guesswho
9mo ago
Fair enough, although I'd like to see if I can sell you on the idea that if we ended Social Security, the 40 years olds who currently grumble about payroll taxes, would instead grumble about having to support their now-penniless retired parents. We'd still have to pay to support those old people somehow, so it's not 'free' money...
Of course, it could be that they'd just mostly move in with their kids, or we'd find some other solution that's less expensive than the current model, so in that sense maybe we are spending more on them now than we would without SS (but getting whatever benefit we get from old people being more independent... social engineering stuff, as you say).
If we're calling SS-style 'tax people then send out checks' government spending, then I'm a big proponent of a universal generous UBI (handled in the same way, tax everyone using progressive taxation then send out the same amount in checks, so it's effectively downward redistribution). I think we're kind of stuck in a sub-optimal Nashe equilibrium that produces a lot of unnecessary unproductive labor, because the universal 40 hour workweek is expected and people don't have the financial leverage to negotiate any changes to it.
I think we may as well make some big infrastructure improvements, including clean energy (counting nuclear) and massively increasing the supply of housing to drive down costs. Also the types of internet and community infrastructure projects needed to help people capable of doing remote work move out of cities, I feel like the population could be a lot less centralized at this point in our economic development.
I'd sort of like to see a massive effort to gather the type of data it would take to actually understand and map how modern technology (screens all the time, social media, engagement algorithms, etc) are affecting people and society, and test better options at large scales. Lots of individual researchers are studying those things but generally in small ways in small labs, I think a really big unified effort would be needed to do the type of data collection and analysis necessary to really learn much. I'm not sure the government is competent to do that, but they could at least provide enough resources to gather the data that other researchers could analyze.
guesswho
9mo ago
As someone with a sister-in-law who married into a higher socio-economic bracket and told stories, my impression is that it's basically a class marker for the people who can afford to get such things casually at a young age, or who can afford to not care about the downsides.
That's in Orange County, at least.
are involved in the political process in ways that may or may not be visible, legal or proper.
I feel like this summary is already overbroad in a way that makes it include both the motte and the bailey again.
Not visible? Of course, there a 3m federal employees and 20m state/local government employees, no one is going to be able to watch everything they all do every day. This seems obvious and value-neutral, definitely the motte of the term.
Not proper? Depends on who's definition of 'proper' you are using, and surely there are some improper things happening by any definition. Here people are going to disagree on how much it's happening and which things count based on their values and intuitions. May be motte or bailey depending on the details of the claim.
Not legal? Now this is definitely in the realm of accusations and condemnation, verging towards the conspiracy theory stuff that is the standard bailey for these discussions.
Basically, I think this definition falls prey to the 'jaywalking, littering, and murder' objection - people can be using this definition while talking about two radically different things (lack of visibility for good and proper actions vs. outright crimes of corruption) that imply radically different courses of action. So it's too broad to accomplish much and leads to people talking past each other.
guesswho
9mo ago
I'd think that 'The deep state stole the 2020 election for Biden' is a good place to start the discussion.
guesswho
9mo ago
The good argument against it is that it would be something that would likely produce tons of evidence of it's existence, and we have no such evidence, despite tons and tons of scrutiny on the matter? Which is pretty much the standard argument against most conspiracy theories.
Unless you do have evidence you want to cite, in which case, we'll probably disagree on what 'cabal' and 'controls' means. Obviously people have influence over things, and obviously when there's only two political parties some of those people will be political allies with each other, but I think 'cabal' and 'control' are both big stretches for the things that are already part of the public record.
guesswho
9mo ago
The we-be's then shape policy and culture to suit their own ends rather than the ends of the organization / society they're allegedly in service to.
I think the crux between this and the 'deep state' narrative is whether they do that in a coordinated and goal oriented way that leads to large impacts on the final output of the system, or if they each do it randomly based on their individual whims in a way that mostly adds noise and friction and inertia?
The former is what it feels like people are saying when they talk about 'the deep state did X', the latter is more just 'bureaucratic gridlock' and sounds like what I would expect from the poeple you're describing.
guesswho
9mo ago
Yup, as I predicted, I'm happy characterizing all that as 'various people and organizations having lots of influence over various things', I think calling that 'a cabal controlling the government' is misleading.
But w/e, if we agree on empirical reality and disagree on semantics, that's not always an unimportant distinction, but it's almost always a boring one.
The way that you are overplaying your hand here is precisely the phenomenon that leads to things like this being handled in a polarized and extremist way instead of a reasonable and measured way.
If 'This made someone uncomfortable and uneasy and was a minor violation of their autonomy that shouldn't have happened, an apology is in order and we should try to keep in mind not to do things like this' was an option on the table, both sides might be able to agree and we could make some progress without destroying anyone's life.
Instead you go to immediate dismissing of the incident as meaningless and normal, attacking the victim as dishonest and manipulative, and drawing battle lines while closing ranks. As a result, the only way to get any reaction of condemnation or acknowledgement of wrongdoing is to go just as extreme in the other direction, calling it a travesty and an attack and screaming for blood and sanctions, just to rally enough outrage to counter the backlash.
And to be clear, I'm not saying your side 'started it', both sides go to the extreme immediately because it is ingrained at this point. The chronology isn't what matters, what matters is whether you choose to participate in the game at all, or if you just decide to ignore it and give the actual measured take that you think would be correct in a world where no culture war existed.
guesswho
9mo ago
The fact that you can't remember cases of unremarkable things that didn't cause much of a fuss and weren't a very big story, is not very strong evidence that they don't exist.
Outrageous anecdotes of crazy shit are not just more memorable and more likely to be reported on a lot, they are also preferentially promoted and even created by media agencies and algorithms that base their business models on outrage engagement.
That's why it's dangerous to go off of your intuitions and impressions alone in cases like this.
guesswho
9mo ago
2 points:
1, I'm not so sure that this is a universal implication that people make about all men who have trouble dating. Rather, I think it's levied at specific communities of (mostly-online) men who complain about having trouble dating, or against men making specific types of complaints that pattern-match to rhetoric from those communities. And then there's a whole rabbit-hole of why people feel those communities are morally suspect, whether that's a fair judgement, whether that judgement is being applied overbroadly, etc.
2, As you point out, the first guess isn't a moral failing, it's a physical/social/economic failing ('fat basement-dwelling loser'). When it turns out that none of those explanations apply, it's natural that people would try to think of some other explanation for what is, after all, a surprising outcome statistically... and if none of physical, social, or economic failings are available as possible explanations, then yeah, some moral failing probably is one of the more likely remaining explanations.
Like, it's not surprising if someone can't succeed in basketball if they're not good at basketball and don't have the physical or mental attributes needed to succeed at it. If you then say 'no actually they're a 6'8" hugely gifted natural athlete with tons of self-discipline and determination and they were born with the resources and opportunities and support structures needed to focus on this and also they still can't make any headway' then at that point yeah you would start looking at less likely explanations for what is going on.
guesswho
9mo ago
I 100% agree with your point about touch starvation and think this is a major failing of our society.
And yet I assume you wouldn't take the argument you just made as a justification for rape, even though nothing in your argument explicitly excludes it.
This is obviously a matter of degrees, some types of non-consensual touching obviously cross the line into being likely enough to be harmful/unwanted that they are not justified by your argument. The question is where you draw that line, or how you behave around this issue so that you can gauge the line better in the situation (such as, you know, asking people what they want).
Your boss, grabbing your head so you can't get away and physically pulling you in, kissing you on the mouth, in front of millions of viewers locally and on camera, seems like something you could predict would be way over the line if you don't have a pre-existing social relationship that makes it seem appropriate. Even if you don't think that should be upsetting/traumatizing in your ideal world of casual touch, even if some pairs of people can do that in the current world and aren't upset by it, it seems quite predictable that many people would be very upset by it, and it should be over the line.
And I just want to point out, I think a major reason why we have this touch starvation problem is specifically because people (esp. women) cannot trust people (esp men) to be reasonable and careful about where that line is, in precisely the way her boss and you are demonstrating here. When men will take any ambiguity about boundaries as an excuse to push further and further towards unasked and random physic intimacy, and when other men will defend their actions to the death every time, then drawing incredibly strict boundaries a mile before the actual line and being incredibly paranoid about enforcing them becomes the sane strategy towards making sure no one crosses the actual line accidentally/casually.
This is again where I say: I wish both sides could just agree that this was understandable but over the line into inappropriate, a simple apology is called for and a reminder to everyone to be more careful. One side saying it was nothing or it's good actually while the other says it's a major violation that demands a head on a spike just means we can never make progress on building a new normal where everyone can trust actual boundaries to be respected and can be more casual about everything leading up to them.
guesswho
9mo ago
There may well be some number of individual cabals, they may well be influencing some number of things. Conspiracies absolutely exist; as you say we have evidence of many of them, and I happily acknowledge those.
But this is again a motte and bailey thing. Or a thing about being so casual with your language that what you communicate is qualitatively different from what you meant.
'Sometimes some cabals exist in the government and influence some things' is pretty much true.
'The Deep State is a secret cabal that controls the government' is not that.
It implies there's one single unified long-term-stable cabal, not lots of disparate and completely unrelated individual ones that spring up and fall apart in response to specific issues and opportunities.
It implies that this singular eternal cabal controls the entire government, that everything the government does is a reflection of their will and nothing else matters ('controls' is a much stronger claim than 'influences', what else could that word choice mean?).
And these claims are not just slightly different from each other, they produce massively different empirical predictions. Like, if there's a single cabal that controls everything about the government, then it should always have consistent goals in everything it does, it shouldn't break down along artisan lines, there should never be different internal factions bickering and working against each other, who you elect as representatives should never have ab effect on what the government is doing, etc. None of these things are actually true.
guesswho
9mo ago
Again, I 100% agree with that statement, while also thinking that this particular case is very plausibly over the line in even an ideal world.
Not sure if we actually disagree on anything, or just endorse slightly different lines.
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
8mo ago
Are you aware that psychologists and doctors are involved in this process?
The #1 institution in the world for convincing people not to transition is gender care clinics. Only a tiny fraction of people who come in for an initial consultation end up medically transitioning; most are dissuaded after talking to psychologists and doctors about whether it's actually the best path for them.
Right, and the kid should certainly tell their parents if they think it's reasonably safe to do so.
Teachers should certainly talk to kids about telling their parents and help them determine whether it's safe and encourage them to do so if it is.
But having the state step in front of that individual judgement and make a blanket policy for everyone will cause a lot of problems. As per usual for state overreach into personal lives.
guesswho
8mo ago
It certainly could be in between, but...
they share a broad ideology that shapes their motives and judgment
Do they?
Surely some of those individual people are democrats, and some are republicans, and some are libertarians, do all of them actually share a broad ideology with each other? Some of them are in the military and some are in the education department and some are in the parks department, do they all share a broad ideology with each other?
That's sort of my point, I'm sure it's true that you could name like 5 or 10 ideologies that large portions of them share and which are specific enough to vaguely predict the actions of the portion under that ideology. But 'the deep state' is used as a unitary term, and I don't think there's any single ideology that unifies their efforts in any way.
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
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
8mo ago
No?
This feels like you are verging into 'Hitler was a vegetarian so all vegetarians hate Jews' territory here.
guesswho
8mo ago
Factions and internal politics implies an organization where people are in some relation to each other.
The creative artists and the studio execs at Disney are two internal factions of a single organization that work together on projects while politicking against each other for how those projects are run.
The creative artists at Disney and the marketing execs at Nike are not internal factions of anything. They're just entirely disparate groups with nothing connecting them to each other.
Some things are conspiracies, some things aren't, the 'deep state' isn't.
And I swear to god, if we have to do another round of this, I'm just going to google up the legalpedia definition of a criminal conspiracy and let you argue against that.
guesswho
8mo ago
Read the rest of the comment though. Teachers aren't doing anything or making any decisions here, the children decide what they want and some teachers humor them to some degree if they are particularly indulgent or supportive.
The only question is whether the state should force teachers to inform on their kids to parents.
guesswho
8mo ago
Admittedly, this assertion is based on stuff I was reading at least a year ago and don't remember the exact providence of, and the SEO around anything trans related is so incredibly fucked by the culture war that now I can't find those sources in 3 minutes of google.
I did find numbers saying that over a 5 year period, 120k minors were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and 17k were put on puberty blockers or pills, suggesting that even among those who get a dysphoria diagnosis, the rates for going on to medical transition are very low, around 1/8th. But my claim is more that most people who go for a first consultation never get any diagnosis at all, so it's not exactly the same thing.
I remain confident that my claim is correct, but won't expect others to take my word for it if they have different intuitions. Based on my knowledge of how the diagnostic pipeline works in general it would seem very surprising to me if it weren't true just on priors, but meh.
guesswho
8mo ago
Then again, teaching kids postmodernist theories of identity in compulsory schools is an even bigger overreach into personal lives.
First of all, no, teaching ideas is not a hostile act. If it is then we would need to have a serious conversation about teaching religion, and everything else.
Second, what exactly is it that you imagine is happening in schools? I'm sure schools in California have library books that talk about gender, and maybe as many as some kids have ever read them, but it's not going to be in the curriculum or on a test or anything.
what is the argument for stopping the overreach at informing the parents about their children's behavior in school?
Two wrongs don't make a right, I guess?
Doing a bad thing doesn't become good just because you're also doing a second bad thing. I'm not sure what argument you're really trying to make here.
I'm 100% onboard with having a magnitudes-richer space program and reevaluating our budget priorities. But I just wanted to raise a minor note of pushback on this specific (very common) rhetoric.
Social security mostly takes the form of 'We take in $X dollars in taxes, we send out $X dollars in direct checks to citizens'.
While it is certainly included in all the charts of the federal budget, I always find it mistaken/disingenuous to call something like this 'government spending.'
It's just a redistribution program. The government isn't taking money from people and spending it on government programs, it's taking money from people and giving it to other people.
It's certainly a huge redistribution program that constitutes major social engineering, but it's not exactly spending in the way that a space program or a military or the FDA are spending. It's paid for by a dedicated tax just for itself.
If the military went away, the government would have a lot of freed up money to spend on different things. And if they lowered taxes by the amount the military cost, the the people would have more money to spend on things than they did before.
If Social Security went away, it would be hard to justify not also getting rid of Social Security taxes, so the government wouldn't have more to spend on other things. And the people wouldn't have more to spend on other things, either, since they were already getting that money back in direct checks anyway.
I agree that we should direct a bunch of the federal budget to space flight and other big ambitious projects. But it feels disingenuous/mistaken to look at things like Social Security when making those comparisons.
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