start solving social problems by dicking around in people's brains, what could possibly go wrong? All of this run by the same NYT-Informational Complex that promotes wokeness nowadays. I'm slowly starting to come to the conclusion that all these ideological fights are pointless. Some people talk about pendulums swinging, I'm starting to see it as evil always finding a way to twist any idea to it's ends.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4mo ago
also, its hilarious to create a 'test' where the 'correct' multiple choice answer is almost always the same
It's hilarious you think this isn't on purpose, you Yanks really need to get with the program on low-trust societies. It's a lot easier to tell your desired DEI hires "mark A on all questions except 17, there the answer is C" than to try to give them a cheat sheet.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
4mo ago
But I also feel that many on the left are extremely conscious of this tendency and try to temper it.
I have no idea how you got this impression. Forget about Trump, I'd hardly begrudge anyone channeling all their hate towards the avatar of their enemy, but they do that to anyone, from workers of a venue that's hosting an event they don't approve to their own family members that voted the wrong way. They absolutely revel in it.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
I can't speak for everybody, but from my perspective you're missing the point.
I'm not sneering at immigrants, not even ones who don't want to assimilate (possibly because I am one). We're all trying to make the best of the cards we're dealt.
I'm not sneering at assimilation. I love the idea, and even though I couldn't hack it myself, I think it's something everyone should strive for, and maybe that hosts should make an effort to make it smoother as well.
What I am sneering at is the idea that assimilation happens automatically. You just send a couple million people with a completely different culture somewhere, and they'll be absorbed by the blob, right? If not them, then surely their kids.
I am sneering at the idea that belonging to a nation is about nothing more than holding a passport, and that a country is little more that an administrative-economic zone. With that attitude, what does it even mean to assimilate?
I am sneering at the idea of migration being an unmitigated good for everyone involved. Even in the best case scenario an emigrant is leaving something behind. The idea of plugging your own country's holes, be it skilled labor shortages or low birthrates, with people from other parts of the world strikes me as incredibly callous.
Finally, I'm sneering at the "hello fellow natives, have you considered that having children is bad?" -> "hello fellow natives, we are going through a population crisis, have you considered opening borders?" routine that our lizardmen elites are pulling.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
If we just look at things which are not just directly related to the changed political valence of the platform
First, people are acting like the political valance of the platform has flipped, this is false. Progressives can post just as easily as they used to, they just don't want to do it when non-progressives have the right to respond.
Secondly, that's stacking the deck already, you can't just not look at it. It was total woke narrative control, even mild jokes used to get accounts nuked. A bit more spam is a fair price to pay for that, as far as I can tell. And it's objectively better that it's not like this anymore, as opposed to just better for one side, because you can't have a healthy ecosystem with one side nuking everyone that disagrees with them. Or put another way - a non-political person is better off having access to info from all tribes.
I think there are some important insights here, but I'd like to speak to the European angle
You're not speaking from the European angle, you're speaking from the European elite angle.
Sure, Trump is widely seen as a rube that's nothing new, but the only people Vance makes things worse for are the European elites. Our entire self-image is built on Americans being dumb rednecks who can't string a proper sentence together, and us being the enlightened ones. Trump can give a prophetic warning about dependence on Russia, and we'll laugh in his face because he's a simpleton, and we're obviously intellectually superior. Vance is a direct threat to that sense of superiority which is why, as TIRM pointed out, European politicians are breaking down in literal tears over his speech, but if you think the average European thinks he's worse than Trump, you're out of touch.
Approximately no one believes in "the established rules of the Liberal International Order". Most people eyes will glaze over, if you bring up the phrase. The war might be "visceral and close and frightening" to people bordering Russia, but quite frankly your bloodlust exceeds even that of the Ukrainian refugees' that I talked to.
You might be right that this is all a massive shock to the European elites who were relying on Americans acting a certain way, but I'd like for you to give some sort of argument for why Americans acting that way is either sustainable or desirable. Right now all we're getting is pearl clutching.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5mo ago
Wokism is over.
I'd wait until it gets purged from the school system before calling that.
Some follow-ups on past stories
The teenager accused of the fatal stabbing of three girls at a dance class in Southport has been charged with production of a deadly poison and a terror offence, the chief constable of Merseyside Police has said.
Axel Rudakubana, 18, will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court by videolink on Wednesday charged with production of a biological toxin, Ricin, and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism.
The charges come after searches of his home in Banks, Lancashire, Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said at a press conference on Tuesday.
The terror offence relates to a PDF file entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual, Ms Kennedy said.
Previous discussion here, and here.
Part of the controversy was about how the right wing assumed the attacker was a boat-refugee and/or a recent immigrant, and while that part remains false, another part of it was about his religion, (see Al-Jazeera, Wikipedia, BBC, or even our own discussion) and how it was wrong / islamophobic to jump to conclusions this way. It now turns out that he was indeed radicalized by Islamists.
A shocking new development has emerged in the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after a French journalist reportedly gained access to a damning medical report revealing Khelif has “testicles.” The news comes months after Khelif seized a gold medal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics.
The report was drafted in June of 2023 via a collaboration between the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris, France, and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, Algeria. Drafted by expert endocrinologists Soumaya Fedala and Jacques Young, the report reveals that Khelif is impacted by 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a disorder of sexual development that is only found in biological males.
(...) The report concludes by recommending Khelif be referred for “surgical correction and hormone therapy,” to help him physically align with his self-perceived gender identity, and adds that psychological support would be required because the results had caused a “very significant neuropsychiatric impact.”
Previous discussion here and here, and here.
More than the object level of either of those stories, what I want to know is: what do?
I've had this discussion with @Hoffmeister25 about assuming the worst about your outgroup without any evidence. While I maintain that it's plenty of fun when your unproven stereotype-based claims are vindicated, I'm going to agree with him that this way lies madness, and that's no way to have a conversation on controversial political issues. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this sort of recommendation for caution is asymmetrical. When mainstream institutions make a claim, that claim is itself treated as evidence, any caution goes out the window, and requests for evidence are met with ridicule. So how should we be approaching these controversies, given that bombshells like these hardly raise an eyebrow anymore?
As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media. Vibe Analysis has been the subject of some ridicule, but I think there should be some space to say "I don't have evidence for this, but my gut says there is something off here" and Reddit-tier "source?!" responses to that should not be accepted. At the end of the day we're only people, and our guts will influence us, no matter how much pretense of objectivity and evidence-baseness we'll put on top of that.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
10mo ago
I for one really really don't like Noah Smith, and don't take him seriously, but wtf is this comment? Are we going to ape the Harris campaign now, jettison all reasonable discourse, and just start calling people weird?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Personally, I think the focus on moderation is a cargo cult. It's how I felt when some people were saying that good moderation was "the secret sauce" that made the subreddit a success, and how I feel now when people are attributing stagnation to it as well.
I think a better approach is to focus on content generation. Stop commenting on happenings, and start geeking out. It's a thankless task, but I think if enough people did it, it would do more for the sustainability of this place than anything you could do with moderation.
If we lived in a normal world, yes, but we seem to be living in some absurdist "everyone pretends to not see the elephant in the room" comedy. The desired destination is "stop immigration, bring jobs back to America, cool it with the global empire that doesn't benefit people at home" and a bunch of cultural issues from "stop transing kids" to "stop teaching racism". Now, if the taxi driver came out and said that's an actually insane destination, we could have an actual conversation, but what we get instead is the conversation Truman Burbank would have had if he asked the taxi driver to take him somewhere outside of Pleasantville.
EDIT: changed the analogy to one that's more fitting.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3mo ago
Arguments concerning the science of anything relating to puberty blockers or hormones or anything else concerning transgenderism are useless, because no one making arguments on either side really cares about the science. All it is is cover for whatever argument they want to make.
You don't find it a little bit strange that we've been having the trans debate in this space for something like 10 years, and these "well, the science doesn't really matter" arguments are surfacing only now that it can be shown that some pro-trans claims can't be scientifically backed, and that several of the experts that we were told to trust have been proven to lie on several occasions?
So ultimately whether it's reversible doesn't matter.
Hold on, "the science doesn't matter" is one thing, "reversibility doesn't matter" is another. If I had a kid, there's many ideas that they could come up with, that I would think are absolutely retarded, but might let them go through with them, just so they get it out of there system, if nothing else, and reversibility is one of the most important criteria I'd use for making the decision whether to let them do it, or call an absolute veto. This seems plainly obvious to me, and I can't wrap my head around how anyone could claim otherwise, so maybe you shouldn't so confidently speak for others (especially for people with values different from yours).
Also, if it doesn't matter, why did the pro trans side spend so much time and effort telling people puberty blockers are reversible, even though they knew they have no evidence for the claim?
For instance, suppose some children develop a heart condition that they may grow out of but will become a dangerous, chronic problem if it persists into adulthood. There's a treatment that can significantly mitigate this risk if the child starts taking it around age ten, but it comes with a catch: It has its own risks, and can cause permanent damage itself if it's unnecessarily used. If you're a doctor making a recommendation or a parent looking to make a decision, then your conclusion would depend on a number of factors—the likelihood that the child will grow out of the condition, the amount of damage the untreated condition is likely to cause, the amount of damage the treatment is likely to cause, etc.
In these situations we tell the patient and parent the risks and benefits to the best of our knowledge, and leave the decision to them. We don't try to guilt them into overriding it, and when someone brings evidence that the original risk/benefit assessment is wildly off the mark, we hear them out and adjust the practice to be in accordance with the best evidence. We don't call them heart-condition-o-phobes, we don't ban them from social media, and we don't send the police after them.
Especially since people clearly, uncritically have taken it at face value.
Someone even pointed out it's a self-report, and the author(?) goes "That's right!" and goes on without the faintest clue of the implications. I kind of wish you wouldn't show me this, it's been a while since my view of humanity has taken such a hit.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
11mo ago
RationalWiki is (or was?) a legitimately good source on a lot of cranks
I don't know about now, but I always thought it's one of the worst. Being raised on James Randi style skepticism, seeing RationalWiki's takes on various cranks that seemed to boil down to a deluge of BooOutgroup, was like nails on a chalkboard.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1yr ago
Sadly, we do still get the drive-by progressive who considers everybody that disagrees with them to be a white nationalist.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
2yr ago
But surely I’m not the only one who finds it suspicious that the harasser / sex-seeker man in the story was never identified, am I?
Nah, not identifying the guy is the most decent thing she did in that entire kerfuffle. It was before cancel culture really took off, but the last thing we need is for the bloke to get cyberstalked by precursor me-tooers. What she described is hardly beyond the realm of possibilities in the context, and didn't even make the guy look bad, so I see no reason to doubt her.
In my opinion, this one is somehow even weaker than the first reveal. Most of this was already known through other sources, it just gives additional information to existing claims about bias.
Huh? Maybe in the "it's not happening, and if it is, it's a good thing" sense. Wikipedia is still calling Twiiter shaddow-banning a "conspiracy theory" (even as they admit it turned out to be true). Hard evidence comes out that it was in fact happening, and you go "pff, everyone knew that"?
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5mo ago
But Britain is still a liberal society with rule of law,
I always thought sicking the police on people for "hate speech" goes against liberal principles, so I think it's only the "rule of law" bit that they can possibly lay claim to. And I'm not sure I believe that claim either.
I don't see why I should assume this is true.
Well, why don't we argue over the facts of whether or not Cultural Marxism is a myth, and then you can tell me which one of those was correct.
Off the top of my head I can think of Richard R. Weiner, Douglas Kellner, and Emily Hicks, so plural. I remember there were more, but I'd have to start searching.
a) I think the term goes back to WWII or thereabouts, and there's been several books written about it.
b) "Myth" means it didn't happen, not that it was neiche.
The students of the core Frankfurt School thinkers were calling themselves cultural marxist, so this is flatly wrong, unless you want to say that people who studied directly under them don't get to call themselves "Frankfurt School".
Yes. It brought it to it's knees culturally not economically. This is why the "Cultural" part of "Cultural Marxism" is so important, and the deadness of economic leftism is irrelevant.
I don't get why Marxists get so defensive on this. I agree that OG economic Marxism is not responsible for any of this nonsense.
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