naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100

It sounds like something omitted from your books is all the child labor. For most of human history, most of human labor was agricultural. Children grew up working alongside their parents, first through useless imitation ("play") and, as the years passed, through making small contributions, then large ones. Children qua children have been culturally loved and cherished to varying degrees depending on a host of factors, but only comparatively recently has childhood been idle. Everything really is childcare, when your work can be performed while you care for your children--and, as they grow, performed with your children. Well, in the 19th century we sort of collectively decided that child labor is bad, but was it bad because it was bad for children, or was it bad because it was exploitative? There are presumably non-exploitative ways for children to labor--otherwise there would be no children in film. Would it be a bad idea to extend that to other industries?
I'm not sure what, if anything, that adds to your analysis, it just struck me as maybe worth noting.
Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?
I feel like this warrants a lot more attention than I have seen it getting so far. Of course, antinatalist spaces are working to clarify the difference between anti-natalism and pro-mortalism, but bombing a fertility clinic is not merely pro-mortalism (unless you count embryos as human lives, I suppose, which none of the anti-natalists or pro-mortalists I know do).
But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?
Considered alongside the whole Ziz cult murder thing, I feel like I am watching the tentative re-emergence of something I have long associated with the 1970s or thereabouts (when it was all letter bombs and airplane hijacking)--radical intellectualism. From the 1980s through the 2000s, painting with a broad brush, my reflexive stereotype of terrorism was Islamic terrorism. This is very American of me, of course--this was also the operating era of the Tamil Tigers, for example, but most Americans could not say what country they threatened, nor point to it on a map. Terrorism--loosely defined as violence in furtherance of an ideology--is an idea that can be applied much more broadly than it normally is, but the central case seems most often to involve a racial, religious, or ethnic group acting in furtherance of identitarian interests. The connection between identitarianism and terrorism seems to me underexplored! But as a liberal who eschews both left- and right-identitarianism ("woke" and "alt-right," respectively) of course I would put it that way.
Anyway intellectual terrorism seems like a different sort of animal. It seems difficult to really get a group of people to cohere around pure ideas. The "rationalist movement," for example, is deeply fractious despite having managed to develop into something of an identity group, at least in San Francisco. But the left-wing prospiracy appears to have advanced to the point where it is sparking an increased number of violent radicals, declaring for causes that average people seem more likely to find confusing than anything else. To the average American, bombing a fertility clinic in the name of anti-natalism is like bombing a Chuck-E-Cheese in the name of anti-baloonism. "Well, that's obviously bad, but also... WTF? Was the bomber schizophrenic? Who's anti-baloonist?"
Here in the Motte we have rules against writing posts that are purely "can you believe what $OUTGROUP did" or picking the worst, most extreme examples of a group and holding them up as representative--so I want to add that I do not think anti-natalists are usually violent, or that bombing fertility clinics is especially representative of leftist political action. But of course the corporate news media gives no such disclaimers concerning, say, abortion clinic bombings or other right-coded "terrorism." Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe. To some extent I guess I'm Noticing this particular suicide bombing in part because the FBI is actually calling it terrorism--and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried. Because on reflection that doesn't actually sound like blue tribe terrorism, quite, even if it is "radical left" coded; it sounds like grey tribe terrorism. And while I am clearly not a member of either the Zizian or anti-natalist factions of the grey tribe, I think that distinction would be utterly lost on most people.
(Actually I experience something similar when people attack universities; many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had more of a platform, so that I could remind Republicans that there are still many conservative causes served by academia, and that some faculty members are broadly on their side and want to help. Please don't catch me in the crossfire...!)
I doubt the effect exists if one balanced for that first.
Maybe! There are certainly confounders galore. There have been a variety of attempts to do as you've suggested, or make other, similar adjustments. The most recent one I'm aware of is here. From the abstract:
First, we examine whether the conservative-liberal divide in self-assessments of mental health remains once we control for a wide variety of demographics, socioeconomic factors, and recent life experiences. We find that accounting for these alternative explanations reduces the gap by about 40%, but that ideology remains a strong predictor of mental health self-reports. Second, we conducted an experiment where we randomly assigned whether people were asked to evaluate their mental health or their overall mood. While conservatives report much higher mental health ratings, asking instead about overall mood eliminated the gap between liberals and conservatives. One explanation is that rather than a genuine mental health divide, conservatives may inflate their mental health ratings when asked, due to stigma surrounding the term. Another possibility is that ideological differences persist for some aspects of mental well-being, but not others.
I just can't help but notice that studies along these lines keep showing up, and keep generating the same kind of response. The 2023 study showing greater depressive affect in leftist teenagers, for example, generated dozens of think-pieces explaining that this was probably just a result of differences in self-reporting, or level of political engagement, or "hey maybe these kids should be depressed, if they're even remotely aware of how terrible things are." But as one of the more thorough essays (archive link to an American Affairs article) I've found on the matter suggests:
The well-being gap between liberals and conservatives is one of the most robust patterns in social science research. It is not a product of things that happened over the last decade or so; it goes back as far as the available data reach. The differences manifest across age, gender, race, religion, and other dimensions. They are not merely present in the United States, but in most other studied countries as well. Consequently, satisfying explanations of the gaps in reported well-being between liberals and conservatives would have to generalize beyond the present moment, beyond isolated cultural or geographic contexts, and beyond specific demographic group
...
[But the] implications and applications of these realities remain wide open to interpretation.
I think there might be a Berkson's paradox going on.
Very possibly, but I feel like just saying that employs Berkson's paradox as a thought-terminating cliche, rather than as a careful consideration of the observed clustered phenomena. Which correlation do you suspect might be spurious?
When I suggested that Lana is not just a person, but a personality, I meant it. Her post on the suicide forum made her a particularly extreme example of the type, but I know many women, including members of my family, who very much fit the type, though they haven't imploded their lives to quite the same spectacular degree. Some stay married (but often publicly declare their bisexuality), some get neopronouns, some keep their hair a natural color... but the commitment to wide-band political leftism combined with a willingness to excommunicate dissenters from their lives makes a pretty consistent through-line. Those things seem pretty obviously connected with the clustered phenomena--political leftism incentivizes sex and gender exploration, for example, and willingness to excommunicate others can extend to an unpersuaded spouse. Sociology is hard, but I'm not sure it's so hard that I should be willing to accept "nothing ever happens" as a refutation of the observations in this thread.
They appear to becoming more like performance art with time, which is likely the product of a growing audience.
This is absolutely my impression also.
History telling Fukuyama "We're done when I say we're done."
This is the most chillingly beautiful phrase I've read this week.
Buddhist or Shinto or something - I don't know, and I assume the creators of the ad didn't know either
I would assume Jainism! They sweep the ground in front of themselves as they walk, and wear facemasks to avoid inhaling bugs. You beat me to it by about 15 minutes.
I dislike the phrase "social contagion", which assumes that being trans is a negative and it's bad for it to spread.
You have this backward, I think--the phrase social contagion emerges from the conclusion, not the other way around. The phrase "social contagion" refers specifically to the vector for an illness. If we accept the "mental illness" model of psychology, then mental illness that spreads via social exposure is a "social contagion." To the best of my understanding, it is pretty well established that e.g. eating disorders exhibit social contagion. So, apparently, does suicide.
If gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then it's not a social contagion. But also: if gender dysphoria isn't an illness, then there's not really any good argument that insurance companies should be required to pay for treatment. (I know Scott Alexander has written about this, though to the best of my recollection he tends to be a bit allergic to drawing the obvious conclusions on trans issues, possibly because of his geographic bubble.) So gender dysphoria ends up in this weird superposition where trans advocates want it treated as an illness when that means they get money, but definitely not treated as an illness in any other context.
There are a variety of definitions out there for "mental illness" but the usual one is something like "a psychological condition that interferes with participation or satisfaction in ordinary, every day life." The standard goal of treatment is to eliminate that interference, but the sociological angle is that "ordinary, every day life" is a culturally constructed and often moving target. So yeah--dying your hair or getting a tattoo could indeed be a matter of "social contagion" if it interfered with everyday life--people who engage in extreme body modifications that make them mostly unemployable, for example, can probably even now be fairly described as suffering from a mental illness, possibly acquired through social contagion. But the more serious we are about pluralism, the harder it is to say what "ordinary, every day life" entails.
I don't think "the pro-trans tribe" would deny it if the name people used for it wasn't something which implies it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted.
The people who think transsexuality is (or is at least substantially) a matter of social contagion are generally agreed that it's a nefarious process that needs to be halted. Which, if it is a mental illness, seems like a fair assessment. Again, if it's not an illness, then related treatment is purely aesthetic, and very few people think health insurance or national health programs should cover body aesthetics (even when looking prettier seems likely to e.g. alleviate your depression).
But Rowling is not a good champion for that narrow, sensible point when she is clearly against social transition, and all forms of adult transition, as well.
Do you have a source for this? My understanding has long been that Rowling is totally fine with neopronouns, social transition, etc., and is indeed quite supportive of trans ideology in almost every context, far more so than e.g. a religious conservative. Rowling just doesn't think males should be permitted to compete against females in athletics, or placed in prison with them, or allowed into female-only shelters, or the like. Basically she has the classically feminist view that males, as a class, are dangerous to females, as a class, in ways that warrant giving certain unique recognition and advantages to females, which transsexuals born male are not; whether they are individually harmless is irrelevant to their continued membership in the suspect class. But if a male wants to put on some womanface and call himself Tina, Rowling seems happy to "yaass queen" him--just so long as he doesn't go flashing his penis in the girls' locker room.
Earlier today I was looking for a particular high resolution image. I don't know when Google removed resolution information from the results it returned, but I had to use DuckDuckGo and then TinEye to actually find what I was looking for--and even then, the level of linkrot I encountered was astonishing. A few weeks ago, I was looking for the source of a specific text string, but Google kept ignoring the way I put the string into quotation marks.
The enshittification of Google has been underway for a while now, but I feel like over the past few years it has accelerated precipitously, and AI is just the tip of that iceberg. Google search no longer exists to return useful results (even if that was not its main purpose to begin with, I at least got results as an acceptable tradeoff for having my privacy sold). Google search now exists exclusively to sell me things, or to sell my attention, so increasingly it gets to do neither.
Thanks for sharing your experience (and welcome to the Motte!). There were always similar concerns in my household (my children are all adults now)--I would like to have had more children (like you, I come from a large family) but then I talk to people who were lucky to have one kid, or who struggled with infertility for years and never had any, and it makes me feel like an ungrateful whiner.
My main reaction to your post is "you don't owe a baby to the world!" You aren't overstating the magnitude of the risks--even today, though the risks of pregnancy and childbirth are much less than they were even a hundred years ago, they remain real. At the extremes, women still die in the process. Even the temporary stuff, like sciatica and morning sickness, is still genuine suffering.
But pro-natalism has arisen almost exclusively as a reaction to the rise of philosophical anti-natalism. And one of the central arguments in anti-natalism is an incongruency in ethics: there often seem to be morally compelling reasons to not have children (e.g. you know you are unable to care for a child, and know that no one else will), but (outside extreme cases of authoritarianism) essentially no one thinks anyone should be compelled to bear children (even pro-life people who think it is wrong to terminate a pregnancy don't believe it would be right to force a pregnancy on an unwilling woman). Anti-natalists inflate the arguments against childbearing toward an all-encompassing edict: humanity should voluntarily work toward its own orderly extinction.
Because I am not a utilitarian, I do not find such arguments compelling. When I say you don't owe a baby to the world, what I mean is this: it is morally permissible for you to have another child, if that is what you decide to do, despite the risks. Whether the risks are worthy to be undertaken is open to you to decide, but you are not under any utilitarian obligation to have another child even if that child would be of tremendous benefit to the world. Something that I think most ethical systems really miss is the range of permissibility; utiltiarians and deontologists frequently run into the assertion that there is always and only one truly right thing to do (the "best" thing) in any situation. It's very constraining! As a contractualist, I think that there is actually a wide range of things it is morally permissible to do, and that having children is often one of those things.
But if you do, you should do it because you want to, and because the risks are acceptable to you; or, you should not do it, because you don't want to, or on reflection you find the risks too great. Whatever you choose, it's not on you to make the world a better place. It's only on you to do what is reasonable. That's all it means, to live a life of choice and value. It's wonderful that you already have three children, and I wish you luck with that endeavor. Whether or not you continue to grow your family, I thank you for your existing contributions to the rest of the world, which we did not earn, were never owed, and can receive from you only as a welcome gift--never, ever as the fulfillment of a moral obligation.
You seem to suggest a radicalization -> divorce pipeline, but I wonder if the reverse is more true? People ruin their relationships and this leads them to a political radicalization as a way to find their true family / identity
This strikes me as related to @urquan's question about religious identity. I saw events happen in a particular sequence, but it's entirely possible that the consequences of personal change manifested in a different order than the actual causes of that personal change. This researcher has done a fair bit of work on how people's perception of their own race can change in response to their politics (most research on race and politics assumes the reverse, treating race as an immutable characteristic). So yeah, I'm certainly open to the possibility that we're talking about, essentially, a two-way (multi-way!) street.
The denial of cert on L.M. v. Morrison was an incredible betrayal by Barrett (with additional mixed feelings on Gorsuch). This only confirms what many have increasingly feared. Roberts and Kavanaugh have always been establishment stooges so I know it's impossible to expect real constitutionalism from the Court, when push comes to shove, but I had hoped that a Scalia acolyte like Barrett could at least be counted on to get the important cases heard.
I mean, you could argue it's still a particular configuration of a single "sex-and-gender" neural knot in the brain, rather than two unrelated phenomena.
Yes.
But when people say "trans isn't a sex thing" they mean "it isn't a kink pursued for sexual gratification".
I regard this as far too narrow a sense of "sexual gratification." The archetypal case for autogynephilia is something like "imagining yourself as a woman helps you achieve orgasm." But then stuff like penectomies or even HRT are known to make orgasm more difficult, or even impossible, to achieve, so you might expect autogynephiles to avoid those things, given that "achieve orgasm" was the whole point of the exercise. But there are other forms of "sexual gratification" than just orgasm; there is for example sexual gratification in simply being perceived as sexually desirable. For someone who is for whatever reason averse to sex, or indifferent to it, not being perceived as an object of sexual desire is a strictly sexual form of gratification.
All forms of sexuality, a-, trans-, homo-, hetero-, or otherwise, are by definition sexual in nature, and gratification does not refer exclusively to orgasm or even to specifically coital pleasure, but to gratification that is sexual in nature. If we accept the (questionable) move of separating them from "gender" and making that word refer only and exclusively to the sociological phenomena that supervene on sex, those phenomena still supervene on sex. Many 20th century feminists understood this, which is why they advocated for the abolition of gender distinctions, rather than merely the decoupling of gender from sex. By reifying traditional gender norms through dubious metaphysical claims about one's "real" gender, today's trans advocacy routinely operates directly against its own intellectual foundations.
You are no one's outgroup and everyone's far-group.
I don't think I've ever specifically had this thought! I usually say something like "the lefts think I'm too far right, the rights think I'm too far left, and the centrists think I'm way too political" but "I'm just in everyone's far-group" has a ring of truth to it... most of the time, anyway. Every once in a while I get picked to be someone's nemesis; fortunately, it rarely seems to last.
How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap?
Pretty confident, because I'm not asserting something about my own experiences as any kind of baseline. I'm making a claim about the trustworthiness of internal claims for which there is overwhelming external counterevidence ("I feel like I really am a man" -> "This is not the body of a man").
~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed
This would be a more interesting result to me if scientists and society proceeded to then tell the other 40% of transmen "it would appear you are not actually trans." If "phantom penis sensations" are neither necessary nor sufficient to the definition of transsexuality in females, what's the difference? Trans identity is doubly vague, with both "gender" and "trans" subject to constant motte-and-baileying. To give a different example, if essentially all AIS-afflicted genetic males experienced serious gender dysphoria prior to receiving AIS diagnosis, that would weigh heavily, I think, in favor of the brain being "in tune" with sex and gender. But such results do not appear extant; AIS diagnosis often comes as a complete shock.
I disagree that it's more worthy of disbelief than any other internal experience.
Returning to this, then: I'm the one asserting that we should treat such claims the same as any other report of internal experience. You believe yourself to be Abraham Lincoln, or to be wolfkin, or to be talking to God? Okay, let's see some external evidence of that. Even our emotional states, which philosophers often treat as incorrigible and original, are often subjected to doubt: have you ever been told by someone, "I'm fine," when you could see on their face that they were definitely not "fine?" Psychology makes a nod to this in many diagnostic processes, look for words like "persistent" and "insistent" and "recurrent" in discussions of when to approve physician-assisted suicide, for example. See also: chronic pain! How can we know you are or are not hurting, when you come seeking drugs? "Internal experience" is very hard on medical practice! But we do at least somewhat insist on interrogating it in almost every context--in theory, even this one, though the weight of social pressure against that interrogation seems to only continue to grow.
Ultimately, I can think of ways you could, say, convince me that you're Abraham Lincoln, actually. But even if you walked me into your time machine and gave me a tour of history, it would be a goodly while into that tour before I accepted that I wasn't being fooled, somehow. Trans advocacy, meanwhile, seems entirely committed to the idea that proof is neither necessary nor sufficient for valid gender claims, even as they cherry-pick those studies which seem conveniently aligned. I have seen similarly cherry-picked studies proving the existence of miracles. In both cases, it's entirely possible that I'm wrong to doubt!
But I doubt it.
Great post!
I don't have any problem with the idea of "luxury beliefs" in the sense that some beliefs appear to indeed be things that it is costly to believe, and that some people are able to bear the cost while others are not. I think that what makes them tricky is that the costs themselves are arguably grounded in what other people believe. Where "luxury beliefs" get controversial seems to be when it is a matter of controversy as to whether the costs are themselves a consequence of the belief, or a consequence of e.g. social norms.
Post-WWII, American culture underwent a radical shift. Progressivism to that point had mostly been about the perfectibility of mankind through social programs--public education, proper nutrition, clean water, etc. were things that many American communities still lacked circa 1920. In the century from 1870 to 1970, the percent of illiterate white Americans over the age of 14 dropped (PDF) from 20% to 1%; the percent of illiterate nonwhites dropped from 80% to around 4%--and those percentages went to about 0.5% and 2% in the ten years following. Similar strides were made in nutrition, hygiene, clean water, etc. and we were exporting these advances, too--engaging in imperialism modernization efforts around the world.
But today if you've "caught the vision" of progressivism, you needn't pursue it very long to discover that the low-hanging fruit is well and truly plucked. Of course new children are still being born (for now...) so there's always more work to be done, but the extent of visible progress achieved by the progressive project within living memory circa 1995 was unprecedented and jaw-dropping. We'd conquered nature so thoroughly that the only thing remaining to hinder our own progress was... other people!
Prototypical progressive thinkers--I'm thinking specifically of John Stuart Mill, here--were very interested in the idea that we should all have maximum liberty, constrained only by the compatibility of that liberty with everyone else enjoying liberty in similar quantities. "My right to swing my fist ends where your right to swing your fist begins," I suppose, though there is probably a more pithy version of that floating around somewhere. At the root of this is the idea that we are all the best judges of our own flourishing, provided we start from a place of adequate education.
So here in the 21st century, we have responses to your identified categories.
- Gender transition is a way for people to flourish by breaking the bonds of restrictive social constructs. The only costs are those imposed by transphobes.
- Sex positivity is a way for people to be honest and open about what actually brings them pleasure. The only costs are those imposed by slut-shaming.
- Drugs are a way for people to pursue their interest in feeling certain ways. This is more complicated and may not apply to certain highly lethal drugs, but the costs imposed on e.g. marijuana or nootropic users are predominantly imposed by moralizing busybodies.
- Psychotherapy is a way for people to flourish with the help of trained professionals. The only costs are those imposed by... psychophobes? Do we have a neat slur for people who think therapy is for the stupid and the weak?
- "Do what you love" may be the single most obvious good that any human could choose. If you read Freddie deBoer's manifesto, his whole "imagine a world where..." is a story about people being free to just do what they want, when they want to, without any consequences being imposed on them by society--indeed, with all possible consequences being absorbed, costlessly and without a single judgmental comment, by society.
I think that some of the rising conservatism I see in today's young people--which of course the Cathedral has already tarred as right wing extremism--is a growing suspicion that these claims about the source of oppression being socially constructed, which it may have been understandable for people to believe as recently as 50 years ago, no longer plausibly hold water.
- Gender is more than just a social construct, and a true sex change operation would involved extensive (impossible at current tech levels) brain surgery, to say nothing of the endocrine system. Sorry, you're going to have to wait for better tech.
- Sexual feelings are more than just a social construct; pair bonding has biological roots and slut shaming is a defense mechanism against defections from the stable equilibrium of general monogamy.
- Psychotherapy might be beneficial for the truly damaged, but most likely you're depressed (or whatever) as a result of trying to believe things your biology tells you that you shouldn't believe. Psychotherapy is a way to maintain in humans the view that their inability to thrive in the new progressive world is their problem, not the progressive world's problem.
- If we all really did what we love all the time, we would all starve to death in short order. Or if we really did manage to make robots do everything for us, our antifragility would lead to widespread psychological breakdown due to a universal crisis of meaning. Humans are evolved to do the work of humans, not to perpetually enjoy only the enjoyment of humans. Loss of the latter means the extinction of the former.
I'm intrigued by the fact that these are all actually fairly empirical disputes--they're just not the kinds of questions it is easy to get clear answers on. Sociology is tricky even when you don't have political activists thumbing the scales, and these days the scales are so covered with thumbs as to render the payloads utterly invisible.
This all applies, I think, to polyamory as well. I can imagine a society in which humans were more like bonobos--where we had sexual interactions as part of all of our social interactions. The first step, I suspect, would have to be the eradication of sexually transmitted disease! But psychologically this would require a transformation that seems to run deeper than culture. Sexual jealousy is universally attested. There are apparently people who can make polyamory work, and for whom it arguably works very well (though a question arises--if you have to make it work...). But for those for whom it doesn't work, I don't think the problem is poly-shaming or other cultural roadblocks. The problems seem more biologically grounded than that. My question is whether the rationalists now doubting the viability of polyamory will realize that this has structural implications for some of their other beliefs.
(In particular--the sneer faction of the ratsphere has always been comparative conservatives about polyamory, and yet they are if anything more progressive than the modal rationalist when it comes to, say, transsexuality. I notice that I am confused.)
Jinx
For this they have received no credit.
Right--putting myself in the shoes of their critics, I would guess that this falls under the "you get no points for being a decent human being, being a decent human being is the baseline expectation" clause. Of course, this clause is only ever applied in one direction, and also I am suspicious of the claim that there is anything "baseline" about humans being kind to one another, but nevertheless--the rhetoric is the rhetoric.
That said, I have to wonder how much of the decrease in violence against abortion doctors can be explained by pro-life activism self-policing, and how much can be explained by the successful psy-op of raising two or three generations of citizens who just don't think that killing the unborn is a very big deal, and often think that subjecting women to authority, ever, for any reason, is peak oppression.
So I ask again- why bother? Is the time for talking over?
Well... it isn't 100% on point, given the different context, but I would invite you to read what I wrote to Kulak's exit and imagine how the substance of my post might apply to you.
Yeah, I have no idea either way, though I certainly have my suspicions.
I have seen therapy work for people, including genuinely saving the marriage of a close family member, but... mostly not.
I'm not sure what to think or say about the rest of your comment, but this part stood out to me:
See my thinking is that qanoners are overwhelmingly middle class and below, and a lot of them are the kind of people who couldn't go to college even if they could afford it, which they can't.
Anyone can afford to go to college. Anyone. It's just not that expensive. Yes, it's a lot more expensive than it used to be, and yes, the ROI is not as obvious or inevitable (though it was never inevitable) as it once was. But "working class" people buy more expensive things all the time--houses, boats, cars--and those things continue to cost money (beyond loan interest--there's also upkeep). A wisely-curated program of education will in almost any economy be a better long term investment than any of those things.
What is not really plausibly "affordable" about education is failing. Every semester, without fail, I have at least one student who never shows up for class. Then, at the end of the semester, they tell me how they are running out of money and can I please pass them or else they will have to take the class again and they can't afford it...
The people who "can't afford" college are the people who lack the intellect and/or conscientiousness to learn at a higher level. College costs way too much to go there when there is not a reasonable expectation of success.
I think the bigger problem is that our educated and wealthy people are worthless morons.
I think this is almost always false. Our educated and wealthy people are only human, and in my experience almost all of them can have their substantive thinking overwhelmed, at least on occasion and maybe more than that, by the need for social signalling. That is a different problem than being morons. Indeed, I think most normies are pretty smart, within a baseline context of human flourishing--they're just that much more susceptible to focusing on sending the right signals rather than identifying substantially veridical facts.
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off.
This does not seem clear to me at all.
In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong.
He's a partisan. I trust his unguarded opinion about someone whose status was in the moment unimportant to his tribe, above anything he said later in public when he was likely to be speaking more to save face or engage in "yay ingroup." I'm applying something like a Bayesian version of the "statements against interest" rule, I guess.
As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question,
Sorry--looks like I dropped a word ("was") from that sentence, mea culpa. You are correct; she was asked "what is a woman" and her answer was "I'm not a biologist," which is a stupid answer even assuming she is a hardened partisan. Someone who believes "woman" means what trans advocates want it to mean ("a person who identifies as a woman"), should have answered in a way that would not imply that the answer was grounded in biology at all. Her answer wasn't just a pointless dodge, it was a bad dodge. If you think it would be more charitable to characterize her answer as a lie than as stupidity, like... okay? But that's not actually clear to me. (I also disagree that the question was a "gotcha." It's not a "gotcha" to ask someone a question that requires them to either admit to the force of biological reality, or speak lies and prevarications in service of one's ideological paymasters. But that is a different discussion I think.)
Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Two people can be idiots at the same time!
it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity
I am opposed (and increasingly opposed every passing year) to the deference shown the judiciary by lawyers, journalists, and the public. Specifically, you are probably familiar with attorneys being disciplined and sanctioned for impugning judicial integrity in court proceedings; I regard that as a blatant violation of the First Amendment. My experience with law practice and legal academia is that there is a prevalent attitude of deference to the judiciary, not only to its supposed impartiality, but to its competence. I think that is both mistaken and a little bit disgusting, especially as the judiciary has become increasingly professionalized. One does not "rise" to the rank of Supreme Court Justice, because these people are not above anyone. Especially when they are explicitly affirmative action selections. Even the brightest SCOTUS justices are approximately comparable to your typical tenured professor in an R1 university (except that university professors do more real, actual work than appellate justices, but again--different discussion). SCOTUS justices just are not that special--and even then, Jackson would not be a SCOTUS justice if she were a white man. Probably she would not even have been admitted to Harvard Law, though we don't know for sure because apparently it's "racist" to ask about her LSAT scores--even though legislatures often demand such information from judicial appointees. (Seriously, have you ever listened to a state legislator who graduated from Fly By Night Law with a 2.1 GPA harangue an appointee over going to State Law with a 160 LSAT? The chutzpah of elected officials really is something else!)
Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
I think it's important to be able to discuss people's intelligence, not just in absolute terms but relative to the intelligence of others. I am not a blank slatist. Apparently you're not the one making them, but I know I have seen posts here discussing Trump's intelligence and mental functioning, and in the past those conversations were also had about Biden. "Trump seems to be showing himself less intelligent than past U.S. Presidents, and here is why..." is an argument I would identify as within bounds, provided the rest of the post were sufficiently backstopped, not needlessly inflammatory, etc.
Now--very importantly--generalizing that to the intellect of "his supporters, almost without exception" or to "conservatives" generally, would be out of bounds. Why? Because of the rule about focusing on specific individuals or groups rather than general ones. Arguing that a person is stupid, and providing evidence for why that is the best explanation of what they said or did (in particular, explaining how you are not using "stupid" as a stand-in for mere disagreement), is a very different thing than characterizing an entire group (especially, an ideological group) as stupid.
despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons
I also am of the view that Trump is not very smart (though he does sometimes seem to possess remarkable cunning). You're welcome to say it, when it seems relevant, and I doubt you'll get many reports for doing so (though I couldn't say for sure). Frankly, if you brought real evidence that "Trump supporters are generally all morons" that might be an interesting post! But it would require you to actually bring such evidence, and it would have to be pretty strong to counterbalance the "bring evidence in proportion" rule, and frankly "Trump supporters" are a sufficiently diverse group that you would be on very thin ice. But hey, we've had Jew-obsessed posters manage to get away with quite a lot of bullshit by adhering to the letter of the law; if you wanted to become a raving anti-Semite but with MAGA instead of Jews, that could be novel and interesting. (With apologies to my fellow mods for even suggesting such a thing.) Just notice that most of the raving anti-Semites here do eventually get themselves banned over it. Very few manage to keep the touch sufficiently light.
So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with.
Those aren't the only grounds, those were just the easiest and most obvious grounds. Other posters have fleshed out other relevant concerns.
Now, having laid all of that out--I could have written that post better. Your concern is valid, and I will try to adjust accordingly. For whatever it is worth, I regarded my mention of the low-IQ wing as a bit of throwaway flavor text expressing my respect for Kagan (despite disagreeing with her). I really do have no respect at all for the intellects of Sotomayor or Jackson, based on many hours of reading and listening to their words, and I think that they are excellent examples of how the "affirmative action" approach to political appointments genuinely harms real institutions. But as that was not the point of my post, I probably should not have included it as a throwaway line, at minimum because it apparently created significant distraction from the actual substance of my post.
you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future
I... think that's a typo? Maybe? If not, you'll have to tell me what IW is. Assuming you mean IQ--I have seen many people on the Left criticize Thomas as an affirmative action appointment, and maybe that is true; partly I have a less firm opinion of him because he stayed quiet in oral arguments for so many years. But Alito is quite sharp, this just would not be a plausible criticism of him. If you wanted to plausibly identify a "low-IQ wing" on the right it would need to be, like, Kavanaugh and Thomas, and off the top of my head I can't think of any cases where they went in together against the rest of the conservatives.
Nice.
(I built a mining rig in 2010 because I thought Bitcoin was philosophically interesting, then I never actually mined anything because it was beyond my technical abilities and I was busy with other philosophically interesting stuff. My only consolation is that there is no possible world where I both actually mined Bitcoin and held it beyond a total value of, say, $50,000, which would be a nice amount of money to have, but is not really a life-changing amount.)
Grift Upon Grift
A white woman named Shiloh Hendrix took her child to the park.
What happened next is not totally clear. This is the only direct video evidence I could find, since so-called journalists are apparently allergic to providing direct links to original sources for direct evaluation (God forbid they should create a hyperlink to a source containing uncensored slurs I guess). In this video a man accuses Shiloh (who is holding her young child) of calling a black child a racial slur. She tells him that the black child was stealing from her son, and, uh, firmly invites the videographer to go away. Instead, he demands that she say the slur to his face. So she does, several times, and he tells her that the word is "hate speech." In some other places I have seen the video continue as he follows her to her car while continuing to berate her. (If there is actual video of her saying anything at all to the black child, I have not been able to find it.)
According to Shiloh's GiveSendGo,
As I write this, she has received $735,837 in donations, prompting some commentary. She hasn't been charged with any crime yet, but someone is considering it.
The "other side" of the story has been told... inconsistently, I guess. Also from the Yahoo writeup:
Several stories (but not all) mention the supposed autism; some add that the black child had three siblings keeping his parents busy at the time and was therefore unsupervised, explaining his reported misconduct as mere childish curiosity.
Well, hopefully Omar knows the boy's parents; after all, according to another news report Omar is the black child's uncle. Or is this a folksy "every man from Somalia is my uncle" sort of thing? Unclear! Incidentally, Omar was recently charged with felonious sexual misconduct, only to have those charges dropped for unclear reasons. Well, "in the interests of justice," whatever that means in this context:
In fact this doesn't actually state that the charges against Sharmake have been dropped, but everyone seems to think so. Presumably just one more piece of relevant information denied to me by the transformation of facts into culture war ammunition.EDIT: This link shows the documents dropping the charges.In response to Hendrix's GiveSendGo, the Rochester branch of the NAACP opened a GoFundMe and raised about $350,000 before closing it down (apparently at the behest of the black boy's family).
It's difficult to know how much to read between the lines, here, in part because the lines themselves are so blurry. Omar is apparently a single man and possible child sex offender who was filming at least one otherwise-unsupervised child at a public park. His story about how he is connected to the child is inconsistent. Given the current state of American politics with regard to immigration law, a family of Somalians deliberately avoiding the public eye seems well advised, but also raises further questions about broader demographic trends and the impacts of those trends. Meanwhile, Ms. Hendrix's unapologetic utterance of the killing curse has turned into a bit of a financial bonanza for all involved (except, apparently, Omar...).
Of course the culture war angles are attention-grabbing, and the toxoplasma of rage ever present. But at the risk of going full "boo outgroup," can I just say--I really, really hate crowdfunding? It seems like a horrible mistake, a metastasized version of the cancer of social media, virtue signaling with literal dollars that feed nothing but further grift. Regardless of their reasons, I'm thankful to the Somali family for shutting down the NAACP's grifting fundraiser as quickly as they did. I'm gobsmacked that Shiloh has managed to milk three quarters of a million dollars (and counting!) out of being accosted over a minor literal playground scuffle.
I mean, I get it--the money is tempting, and if you aren't getting yours, someone else will be more than happy to scoop it up "on your behalf." Racism is big business, for which the demand vastly outstrips the supply, and overtly slur-slinging white moms are... well, usually they're rapping or something, not dropping the honest-to-God Hard R. And on a child!
...for $750,000, though?
To be completely honest--I was irritated earlier this week because one of my social feeds was inundated with requests for money for some kid who was super sick and then died. Did he not have health insurance? Oh, no, he was insured. Why did he need $50,000 then? Well, his parents had to take some time off work, you know. Didn't they have paid family medical leave? Oh, well, yes, but you know how "incidentals pile up." Burials ain't cheap! And everyone was so heartbroken, because kids are so great! And this kid was great. Just brightened the room and everyone's lives. Obviously $50,000 isn't going to bring him back, or help his parents heal, but at least we can all show our sympathy and support... better than "thoughts and prayers," eh?
So probably I was kind of sensitized to this when I ran across the story of Shiloh and her anonymous (autistic?) antagonist. How many humans live out their lives by, ultimately, convincing lots of other humans to just bankroll them? How much of my frustration with these people boils down to a kind of deep-rooted envy, that I must labor while others take their ease, simply because I do not have a gift for grift?
As a matter of principle, I do not give money via crowdfunding. I don't even use Patreon, much less GoFundMe or GiveSendGo or whatever. I regard it as a moral failing when I see others do so, no matter how apparently worthy the cause. I am prejudiced against the entire enterprise, but I cannot rule out the possibility that it is because I have no expectation of ever benefiting from it--even though this is at least in part because I would feel like a charlatan if I did.
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