curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
In this specific case I really doubt it's a fetish based on the description
“He hides his fingers, keeps them flexed, leading to impaired dexterity, localized pain, irritability and anger,” Dr. Nadia Nadeau, of the department of psychiatry at Université Laval wrote in the journal Clinical Case Reports. He grew more determined to find a way to get rid of fingers he considered “intrusive, foreign, unwanted.”
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
People who get abortions really don't want to have kids. It disrupts their entire lives. I'd expect something like a 2-7% increase in the fertility rate (compare to increases in state with abortion bans) - which isn't getting us above replacement - and those increases will mostly be among the sorts of people who aren't intelligent or bad at planning, which aren't what you want.
To get fertility above replacement, you'd want a significant culture shift such that more people actually want - and not just want, see it as a powerful social / moral good - to have children, and more than two children at that. And something a little bit like that is part of the conservative package - it just doesn't have much to do with anti-abortion.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
And so if we listen to a lot of HBD proponents like Murray and ‘accept’ it and dismantle those programs that largely benefit those communities, and abolish / criminalize affirmative action and so on, do we really think that the social problems we see in black communities are going to improve? That issues with eg violence are going to improve? It just seems very unlikely to me.
A more generally reactionary view lets you propose programs that might actually work, once you're no longer putting effort into ones that don't work! One of those is just genetic enhancement - just like it's easier to replace a broken machine than to fix one, we know the genetic 'recipe' for whatever kind of people we want, and we can just birth more of those. There's no reason this has to hurt ethnic pride - there are plenty of well above-average black people on any quality, one can just use their genes. Even if you can't say HBD, universal genetic enhancement still works.
It's not gonna happen, but the best way to solve the criminal underclass (as a relatively small % of the black population) is just paternalistic interventions into criminal communities. Think moldbug's proposal of "give Black churches sovereignty over black criminal youth". I think if you gave some elite absolute sovereignty and let them be totally unclouded by political affiliation - whether progressive, conservative, or wignat - they wouldn't find the issue that hard to resolve on a technical level. But, yeah, that's just not happening, at all.
So even with the significant restrictions of liberalism, I think it's highly likely that a smart and driven elite with accurate beliefs could significantly improve things. In terms of crime, just imagine police that just used technology and strength of numbers to effectively enforce laws around drugs, theft, assault, with a focus on rapid and consistent prevention and punishment, even if the punishments weren't that harsh. The hour-level action of stealing or dealing would just become unappealing, and it'd plausibly stop happening. This isn't even, really, a HBD belief, but it's the kind of thing an Effective Altruist in a political culture that actually understood that affirmative action and anti-racism just don't work anymore might get behind.
And, honestly, I don't think ethnic underrepresentation in positions of power is itself a huge issue. Ethnic nationalism in America is just much less intense than it is in Nigeria. Representation of minorities in the media or politics is most of what the average person notices, and that comes naturally anyway as minorities cluster physically and being a pop star or comedian isn't as g-loaded as being an engineer. I think all of the push for higher minority representation in positions of actual power comes from other elites, and there won't be any riots if that just becomes deemphasized because elites don't care anymore.
curious_straight_ca
3mo ago
As for "oh the cute cuddly octopuses which are just as intelligent as we are, don't farm them!", I think a few videos of the intelligent cute octupuses hunting and eating their own fellows would counter all that. If octopuses think their own species make delicious meals, why object to a totally different species eating them?
"Other tribs of humans naturally hunt and kill each other in war, why object to my tribe doing it to them for fun"?
see here https://www.themotte.org/post/780/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/166814?context=8#context
As I have said multiple times over the past so many years, I do not think there is a single trans person who should, from their perspective, socially transition or medically transition. I think the entire thing is dumb. I don't see why that means I must support whatever decentralized oppression mirage conservatives claim that's directionally similar to my position!
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
Every time this issue comes up you excuse the teachers by saying it's mostly creepy discord moderators and tumblr influencers doing most of the grooming, but you don't ever talk about them except to dismiss criticism of the teachers.
This is assuming 'arguments are soldiers'. Am I wrong, at all?
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
A lot of them are using it, to great effect. The flat piece of nanoscale-patterned silicon you're using to post, the network of private businesses and public law that makes up the 'financial system' that structures your economic activity, and a thousand other omnipresent social systems have been built by hundreds of thousands of those 'experts'. And they all work pretty well, and are complicated as hell! Even when you can intuitively tell something's wrong with one of them, that does not imply they're wrong or lying specifically about the first thing that comes to mind, e.g. inflation or how productive the economy is.
The reason people are using personal anecdotes is they are not given access to the same data the "experts" are, so any comparison between the two is inherently disingenuous from the start.
I strongly disagree? I'm strongly for making more data used for research public (as in, free to download from github or wherever), but, like, there wasn't any secret data that mask or vaccine advocates were making decisions off of that we didn't have access to. And there were a small minority of experts, people at Harvard or similar, who fought the covid consensus the entire time. Do you have an example in mind here?
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
The experts are wrong a lot. But, for almost everyone in the general population, and for many people here, your vague guesses and anecdotal impressions are a lot worse. It takes effort, discipline, and raw intelligence to do better! It's reasonable to not trust that everything's going great just because the economy numbers are up! But you shouldn't just jump from 'my costs feel higher than a few years ago' to 'clearly experts are wrong', dig deeper!
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
This is responsible for a lot of it, but these single-sentence own comments don't add much value imo. People have made the case for this at length elsewhere
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Considering coronaviruses in general are seasonal respiratory viruses and this is a new variant, spreading to humans either naturally from animals or from a lab escape of virus collected from animals, I think the flu (animal hosts, new variants, seasonal disease) is a closer analogue than measles - and seasonal flu vaccines don't successfully eradicate the flu, but are useful and successful despite that.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Right, because most of the smartest and best people are still fundamentally progressive, and oppose your actions. Change that, and you win. Don't change that, and you lose.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
I think a more parsimonious explanation is that people naturally become friends with, care more about, and adopt the beliefs of the people they spend time around and believe in the same things as. So when someone leaves their old community behind to join a new one - especially one whose people are in general smarter, more capable, generally better to be around - they just are going to care about their new community more. And then different groups of people generally find reasons to dislike other groups. Deep South folks also dislike liberal elites, it does just happen in general.
Modern elite liberal culture actually demands less obedience to its ideology than most other ideologies. For instance, it doesn't literally demand obedience. Which, you'd think that's a low bar, but not one that most historical ideologies meet! Christianity, for instance, does actually have divine commands that you must follow, a holy book that's indisputably correct, heresies, and so on.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
My political positions are ... on the same side as conservatism, at least. I think you're right, at least, that the 'culture war sticking points' aren't really moving anyone towards conservative norms - banning drag queens, not allowing gay marriage, banning abortions for poor black women, this doesn't really move us towards a more conservative society.
I think it's bad, on an individual level, for anyone who transitions. Meaningful desires aligned with their outcomes (desire for sex/romantic relationship that produces kids) are replaced with confused simulacra. And actual children (pretty important! whether you're a radical inegalitarian or a sum of hedonic state utilitarian, more people existing is good) fail to be produced.
But if you actually try to consistently pursue the underlying values that generate something like 'trans is bad', the harm actually has to come from 'not having children' - and 'trans people being .2% of the population' is simply 50x less of an issue than many people not settling down into families, or those that do deciding to have 2 children. I do think that conservatives should focus on the latter, and not the former.
Unfortunately, I'm not having a rational conversation with "conservatives", the conservative movement is a huge mass of a hundred million people that hypes itself up about a whole bunch of nonsense. Just like progressives. So, idk. Maybe the only way to change things is elite persuasion, even more likely there's just not enough time to change things too much until AGI is too big of an issue.
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
It might be an election loser but Pro-life seems a very good policy and a cultural view that is extremely good if I want my society to be strong and growing. If you look at the entire pro-life package it’s better than the opposite which is sub replacement level fertility in core American ethnicities behind American success
You're switching between "pro-life" as "anti-abortion" and "pro-life" as "pronatalist conservative". The literal policy of being anti-abortion does essentially nothing for fertility rates. The "entire pro-life package" only promotes fertility rates to the extent that it's the entire conservative package, and even US conservative fertility rates aren't that high. Being "pro-family" or pro "making it easier for families to have children" politically toxic in the way that being anti-abortion is.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I feel like this is just a haze of unrelated grievances rather than an actual cause of PUA dying.
general decline in the human quality of Western women
By any metrics you're claiming, compared to the early 2000s, there hasn't been that much decline, it's been a slow downtrend since the 1960s at least.
rising rates of alcoholism and prescription pill addiction, the normalization of fat acceptance and mental illness etc
Alcoholism hasn't really risen since the 1990s, pill addiction is present in a small minority of the population, 'fat acceptance' has little to do with the actual rise in obesity caused by diet which, itself, was already quite high in 2000, 'mental illness' is rising more as a consequence of greater prominence of diagnosis and therapy than anything else.
the combined effect of stringent laws around "enthusiastic consent"
Ehhh. The laws around enthusiastic consent govern university campus standards for sexual assault, and are (as far as I can tell) not actually enforced enough to entirely change the culture.
note that I didn't address your points about #metoo or the smartphone and internet, which may or may not be true
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
I'd rather have a 50% of being sexually abused as a child than counterfactually not exist, frankly. I think most people, if they were honest, would agree. This makes banning gays from having assisted-reproduction children ... extremely stupid, imo, and the morality that leads you to believe it must be prevented extremely suspect. (Its' still fine to think gays are evil or whatever, that can coexist)
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
I think that the ruling class strongly discouraging support for Red candidates and encouraging support for Blue candidates, establishing favorable conditions on the ground for Blue Candidates through the selective manipulation of impactful process mechanisms, selectively harassing Red candidates via the state security apparatus, encouraging widespread political violence against Reds and their proxies while engaging in equally-widespread selective enforcement against such violence, as well as a variety of similar actions, constitute illegitimate actions within a democratic system.
These are all ... soft. "Encouraging", "favorable conditions", "harassing" - these are all things that have happened, to greater or lesser extents in the past.
I think there are more suggestive examples in the past. A president who appears to have committed voter fraud to become senator. Or Bush v Gore, where SCOTUS may have directly decided an election on controversial procedural grounds.
And if we can go further back, there's the compromise of 1877.
All of those undermine democratic mechanisms more!
curious_straight_ca
5mo ago
You seem to be in the strange position where you don't think anybody should transition but you don't see a big deal with teachers and other influential adults putting pressure on children to encourage certain important life changes like transitioning.
I am also not worried about teachers forcing children to become Muslim, because that isn't happening enough to matter.
There is so much energy available to shut down anti-vaxxers, shut down white nationalists, shut down Russian influence, but to prevent kids getting groomed into sterilization there's nobody.
Yes, I agree that none of those are significant enough to matter, except perhaps white nationalists. That is a hypocrisy, the left claims A and B and we know that A iff !B. But you only get to pick one side of the fork, either A and !B or B and !A. Not both.
I know I'm going away from the subject, but if you disagree with the concept of transition, what are you doing about it?
I disagree with a lot of things that I don't do anything about! One does have to prioritize.
curious_straight_ca
6mo ago
That by doing advanced calculus on harm and good you will arrive at a moral outcome
Okay, I'm in a town of 1000 people. One person has a factory that produces very nice shoes, but fills the air with smog. The smog makes everyone choke and gives everyone lung cancer. Should we forcibly close down the factory?
Now I'm in the same town, but instead of a factory, it's a slaughterhouse. The stench smells about as bad as the smog, but it doesn't cause lung cancer. Also, it provides much of the food for the town. Should we forcibly close down the factory?
The answer is yes in the first case, no in the second case. One comes to this conclusion by, uh, doing calculations on the outcome. The first has lower benefit, higher cost, the second has higher benefit, lower cost. How else can you come to this kind of conclusion, if not by doing calculations on harm and good
Maybe during the industrial revolution the air and water had to be a bit polluted because the only other option was no industry, but now we have better technology and can have industry with less pollution. Any rule in deontology or virtue ethics about how to make that decision just ends up deferring to the calculation of benefit.
Like, people exist, benefits and harms exist, actions lead to outcomes in incredibly complicated ways, whether you're a socialist or liberal or conservative or a nazi you need to judge actions based on their outcomes, and the calculations are complicated because the situations are complicated. Should we have a democracy or a monarchy? Under what conditions should we go to war? Should we have computers? Should we create advanced AI? Nonconsequentialist moral systems dodge these by taking the answers for granted and treating them as 'rules' or 'virtues'. But the virtues/rules themselves embed complexity that represents a calculation that some human, or perhaps a decentralized system of humans, made in the past.
(in case you don't read the rant, first:)
I'm curious if Wikipedia had less of the 'I got reverted by an editor with more clout' issues back in the early 2010s, and for detailed writeups of how wikipedia is bad in current_year, if you have any. Long is fine, the awful wiki-reddit-thread format is fine too.
Okay.
sacrilege. I'm not exaggerating.
Okay, let's see what we're working with.
WP: No Nazis is a page about how nazis should be blocked just by viewpoint. It was created in 2018. It then goes on to describe a series of beliefs that are, more or less, what modern nazis believe. This is "purging rightists", in the sense that banning Stalinists from your forum would be "purging progressives".
Maybe the page is frequently used as a justification for banning conservatives. I wouldn't know. But I'd like to, before I start nodding along with the post.
And, yeah, they shouldn't ban nazis, the nazis are right about a lot more than one would expect. Still, 'um, what the fuck, ban nazis?', when applied to actual nazis rather than republicans, is a universal, cross-party value in America (... sure, slightly less so among the populist right in 2023), so it's not too damning that wikipedia adopted it.
adding conservative-media sources gets you auto-reverted
No it doesn't! Well, again, it does in the sense that adding progressive (i.e. iranian state media) sources also gets you auto-reverted. But I sometimes read the National Review, the Daily Wire, the New York Post, the American Conservative, the Washington Examiner, the Spectator, the Dispatch, the Bulwark ... none are on that list. Is Fox?
And the sites on that list deserve to be. The Daily Caller, Breitbart, the Epoch Times, InfoWars, Project Veritas, really do constantly make things up. Unz and VDARE do too, unfortunately. They belong with Occupy Democrats, MintPress News, Grayzone, etc, all on that list. They lean left.
Again, maybe the National Review isn't treated as a RS. I don't see any evidence in the OP.
... Okay, I could leave it there, but I can also just ... look. So here we have perennial sources, which summarizes prior consensus on the reliability of various sources. Of the sources I listed, the WSJ is reliable, Fox is reliable for non-politics, the NR, AmCon, Examiner and Spectator are yellow/mixed, Daily Wire and Post are unreliable. There's a bit of bias here. But it also does reflect differences in accuracy, quality of fact-checking. I don't need to mention where the NYT lies, but it does so less, on average, than the Daily Wire. When Nate Silver or Scott note that the 'reliable media' is also the 'progressive media', they don't deny that they're still more reliable on average. So ... most quality conservative media isn't auto-reverted.
and right-coded ideas get lumped into "misinformation" articles
I mean, they do give the lab leak its own article, and reference it in the origins article. But, yeah, they dismiss it and call it a conspiracy theory for essentially no good reason. The times takes a different perspective, saying we might never get a clear answer. This ... clashes ... with wikipedia's "Some scientists and politicians have speculated that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory. This theory is not supported by evidence". They even cite the NYT article with the title "The Ongoing Mystery of Covid's Origin - We still don't know how the pandemic started. Here's what we do know — and why it matters"."! Almost all of the wiki articles' statements are true, technically, but they're clearly misleading in tone.
Sacrilege, though? That's one thing. It's an entire encyclopedia. And it's maintained by people, who are falliable. What would the Vietnam War or War on Drugs articles look like in the 20th century?
Like, maybe you're right. It'd be more illuminating to go through a few specific incidents of bias, rather than just link some pages that readers may or may not have clicked on.
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
The issue is that you attempt to address the newspapers' dishonesty by trusting the internet people more, but the internet people aren't actually less misleading than the newspapers because
Given the popularity of "don't give ammo to the rightoids" argument on progressive forums, I'm pretty sure that this is also happening quite often
When someone says that, what they're thinking is "this isn't representative of a broader trend but posting it appears to, which feeds prejudice and bias". That kind of thing can be true! You'd accuse left-wingers of doing that themselves whenever they report on a school shooting or a hate crime, accurately. They are not explicitly, intentionally lying.
Also, themotte is smarter than most left-wing sources because we're smart. I don't think we're smarter than center-left rationalists, though, so it can seem themotte (right-wing) is better than other sources (left-wing) but the betterness is the cause, not the right-wingness.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
there seem to be far too many of these stories for it to be coincidence
I mean, any such arrest is really dumb. But 'it isn't a coincidence' and 'ideologically captured' are very vague claims. And it's usually a mistake to conclude anything about the relative frequency of events from their relative frequency in headlines you see. 50 school shootings, 800 dead in mass shootings, vs 25,000 total homicides - news consumers intuit a different ratio. The police still spend >98% of their time on things other than 'arresting for offensive speech'.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Eh while there are a bunch of non-falsifiable woo-spiritual idealist components to it, it is in large part falsifiable IMO. And it's not just, like, a single dumb belief that doesn't affect the behavior of the internet racists very much, it's something many of them are very deeply rhetorically and personally invested in.
Why it's falsifiable, in theory: The most obvious interpretations of it all make direct claims about what people do in hypothetical but theoretically realizable situations! Some anti-racemixing people just think other races are inferior, others think different races have different noble 'qualities' and mixing is degenerate relative to both races. Both are falsifiable - you (god-king or alien or whatever) could just take a bunch of 'pure' nordics and a bunch of mixed people and put them in various 'ancient bands of men swordfighting' situations, and see which group acts 'nobler' according to your criteria. You could, similarly, put white and asian people in situations that test whatever standard of strong independent man-ness you think asians lack, maybe they have to speak out against their boss or lead a revolt against a corrupt lib regime or whatever. And then see which race statistically does the thing more. This all sounds absurd, of course, but it's what a literal reading of the statements these people make would suggest.
I think that, though no perfect natural experiments like that exist, one can falsify the claim by just observing the behavior of half-white / half-indian/asian/arab people compared to pure white people & observing the behavior of whites/asians.
Not the place so I'll keep it brief, but I don't think it's worth diving headfirst into a large number of cosmic-scale factual and moral claims that are both historically contingent on political and social arrangements that seem unlikely to produce truth and are also knowably false just because you find modern value systems to be spiritually bereft. Even given that progressive or liberal values are false, that doesn't make the values they replaced true! Closing your eyes doesn't make the technology and social changes that precipitated modern values go away!
To actually answer your question: churches are everywhere, just google <my area> plus 'church', or optionally 'catholic church'. Good advice I've heard is to just try service at quite a few different churches, one after the other, there a lot of variation both between sects and between individual churches in the pastor's style, and see which ones you like. Sometimes people worry this is disrespectful, but I've been told it isn't at all.
Other commenters who note that catholicism and eastern orthodoxy are very different ... that's true within the values of the churches themselves, but isn't true from an outside perspective that views religion as an aesthetic way of organizing social relationships - potentially a valuable one - than a divinely ordained and accurate set of claims about the structure of the universe. Some intelligent devoted christians spend years 'discerning', agonizing over the subtle doctrinal differences separating sects. But, with the Filioque as the obvious example, these doctrinal differences have little practical relationship to the moral and aesthetic differences between sects, which are (as indicated by your preference for Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy due to ritual and moral gravity) arguably much more important. And ... clearly, just viewing the causal structure that leads you and similar people to religion, the outside perspective is a more accurate description of what you're looking for, revealed-preference-wise, than the other!
Despite thinking transitioning is in general bad no matter if you're TruTrans or not, this is a silly line of argument. If a treatment is genuinely good for a small minority of people, and bad for a larger number of copycats, just ... figure out a test that differentiates the two and only give it to the first group. One can do that. It's absurd to say "no" early to people who'd really benefit.
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