curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
You seem to mean something other than 'gay is when you're attracted to men' here, "gay" in a vague sense of "feminine, submissive, powerless, sad, degenerate". Disagreeing over definitions like this is more an argument that gay in the latter sense has some moral force, and that gay in the former sense doesn't, as opposed to actually disagreeing over definitions. It's better to directly state and argue for that, as opposed to saying 'this is the word meaning'
curious_straight_ca
7d 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.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Sure, but that's a general brokenness to the justice system, and Trump's increasingly large legal wounds are mostly a result of him refusing to stop walking on the broken glass even when he could just step around it and only be a bit inconvenienced, not the system being biased against him.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives
You are conflating two things here. One is: a student goes to a teacher and tells them they are trans, wants to use the female name in class, and doesn't want to tell their parents. The teacher says 'awww sure of course sweetie'. Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week. I think this happens for <10% of trans kids, but still does happen sometimes. The teacher plays ~no role, either in terms of direct causation or in terms of being a 'prime mover', in causing the kid to be trans.
Two: A teacher spends an hour plus every week or two talking to the kid about trans issues, sex, or porn. The teacher, causally and/or by intent, plays a significant role in the child realizing they're trans or deciding to transition. The teacher tells the child to not tell their parents. Maybe they themselves are trans, and like the idea of having more kids be trans, or maybe they just believe it because it's the wholesome LGBTQ+ thing to believe. Maybe the teacher also does sexual acts with the child.
I think two happens with <1% of the frequency of one.
Forming a special, secret relationship with a vulnerable individual and encouraging them to lie to others about the details and nature of that relationship is a profound violation of trust regardless of the motives. To do this from a position of formal power, as an agent of the state, is a profound abuse of power as well.
You are imagining that most cases of one carry some of the characteristics of the second, enabled by your engagement with the topic being very 'alienated' from the details of the actual people and causation involved. You're also imagining that cases of one are more common among trans kids than they are. Neither are true! To whatever extent children transitioning is bad, this paints a false picture that just makes it impossible to prevent anything bad from happening.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
No, we have seen people mutilate definitions and concepts to deflect criticism of teachers "hatching little eggs
This mostly doesn't happen. There hundreds of millions of people so i'm sure it's happened, but >95% of 'trans kids' realize they're trans on the internet.
why is this teacher showing my kid porn and telling him he'd look sexy in a dress" is "woah, how is that any different than promoting patriotism, tu quoque
This is like saying Catholicism is a fundamentally Pedophilic religion because look how they cover it up!! Except actual generic pedophilia is 1000x more common (among both catholic priests and teachers) than teachers showing kids porn with intent to trans them.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
"Completely and explicitly"? Huh? Chinese reports on corruption of Xi's son wouldn't look like (pre-2020 election) this - or explicit coverage of a biden sexual assault allegation
Because political leaders in China can have stories, or entire topics, pulled at their discretion!
I'd challenge to to find a more-impactful example of corruption censorship from any other news media in world history
:/ Not sure how to respond to this? Chinese media reporting on Xi's consolidation of power? Saudi media reporting on MBS's purges?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Do most liberal/apolitical men take serious issue with their partners having had a few previous boyfriends and 5 more previous casual partners? My impression is, generally, not really. Maybe something biological prevents most men from marrying someone with 100 bodies (although I doubt it, cultures are very flexible), but marriage rates demonstrate 5 bodies doesn't mean much. You note that these characters are '96th percentile', and most men avoiding long-term partnerships with the top 5% of sluts isn't a societal issue. So I don't think there's a societal issue here - we've already moved the needle a long way from 'parents checking for bloodstains on the marital bed'.
curious_straight_ca
1yr 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.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
the point of discussing mask usage in genereal is to ... figure out policy for the future? Or just figure out personal risk tolerance from the future? Concretely - should my/your elderly parents occasionally wear N95s in e.g. airports, to reduce general disease risk? From my longer comment:
The latter is ... arguable, actually - imagine a case where N95s were mandated/heavily encouraged specifically for vulnerable populations (old, immunocompromised, other health conditions), along with early studies making sure they were useful & how to use them effectively, without lockdowns or mask mandates for most.
And from the review itself:
Routine long‐term implementation of some of the interventions covered in this review may be problematic, particularly maintaining strict hygiene and barrier routines for long periods of time. This would probably only be feasible in highly motivated environments, such as hospitals. Many of the trial authors commented on the major logistical burdens that barrier routines imposed at the community level. However, the threat of a looming epidemic may provide stimulus for their inception.
When people say "masks don't work", they clearly mean the masks they were forced to wear.
I think when people say "masks don't work", they mean "masks don't work". See the OP substack citing the evidence against N95s as "devastating".
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
1yr ago
The WEF post spends 7 paragraphs @ 1k words on non-accusatory exposition about the details of the WEF itself and the history of right-wing beliefs about the WEF, limiting the 'attacking people' part to the title and a short 100-word conclusion that makes a valuable strategic point.
OP by contrast is peppered with unfair generalizations and jabs all the way through, with no evidence to back it up.
Now, I don't really care about personal attacks or unfairness or jabs, my only issue with chris's post is that it's in large part wrong, but it is much more 'rule-breaking' than rafa's when we weight usefulness with bite. "necessary, true, kind: pick two".
curious_straight_ca
1yr 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!).
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
specifically an unwillingness to accept the possibility that someone can be both "smart" and "wrong"
er, clearly hoffmeister and some of the alt-right believe that e.g. the libs and (for the alt-right) jews are both very smart (given both technical achievements and cultural influence) and wrong.
One of the core tenents of the whole blue tribe memeplex is that behavior and morality exist completely independently of the other. It doesn't whether a man is a hard worker or a good father, what matters is what he thinks and what he feels.
... both the alt-right and probably hoffmeister value "hard work" and "being a good father". Did this idea come from the left accusing people of being racist, and racism is a "think and feel" instead of a "behavior"? But "blue tribe morality" prescribe plenty of behaviors such as giving to the poor (note all the blue-tribe charitable foundations).
" is that they are so deeply embedded in their own blue tribe backgrounds that they don't know the answer to "what is the point of being a good man if it won't get you ahead in politics"
The value of being a 'good man' is always something though! "Being a hard worker" is valuable in that that work produces something useful for people. "Being a good father" is valuable in that it helps raise children! If you're 'being a good father' in a way that isn't helping a child, or "working hard" as a MLM marketer, you're not actually "being good". (this suggests that "being good" isn't an informative statement itself, that one needs to point to the actual thing being done). Those people are saying that the thing you're doing isn't actually accomplishing the thing you're claiming it is.
When you said "public knowledge", did you mean "public knowledge that a large number of people were interested in"?
My point was that if someone's motivated enough to go to the IRL location of your children, they're probably motivated enough to look in voter registration databases, or do the 5 hours of research necessary to dox 90% of people who use the internet. The motivation is the problem, not the publicness of the information. Doxxing is bad, but unless you put a lot of effort into hiding it, it's really easy to dox people. (I don't know precisely how one does it, but have seen it happen many times).
This story's continued popularity seems to be a combination of "man bites dog" (and it is funny), and specifically claims that "wokeness" degrades the quality of government, and that LGBT people are weird fetishists. From twitter, searching "Brinton": "Raise your hand if you knew Sam Brinton was mentally ill before any luggage was stolen", Re. Sam Brinton, let's call it what it is: a person clearly unfit for a high-level national security role was hired because the Admin prioritizes wokeness over competence. (not cherrypicked, those and paraphrases of them were the top results). While Brinton is being retarded, taking this as something bad about 'wokeness' or 'lgbts' is about as bad as taking every base-rate sex crime by a republican as evidence for pedocon theory. There are many LGBTs in the government, at least a dozen of which have been in the R news cycle in the past few years. Many casual politics observers hear these random events and say "wow, those libs are fucked up, man" - all that does is confuse one and make it harder to pick out serious trends. And people with power having strange proclivities isn't new. (and as usual, this isn't a point about how LGBTS are good and all evidence against them is BAD, but a point about good and bad evidence for broad political points)
edit: removed jinx doublepost of LGBTQnation article
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
'Straight' doesn't mean 'not degenerate', familiar words + owning the libs != accuracy. If a straight guy + a woman do butt stuff ... how does that make the guy 'not straight', even if he gets off from it? The claim is iirc 'prostate stimulation is sexually pleasurable', and that doesn't have to involve enjoying the idea of being penetrated by a penis, necessarily. This is separate from 'is it good' or 'is it degenerate', just in terms of accuracy, 'it isn't straight' doesnt seem right.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere unless I write a 5000 word effortpost with a dozen tiktok, reddit, and discord screenshots each to actually convey the understanding of what it's like to be a 'trans kid' and why the school isn't relevant. And the time for that was a year or two ago anyway.
So instead, I'll go back to the above argument - put the mental effort into having an extra kid (or two, or ...) instead. Even heavily discounted, it's more important.
Or I guess working on AI or something. It probably seems like an odd tic that I keep bringing that up, but all of our moral philosophies depend on and don't make sense outside of the indefinite continuation of human life and civilization and power, and that is very much in question! If you're having a kid who will themselves have kids who will ... and so on and so on, I can see that as a divine duty of infinite importance, an unbroken chain - or, really, an unbroken interwoven net of sexual reproduction tiling the whole of your nation - of intergenerational devotion. If you have two kids who each have three kids who all starve to death because we're now to silicon as horses were to us ...
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I wouldn't say I liked it as a post - I'm happy it was posted if only because there just aren't enough toplevel posts in general - but if it was the right-wing equivalent, it'd be at the minimum +10.
Eh. There's a real class of very bad ideas like the QAnon cinematic universe, or things like 'the government has secret spies all over the place. I have a friend who used to be one of them, he tells me about the reptilians and their spiritual plans for humanity's enslavement. I'm not sure I believe it but apparently the elites conspire with them, they took out JFK, they took out the people on the Clinton kill list..." (those are all real things I've actually been told by people who were being genuine, not hyperbole). I think OP is very much coming from the mindset that generates that.
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
What's the obvious deal that America should dictate to Israel that'd solve the I/P conflict? The only thing I can think of is 'actually occupy, subdue, and govern Palestine', but that's less pro-palestine than US policy currently is.
This just made me realize I generally trust Internet commentors on themotte more than just about any mainstream newspaper. Why would I trust a mainstream newspaper on a culture war topic?
At least half of the information we discuss here comes directly from mainstream newspapers, and much of the rest is filtered through them. And the information that comes from newspapers is disproportionately about 'real things' like politics, business, and war, while the thing that come from internet journalists are more often weird internet or culture war drama.
Also, motteposters are wrong a lot, as demonstrated by how often we disagree.
Maybe works, but what how do you secure that authentication? Ukrainian equipment and personnel can both be captured and interrogated to spill their secrets.
The same way you solved that problem for every other network-connected piece of military equipment, of which there are a lot? That was just a "guess" on my part though, I don't have any particular knowledge about this area.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them
That's possible, but all i have here is the New Yorker's assertion vs your assertion. Do you have a source or something?
My guess would've been that access would've been controlled by some method of authentication, so that the Ukrainian terminals would work anywhere but anything held by Russians wouldn't work at all, making such a geofence unnecessary.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
The only reason we care about COVID-19 is severe illness and death. There are many other circulating coronaviruses that didn't cause unusually high rates of severe illness, and we do not care about those.
you know it was explicitly argued that the COVID vaccines do it as well.
(low confidence) That was argued, and seemed plausible at the time! It ended up not being true. But, since it still prevented severe illness and death, people who got the vaccine died a lot less! And most people in high-risk groups got the vaccine. Which is, I think, a success, since the one bad thing was prevented!
It's weird to imagine scenarios where covid doesn't mutate to become less deadly but the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission. Why couldn't it mutate to become more deadly? I vaguely think there's a trend to become less deadly to become more transmissible, but it's clearly not universal given the many deadly diseases of the past.
to whom you’re attracted
"A woman to whom you're attracted" is an odd term to use in in a society-wide analysis. Attraction is fundamentally situational - like everything human, it adjusts to its environment. If you were stuck on a desert island with your grandmother, she'd become appealing after a year or two. If you spent a few years surrounded by only supermodels, you'd find something unappealing about many of them.
Consider - a quarter of America is obese. Of all the very fat, ugly men who date very fat, ugly women - nothing could biologically make you like fat women just because you're fat, if you could go after models you'd find women as viscerally disgusting as I do. But, for the most part, fat people manage to get it up and desire sex with each other. People adapt.
This isn't really a cause of sexlessness or dating woes, though. And I don't think sexlessness is that big of a problem anyway. To whatever extent it does exist, the cause is probably a combination of physical proximity not happening on the internet, pornography, and whatever other right-wing social ideas you want to add to that.
Fraud
How is pickup artistry fraud or manipulation? Everyone, admit it or not, both consciously and instinctively, practice and train their speech and behavior to get the partners they desire. PUA stuff is kinda just an explicit and well-done version of that. Which doesn't mean you have to like the consequences, but it's not any more 'manipulation' than makeup or 'asking a friend what you should text'. Semi-deceptive or semi-adversarial techniques aimed at getting sex or a better wife aren't new features of the 21st century, or even modernity.
Obviously "the airport elon's jet most recently landed at, which is available to anyone at (i think) https://www.adsbexchange.com" and "the live location of xae12" are different
If someone knows you personally, it basically is? They're, usually, either at your house (which you can usually get from a name), at school/school-associated location (the school is often directly derivable from house location, and generally not private) - and at predictable times!
This was 2rafa's point earlier, the knowledge necessary to harm someone is universally available and fairly easy to use. That people aren't usually harmed is due to people not desiring to, and law and society imposing punitive costs on those who try to.
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