curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
2mo ago
Yes, Chris is better than him. In the relevant sense of writing better posts, all this does have some correlation with all other ways in which you can judge a person's quality. The quality of posts an individual writes is strongly correlated across time, and I'd rather themotte have more chrises and less tyres, proportionally. There's a hierarchy - some people are better than chris, some people are worse than tyre, and a lot of noise, but it's true.
The first sentence is obviously somewhat inflammatory, but I don't think it should be. It is - first - a neutral statement of fact, phrased in the simplest possible way - and then, second - inflammatory because people do not like hearing it directly stated. But in order for the second meaning to exist, the first meaning must have come first, otherwise there'd be nothing to be upset about.
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 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
2mo ago
Yes I agree that all of that is dumb, and I think all but .2% of the people who use this site do too, so we don't really need to be reminded, because it doesn't directly impact the more substantial discussion above.
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?
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
5mo 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 observe that Blue teachers and administrators have put large amounts of effort into policies that specifically protect and enable your scenario 2, excepting the last sentence
Can you name something Blue teachers have done that enables 2 but not 1? Ignoring the sex part.
Instead, these teachers have explicitly demanded lessons on gender identity
As far as I know, this is, like, one or two lessons per year in a group setting. Which is at most 1.
have specifically demanded a policy of actively facilitating queer expression at school while lying to parents about their kids actions, and their interactions with those kids
Again, this seems to be 1 to me. "Maybe they talk for three minutes at the end of class every other week" as opposed to, like, half an hour once a week or so. I think you need the latter for any grooming (in the usual sense) to happen.
I suppose it's possible that all these teachers and administrators are simply lying about the things they do, the things they intend to do, and the actions they support, when all they actually want to do is completely innocent and unobjectionable things. If so, they are too foolish to be allowed to keep their jobs.
I don't think they're doing that.
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.
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
5mo 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
6mo ago
The 'financial system', and the other social systems, not so much.
I think stock markets, commodity markets, corporate and contract law, insurance, banking, accounting, and thousands of individual facets of modern economic practice and culture are technically complicated and quite important to the functioning of the modern economy? And they're definitely built and maintained by "experts". (Some of) the field of economics, too, is quite relevant to modern business, and also has a lot of experts.
Other social systems are important too! Courts / the law, for instance, are kind of a core case of "thing maintained by experts", they're the highest authority and last resort conflict-resolvers, and the entire system only works because lawyers and especially judges being inculcated into taking the law seriously by the last generation of judges and lawyers.
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?
It's good that progressives post about school shootings, because events like that should be discussed
I mean ... not really? Progressives place an entirely unjustified emphasis on school shootings, and, in an unexamined manner, imagine that they are a threat worth mentioning to the well-being of children in the united states. Statistically ... they just aren't. Progressives should post less about school shootings, as a result. My point was just that when a progressive says 'this black shooting isn't worth reporting on because it's over-representing a rare phenomenon', that's wrong for reasons that aren't obvious to the progressive, the social taboo on racism and the idea that the racism is morally bad are melded with factual claim, in ways that make the output quite distinct from intentional dishonesty. (There's another objection like 'most people are stupid and won't be able to individually conclude that core political issues they hold are invalid because of thought experiments about biased reporting of a coin toss' but I'll ignore that for now.)
Since what we're discussing here is whether or not we should trust mainstream newspapers more than internet randos, this only proves my point.
I'm saying you shouldn't trust internet randos more. And if the randos (or more realistically, people 10 layers down the social media telephone game from them) got political power I'm not sure things would improve. If the media really were just being dishonest and there was a second non-dishonest group of people we could swap in for them ... that'd be one thing, but that's not the situation we're in.
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.
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
9mo ago
Hm, that isn't how wikipedia frames that. The thing is, a left-winger would have a similar response to the obamagate stuff, and I think each side is about as likely to be correct.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Might there be other explanations for Trump's failure than the forces of Mordor using dark plots to defeat our lone hero? Maybe Trump was an ineffective executive with a lot more bluster than execution, who was too stubborn to not commit crimes that didn't benefit him at all?
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Not that this solves the many problems of bans, but I (vague guess) don't think people would get fat off of sugar packets, for the same reason they don't just pour sugar into water and drink the sugar-water.
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
Wait no, this whole conversation began with Ash's
The vaccines were kinda sorta effective, but not in the way that I had hoped they would be
And my response
I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.
I'm just talking about the effectiveness of the vaccine itself, not about negative aspects of the way it's used. I'm not 'glossing over' them, I'm just not talking about them, it's a separate but reasonable (if beaten to death) discussion to have.
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.
curious_straight_ca
11mo ago
I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have happened if he hadn't hid the documents and "corruptly concealed a document in a federal investigation, and made false statements and representations". I'm not even sure why he did those things, it doesn't seem to have helped him at all.
Reminder that around the same time, biden was found to have kept classified documents - but he (as far as we can tell) hasn't tried to hide them or lied about their existence!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
If you believe that, can you name one, single, specific punishment that trump is likely to do and would materially benefit the right wing? What does that sentence even mean?
In this specific case I really doubt it's a fetish based on the description
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