guajalote
1yr ago
In recent years being a "2000s liberal" who is "generally progressive, but not to the point of speech controls or whatever" has been increasingly labeled as right-wing or "right-adjacent" (e.g. Dave Chappelle). The fact that the Onion is able to occupy that space without getting tarred for it is a good sign, I think. Progressive friends of mine who have previously denounced people like Dave Chappelle and who opposed the Musk purchase of Twitter on the grounds that it would result in too much free speech are now sharing this Onion amicus with approval. I've seen literally no criticism of the brief from anyone. It feels like a subtle, yet tangible, vibe shift on free speech.
guajalote
1yr ago
This is what surprised me about the brief. If a "transgressive" comedian like Dave Chapelle or Matt Stone and Trey Parker had filed this amicus brief I wouldn't have batted an eye. But the Onion has obediently toed the party line for quite some time. And the party line has been hostile to full-throated defenses of free speech. The fact that a politically correct institution is defending free speech with no disclaimers is a positive sign.
I take your point, but can you think of any examples in the past couple of years of a politically correct organization putting out a statement defending free speech without some kind of caveat like "...but that doesn't mean freedom from consequences" or "...but we also acknowledge that free speech has been used to perpetuate systems of oppression." I can't think of any examples besides this one. I certainly can't think of any other examples that included a statement like "the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant."
guajalote
1yr ago
If those “tacked on” fines aren’t part of the sentence, by what authority are they being imposed? If you are legally obligated to pay a sum of money as a result of a criminal conviction, it seems to me you have been “sentenced” to pay that sum of money.
guajalote
1yr ago
It’s interesting that if you ask woke people to name their movement, they usually won’t have a name in mind, or they’ll say something general like “I support human rights for everyone” or “I believe in basic human decency.” If you’re not woke it’s easy to recognize the woke movement and its adherents, but a woke person is reluctant to apply the label because it has derogatory connotations.
I think we’re seeing sort of the same thing in reverse with the movement on the right for low status males that you describe. Its adherents don’t really have a name for it, but its critics are not shy about labeling it using terms like “incel,” “fascist,” or “semi-fascist.” I don’t know what term will ultimately stick, but I suspect it will be some kind of sneer term, similar to how “woke” is a sneer term.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think the normies are at least partly correct here. I think it's a mistake to say "I don't have a methodology for actually calculating my Baysean priors, but let me put a number on it anyway just to make myself more clear." You are not actually clarifying your position, you are obfuscating it.
In science, the concept of significant figures is extremely important because you have to represent the precision of your knowledge accurately. Lets say I have 1kg of lead and lead has a density of 11342 kg/m3, how many m3 of lead do I have? 1/11342 = .0000881679. Is it accurate to say I have ".0000881679m3" of lead? No, because that's representing an inaccurate degree of precision in my knowledge.
I think people reporting a Baysean prior of "90% confidence" are usually committing the same mistake -- they're misrepresenting the precision of their knowledge. Normies pick up on this and interpret it (correctly) as ludicrous overconfidence.
guajalote
1yr ago
90% of confidence plus or minus blah blah blah
Unless you are using some transparent methodology to calculate the confidence interval, this is even worse than just saying 90% because you are now claiming to know both your priors and the uncertainty of your priors with high levels of precision.
guajalote
1yr ago
I agree with your overall thesis, and I think it applies widely to many things including most economic policies. Also things like Covid lockdowns and school closures, which I'm surprised you didn't mention - even if only small costs were associated with these things, those costs would still be a big deal when distributed across the population.
But I think this is a weak example of your thesis:
Trans women are women: If some people experience pain because they're not considered to be in the social category they want to be in, what is the harm in everyone else agreeing that they are actually in that category? Why not consider trans women to be real women? This argument doesn't take into account the fact that words and categories are useful. In particular, they're useful to all the other people who are using those words and categories. For people who only want to date partners with whom they can reproduce, and for anyone who wants to predict others' behavior by knowing their biology, diluting the meaning of social categories and blurring their boundaries makes those categories less useful.
"Woman" was always a noisy signal for fertility and behavior. Only a tiny percentage of people (<0.5%) are transwomen, and only a fraction of them pass well enough that you would be confused about their birth sex. Injecting a tiny amount of noise into the predictive power of the term "woman" (which already had relatively weak predictive power) is I think too insignificant a cost to worry about, even when spread across the population.
That said, there are plenty of other costs associated with "transwomen are women." Things like transwomen in women's sports, the possibility of regret or detransitioning, and the fact that people are being censored for disagreeing with the orthodoxy.
guajalote
1yr ago
I agree this is a problem, but it's a different one than the OP pointed out. People should be free to speak as they wish.
guajalote
1yr ago
There are (conservative) cultures where it's considered semi-acceptable for married men to have sex outside the marriage. For example, I have met multiple women from Mexico who have expressed sentiments along the lines of "wives should never cheat, but if husbands cheat once in a while that's unfortunate but understandable."
guajalote
1yr ago
As an American who has traveled a fair amount in India and East Asia, I fully agree about bidets, though I prefer the East Asian style over the Indian "shower head" style.
I think the resistance to bidets in the US and UK is connected to a reflexive prudishness about them. When I had bidet toilets installed in my house a few months ago, my wife asked if they were "some kind of sex toy" and my plumber acted like I had asked him to indulge some weird fetish of mine.
guajalote
1yr ago
A not very bright friend of mine in college got stoned one time and was trying to express some kind of stoner thought about relativity, but kept referring to Einstein as "Frankenstein" and was confused why I kept laughing my ass off at him.
guajalote
1yr ago
There are two main reasons an organization like FIRE doesn't use arbitration: (1) it does not set any legal precedent and therefore the outcome is basically only relevant to the specific case at hand, and (2) arbitration is often more expensive than litigation because you must pay the arbitrator's fee, which is typically $1000-$2000 per day.
guajalote
1yr ago
My wife is Mexican and a big fan of GBBO. She isn't woke and wasn't offended by that episode per se, but we were both pretty disappointed at how phoned-in it seemed to be. Mexico has a huge variety of interesting baked goods, yet they chose a taco as the technical challenge? It's an extreme stretch to call that baking, and it felt like they were just too lazy to google "popular baked goods of Mexico."
guajalote
1yr ago
If escargot was the technical challenge in "French Week" of the GBBO, I'm pretty sure everyone would call BS since it's a baking show not a cooking show.
They didn't need to do some obscure baked good, it could have been something like conchas which are widely available in grocery stores in US border states.
guajalote
1yr ago
I've never heard of 50% of the stuff they make on GBBO.
FYI a torta is just a Mexican sandwich served on a sweet baguette-like roll. Basically a taco on bread. At least that would have required some actual baking.
This argument would seem to imply that you are entitled to demand sex from anyone unless they can give you a "desert-based" justification for their refusal to consent. Doesn't this argument contradict commonly held beliefs about the importance of consent and bodily autonomy?
To put a slightly starker point on it: doesn't this argument imply that "nice guys" (assuming they are genuinely nice and don't have "desert-based" flaws) are entitled to demand sex from any woman?
It’s blatantly obvious that this argument is that it’s immoral not to sleep with trans, and it’s blatantly obvious that that applies to, say, cis men not wanting to sleep with gay men too.
It's obvious this is the professor's intended conclusion, but other (presumably unintended) conclusions also follow from the same argument, and I think it's worth pointing those out as a way of testing the veracity of the argument.
I suspect that most women in practice can come up with non-ugliness related reasons. They probably already say things other than just ‘you’re ugly/short/poor, sorry’.
I suspect it would be surprisingly hard to justify those reasons, and at a minimum the professor's argument implies that such reasons can be wrong in an objective sense if they are not "desert based."
If a "nice guy" walks up to a random woman and politely asks her for sex, what sufficient "desert based" answer can she realistically give? Perhaps she says "you're a stranger and the fact that you would randomly proposition me for sex makes me uncomfortable, so I decline." But being a stranger is not a "desert based" flaw; the man did not choose to be a stranger. And respectfully propositioning a woman for sex does not seem like a "desert based" flaw either. In fact, the professor's argument implies that refusing sex is generally inappropriate except in specific cases, and therefore propositioning a random woman for sex would seem to be a reasonable request in most circumstances if the professor's argument is correct.
guajalote
1yr ago
If we're talking about racism, may-issue permitting laws have a long history of explicit racism, serving as ways of preventing black people from owning guns. Referring to may-issue laws, Frederick Douglass said "…while the Legislatures of the South can take from him (the black man) the right to keep and bear arms, as they can … the work of the Abolitionists is not finished.”
Stated another way, politicians are doing a great job at convincing us that society is safer, and it's tempting to believe them.
I don't really think the right to own guns is in any way contingent on the safety of society. Rather, as Douglass alluded to, the right is about freedom from bondage and tyrrany. It may well be that gun ownership makes society less safe, but more free, and that is a tradeoff I'm gladly willing to accept.
guajalote
1yr ago
How would such a rule be consistent with the professor's argument? First, many people live in relatively racially homogeneous communities, such that "I don't sleep with strangers" would by default mean "I don't sleep with members of other races." This is explicitly forbidden. Second, the status of a person as a stranger is an immutable characteristic and not a desert-based characteristic, so the professor's argument does not permit discriminating against people based on the fact that they are strangers.
guajalote
1yr ago
Can’t say I really understand this system. For example, how is Boston ranked higher than Houston? Houston has either the busiest or second busiest port in the US depending on how you measure it, Houston is just way larger than Boston in terms of population, Houston has a higher GDP than Boston, and it’s a major city for the energy and finance industries.
The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
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