curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
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.
nobody is calling CPS over parents preventing their kids from watching porn. there is no culture war over parents preventing their children from watching online porn. This is because 'kids and sexuality' is a taboo pressure point for almost everyone in the US. Which is why conservatives try to associate trans with child + sex (grooming!). The culture war issues are all about trans in schools, drag queen story hour, etc.
If your concern is that schools or institutions embrace trans, then ... they embrace trans because everyone does, so we circle back to the original 'is trans real and good' debate, 'society as a whole' isn't going to suppress something most people think is good. If your concern is your kid becoming trans, then said institutions have basically no causal role in an individual kid deciding they are trans (other than 'not explicitly opposing it it', which brings us back to the first point). Nowhere does it make sense to specifically attack schools. The entire 'trans in schools' issue is based on a bunch of false premises that spread because they rile up disconnected but concerned parents.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
No, that would be more of something like - statements of fact / material statements relating to a political candidate or issue, which would receive broad First Amendment protection, as restricting that gives the govt/courts a way to directly censor some political positions. That's clearly different than issues solely related to election procedure like 'where and how to vote'.
This wasn't just a single casual joke!
Excerpts from the complaint, which somehow blocks copying
[...] Within minutes, members of the Madman Group discussed ways to make the Deceptive Image more effective. One member of the group responded, "Don't post it yet though, a week or less before the election. I'm making a version myself." Co-Conspirator 4 responded, "make sure to use the latest color schemes they have.
Three minutes later, a participant in the Madman Group responded, "Dopey shitlibs will fall for it too."
Co-Conspirator 2 stated "here's what I worried about [I, people on[Candidate 2's] side thinking this is legit and they stay home. I'm plotting, will have something soon.» Another member responded, "[Co-Conspirator 2], what about if we say something about its too late b/c we didn't register for it [and] we'll have to do it next election or some shit." Co-Conspirator 2 responded, "Yep, I think so."
This does seem to show intent to actually influence voting, as opposed to just laughing. That said, 'actually influencing the vote' is pretty funny. And the sort of person who'd fall for such a dumb trick probably isn't someone whose political opinions, and thus vote, are of particular value anyway.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
To you and @rococobasilica - yeah, there's some general dislike (potentially justified!) of higher body counts, especially for wives. But - how strong is that? It doesn't seem to be anywhere near what the OP implies. Anecdotally, while my right-leaning friends care a lot (imo too much) about body count, my apolitical or liberal friends either don't care about, or care a bit but not much about, for instance 8 past partners, for a wife - and it's somewhat hard to tell but their actions don't seem to contradict it. They'd, ofc, find 50 past partners unappealing, but few women have that so it's not a general issue. My experiences aren't universal obviously, social clustering is weird, but my guess is it's common enough, and the amount of caring about 8 past partners among non-conservatives small enough, that OP's worry about 'promiscuous women not finding partners because men aren't interested' isn't a big issue for feminism.
Why do they do this if they don't feel the number lowers their status? Do you believe women are just being paranoid?
No, it does a bit, just not that much. People lie about all sorts of things. Men lie about their height, everyone lies about attractiveness, even though everyone can already see them.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The 'the MSM is trying to hide the real story with fake stories' thing doesn't really make sense. Media is generally incentivized to print entertaining but meaningless stuff to get attention, whether or not there's something to hide. There isn't a single week without something wacky like this. Plus, it's tucker appearing on a podcast, not a fox news headline.
I don't like the "not in control of their actions" idea. Someone with a mental illness doesn't have an entirely separate process intruding on their thoughts - they're taking actions with the same complex network of neurological processes (that aren't understood too well), just either there's some biochemical defect (autoimmune-induced schizophrenia?), or some other social/environmental factor, causing parts of it to be slightly off. And that doesn't seem like 'loss of control'. The 'person' is still 'in control of their actions' (which really is a tautological statement), the actions are just ... bad.
... as an illustration that doesn't have that much resemblance to real mental illness, say the same kind of mental defect gives one person an obsession with collecting baseball cards and another person an obsession with eating rocks. One might say 'the person isn't in control of their actions, they have to eat rocks'. But one wouldn't say that of someone who really likes collecting baseball cards!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
It's interesting how this particular manner of writing is common among people who are vaguely "conspiracy theorists", or who are vaguely but ominously musing about dark, shadowy conspiracies.
Very frequent line breaks, jumping from topic to topic, a narrative/story-like flow, vague hints.
[not saying this as evidence your points are wrong, good points are sometimes made with weird modes of speaking, but association is strong]
That isn't what "base rate" means, base rate would be "rate in a larger population", not "rate among people who I've heard of in the news". Most obviously, taking 'two trans in government' as true, there are other high status positions with only few trans people - powerful executives (such as martine rothblatt ), celebrities, transgender state legislators. Each category increases the overall sample size, making 'one in two' much less obvious.
Also, they aren't transgender - "Brinton is bisexual.[9] Brinton, the first openly gender-fluid individual in federal government leadership, uses they and them pronouns.[1][5][6]". Transgender is sometimes used to include 'nonbinary/genderfluid' descriptively, but more in the 'everyone is queer uwu' sense than a literal one.
In terms of base rates, of the dozens of productive and competent transwoman software engineers I know of (whose economic value outweighs occasional purse theft) ... a decent few are 'sexual deviants', but almost none of them have committed crimes related to it.
Also, this isn't "outing" brinton as a sexual deviant, they were publicly a kink activist and did drag beforehand.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I don't think the optimal covid response involved lockdowns, but that doesn't mean the best case is "midwit morons". A week / month-long lockdown wouldn't have been that bad - even lockdowns as they were just weren't that bad compared to the 200-year history of american political/economic mistakes!
Covid's mortality rate was, on a log scale, only a bit worse than the flu. Diseases with 10-100x higher mortality rates can exist - smallpox, the original SARS, etc - and lockdowns would be justified for those.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
and rural areas dependent on urban areas for things like finance, communications, and media
Technology, logistics, military too! That severely understates the dependence (also, the 'rural' population of america is ~ 15% iirc, rest is urban + suburban).
Although, does a WFH stripe employee living in the woods count as 'rural' here?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Again we can separate out 'is degenerate, is disgusting, is perverted, should be condemned, mixes the meanings of sexual acts' from 'is straight'. If a guy enjoys having a domme put a vibrating toy up his ass, that doesn't seem 'not-straight' in the sense of 'wants to have sex with men'. Even if a guy enjoys the feeling of the thing, it really isn't obvious why it's "a pseudo phallus" that matters, if e.g. he isn't playing into that in the masturbation fantasy.
What if he regularly engages in anal sex with men, but not because he is attracted to men per-se but just because he finds that they are more capable of stimulating him physically in certain ways? Is that not gay either?
I mean - what does "gay" actually mean here? I'm sure there's at least one straight person in history who is as straight as anyone, and naturally uninterested in men as anyone (although it's not clear how 'natural' desire is for bisexual people, so this may be a meaningless statement), but regularly engages in gay sex for some weird idiosyncratic reason. Not that that's a meaningful fraction of people, but it is possible. So can't 'gay' mean multiple things - 'desires sex with men', 'has sex with men'? And - from this distinction, sure anal penetration is like sex with men, but - let's say lesbians 'have sex' and involve a dildo, does that make the woman straight?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Is eigenrobot far-right? He certainly leans that way a bit but is still, like scott, still antiracist, prolgbt, etc
On eigenrobot's essay itself:
Donors being anonymous doesn't solve anything, they can still influence secretly, and even if they don't the 'power' just moves, someone / a group of people still publicly distribute the money and they have the same incentives.
Decision-making within charities conducted by large voting bodies and randomized assignment, to make attempts at direct influence of decision-makers more cumbersome
democracy bad, this just makes your charity less effective because it's run by random people, and less possible to organize large scale action
'power corrupts, so power is bad' is dumb. you still need power and organization!
curious_straight_ca
7d ago
I also vaguely remember something like that happening? It might (or might not) have been this. https://time.com/collection-post/6140206/cultivated-meat-passes-the-taste-test/
Again keep in mind that I'm comparing this to shitty meat. I don't even like shitty meat.
curious_straight_ca
1mo ago
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.
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!
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.
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