curious_straight_ca
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User ID: 1845
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
Obviously something else happened! Industry, newspaper, modernity, computer. And yet. Is it so implausible that the prophet that spoke to the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden with love has something to do with progressivism? And is a break with "savagery"?
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
The fact that American fails at empire is a good thing, both for us and for the world
Is it? It it good, for the millions of hungry and displaced Sudanese, that it's not administered by a western government? It's worth thinking carefully about. Sure, re-education camps and censorship are not great. But you named empire, more generally. Even given the authoritarianism, you'd probably rather live in China than in Sudan. It's easy to say you value freedom, but how many lives should be sacrificed on that altar? Africans would probably be closer to freedom, in a positive sense, if the transition to self-rule had happened in a more orderly fashion, or not happened at all. And those with power in Western countries like you do not find re-education camps appealing, and so probably wouldn't implement them.
Likewise, I think this is why the Sexual Revolution and the rest of the works of the Enlightenment are not going to last much longer. The lie only works when it hasn't been tested or when the results of the test can be concealed. We've been running the test for decades now, and the systems that work to hide the results are breaking down. Once our society completes its current trajectory, the ideological precursors that created and maintained the Sexual Revolution will no longer be capable of sustaining any degree of credibility.
Really? I think that a bunch of people will feel vaguely burned by the SR as adults and retreat towards conservatism, but this won't lead to lasting change and the youth will be even more progressive and sex-positive and weird, and the cycle will repeat just like it did the past two generations.
The question remains whether there is a coherent cluster of behavior that is naturally shameful to humans, which can be altered through significant effort, or if it's all just a random walk. I think it's the former.
Nature changes with time, though, for some people at points in history it was natural and healthy that it was shameful to not own a proper number of livestock. Now, that's not true anymore. People look at their situation and try to judge what should and shouldn't be shameful. Instincts in our genes are evolved, too, and as the environment changes the value of an instinct changes. Better to justify the kind of shame you want than just say it emerges naturally.
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
You've given us a picture of poverty. Is this painting social realism, a realistic and detailed study, or is it a cartoon collage of unrepresentative impressions?
Jumping straight from two YouTube videos to a diagnosis of social ills is, you'd think, a bad sign. What blows up on YouTube selects hard for being interesting, surprising, and generally stimulating. Youths stealing cars and livestreaming it, that's interesting! People who make decent money but waste it all embarrass themselves, pass the popcorn, not representative.
Rather, it is the culmination of various American policies which have created an underclass which sucks endless resources and only returns crime.
Evidence? What policies, which people? The second youtube channel certainly isn't an example (the guests seem to make about average income and just spend poorly, hardly 'sucking endless resources'), and the former are just a particularly newsworthy example of teenage criminals.
Unfettered illegal immigration further strangles poverty-stricken America ... Of course it helps the government are subsidizing migrants to the tune of $350 per day, or $127,750 per year per migrant which would launch them almost into the top 10% of earners in the United States.
$350/day is not at all representative of the money the govt spends on illegal immigrants per day, you know about it specifically because it's shockingly high (and that's money spent on "services", not money transferred to them), so it's not really a useful way to understand how unfettered illegal immigration is "strangling poverty-stricken America", considering it's specifically in NYC.
So the question remains, what can be done? It's quite possible liberal policy is somewhat correct but doesn't go far enough. Instead of social security checks, benefits should be more tied between work programs and corporations
This is the idea behind things like the EITC and work incentives!
There's something to the idea that a strong state should directly attempt to change the culture in the culture of the criminal underclass, but there's little in the way of good diagnosis or treatment here, "make them go work at amazon" isn't enough, the youth already have plenty of financial incentive to do so.
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
Perhaps government actions are often arbitrary? Maybe the person who did the former has different values, and has a different job, than the person who did the latter?
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
Thanks for posting, I liked reading it.
Social stratification seems unlikely, analogous to predicting only the rich will have advanced computing technology, meanwhile they use iphones and gpt4-turbo just like we do.
I think the hormone balancing part is very confused, intelligent people adapt their behavior to circumstances in complicated ways and hormones don't just generically modify behavior because it has to coexist / interact with the former
In general, concern about this sort of thing past a few generations is kind of obviated by AGI I think.
There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Sure, but anyone who's getting a sentence of a year is unlikely to be deterred by a single physical punishment. The tradeoff is more caning vs weeks. I'm not actually sure it's on the pareto frontier. Time in jail sucks in a way you can't shrug off, it's burning time you never get back, whereas pain is just pain, it goes away.I think a most people would just shrug off the pain and do it again, unless the pain was bad enough it corresponded to a lasting injury. (And then you get into things that aren't just 'not-progressive' they're just 'obviously evil' from the usual perspective like using medical science to create a drug that causes extreme pain without permanent damage!)
I think swiftness and consistency of enforcement is much more important than the kind of enforcement, anyway. Even if organized retail theft had no punishment at all, cops just grabbed you, returned the stuff, and dropped you off an hour away, it'd quickly stop because there'd be no benefit.
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
Surely there's somewhere in the code you could just add 'if username in ['guy1', 'guy2']: return'?
curious_straight_ca
1d ago
Please explain to me how the existence of a single "government affiliated kids BDSM club" is evidence they don't want people "making and distributing porn independently of party control"? Homemade, freely available porn gets billions of views every day on reddit and twitter, and of course there are many dedicated porn sites.
To be explicit, your reasoning is deeply flawed and your conclusions are nonsensical, it's like a rdrama comment. It's the 'one single coherent actor is behind every single news headline that annoys me and that thing is the PedoNazis' theory of politics
From the article UnHerd cites:
“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.”
“He had contemplated asking a friend to watch over him and be prepared to call emergency services in case his attempt led to a need for resuscitation,” Nadeau wrote.
After undergoing elective amputation, the nightmares and emotional distress immediately stopped, Nadeau said. The post-op pain resolved within a week, there was no “phantom pain” at one month follow-up and, without the two missing fingers, “he was able to pursue the life he envisioned as a complete human being without those two fingers bothering him.”
It’s not the first time amputation has been used as a treatment for BID. In the late 1990s, a surgeon in Scotland amputated one leg above the knee each in two men who’d felt a “desperate” need to be amputees, and who had been turned away by other doctors.
Despite the scandal that erupted, “At the end of the day I have no doubt that what I was doing was the correct thing for those patients,” the surgeon, Dr. Robert Smith, told a press conference.
The fact that there were only two fingers involved in the Quebec case, as opposed to a complete limb, made the decision to proceed easier for the medical team, Nadeau said.
If this now-amputee were me, I'd try to just get over it. Stop taking any action to either sate or resist the discomfort, meditate real hard, just feel it and let it burn out. I think it'd work for me.
But it's a mistake to not understand the other side's perspective. You have a guy who's constantly distressed, whose daily life is significantly impaired, who's begging for help, where many pharmaceutical and therapeutic interventions have failed, and a simple operation will fix his problem permanently. It makes a certain amount of sense, right? This guy's had this problem since he was a child, and it is a doctors' job to fix it, and nothing else is working.
It reminds me of
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
The Hair Dryer Incident was probably the biggest dispute I’ve seen in the mental hospital where I work. Most of the time all the psychiatrists get along and have pretty much the same opinion about important things, but people were at each other’s throats about the Hair Dryer Incident.
Basically, this one obsessive compulsive woman would drive to work every morning and worry she had left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house. So she’d drive back home to check that the hair dryer was off, then drive back to work, then worry that maybe she hadn’t really checked well enough, then drive back, and so on ten or twenty times a day.
It’s a pretty typical case of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but it was really interfering with her life. She worked some high-powered job – I think a lawyer – and she was constantly late to everything because of this driving back and forth, to the point where her career was in a downspin and she thought she would have to quit and go on disability. She wasn’t able to go out with friends, she wasn’t even able to go to restaurants because she would keep fretting she left the hair dryer on at home and have to rush back. She’d seen countless psychiatrists, psychologists, and counselors, she’d done all sorts of therapy, she’d taken every medication in the book, and none of them had helped.
So she came to my hospital and was seen by a colleague of mine, who told her “Hey, have you thought about just bringing the hair dryer with you?”
And it worked.
She would be driving to work in the morning, and she’d start worrying she’d left the hair dryer on and it was going to burn down her house, and so she’d look at the seat next to her, and there would be the hair dryer, right there. And she only had the one hair dryer, which was now accounted for. So she would let out a sigh of relief and keep driving to work.
And approximately half the psychiatrists at my hospital thought this was absolutely scandalous, and This Is Not How One Treats Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and what if it got out to the broader psychiatric community that instead of giving all of these high-tech medications and sophisticated therapies we were just telling people to put their hair dryers on the front seat of their car?
But I think the guy deserved a medal. Here’s someone who was totally untreatable by the normal methods, with a debilitating condition, and a drop-dead simple intervention that nobody else had thought of gave her her life back. If one day I open up my own psychiatric practice, I am half-seriously considering using a picture of a hair dryer as the logo, just to let everyone know where I stand on this issue.
Amputating a few fingers is somewhat more invasive than putting a hairdryer in your car. But it's the same principle, right?
That's from the categories are made for man, which Zack's spent a lot of time disagreeing with because, yes, it was about trans people and how to treat them. I didn't even remember that was why Scott told that story until I looked it up again today.
And, it's a good analogy, because this is what it feels like for a medical professional dealing with trans patients. You have adults who beg for hormone treatments, claim to be and appear to be in severe distress due to lacking them, and do indeed appear to improve after taking them. This is what it should look like! There are issues with kids, issues with surgery, but none of those undermine the obvious case for accepting trans people and treating them with hormones - it seems to make them happier and better. Again, yeah, edge cases, but the trans people I know are not perpetually depressed psychological wrecks like you'd expect from rw twitter memes, they're generally normal and happy.
Claiming otherwise requires some sophisticated reasoning, like one that claims happiness or sexual satisfaction are of little value themselves, and only matter when done for in line with a greater purpose - in this case, marriage and having children. And since trans individuals imitate the appearance of sexuality without the fertility backing it, it's bad. I agree with something like that.
Nothing specific to add to this* beyond despair. The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured
If A is evidence for B, B should be evidence for A, yes? "One man’s modus ponens is another man’s modus tollens?" If we took this case being a novel case of unnecessary amputation as evidence that trans ideology has thoroughly captured the medical system, or something like that, and then we observe that this isn't novel - I think we should doubt the reasoning that led to the claim of ideological capture.
edit: here is the paper about the case.
curious_straight_ca
16d ago
I don't sense much anger tbh. I might see a post get downvoted because it's too left-wing or something, but all the responses are still usually polite even when they disagree. Even when someone's accusing the outgroup of destroying civilization it's done in a very literary way over multiple paragraphs, as opposed to what you see on twitter
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
Funnily enough:
One of the earliest described cases of BID was termed apotemnophilia by Money in 1977
Yes, that John Money!
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
8d ago
I don't think this is perfect. There are a significant number of people who seem to have developed something like transness, whatever you want to call it (and maybe there are different things that cluster), people who describe themselves getting off to the idea of being a woman and wanting to wear female clothes and only then learning about being trans and really wanting to be that. Here's an example, and this isn't strong cherrypicking, I linked Zack's blog in this thread.
On 6 August 2006 (I was eighteen years old), while browsing Wikipedia (likely the 31 July revision of what is now the "Blanchard's transsexualism typology" article?), I came across the word autogynephilia for the first time, and immediately recognized that this was the word; this was the word for my thing.
I didn't know it was supposed to be controversial, and was actually surprised that it had been coined in the context of a theory of transsexualism; I had never had any reason to come up with any ludicrous rationalizations that I was somehow literally a girl in some unspecified metaphysical sense.
I wrote in my notebook:
THERE'S A WORD FOR IT. There's a word for it. I don't know whether to be happy that there's an adjective for what I have, or sad that other men have it, & that it's not mine, & only mine. Bless Wikipedia for showing me [...] But still, after all emotions have fitted themselves away, there is the word. "Autogynephilia." So simple; I know all the foreign roots; I should have thought of it. "Autogynephilic." That's what I am.
notebook: THERE'S A WORD FOR IT ...
And:
Scarcity is a metaphysical fact, so why am I hurt when my word (which I didn't invent & only discovered a few hours ago) has so many connotations attached to it that I don't like? The dictionary definition is perfect for me, but all the exposition after that has to do with transsexualism, which annoys me, although thinking of it now, I suppose it would seem to be a logical extension to some. I'm autogynephilic without being gender-dysphoric—or am I? If transitioning cheap & fast & painless & perfect—wouldn't I at least be tempted? What I can't stand is transsexuals who want to express the man/woman they "truly are inside"—because I don't think there's any such thing. It has to be about sex—because gender shouldn't exist.
A lot more people have this experience with 'being trans' than 'autogynephilia', and I've read the same thing about 'being trans'. I don't think this is compatible with an exclusively memetic diagnosis, even though I do think most currently trans individuals would desist and forget about everything related to it eventually if they were in a universe with no other (depending on your POV) TruTrans people / people believing in the meme. And I think as a result your ethical grounding has to actually be able to claim 'no, these people who didn't get it memetically shouldn't transition either' if you want to claim that the concept as a whole should go.
curious_straight_ca
18d ago
I don't see how placing a hairdryer in your car violates Primum non nocere.
They did try, first, doing no harm - "attempts at “non-invasive” relief, including cognitive behavioural therapy, Prozac-like antidepressants and exposure therapy".
Well, some and some. From my understanding, having read Jesse Singal's deep dives into this issue, the evidence base is a lot more mixed than trans activists would have us believe.
My recollection of the deep dives is mostly that the scientific evidence isn't strong either way, but both from my recollection of those studies and from anecdotes, most adults who go on hormones are happy about that, and even most adults who eventually stop taking hormones are happy about the fact they took hormones. There's clearly a large core group MtFs who are very committed to being trans and seem to (not necessarily counterfactually, just before and after) be happier as a result.
If you have examples of cases of bodily integrity disorder being treated with amputation prior to the modern trans activist movement, I would love to see them
I mean, the leg amputated in the 1990s I quoted above. I'm not claiming it has no relationship to trans activism, just that "The Anglophone medical establishment appears to be fully ideologically captured" isn't a justified conclusion from this particular amputation and a single paper connecting BID to transgender people.
It's much harder to deny that individual genetic differences in IQ exist than that group differences exist - the science on the former is, in fact, settled. And if one views race as little more than different distributions of genes caused by ancestry, what's truly different about being low IQ because your two parents were vs being low IQ because you're of a certain race? In either case, an identifiable group of people is noticeably dumber. So, race HBD or not, the moral problem persists anyway, replace "race" with "class" in your post and little changes.
And "fruitless all along" - not at all, few hereditarians claim blacks didn't benefit significantly from desegregation and civil rights, few claim the IQ gap didn't close at all. And genetic enhancement is coming!
Also, just a guess, decent chance OP is a troll.
and which can drop non-blinded studies one level in assessed quality, thus preventing many non-blinded studies from qualifying as high quality evidence
Were there even any randomized, non-blinded studies cited? I skimmed the references and didn't see anything. And it'd make sense that there aren't any randomized trials of puberty blockers or hormones given the emotional weight everyone puts on the issue. I'm not sure how this is relevant unless there are specific 'non-blinded studies' that aren't classified as 'high quality'.
Or maybe you're referring to a more sophisticated criticism, that these "critics" are making. What critics? Where? May we have a link?
Why make this particular criticism? How does it tie into the main claims the report makes? Can you at least outline the core of the report, what it wants to tell us and how it attempts to support those claims, before you attempt to undermine it? This is like a twitter swipe - take a thing, point out a "flaw", write like this flaw is a critical flaw, and watch as everyone's satisfied that the bad guys were wrong again, without anyone involved understanding what the thing even is.
It'd be more interesting to explain the context behind the report - the politics and medical practice in youth transgender medicine in the UK for the past few years - and then explain what the report claims, and then go into the reactions it's gotten.
If you want a criticism, I think the best one is just: There are ethical (it's conversion therapy for the control group) and methodological reasons to not do RCTs in trans youth. Given that, we need to use the evidence we have, and a standard requiring RCTs is bad.
(edited because I used the wrong link)
I'd dispute that - there's a reason high quality evidence requires RCTs, it's because history has shown that observational studies are just not reliable. If you disagree, I'd suggest picking a specific study (not review) that this review considered low-quality but you think is good enough to form part of the foundation for a medical guideline, and we can critically examine it and see if it is. I don't think there are ethical reasons to not do RCTs for trans youth that wouldn't also apply to RCTs for treatments for deadly diseases, which we do all the time when it isn't clear if the treatment is beneficial or not. I think the methodological reasons are ... significant, but (guessing) not in fact worse than the problems with observational studies.
curious_straight_ca
19d ago
I suggested that there were people (besides professional artists themselves) who cared about whether art was AI-generated or not
I think this is more of an oversocialized, cancel-culture-inflected anger at AI art for taking jobs away from (furry, in this case) artists and writers, and less a genuine aesthetic preference against AI art.
Uh, you might have been able to generate more discussion by waiting ~12 hours and posting this in the new week's thread?
We should just display the last thread's comments in the new thread, that should just be a bit of code I think.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
This kind of stuff is why, despite being too dumb and lazy (for genetic reasons, surely) to understand the dense statistics that underpin much of the HBD cinematic universe*, I'm pretty skeptical of the whole thing.
This is (a bit) like being skeptical of biology because you read one of the thousand papers about how cinnamon cures cancer or something. Every field had bad papers, and every field has cranks on social media that believe the bad papers, even if the ratio is more like psychology than physics for HBD. If you focus on the good arguments, I don't think this is an issue.
curious_straight_ca
18d 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
20d ago
I don't have much to add, other than some fun excerpts from the first article for those who won't read the whole thing
Three years later, a British former undercover cop, who now works as a private investigator and goes by Jon, was hired to work for a client who had set up temporary residency at the Dorchester hotel, in London. The client was well built, with close-cropped hair and an even stubble. He was of Libyan background, but had grown up in France, spoke flawless English, and tipped the hotel staff with high-denomination notes. “He wanted countersurveillance on himself when he was in the U.K., to make sure that no one was following him,” Jon told me.
Jon doesn’t like the term “private investigator,” because he thinks it diminishes the scope of what he does. On an average day, he collects the travel histories and police files of five to ten targets, through contacts in the public sector. They don’t know his full name—they just know not to ask questions, and that they will be paid in cash. His clients include businesses, government agencies, and billionaires, and his duties range from spying on philandering spouses to helping international criminal gangs insure that a stolen passport can be used to get a murderer across a border. “There’s a lot that is very questionable that I can do, that I have done,” he said. “In the police, you have to have morals—or you’re meant to. That’s the whole point of being a police officer. And then you come out into the private sector and—let’s be honest—it really doesn’t matter.” For almost four hours, he spoke candidly, on the condition that I neither publish his full name nor describe him physically.
...
In the following months, the attacks on short sellers grew increasingly personal, and even violent. Fahmi Quadir was punched in the head by a masked man with brass knuckles while walking her poodle on the Upper West Side; she was knocked unconscious, and the assailant, who stole nothing, was never found.
It also appeared as if operatives were collecting detailed information on Nick Gold’s trades; in the next few months, all his leveraged bets were liquidated, with losses into the tens of millions of pounds. “My name was tarnished. Banks were now shutting me off, overnight,” Gold recalled. “My wife left me.”
If I read all that on some random substack, I wouldn't think twice about disbelieving and ignoring it.
Speaking of disbelieving, the authors of the second article are the same as the authors of the havana syndrome piece from last week, one I was as skeptical of as some others here. I'm genuinely not sure if / how much I should discount the content of the second article as a result - the Havana article does lay out its evidence in a way that makes the faulty inferences clear, while this new article directly states the main points, idk.
The USSR was flawed enough that after enough generational turnover for the revolutionary passion to wear off, the elites decided capitalism was better. I do think people overstate the extent to which communism doesn't work, that the arguments made about how bad communism and central planning and authoritarianism are prove way too much. But it's nice to have a wide variety of consumer goods, decentralized technology development, little state-backed political repression, few shortages, and for it to be very hard to expropriate a significant portion of the population or to cause a famine negligently or not. Cultural capital didn't produce the Randalls grocery store Yeltsin visited, it didn't produce America's global lead in technology, etc. "Communism doesn't work" is a reasonable way to say that.
curious_straight_ca
22d ago
it does not present a clear course of action
-
cease race-based affirmative action (and affirmative action more generally)
-
smart people should have more kids
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embryo selection (possible today), more direct genetic engineering (possible within a few decades)
curious_straight_ca
21d ago
That would be counterproductive
They're saying that ideas latent in Christianity, deeper currents that Christianity just represents an early emanation of - caring more for the downtrodden, poor, and weak than the strong, caring more about peace and salvation than greatness and power - are to blame for 'cucking Whites'. And that returning to Christianity won't solve that core problem. So this doesn't rebut their argument at all.
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