curious_straight_ca
No bio...
User ID: 1845
"Extremely implausible a priori, crimestop" is going way too far, it's basically "boo outgroup". Evolved mechanisms can be surprisingly flexible in some ways while being totally inflexible in others. How 'plausible, a priori' are XY females? The 10 vs 50 comparison is just dumb, nobody who claims blockers are reversible would claim they're reversible after 50, they're claiming blockers are reversible within the bounds of normal use, delaying puberty for a few years. And more directly - a few years of puberty delay is (probably) within the natural variation of puberty among human populations. I think 'puberty blockers are reversible' ends up being true for >75% of people who take them?
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Brianna's activism isn't mostly for 'ethnic spoils for my tribe', it's mostly for 'pls stop killing us racists :(((('.
Also, white people aren’t allowed to be considered downtrodden
There's clearly a racial component, but people like brianna are more than happy to complain about police violence, poverty, or the opioid epidemic among poor whites, and try to help them with policy.
I think there's a thing here where, in order to 'fight the left' while still maintaining progressive moral values, people rhetorically twist the left's actions into what the left calls evil - so "white genocide", "black ethnic tribalism", "the left wants us dead", etc, even though those are not accurate. Considering the idea of 'should carjackers be killed', outside the context of 'if they are black' or 'if they are 13', is more useful - and brings up - is every life 'of equal value'? Where does the 'value' of human life come from?
curious_straight_ca
8mo ago
How is that an argument for trusting mainstream newspapers on a culture war topic
It isn't, it's an argument that we do already trust mainstream newspapers as much as we trust random internet commenters in many areas.
Newspapers can be wrong all they want, it's their dishonesty that's the problem
I think most instances of newspaper 'dishonesty' that we identify are more unintentional mistakes or poor socially influenced reasoning that's amplified due to other social dynamics, rather than the kind of thing you're (presumably) imagining where someone says or thinks 'wow, we better not post this because it proves our enemies right!'. The reason I think this is you can watch that happen organically in internet communities of both left and right wingers, and the information they produce is less reliable than that of the media. Not that explicit intentional dishonesty doesn't exist, it's just much less common - and it's also not obvious it's more frequent in the mainstream media than random internet people.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
My point is that, if that's what's happening, because a 50% increase in homicides is a lot, there will be many anecdotes or sorts of evidence of the form 'our group is getting much less police pressure now, and are able to operate in more parts of the city', or jail occupancy rates for specific severe crimes significantly decreasing, or officers reporting seeing - many times - letting someone go for a mid-tier crime and seeing them commit more crimes, at a rate 50% higher than in 2019.
Just staring at a 'blm graph' and a 'homicide graph' and observing they both go up in 2020 isn't enough to prove that. Nor are a dozen or even a hundred articles about 'X was released after arrest crime Y and then committed crime Z later', because those articles also existed in 2019, and the way media reporting works, the numerical effect of media attention and people sharing articles totally overwhelms any signal in frequency relative to a mere 50% increase.
To be clear, "the media" are, at their core, just a ton of very smart and driven people who also happen to be, mostly, progressive. Nothing stops driven conservatives from reporting on the misdeeds of liberal justices, other than a lack of conservative reporters (as in Trace's earlier post), or a lack of misdeeds.
I think it's entirely possible the liberal justices haven't done anything similarly bad? Thomas's actions are specific things that might or might not have happened. I could see an alternate history where Thomas didn't do what he did. I can see a history where the liberal justices and thomas both did similar things. So I can also see a history where Thomas did that and liberal justices didn't do something similar. Like, Bob Menendez chaired Foreign Relations, and he happened to be a democrat. It totally could've been a Republican who did that, but it wasn't.
(also: Liberal Media didn't seem hesitant to report on Menendez's misdeeds. Obviously supreme court justices are more of a sore spot, but it's a comparison)
curious_straight_ca
9mo ago
The vaccines were kinda sorta effective, but not in the way that I had hoped they would be
I mean, they strongly prevented severe illness and death, which is the only really important thing.
It became clear that there was not going to be a covid-free future and the best we could do was get vaxxed and get on with life
To my knowledge, current circulating covid variants are not causing excess mortality, so that's as good of an outcome as being covid-free? It seems a bit convenient and too-many-degrees-of-freedom that the vaccines prevented death, and then the variants independently became less deadly and now covid's not an issue, but I think that's what happened. So I don't think that our current situation is particularly non-ideal, or that the vaccines failed in some significant way.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
99% of transgender"ism" is all the things trans people actually do - gender dysphoria, hormones and surgery, dressing and acting and speaking and looking like a girl. 1% of it is "forcing conservatives to use the right pronouns". that may be the part you're objecting to, but that doesn't make transgenderism communal.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The topic in OP was "gay marriage", though. It's possible to have fair working conditions without purges (see: any modern country) - do you have any reason to believe "gay marriage or trans acceptance" necessitates "scalpel to your 14yo daughter's chest"?
It's much better to actually take issue with trans as a whole.
As an analogy, the gay rights movement came alongside a movement for free love more generally, which included love at any age - hence stuff like this and this. But as gay rights 'won', pedophile rights did not. It's still possible that something about the philosophies behind LGBT also justify pedophilia or transitioning minors in a way representative of why some LGBT things are bad, but that should be argued, instead of just vaguely hinted at with 'scalpel to 14yo daughter's chest'.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
There's nothing low-IQ about being suspicious about the biological effects of ubiquitous, evolutionarily novel, and persistent environmental toxins. There is something low IQ about thinking the gubmint is fluoridating our tap water and making us eat bugs to make us feminine and compliant with the globalist agenda.
Similarly, there's nothing low IQ about trying to understand the way political ideas spread and gain traction among networks of 'elites'. There is something low IQ about thinking the WEF NWO is trying to mark of the beast chip population control.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Yeah, because the blues told them to! Those peoples' ancestors would be in agony if they saw their great granddaughters' mixed-race husbands today. This doesn't make them wrong, but does indicate the "red tribe" isn't as red as they used to be.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
Musk is based and anti-woke
Based just means 'guy i like' now. Communists have been saying 'based' since 2016. Musk is an independent centrist who is good at engineering and management. Maybe that'll change! His memes, and those of his supporters, are about as funny as r/AdviceAnimals. I'll take @rapegroyper1488 and @gaypissretard420 being unbanned (not ironic), but that doesn't make him 'based' or right-wing or make his twitter decisions competent.
The real question is, why does the left hate an anti-establishment, egalitarian, and pro-meritocratic guy like Musk? Could it be because the left is the establishment now? And they fear losing their power?
the right has been saying 'whoa the left is powerful and bad and doesnt like us' for a century now, it clearly isn't enough to just go 'whoa what if the left isnt nice' over and over
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The thing is, 90% of the population will always be making unfunny, low-IQ jokes about their $outgroup. The pro-musk people are incredibly unfunny and cringe being pro-musk, anti-musk people are the same. Picking a side off of that is dumb.
curious_straight_ca
4mo ago
You can look at it in terms of DALYs, or just 'even weighting every life equally, sixty more years is 60x as valuable as one more year'. I prefer to look at it in terms of what one does with that time - productive work done, depth and complexity of experience, et cetera, and young peoples' time is certainly even more valuable by that metric. At the same time, I think lockdowns were more 'dumb and avoidable' rather than 'awful terrible catastrophe'. It was dumb, wasted a bunch of effort, but it was fine, and like 75% of the population thought it was a good idea and actively went along with it at the time. And modern society wastes plenty more effort and time than at the best of times, so whatever. Half of everything is broken and evil, to react with terror and rage to a particular instance while not noticing the rest is simply mistaken, and if you notice it all the "OMG THEY ARE FASCISTS WTF" no longer seems particularly useful. We're all fascists by that standard.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
The idea of the piece is that they're right and honest about most things, not that they're right and honest about every thing. Yeah, wrong about russiagate, but right about most of the ukraine invasion, 'who won the presidential elections', TSMC's american investments, china's lock downs, and tens of thousands of other things, small and large.
I cannot point to a single period of my life where those mainstream news organisations have not been staking their credibility on claims which have later been proven to not just be false, but so easily demonstrable as false that ignorance cannot be an excuse for their coverage
Since the media reports on many things during year-long time periods, this is entirely compatible with 'most'.
From Hanania's original article:
[...] I go on to explain how non-leftists can have a healthier relationship with the media, and close with some thoughts on why hysterical complaints about the press are ultimately counterproductive and self-defeating. Blind media hate creates a dumber society, with this effect influencing the conservative movement most of all, while making reform much less likely.
Someone who wants to "reform" the media to fix their blindspots on race, right-wing politics is not endorsing those stances.
And can you give an example of NYT/Rand differences in ukraine that are so 'vast'?
How would you attribute increasing 'acceptance' of homosexuality and trans people in society to "a higher power imposing our will on our opponents"? One could argue media, or social media, are playing a significant role, but that's not exactly "executing your will", more persuasion.
about TRA groups saying their best strategy was to approach MPs or other people with power quietly
This clearly isn't the general strategy of 'trans activists', who are all over twitter and are present on left-leaning TV and news websites with stories about legislation to protect trans people, how transphobia is bad, etc. 'Approach people with power quietly' is often a good strategy for actually getting legislation passed, whatever the area.
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
What do you think a (sufficiently intelligent and non-seething) LGBT-supporter would say when they hear that response?
Maybe ">90% of trans people are over 18, and maybe 2% of them are in prison. Trans people just want to be accepted as the gender they are, and put a lot of effort into being, and be treated similarly to anyone else. You're picking particularly contentious niches-within-niches - many trans people don't even get surgery, those that do >95% of the time get them over age 18, and even those who get surgery under 18 are 16-17, not 14. Why focus on those, when the bulk of what we want are thinks like insurance-covered hormones for adults and general social acceptance?"
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
I do not think it is an exaggeration to say that its touch was felt in every facet of adult life nation-wide
Eh sure, but BLM is just one tiny facet of progressivism. Progressivism/universalism has transformed every facet of adult life, as opposed to touched.
Basically - 'X was very important' and 'Y was very important', together with 'maybe X caused Y', does not prove 'X certainly caused Y'. I agree it's plausible and worth investigating.
There is clearer causation between the BLM movement and our current murder rate than there is between any social-science intervention and any given result in living memory
why do people make these arguments so much? This is (sort of) true because social science is garbage, not because BLM caused the murder rate. This only works in a sense that it lets you win an argument against some hypothetical interlocutor who likes social science, it doesn't prove anything else.
The law-enforcement systems it was directly and unambiguously aimed at experienced the largest-magnitude change ever recorded, almost immediately after these interventions began.
There's no way BLM was the largest change ever to US law enforcement. Surely something during e.g. the civil war was larger-magnitude. This doesn't address this specific point, but generally your arguments seem to be ... very presentist, making very grand statements about very current politics, instead of understanding things in a way that can be used to affect the systems involved. Yeah, BLM was very significant and not very nice, but what does that tell us about how BLM worked, or why it accomplished what it did, or how we can understand its effects or interact with similar movements in the future? Your claims are quite vague and very nonspecific, compared to the sort of detailed, specific evidence I'd like to see!
curious_straight_ca
1yr ago
This is my point about the conservative approach - even if you win "trans women in sports", that's a very minor facet people have managed to funnel a vague distaste for trans stuff into.
Is it accepted when someone can use self-ID to claim a woman-only scholarship, or a spot in boardroom that was supposed to go to a woman?
If a more competent transwomen, by virtue of being mostly male, takes a slot at google that was "meant for" a woman, so much the better for them and google!
"It's cherry-picked" doesn't go down well with "you must agree with me, or you're a bigot".
This isn't really a principled argument though. It's just a vague signal that "the people, the real americans" agree with you. What happens when, as with gays, and then gay marriage, the pill starts going down in five years? What if it's already going down fine for most people, and the snapshots of discontent are random and fleeting?
curious_straight_ca
1mo 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
4mo ago
There is a mountain of evidence masks did nothing.
Yes, I'm implying the competent country would design masks that worked.
Maybe the solution to doing well with covid is “don’t have a bunch of fat old people”
I did a whole thing about this a year or so ago, obesity is much much less of a risk factor than age. Old and thin people still died a lot, 20 year old fat people didn't.
curious_straight_ca
1yr 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
1yr 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
1yr 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"
You just said 'girlboss feminism bad' in five different ways. "poor choices", "success rare", "poor fit for reality". Not that much was communicated.
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