guesswho
3mo ago
When NY Times starts investigating this page and wants to interview me as the one sympathetic-to-their-audience 'progressive' venturing into the lions den, I promise to tell them y'all are just misguided victims of radicalizing social media algorithms. Probably the best I can do.
guesswho
4mo ago
The reasoning is similar to regulations in which adults are not permitted to enter public playgrounds unless they are the parent or guardian of a child: obviously a child molester can simply ignore the regulation, but the regulation is designed to make bad actors more obvious to bystanders.
More right than you know.
Missing children are overwhelmingly runaways, actual abductions are overwhelmingly the parents, non-parent cases are overwhelmingly someone else known to the child, actual stranger abductions are overwhelmingly of teens.
Young children being abducted from a playground doesn't happen literally never, but it's so close to never that spending time thinking about it, and letting it drive larger policy issues, is both insane and counter-productive.
We talk about it because it's emotionally valent and easy to imagine. Not because it's important, not because it happens.
Same thing here. You can clearly imagine this situation in your mind, but it doesn't really happen. Not enough that we can actually say that trans bathroom rights make it more likely, not enough that it's worth warping public policy over.
Also, you know, the whole claim is mistaken to begin with, because: if trans people must use the bathroom of their birth gender, then Buck Angel has to use the women's room.
If your worry is that seeing male-looking people go into the women's room will make life more dangerous for women, then you should be in favor of letting trans people use the right bathrooms. Because way more male-looking people will go into trans bathrooms if you force all trans men to use them, than if you don't.
guesswho
4mo ago
Can I just take a moment to say:
Racists do not describe themselves as racists. They always have beliefs that re perfectly reasonable and normal from their own perspective, and generally have either sources of evidence they consider authoritative or arguments they consider persuasive to validate those beliefs.
That being said: are we all ok with calling BAP a racist, after posts like this?
And if not, who in the world could we call a racist, then?
I worry a lot that people in spaces like this one get blinded by the aesthetics of intellectualism and academic rigor. But it's actually not very hard to use big words and phrase thing in empirical framings. It's not even that hard to do a literature search and find the one paper out of 5,000 that has some stats supporting your view which you can cite.
But in many cases, it's pretty easy to tell when that stuff is all happening above someone's bottom line. This also relates to epistemic learned helplessness, with people being rightly skeptical of arguments and citations that seem persuasive but are highly optimized to seem that way by lots of distributed effort in some cases, but being more amenable to those types of arguments when they come from certain people/groups or support certain things they're disposed towards.
No matter how many epicycles go into justifying the position and adding layers of nuance to it, there has to be some point where you take a step back and notice that the only thing they care about is vilifying racial minorities, blaming all of our problems on them, and advocating for policies against them. There has to be a word for that position regardless of the aesthetics that it is cloaked in.
guesswho
3mo ago
This feels like such a stretch.
The central innovation of the Florida school curriculum lockdown controversy was the right starting to call anyone on the left who tried to help trans teens or teach anyone that gay people are a thing that exists 'groomers'.
Furnishing minors with alcohol and/or drugs so that you can lure them to your house and have drunken parties with them is quintessential actual grooming behavior, like, it's literally what actual groomers do to actual minors to actually statutorily rape them.
Which, I'm not saying that full sequence of events necessarily happened here, but come on. If your side is going to make the entire argument center on who is or isn't a groomer, 'my boyfriend and I throw drunken parties every week for local minors where we get wasted with them and get in psychical scuffles with them' cannot possibly be spun as a good look.
guesswho
8mo ago
You seem to just be imagining teachers to be some type of demonic criminal bent on destroying children's lives, and the children (re: teenagers old enough to be considered adults in most human cultures throughout society) to be these entirely non-agentic dolls with no sense of their own life and no knowledge about what is actually best for themselves. This seems entirely alien to me and it's unlikely we will be able to agree on much when our priors about how the world works are this far apart.
In particular:
If I ever had a child whose teacher presumed to know better than me what was best for my child, that would not be a problem to lightly overlook.
That is not what we are talking about. Teachers are not assigning children new pronouns against their will.
We are talking about children (again, primarily teens) knowing what is best for themselves, including what is best for their own safety.
It's an open question whether children do know better than their parents in any particular case, but the teacher isn't making any decisions here.
The idea that government employees would conceal information from parents about children is so horrifying to me.
What is the difference between 'concealing information about' and 'not informing on'? Because it's not like we're talking about a law preventing teachers from giving parents information, even when the teacher wants to; we're talking about a law forcing teachers to give parents information, even when they don't want to.
So what is the line about which information teachers should be forced to notify parents about? Is it horrifying for teachers not to notify parents if they find out a student is gay? Is it horrifying for teachers not to inform parents if a teen starts dating someone? Is it horrifying for teachers not to inform parents if a teen is flirting with someone? Is it horrifying for teachers not to inform parents if a teen gets an erection in class?
My feeling is that their is no line, it is not a teacher's duty to be informants on the personal lives of their students. It is a teacher's duty to teach them, and being an informant for the state to their parents makes that harder to do. If a parent cares about their child's life then it is their job to find out about it, and if they've scared their child into thinking it is literally not physically safe to tell them something then that is the parent's fuck-up and they're not entitled to state-sponsored spy operations.
guesswho
4mo ago
How does a prosperous society combat insidious "compassion"?
With actual compassion.
It's not like homelessness is an unsolvable problem.
Sure, we'd need to spend money on it, but not that much; do you have any idea how much money we spend on beer and makeup? More to the point, do you realize that the labor force participation rate for adults is around 62%? We have plenty of excess capacity that could be turned towards solving this problem, if we wanted to.
Hell, the biggest predictor of homelessness rates in an area is housing prices. We could make a big impact just by lifting the zoning restrictions that economists are already telling us to lift for non-compassionate reasons.
It may be true that some specific types of half-measures towards compassion are worse than nothing, but that doesn't mean we should accept doing nothing. It means we should use full measures.
but who ended up being right, people freaking out about the changes in Internet discourse seen in Tumblr Social Justice Warriors, or people claiming it was just a couple crazy kids on the Internet?
People claiming it was just a couple of cray kids on the internet.
The thing is, you can certainly point to things that the social justice movement has changed about the world, and be mad about them if that's your perspective.
But those things were not the central claims of the anti-SJWs at the time. The central claims were things about Otherkin and 53 genders and Muslims taking over city and raping all the women and Christians being persecuted into the shadows and of course of course of course children being groomed and abused and etc. etc. etc.
You do the same thing here:
but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors.
Again, the blood libel that absolutely did come up and that we were saying 'that never happens to' is 'Crazy mothers cutting of their 4-year-old's dick', and evidence is still that this never happens. The best you have is the one Reuters search of giant databases, which even assuming there are zero errors in that medical database with hundreds of millions of entries (which, just, NO, that's not true), lists '56 genital surgeries among patients ages 13 to 17 with a prior gender dysphoria diagnosis from 2019 to 2021'. Which, 1. 16 is the age of consent in most states, 16 and 17 year olds doing things is not the same claim as 'young kids are doing this thing', 2. that's just genital surgery of any kind, no data to indicate it's genital reconstruction surgery for purposes of medical transition, some people need genital surgery sometimes, 3. some people are born intersex or with other developmental abnormalities in the genitals, choosing how to resolve those at 17 isn't the central case for the trans debate at all, and 4. etc.
So, sure, maybe a few years ago, there were a few people saying 'I'm really worried that as many as eighteen 16-17 year olds per year might be getting genital reassignment surgeries, I wish they'd wait another year or two', and the correct reply to that would have been some measured response like 'Well the data is kind of ambiguous and I'm not sure it actually tells us that's happening at all, and since you're allowed to get married and have kids at that age I'm not sure it's hugely important to deny them this one life-altering decision while allowing so many others, and if the numbers are that small I'm not sure it makes sense to have the larger debate about the trans issue generally hinge so crucially on this tiny and ambiguous group of people, but sure, maybe a few people are making questionable decisions and should wait a year or two to be sure, maybe we send around a memo to doctors about that or something.'
But that measured take of 'I'm really worried that as many as eighteen 16-17 year olds per year might be getting genital reassignment surgeries, I wish they'd wait another year or two' is not something that I remember ever encountering from the loudest culture warriors on the other side, who I had to engage with if I wanted to have any public debate on this issue at all. The bailey was very much 'children are getting their genitals mutilated left and right,' to which I correctly said 'No, that's not happening.'
For both the trans issue and the SJW issue, there was probably a motte of people with limited nuanced predictions who were mostly correct, but the bailey where most of the rhetoric took place was very much wrong. This is not surprising or even unusually shameful, my side does it too, it's what pretty much always happens on every issue everywhere all the time. That's why it's such an important idea that their site is named after it.
What I do consider shameful is the perfect-hindsight/moving-the-goalposts tactic of bringing up vague memories of how people rejected your bailey in the past, and then going 'see, here is my perfectly reasonable motte, and remember how the other side rejected it back then? They sure have been proven wrong!'
This is part of why I don't try to keep score and issue recriminations (unless challenged, as here). I'm sure a lot of this is not intentional, that in hindsight you remember the argument being more about your motte, or that you personally did hold the motte in the past and interpreted people rejecting the bailey as rejecting you too. I'm sure I'd accidentally make mistakes like this one if I tried to keep score and issue recriminations. I just don't think it's worth it.
guesswho
5mo ago
In what way does the observed evidence differ from what we would see in a world where these officials genuinely care about and want to preserve democracy, and genuinely believe that the Constitution has been violated and that this is the appropriate legal remedy?
It feels like your bottom line is 'My opponents will lie and cheat to beat Trump' and therefore it doesn't matter what actually happens in reality, if it's something that hurts Trump then the explanation must be lying and cheating.
That's the type of totalizing philosophy that can't actually learn from new evidence or predict things with a causal model. It should be avoided wherever possible.
guesswho
1mo ago
Talk to actual high school students from not-very-well-educated areas about what does or doesn't count as rape or consent some day. 'If you paid for a nice meal doesn't she kind of owe you at least a blowjob' is far from the most troubling thing you will hear. Don't even ask about drugs and alcohol.
It's easy for well-educated affluent adults to think that 'teach men not to rape' sounds absurd, and must be some kind of dumb metaphorical power-grab in the culture war over where to place societal blame. But it is very much an extremely literal statement that is reasonably commensurate with how bad sex education is in many parts of the country.
guesswho
3mo ago
I mean, my memory is that the slippery slope people were not talking about transgenderism back then, they were talking about bestiality and pedophilia becoming accepted and mainstream. Same as they are now, same as they always are.
There's a difference between an advance prediction of 'X is a slippery slope that will lead specifically to Y', and a retroactive claim that 'X was the start of a slippery slope that has led us to current thing Z'.
You can make up a retroactive narrative about anything leading to anything, once you've observed them both.
But the religious people of the time didn't actually predict the things that have actually happened since then - or if they did, those predictions were tossed out alongside a barrage of thousands of other predictions that failed - and therefore, they are not 'vindicated' and don't get any credibility from it.
guesswho
4mo ago
I don't see much fuss about trans men using bathrooms
... Except for the law making it illegal in many states?
That seems like a fuss.
I seems like you're saying 'well Buck Angel can and should just casually break the law every day, it's no big deal'... Maybe if you're fighting for a law that you want lots of people to break every day, you should be fighting for a different law instead?
Listen, if people were passing bills that said 'You must have 1 year of HRT and FFS before using the women's room' in an effort specifically only to make sure trans women using the women's room mostly pass, that would still be contentious but it would at least be credible that that's what the laws are worried about and trying to fix.
That is not at all what the actual laws say, the actual laws say Buck Angel uses the women's room, and no one backing the laws in reality has any problem with that. The laws are anti-trans in concept, not just focused on a single set of outliers.
guesswho
7mo ago
Alright, I feel like I extremely reluctantly have to be the person to remind everyone that our legislative body was invaded by an angry mob and that a seated session of Congress which was counting electoral votes had to be evacuated in fear for their lives.
It is not unreasonable that the judiciary should think that there should be a trial over these and all the other actions actually at stake in this trial. If there were some dispassionate philosopher-lawyer who cared only for the letter of the law and it's enforcement, I would expect them to want to have a trial on these topics.
I'm not going to claim that the prosecutor or everyone at justice or etc. have no political motivations or desire for revenge or etc. at all, nor that everything is always 100% of the time being done in a perfectly professional and dispassionate way that has nothing to do with politics. Of course that's not true.
But, "The entire point of this prosecution is to hamper Trump's efforts to campaign"?
No, that's a nice side benefit for some of the people involved. There's very plausible crimes being tried here, real things really happened in the real world.
Everybody starts using the child's new names/pronouns in everything from casual conversations to official reports...and the parents don't notice for >2 years
You should listen to stories from educators who deal with these issues in reality.
Yes absolutely kids ask teachers to use different names/pronouns in class and the parents never find out.
Yes absolutely kids ask if they can use the gender-neutral single-stall bathroom next to the teacher's lounge, or change in bathroom stall instead of in front of the other kids, and parents never find out.
You can't 'ensure' that the parents never find out, but you can maximize your odds.
And even if they find out eventually, buying 6 months or a year or three years of time can be very important for a kid trying to build a secondary support network.
guesswho
1mo ago
At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else.
It is common to focus on the most extreme and most rare version of a problem as a rhetorical tactic to avoid addressing the most commons forms of the problem that actually affect the most people.
15 years ago no one though Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein were committing 'real' rape, so why bother raising a fuss over it? And AFAIK (IANAL), what we now call marital rape was legal across the country until the 1970s.
The expanding definition is a necessary step in actually confronting and preventing bad behavior.
I am also a high-decoupler (ie autist) who likes words to have crisp, unambiguous, and unchanging definitions. But I also acknowledge that words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want, and these type of shifting and ambiguous definitions are very often a result of someone tuning the language to accomplish something important and valuable.
guesswho
3mo ago
Next person who responds to the top level trying to start something is eating a ban.
Just to be clear, does this mean that people are allowed to make responses agreeing that the left is bad, but are not allowed to make responses arguing that the right is also bad?
Maybe if you are at the point of 'This post is bad to the point where most people replying in kind will be so bad that they deserve a ban', you should just remove the post? I think this is what lawyers call 'an attractive nuisance' at this point.
Pretty damn funny to me that OP who introduced this topic using that same terminology gets a one-line 'please phrase this better', and I responding using the exact same language get a four paragraph 'you are awful, you are terrible, I'm informing everyone else reading this that you're worthless' tirade. It might look less like a double-standard if you made one post modding the actual behavior that violates the rules, and a separate post with the personal attacks?
If no one should engage with posts like the one I'm replying to, why aren't the other 10 people who have done so getting a warning?
It's bad to engage with things that are egregiously wrong or offensive, because that draws more attention to them? That's a central tenant of cancel culture, surprised to see it endorsed here.
I literally (did)[https://www.themotte.org/post/882/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/188688?context=8#context] reply to Walterodim already, maybe you should look at my posts outside the report queue before confidently declaring what my posting tendencies are like?
And the only post I see by SCCReader is the reply to my own comment, I considered replying with 'Yeah of course you're right and the real answer here is that OP's premise is wrong and they're just being histrionic', but I thought that would be more rude and confrontational and not worth getting into!
guesswho
3mo ago
You might be more interested in debunking flat earthers if they dominated one of your primary social spaces.
guesswho
8mo ago
The question is not whether parents should ever be informed that a child is experiencing gender dysphoria; ideally, the child should tell them immediately.
The question is what happens in the rare cases where the child feels that it would not be safe to do this.
Child protective services does exist; some parents are bad parents, and the state is aware of this and has policies that acknowledge it.
Acknowledging that some parents are bad and need to be treated differently from other parents is in no way at odds with saying parents should generally be trusted to make good decisions for their children. It's just that every rule has exceptions.
The question here is what to do about exceptions. So far it has been up to the student and teacher's best judgement about what to do in each case, based on their local precise knowledge of the situation.
The proposal here is for the state to override that local judgement and regulate that all parents be treated the same no matter what, ignoring the possibility of legitimately dangerous exceptions.
This is big government overreach into people's private lives, in a way that's legitimately dangerous as well as onerous. And it's being done for clear culture war reasons, there's a reason we have 50 high-profile bills about trans kids in school and few to none about school funding or other things with much bigger impact.
guesswho
1mo ago
Thanks. I try to be careful about specifying when I'm saying what I believe, steelmanning what some group or person on the left might say about the topic, or playing devil's advocate to stress-test a position. I do get the feeling that people are often not noticing this distinction, maybe I can be more explicit about it or maybe that's a lost cause.
I do feel like this community many years ago (like, back when it was part of /r/ssc and right after) was much more interested in stress-testing ideas against devil's advocate objections, and searching for steelman representations of the opposition to learn about and discuss, and trying to pass ideological Turing tests. And it feels like here and now it's more often about gesturing at the 'loony left' being dumb and then expressing incredulity of people disagree. Not that it is/was 100% either one then or now, just feels like the types of conversations I'm trying to have are not appreciated the way they used to be.
guesswho
3mo ago
And the irresolvable difference here is just that I know a lot of trans people and think that allowing them to transition has been better for them and their lives than not allowing that, so I don't see anything unreasonable there.
I expect pedophilia and bestiality not to get normalized because kids and animals don't actually want to have sex with you, there's an actual victim there. I expect that the future will normalize a lot of things I find weird or upsetting but which don't actually harm anyone on net, which is how I see the trans movement.
We probably can't reconcile our predictions before reconciling that disagreement-in-fact.
guesswho
3mo ago
Let's just get all the "but of course he did it, he's the type of guy, grab 'em by the pussy" stuff out of the way. "Reade is crazy, she's a Russian asset, it was all lies". Ignore all that. Try, as far as you can, to put the background and any opinions you have on X versus Y out of your mind. Just go by the statements of what was accused and alleged and no interpretation "well of course A is the type to do this so B is telling the truth but C is not the type so D is lying"... Again, no 'afterwards we learned this or we heard that', just judge the two accounts on what is said here and which you find credible, if either, or both, or none.
Why are we ignoring humongous amounts of Bayesian evidence here, exactly?
Yeah, if we just took the singular initial victim statement and judged the case based on how persuasive that was out of context, then we might judge a lot of cases differently. Probably we would find in favor of educated and well-spoken victims who know how to craft a persuasive narrative. That's not a good thing.
Why does Carroll get an $83 million payout for Trump saying she's a liar while Reade - doesn't?
Because one was defamed and one wasn't?
'That didn't happen' said a few times in response to questions isn't defamation. Taking time out in a bunch of your stump speeches and social media posts to call her a whackjob and crazy liar and say you never met her and fire up your followers to attack and harass her and ruin her career is defamation.
Like a lot of cases that come up here, the reason Trump gets a harsher sentence/any punishment at all is his own behavior around the event at question. Yes, there's a difference between discovering that you accidentally held onto some confidential documents, immediately notifying the relevant agencies to turn them over and ask if there's anything else you should do, and ordering your staff to do an internal audit to make sure it hasn't happened anywhere else, vs intentionally taking dozens of boxes of confidential documents to your home, bragging about it and showing them to people, denying it and lying repeatedly when the feds inquire about it, trying to cover them up and hiding more when the feds come to get them, and etc. etc. etc. Malicious intent matters for sentencing.
guesswho
8mo ago
No?
This feels like you are verging into 'Hitler was a vegetarian so all vegetarians hate Jews' territory here.
This is a fully semantic argument, and in a semantic argument there's not a much stronger rebuttal than 'no one else is using the word that way, so if you do you're just failing to communicate.'
Also: if you agree it's bad behavior and that some people might do it without realizing that, do you agree they should be taught not to do that?
If so, you agree with the feminist message of 'teach men not to rape' in substance, and just have a semantic disagreement about one word.
guesswho
4mo ago
Yeah, I don't really care about gun control, I agree that people use school shootings for rhetorical purposes more than on logical grounds.
I think we waste too much time and energy and social capital on low-frequency high-salience events like this, enough so that we make things actively worse in total. Sure there are some common-sense things we should do, mostly just staying alert, but the scare mongering and warping of everyday life to accommodate the media-driven panics around these issues are really bad for our society and the people in it.
If you live most of your life surrounded by leftists and consuming leftist media, then of course leftist whining is the type of whining that is most annoying to you.
As someone with Republican relatives and in-laws, I assure you that rightist whining over the last four years has been both intolerable and often scary. I can't imagine what it's like to live in right-leaning communities at a time when most believe the election was stolen and they're living under the equivalent on an anti-pope.
4 years of Biden has not particularly enshrined leftist values into law, as far as I'm aware? Some of the massive infrastructure spending was earmarked towards renewable energy, I guess, but that's not exactly super-radicalized social justice leftism. As far as I can tell, the law has moved to the right significantly during Biden's term, because of Republicans owning the Supreme Court and most state legislatures.
Honestly, I think that the way to make things move right without backlash is to give in on the tiny culture war sticking points while persuading people on the underlying conservative norms.
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids. Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
Basically, assimilation. It's actually true that the basic conservative values are appealing to a lot of people, and a comfortable default for a lot more. A lot of people will happily fall back into those values without thinking about it, if you just stop doing things that look explicitly bigoted or unjust or cruel in ways that get them mad and turn them against you.
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