laxam
9mo ago
It's very bare minimum and the numbers are small, but I was surprised to see this pop up.
laxam
10mo ago
There were no great candidates in 2016, but probably any of them but Bush could have beaten Clinton fairly easily. Bush's name would have dragged him down harder with the kinds of voters he needed to make up for the lack of immigration restrictionists that we really got to see when it was just the primaries.
There was a time when people were thinking, "I we really going to end up with Bushes and Clinton's again?!"
laxam
8mo ago
Probably tiny. The problem is that, if the polls are accurate, this is a ludicrously close race and tiny errors can have huge effects.
laxam
8mo ago
They 'ratfucked' him because they were fully aware a self-identified socialist would get crushed in an American election and stood the chance of poisoning their brand for an extended period of time.
laxam
8mo ago
Out of your list, I think only Shapiro and Moore are actual national possibilities. The rest are some variation of Blue Scott Walkers or nobodies whose current media attention is pretty much an in-kind campaign contribution.
laxam
8mo ago
Inflation doesn't erode asset prices (going into assets is actually the way you're supposed to respond to inflation), it erodes cash balances.
laxam
8mo ago
invite them to live in our house designed to be a place for similar guys with similar interests to hang out
Isn't the whole point of the guy that he grew up around these kinds of white guys and he is a similar guy with similar interests?
laxam
9mo ago
Yep. It can be done, even when we were so much poorer 150 years ago. We could make something safer today, no doubt, for the vastly smaller numbers of people via our overall population and keep it affordable but we have, in addition to much greater wealth, much greater numbers of 'building codes'.
laxam
9mo ago
The Ron Paul fanaticism on the internet of 15 years ago was real, not calculated.
laxam
9mo ago
Marxist in the sense the orthodox Marxists were Hegelian
Except in the sense that Hegelianism means something more specific that Marxism isn't, a lot of what's wrong with Marc absolutely comes from an over reliance on Hegel. Marx was just another German working in a tradition of German historicism, but he took on a particularly Hegelian form of historicism that turned out to be congenial with generating evil outcomes.
laxam
9mo ago
Hopefully people don't actually put self worth into internet points.
I have bad news about the modern world.
laxam
9mo ago
Twenty years ago, in college, I was a neocon/hawkish liberal/big government conservative and I was wrong everything they were wrong about: the Iraq war, the idea "no excuses" schools were the solution to fix the racial achievement gap, the idea that modern economists had basically figured out the business cycle and how to stop it, that the gold standard was a barbarous relic, the idea that it's women who want "nice guys" and marriage and its men who are generally the cads.
Isn't it awesome how you've learned that all those things the people in the circles you moved in twenty years ago believed were wrong and all the things the people in the circles you move in now believe are right?
laxam
10mo ago
The basic idea behind trans ideology is that sometimes you get a person, a trans woman, who is born as a guy. Despite this, they feel a strong desire to modify their body to have breasts and a vagina. When they modify their body in this way, they become much happier - it is one of the most successful medical interventions, on that axis.
Yes, and this is a body dysmorphia, like phantom limb syndrome.
It may well be that the best treatment for gender/sex dysphoria is some form of physical transition surgery. But, if you can acknowledge that that is what is going on here, the only thing we really might disagree on is where exactly that line is on various axes of treatment.
Tada! Nothing circular, and nothing referring to any sort of immutable biology.
Of course, you're no longer talking about anything like 'gender' as separate from sex. Trans women are natal males who are born with an intense desire to be female and vice versa. This desire can cause such serious stress that it becomes clinical and they must be treated in some way, possibly (and, honestly, probably, once the evidence base catches up) including surgical transition.
I'm totally aware that plenty of trans activists want to go beyond this, of course
Yes, and they're the people I have a problem with. At heart, they're communists or the useful idiots of communists and their whole ideology destroys everything it touches, intentionally.
laxam
10mo ago
External Gender: When people greet me, they say "ma'am" instead of "sir". There's a wealth of subtler behaviors, but the basic idea here is that people perceived as "female" get treated differently than people perceived as "male".
This is the 'gender role' terminology: The social role played by a particular gender.
Internal Gender: I prefer being called "ma'am", and am happier when my external gender is "female". In a lot of magical stories, a character has their sex transformed by some magic. "Internal Gender" is when a character wants to transform back, which is fairly common. "Internal Gender" is the idea that if you body-swapped with your mom, you'd still want to be called "him" despite the uterus.
And this is the 'gender identity' or 'gender performance', depending on the exact thing being discussed: Either that internal feeling of what 'gender' you are or the behaviors that feel natural to you on account of your felt 'gender'.
But here is the hard part: What is 'gender' separate from all of those individual nouns? What does the modifier 'gender' alone mean in front of all of these?
The truth is that it's an empty signifier unless you treat it as as synonym for 'sex'. But that has a whole lot of implications that aren't like by the kind of activist theorists who invented 'gender' as something different: Someone with a 'gender identity' discordant with their physical sex has a body dysmorphia, for example, and not something more deeply psychologically central. If that's true, the drive to 'affirming' care runs up on the rocks of evidence based medicine, where it's not entirely clear that that paradigm is actually the best. And it also means there are only really two genders, because sex and gender are the same thing and there are, in humans, only one big gamete and one little gamete and the machinery to produce each (which may or may not actually work in any particular implementation). That means that the 'nonbinary' clique is a philosophically incoherent trend, rather than anything more meaningful (not like there is anything wrong with that -- there's a reason punk ranges from anarcho-communist radicals to skinhead Nazis: there's something at a the heart of punk that doesn't make sense or, more likely, there's really nothing there but loud, angry music).
But these results are disturbing, so the desperate pretense must be continue.
laxam
10mo ago
Progressive just wasn't a word used much at the time, but the kind of liberalism TOS/TNG Star Trek embodied could have pretty uncontroversially been called 'progressive'. It's not that modern progressives are claiming some past non-progressive ideology as their own, it's that the word 'progressive' itself has morphed in meaning since the 1960's (and before...), to the point where most people who would identify as 'progressive' today are really just Leftists. Most modern 'liberals' in the old progressive sense are just confused and can't tell this has happened.
laxam
10mo ago
And that sort of classical liberalism was controversial in the 60's when Star Trek was doing it with the OS and, if not controversial, at least something people had in mind as a sore point when TNG was doing it in the 80's.
laxam
10mo ago
Bush's lead was already shrinking before Trump came down the escalator. He had an early lead because he started with more name recognition, but he was not a strong candidate along any dimension except that vague sense of competency that came from having done a good job in Florida, which he failed parlay into actual success on the campaign trail.
Immigration was already an issue prior to 2016. The whole reason the autopsy had happened after 2012 was because the Republicans were already tentatively on the restrictionists side of the brewing crisis and had been for a while -- pretty much the entirety of the highly restrictive current legal environment was passed by Republicans in the 90s and 2000s. Unfortunately the only Republican President to serve after those laws came into effect was an immigration booster and Obama was never going to enforce the letter or the spirit of the law, so they never worked.
Cruz came from the right wing of the party on this debate. He may not have made it the center of his campaign -- but he may well have -- without Trump, but he already had the reputation and had already made it a important plank of his platform.
laxam
10mo ago
I am annoyed by how weak the Republicans are. Increasingly, 2016 seems to be a flash in the pan.
2016 wasn't a flash in the pan, it was a brick wall that all the momentum the right had been building since 2010 smashed to pieces against.
Touche. Strictly, it's meaningless to talk about a fundamentalist movement prior to the early 20th century and the Fundamentalist-Modernist battle. I apologize for carelessly using the terms synonymously.
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