curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I think I've expressed my opinions on 'trans in schools' enough here (tldr for kids who decide to be trans they see <.1% of the trans content they see at school, they get it from the internet, the school plays almost zero causal role in them deciding to transition).
But even if schools were pivotal in causing every single trans kid to be trans, that's still less important than TFR being under replacement by a solid system of values imo. Trans is bad, sure, but there are a lot of bad things - disease, obesity, being born with low IQ, crime, popular consumer media - all of those have negative aggregate impact either on the same order of magnitude as trans or much higher. And "people not having kids, especially smart people" is just way higher.
Like, if you have an extra kid and that kid has a 5% chance of going trans, and let's do some absurd but illustrative math and say that if someone becomes trans it's not only better for them not to exist, but for a whole other perfectly good person to also not exist because being trans is just THAT bad - in expected value it's still much more important to have the kid. Kid also has a 5% chance of having some weird disease, disability, personality disorder, or whatever.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Can you give an example of someone who took puberty blockers for 'too long' and was left with side effects due to taking them for too long? I don't think 'puberty blockers are safe for two years, but BAD if you take them for eight years' is relevant to the general issues with puberty blockers?
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
When someone claims a leftist is doing "blood libel", most of the claim's power comes from claiming they hate white people or are malicious somehow, as opposed to a subtle claim of hypocrisy. And I'm claiming the application isn't particularly fair, but even weaker than when the leftists do it.
It would be very easy to ask those questions! For some reason, they don't get asked
Well, those questions have been asked in influential works of moral philosophy and politics for centuries. But the ways they're answered generally don't justify shooting carjacking black 13yos.
The "trans acceptance" part seems to be widely interpreted as requiring a scalpel, yes
What, precisely, are you trying to argue here? Is it that "trans activism is generally reasonable, but goes too far with <trans minor surgeries/drag queen story hour>?"
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
it's (vaguely) "criticism of your team" - "rightoids believing the WEF conspiracies is an embarrasment for us, and makes us less effective / likely to accomplish anything"
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Uh, if they are better, then a 'push to promote them despite unpopularity' is good? Was the green revolution bad because it was pushed by the elite? (There may be problems wrt unnatural food, pesticides, etc but that goes along with the population increase) There was a push against cigarettes because they were unhealthy, this isn't exactly malicious. Nobody would care if the WEF were pushing for whole grains, food waste reuse, or food safety in africa (which, indeed, they are).
Yeah, it's not hidden...
You're claiming something is, because we're not taking their stated goals at face value, as if they're hiding something. But hiding what?
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Wouldn't they do that on any other social media platform though? And offline? It's not like the NYT newsroom or universities in 1950 were less 'elite sens-makers and narrative crafters jerking themselves in a circle'
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I do not think you're thinking clearly about this. Elon does not get different information if he cuts everything now, vs sending out an order to cut everything in 60 days. In both cases, he has to make factual determinations about how important the womens' organizations in Myanmar are.
Are you implying that all these programs clearly star what they're actually doing, and no one will try to hide their operation under a title that's more palatable to the current administration?
I don't understand how immediately freezing funding makes it easier to collect this data, I think that's something that was imagined after the fact to justify the freezes. (And, again, most of the freezes have themselves been blocked, so...)
How do you collect that information without the freeze? USAID refused to cooperate with an audit, that's the entire reason their funding was frozen
I do not think this is true? DOGE staff were inside the USAID building and had access to their computer systems. Freezing USAID doesn't affect their ability to do that.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
... look, if I wanted to see posts like this, there are hundreds of thousands of them on crypto twitter. I come here for a higher standard of quality, and your post probably breaks the 'low effort' rule.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The way you say it you'd think Critical Theory was an esoteric subversive cult and not a very popular and influential historical school of thought, whose notable figures rank among the most cited individuals in all of published research everywhere.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
No. The claim that lifting and combat sports make you politically right wing is just untrue in my experience. It seems true in online communities with beliefs that encourage both lifting weights and right-wing political beliefs, but if I exclude that from the anecdotal sample of people I know and control for background there's not much correlation.
7.3 percent of all living Americans have served in the military at some point in their lives.
This is a factor of ten smaller of a difference than would justify the above comment. 90% southerners never serve in the military, and those that do serve only 20% more often than northerners. Calling them the 'warrior class' is absurd.
Or, you know, maybe the first numbers on Google are wrong. That's possible. (I skimmed the articles, they seem reasonable). But if you're going to make fiery moral pronouncements, maybe bring a number or two with it, so we can check if the claim is justified?
Great comment, deserved more votes.
The contrast between what you say and gp's comment speaks to the utter detachment from historical context that possesses most reactionaries (ironic given their yearning for historical politics). Historic people mostly did not have the sort of universal freedom and capability that modern americans have, either in the 'negative' or 'positive' senses. Any reactionary politics has to find higher values than individual liberty and lack-of-oppression, instead of just claiming that 'liberals are the real racistsoppressors' and claiming a nebulous illiberal reaction is the only way to protect people from cherry-picked grievances that are rarer than any point in history. And while reactionary politics has exploded over the last ten years on the internet ... almost all of its popularizers have similarly incoherent grievances to OP's. Even if one has far-right sympathies ... do we really want to select the most capable social climber among these people and give them absolute power? I don't think the net effect of that is positive, even if we can acknowledge race and IQ or whatever. And this practical impotence extends to areas where I think they're correct in theory. The far-right can meme about eugenics and killing the weak all they want (based on racial or martial criteria for reasons that were the most legible / practical criteria in 2000 BC but no longer are today), but it's the progressives who are actually doing something useful or good with things like embryo selection.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Why do people continue to think that this is a worthwhile point? Comey actually explained this and has been extremely vocal about his dislike for Trump.
No, I agree it's not good evidence the FBI hated clinton. But if things like that still happen to someone the FBI hates, why is it good evidence the FBI tunnel-vision hates trump given what happened to him? Especially given the impact on 2016 voters of comey's statement was, I think, larger than the impact of what they did to trump in 2016. Post-2016 actions would be a different discussion.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
What I'm claiming is that the, say, practical or utilitarian impact of the vaccines in terms of preventing deaths was almost as good as it would've been if they'd fully stopped transmission, which ... seems like the important part. That the media messaging around it and cultural norms around it was very confused doesn't change that.
Contracting COVID had also become socially shameful; friends of mine reacted to exposures or infections as one might to an STI. A vaccine that could not protect against this was unsatisfactory, so they yelled “anti-vaxer!” at people on Facebook for saying the vaccine could not protect against this.
Which is very dumb, but doesn't have much to do with how practically useful or effective the vaccine, the technological artifact, is. We (correctly) don't do that with the flu!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Put the houses closer together, maybe stack some of them, and turn the space used by lawns and garages and driveways into community parks and such. Maybe density would enable 'mixed use urbanism', where there are enough people nearby to support small shops and attractions!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
there is no evidence to assert this as unique
If you can find evidence that a past president did something like this and wasn't prosecuted, I'll significantly change my mind.
a federal investigation over a crime it is not possible for the president to commit.
It is still illegal to lie under oath / to investigators about a crime you didn't commit!
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Ya I would agree you can’t prosecute Trump because he didn’t “lawfare” well. Otherwise then any non-establishment politician will get prosecuted.
Any non-establishment politician that makes false statements to a court? Yeah?
The indictment cites notes from a May 23, 2022, conversation between Trump and his lawyer Evan Corcoran in which the former president questioned whether he had to fully comply with the subpoena, including making the statements, “I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes. I don’t want you looking through my boxes,” “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here?” and, “Well look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?”
Trump is charged with willful retention of national defense information; conspiracy to obstruct justice; withholding a document or record; corruptly concealing a document in a federal investigation; scheming to conceal; and false statements and representations.
I suspect an establishment politician who did that would be prosecuted too.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
10/year to 5/year is ... very noticeable. Just over a year, with shitty math, that'd be a one-tailed p value ("how probable is an outcome equal or more extreme") of .056. Over ten years, 100 -> 50 would be a p-value of 2.8665157187919333e-07.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
incoming modhat comment: "This isn't a good comment for the culture war thread" - effort, uninteresting meta topic "posting about posting", etc.
The twitter files themselves were discussed here, how is a rehash of them in congress interesting? The new J6 footage isn't particularly interesting imo, but it's more relevant, and anyone (you?) could've make a post about it.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Grounds in what sense? There isn't some lib in this conversation whose hypocrisy is being exposed by differing standards here. Why should I lazily believe dumb ideas just because people I dislike believe dumb ideas?
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
The innocence project reliably puts out stories of the wrongfully convicted or executed. If you propose a general increase in 'swift death' or 'permanent jail', how do we balance Berges against Cameron Willinghams? Our system reliably proliferates Berges, as it does pedophiles, fraudsters, schizophrenics, people with nine toes ... because out of hundreds of millions of americans, five hundred people who are released and later reoffend is genuinely difficult to avoid.
Not that you don't have a point, but the evidence here isn't enough to claim "progressives demonstrably make the world into a rotting sewer". Especially since crime rates, over the past 400 years, have consistently trended down, as everything's become more progressive. This is one of the issues I take with neoreaction generally - a monarchist claims crime was better under monarchy because of strict order, etc, but I've never seen this really elaborated upon, other than 'I read lots of victorian literature and they say so', yet crime seems to have decreased generally.
The mainstream media's function isn't exclusively, or even mostly, political propaganda and general misinformation - whether it's calling elections, writing about relevant events like antitrust lawsuits, reporting on trends in international politics, or just cooking, the MSM serves plenty of useful functions.
Wouldn’t even worse journalists just fill the void? That would be one effect. Yet the bigger effect, I warrant, would be a Great De-escalation
If the MSM disappeared and nothing else changed, people wouldn't stop caring, lying, or bullshitting about politics - the many independent left/right wing journalism websites, and twitter accounts, that are less 'fact-based' than either cnn or fox demonstrate that. There's plenty of demand, and the marginal costs of producing it are very low.
If "all misleading and not-motivated-by-truth media production" disappeared, that might be nice - but that's so common it's more in 'gene editing' or 'AGI' territory than 'just remove the MSM and we're fine!'.
I consume near-zero mainstream media, but I voraciously read history and empirical social science
My guess is this isn't true, and caplan gets a lot of information from the MSM. So:
... scrolling back on his twitter, an appearance on Tucker and and a RT of a NYT opinion by Douthat don't really count, but here's him posting a NYT article about NYC parking lots, here he approvingly QTs a Pinker article in the New Republic, he tweets "One of the best @arthurbrooks pieces" which is the Atlantic. That's all this January. He cites substacks like hanania or ACX more than he does the MSM ... but as hanania's approval of the media suggests, that doesn't cut the MSM out of the loop e.g. a few of the links in ACX linkposts are to the msm. But even if the MSM were fully cut out, and replaced with networks of independent blogs and substacks, we'd see more like Heather Cox Richardson's substack, topping substack's leaderboard at above 100k paid subs, described by Scott as
one of the few Substackers to have a New York Times article about her - in fact, part of the even more select group of Substackers who got NYT articles about them consensually. The Times describes her as a mild-mannered history professor who rose to superstardom “by accident” after an essay she posted took off. Her day job is studying the Civil War, and part of her shtick is comparing modern Republicans to Civil War era slaveowners, something there is certainly not zero demand for.
Still, all of her posts are like this. A daily discussion of one timely issue, a lot of useful context and explanation, and a paragraph or two about why it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry.
... along with Matthew Yglesias, "Bulwark+", Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. Which isn't that much better than the MSM, if we interpret the MSM to include big center-right media as well.
curious_straight_ca
2yr ago
Religion tends to imply far-reaching moral claims and ways of living organized around mystical / supernatural ideas. Anti-racism/progressivism may be distinctly christian, and may make significant moral claims, but it isn't a religion - it doesn't have supernatural claims, nor does it provide a grounding for all or even most moral claims.
It's claimed to be a religion because of the combination of moral dedication and seeming wrongness - as if people follow it religiously because of a 'religious impulse' to believe strong moral claims at the expense of correctness. This doesn't work because wokeness makes specific, non-mystical claims - calling it a religion doesn't actually rebut the claims (it'd come closer if woke people believed in an Anti-Racism Allfather that lived in the sun, but it doesn't!).
Because EOs are just not that powerful of a tool. They don't override laws, and there are a lot of laws constraining agencies.
The other stuff doesn't have much to do with democracy? It's bad policy.
If we assume the election fraud claims are false, Trump attempting to invalidate an election against him is worse than that other stuff? Democracy is a tradition, of peaceful transfer of power every so many years, and Trump tried to break it!
(It is reasonable to not like democracy. It did, after all, give us Trump twice, punctuated by someone too old.)
More options
Context Copy link