naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
That was the first mention of Israel, that I could recall, but the whole conversation is about Ukraine, Russia, Putin, and NATO. It's not exactly new to me, but it's refreshing to hear someone so clearly say that this is a war of choice, and the choice is being made by the USA, and their puppet states involved in NATO.
I don't understand how it's possible for you, or anyone, to believe this. Insofar as any conflict in Israel is a "war of choice," the people making that choice are, and have been, Muslim Arabs, whether inside or outside of Israel. For generations, now. If Palestinians stop fighting, there will be no more fighting. If Israelis stop fighting, there will be no more Israel. The commitment of Hamas, its handlers abroad, and most of the people living under its rule is the eradication of Israel. They have never accepted any of the compromises offered to them for more than a handful of years, during which time they have always been sharpening their spears for their next attempt.
I understand that the United States is entangled in this, as it is entangled one way or another in most armed conflicts around the world. At minimum, the American government is a well-compensated arms dealer! And I understand that the Israeli government has made a variety of foolish, cruel, and otherwise objectionable decisions along the way. Nobody in that region has anything approaching clean hands. But exactly one side of the Israel conflict is ideologically committed to actual genocide, as a matter of religious prescription, and it's not the Israelis.
Ukraine, okay! There's a conflict where American (or at least NATO) interests have absolutely been downplayed in favor of spinning a Russophobic narrative. I still tend to see Russia as the bad actor there, because I am prejudiced against aggressors, but I can accept that the United States played at least an indirect role in poking that particular bear. The United States had nothing to do with the murder, mayhem, robbery, and rape perpetrated by the Palestinian stooges of Islamist governments on October 7, and Israel's response to that attack has been, if not obviously proportional, absolutely understandable. If a bunch of Canadians, at the urging of their government, snuck across the border to rape and murder a thousand innocent Americans, I would not be satisfied with a merely proportional response; as a matter of clear deterrence, I would definitely want to see an absolutely merciless escalation.
And if it kept happening, over and over again, over years and decades, well... at some point the only thing that makes sense is to reach for the metaphorical banhammer.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
‘When the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing’
I quite enjoyed this interview with Alex Byrne, a professor of philosophy at MIT. As an epistemologist his career was built on arguments about the nature of color (or colour, if you prefer) but in the past six years or so he has taken up questions about gender, eventually having a book dropped by Oxford over it. I was not previously aware that he is married to academic biologist Carole Hooven, an apparent victim of "cancel culture" over her writing on the biology of sex.
No one who has followed trans advocacy lately will find much of surprise in the interview, I suspect, but from a professional standpoint I really appreciated him laying this out:
Philosophers talk a big game. They say, ‘Oh, of course, nothing’s off the table. We philosophers question our most deeply held assumptions. Some of what we say might be very disconcerting or upsetting. You just won’t have any firm ground to stand on after the philosopher has done her work and convinced you that you don’t even know that you have two hands. After all, you might be the victim of an evil demon or be a hapless brain in a vat.’
But when the chips are down, the philosophers turn out to have been bluffing. When there is the real prospect of being socially shamed or ostracised by their peers for questioning orthodoxy, many philosophers do not have the stomach for it.
Most of the professional philosophers I've met over the years pride themselves on "challenging" their students' beliefs. This has most often come up in the context of challenging religious dogmas, including faith in God. They (we, I guess I have to say) boast of teaching "critical thinking" through the practice of Socratic inquiry, and assuredly not through any crass indoctrination! And yet in my life I have been to dozens of philosophical conferences, and I cannot remember a single one where I did not at some point encounter the uncritical peddling of doctrinaire political leftism. And perhaps worse: when I have raised even mild pushback to that peddling, usually by raising questions that expose obvious contradictions in a relatively innocuous way, it has never inspired a serious response. Just... uncomfortable laughter, usually. Philosophers--professional argument-makers!--shy away from such argumentation. And yet they do not hesitate to skulk about in the background, wrecking people's careers where possible rather than meeting them in open debate.
I do have some wonderful colleagues and I think there are still many good philosophy professors out there; Byrne appears to be numbered among them. But I have to say that my own experiences conform to his descriptions here. I suspect a lot of it is down to the administration-driven replacement of good philosophers with agenda-driven partisans, which appears to be happening across most departments of higher education, these days. But that is only my best guess.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
When I search on Google Scholar for that quote, I find only the source you link. Ditto when I search for the two phrases, “all education is political” “teaching is never a neutral act”. So, basically no one is publishing that quote.
I directly linked three books from academic presses from the last two years, an academic blog, an academic tweet, and an academic paper, and I only furnished a sampling of what I found because it just seemed silly to keep going after finding so many examples. That's a far, far cry from "basically no one."
What people ARE doing is paraphrasing Freire
The numerous, recent sources I already cited literally directly quote him, often giving a page number (usually, 19) for the quote. Are you... engaged in performance art here? Duplicating the phenomenon about which I am complaining?
how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases?
Do you have someone in mind, here? Like, I vaguely recall an essay by Alex Byrne suggesting that the notion of "feeling" a certain gender seems incoherent, under the rubric of socially constructed gender. But that kind of thinking, with gender distinct from sex, is very mid-20th century (Simone de Beauvoir) on. Historical cases don't really deal in gender differences without also addressing sex and sexuality; individual cases differ, but the text confirms my expectation that a 1979 Playboy reader would naturally assume transsexuals to also be homosexuals. Why imitate the dress and behavior of a sexually available woman if you were not trying to attract sexual attention from men (or, perhaps homosexual women)? The endogenous feeling there would be homosexuality, of which transsexuality would be a symptom. Autogynephilia would also qualify as endogenous without being a gender feeling. Historical examples aren't hard to explain with just-so stories either way. Noticing, say, the boom in rapid onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls is not the same thing as committing oneself to the position that transsexuality is strictly a social contagion. So it seems like you need to be more specific about which argument you think you're undermining, here.
she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child
I have never heard anyone make a claim like this in a way that seemed really believable to me--much like my expectation that people who claim to have seen miracles are more likely to be either foolish or lying, than to have actually seen miracles, no matter how honest they seem to be. I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings. Children often reject the gender roles imposed upon them, but part of the problem here is--how do you know you "feel like a girl" if you've never been one? Wanting to fill a cultural role assigned to the opposite sex is something many, maybe most people experience on occasion. Cranking that all the way to "no, I just am fe/male" simply elevates such feelings to the level of an insistent delusion. The addition of social "support" for that kind of thinking probably makes it easier to sell the obvious lie to oneself, or to sort of emotionally sanitize homosexual or autogynephilic drives.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but sexual psychology is really screwy. Humans have sex with animals. Humans have sex with trees. Jeff Bezos, a human billionaire, left his attractive and long-suffering wife for sex with a second-rate journalist made mostly of plastic. Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever; that may be one of the least weird things humans have done, sexually. The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender. It's all one big, thoroughly interconnected mess. That is how "trans" cases can come to exist even in the absence of social contagion: the same way every other psychosexual phenomenon comes to exist! Through the interaction of reproductive drives (normal, pathological, or otherwise), personal circumstances, and cultural norms.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
I’m surprised you can get a quality contribution for an empirical claim that you flatly refuse to supply evidence for.
You are welcome to respond to AAQCs, here or elsewhere, but grumping about someone else's award because their comment doesn't reinforce your preferred narrative is obnoxious at best.
I could find zero evidence from any organization that Hamas utilized pre-teen child soldiers in the past decade.
This is a mod-hatted warning, and we generally don't dip into substance on that, but Google gave me this (PDF warning) pretty readily, and it was far from the only thing Google gave me on Hamas child soldiers. I have no particular opinion on the reliability of the sources etc. and I'm not going to get into it with you, but your emphasis on "pre-teen" and the way you referenced "the past decade" while quoting Dean referencing "the last few decades" suggest very strongly to my mind that you are not engaging charitably, or even just honestly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
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.
Six months or three years can also be exceptionally damaging to a kid who is confused or being taking advantage of by others, be they teachers, peers, or otherwise. The idea that government employees would conceal information from parents about children is so horrifying to me. To talk casually about "buying" time for children to deceive their parents strikes me as deeply misguided.
There is good reason why people sometimes call this "grooming": because the most common kind of adult who keeps secrets about a child from that child's parents is someone who is taking advantage of that child for their own purposes, "grooming" them to some role. 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. If this involved core aspects of my child's identity, I would seek that teacher's dismissal. If it involved my child's sex and sexuality, I would be willing to burn through substantial personal resources to impose serious and lasting costs beyond mere dismissal. I cannot imagine a reasonable and loving parent feeling otherwise. There is nothing so special about transsexual activism as to exempt it from these feelings, and that is why transsexual activism continues to be a catastrophically losing issue for Democrats who swing at that particular tar baby.
I understand that some parents are wrong about what is best for their children, and that some parents are abusive, and so on. But this does not meaningfully distinguish them from teachers, who are also often wrong, abusive, and so on--and teachers have less reason to love children and see to their best interests. As Aristotle notes in the Politics--"how much better it is to be the real cousin of somebody than to be a son after Plato's fashion!"
I have seen enough cases of ROGD, as well as the results of decisive parental action against ongoing ROGD, to believe that the evidence of my own eyes is that schools should absolutely never conceal relevant facts from parents. Not for six months; not for six days. Better that a few children face harsh discipline at home, than many be subjected, with the aid of government actors, to the (often, lifelong) suffering brought on by politically popular social contagions.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Is there some other "protected minority" that is given veto power over state legislation?
That's Fourteenth Amendment jurisprudence in a nutshell.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I imagine this isn't enough to send in the troops - but I could see myself reading a history book in 30 years about how Poland, and by extension, everyone else, were pulled into the Great Russian War by a bomb and two dead farmers.
The problem here, I think, is simple to state, but devilishly complicated to solve: is NATO membership worthwhile?
If things did unfold as it seems, then Russia is responsible for a military attack on a NATO country. If it's "accidental," Russia essentially has to sacrifice someone's head on a platter--even though there's no reason to think Putin wouldn't just send some of his own troops to take responsibility, to keep the West guessing. But if there is no reprisal, then Poland, at least, has to be asking, what's the point of belonging to NATO? NATO, the alliance that was specifically created to deter Russian military incursions?
On the other hand, if there is reprisal... maybe WW3? A big NATO fight in Europe basically guarantees an attack-of-opportunity on Taiwan, and god-only-knows where else.
And if this is actually a Ukrainian false flag somehow, like... what a way to gamble. But I suppose a nation faced with a genuinely existential crisis has no reason to not gamble with the fate of the whole world, beyond pure, likely supererogatory altruism.
A year ago I'd probably have said "this is surely an accident and Russia is going to make that very clear very quickly, possibly with generous payments to next-of-kin." Today? I just don't know.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?
Serious question: is there anything the government could feasibly do now, to nudge Democrats towards accepting the result of the election in the event that Kamala loses?
Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."
Someone will inevitably cry, "But there's no clear and undisputable evidence of widespread or coordinated voter fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of 2020!"
Sure, let's grant that. But let's also observe that setting up elections to come out the way you want them (i.e. rigging, in the most boring metaphorical sense) can be done in numerous legal and quasi-legal ways. In fact most attempts to "rig" elections are conducted in entirely legitimate ways, and people don't object because if everyone is free to do what they can to influence the outcome of the election, well, that's just democracy!
However there are at least two important institutions in our culture which we broadly expect to refrain from influencing elections. One is the government itself, including government actors like FBI agents and military personnel. Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.
These two institutions have all but entirely abandoned the pretense of political impartiality. The recent example of 60 Minutes doctoring an interview in Kamala's favor can serve as just one instance of persistent and repeated behavior from the press. Disparities in the Justice Department's treatment of, say, 2020 DC rioters versus 2016 DC rioters can serve as just one example of persistent and repeated behavior from the government. The bureaucracy and the press are dominated by Democrats, such that a prospiracy to thumb the scales for Democratic candidates is basically inevitable.
One of my biggest problems with Donald Trump is that he often says false things that are directionally correct, which takes attention away from real problems to focus on fake ones. But one reason he might do this is simply that the truth is complicated and most people haven't got the attention span for it. I have not taken the time to make a lengthy linked catalog of ways which the government and the press abused their putative impartiality in part because most examples are, in isolation, small and easily dismissed. I'm not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth over the real significance of, say, dismissing Biden's violation of federal law due to his being an "elderly man with a poor memory." We used to impeach (or try to impeach) executives who used government power to hamper (or try to hamper) their political opponents. But not anymore! It's just that I notice the direction of these things, and the small examples pile up quickly.
(Well, don't worry. The FISA court ordered numerous corrective actions, which I'm sure will be followed meticulously any time they do not interfere with Democratic victories at the polls. What more do you want? Surely an impeachment would be far too much of a hassle.)
When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?
Because if you can't answer that question, or you think it's a meaningfully different question, then I don't think anyone is in a position to give you a satisfying answer to your question, either.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
I get nervous about the death penalty for the same reason I think it should probably be legal: death is irrecoverable. When the state puts someone to death in error, that is an error that should shake the government to its foundations. Basically everyone involved in allowing that to happen should be removed from government office or employment, permanently, and strictly speaking at least some of the police, lawyers, and judges involved seem to have earned the death penalty themselves as a result. And wrongful execution does seem to happen, sometimes, and the consequences for it happening are basically nil; redistributing a bunch of tax money to the family of the innocent deceased is no solution at all.
But by the same token, when a murderer ends someone's life, there's just literally nothing anyone can do to "make it right." We sometimes allocate money to the bereaved, but their loss is inescapably paltry by comparison to the permanent, irrecoverable loss imposed on the deceased. The death penalty is society's way of saying, "the impossibility of restorative justice in these cases means that Hammurabi is all we have left."
Discourse on this topic is frustrating because a rather labyrinthine motte-and-bailey complex has arisen in connection with the retribution/deterrence/rehabilitation theories of criminal justice. In the United States, at least, we refuse to really commit to any particular theory of criminal justice (probably as a result of the democratic process). Instead, we engage in laundered mob justice, demanding our lawyers dress it up in whatever theory has the best fit, or happens to be in fashion. This strikes me as... inadequate.
So I end up being kind of weakly opposed to the death penalty, more because I tend to despise government than because I have any philosophical objections to executing known murderers. This is all in much the way that I vehemently reject the idea that "all cops are bastards," while comfortably believing that, say, "all traffic cops are bastards" is basically correct.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
"fucking stop it, you're going to cause a literal civil war with your antics"
It is remarkable to read stuff from the early 1800s discussing how an American civil war over slavery was just inevitable--a matter of time.
It is depressing to feel like that's where we are today, that it may still be decades away but that a civil war between "reds" and "blues" has become inevitable. I would like to believe there is time to de-escalate, but I'm not sure there is a clear way--the bifurcation of American culture has gotten to the point where one side or the other simply must go away if the country is to survive at all. Time and demographics could accomplish that naturally and gradually, but if not, then a civil war is what will do it. But demands for political orthodoxy (on either side) seem to be getting louder, not quieter.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I really admire how smoothly you were able to combine the implication "basically no one is doing this, who cares" with the implication "this happens all the time, who cares" in this comment. If that move hasn't got a fancy name like "motte and bailey doctrine" or "apophasia," then it should, and if it does have a name, I would like to learn it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Yeah, becoming a skeptic (which happened gradually, but I think I noticed really happening around my second year of grad school) made it very hard for me to accept the death penalty, for basically the same reason. I am not opposed to it, in principle, for murder. I expect it is probably warranted in some cases of military misbehavior. But in a modern jury system? I just can't bring myself to endorse its actual implementation. We know that some innocent people get executed, and evidence that the death penalty discourages murder in other cases is too thin and dubious to support the occasional death of an innocent.
I enjoy reading insights from the various criminal lawyers who occasionally post here, because that is a job I could never do. In practical terms, I can't handle the sausage making. I'm too attached to my ideals. Sometimes this is to my benefit, but I think it makes me a poor politician, and an even worse trial attorney.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
The PDF I provided explicitly mentions children under 15, and elsewhere distinguishes between "children" and "adolescents," both of which Hamas has recruited in its history, in some cases quite recently. But one of the reasons for me to not get into the substance with you is that you have shown no inclination to actually accept evidence when it is provided to you. I anticipated you would do that, and now you have done it, so there is evidently no reason to continue to attempt to meet your demands. You apparently will not accept any evidence even when it is provided to you (as an aside, you do not seem similarly inclined to demand precise evidence when Hamas makes dubious claims--interesting!).
I think that, at best, you have actually failed to understand what Dean's post was really about. What you identify as its "heart" seems non-central on my reading. I suspect that you are doing something worse, though: I suspect that you are demanding rigor in isolation, in order to excuse your own uncharitable engagement.
Well, you are under no obligation to like Dean's post, or to accept his or my evidence of anything. You are under no obligation to like or agree with any of this. What you are under some minimal obligation to do, is not to engage in ways that degrade discourse here. The way you have chosen to grouse about this particular AAQC does not meet that threshold.
Moreover, about a year ago, I warned you that your engagement on the topic of Israel was verging into "single-issue poster" territory. It's clearly something you care about a lot, for reasons I cannot fathom. I am hesitant to impose a topic ban on you, but I am pretty protective of the AAQC process, and the discussion we're having right now is doing a lot to persuade me that I should simply ban you from discussing Israel anymore.
is this really the standard you want on themotte
Yes. Dean is an excellent poster with an absolutely stellar history of making quality contributions to the Motte. He is probably in the top 5 userbase favorites. You, too, have made some good posts in the past, which is one of the reasons I haven't banned you yet. But if you're gonna rain on the AAQC parade any time your ox gets gored, I'll count it against you.
The example I see getting kicked around a lot is how insanely bad Jackson's dissent in the Asian discrimination cases was. Her commentary about black babies and black doctors was just a complete hash, as if neither she nor her clerks have even a rudimentary grasp of statistics. Innumeracy is not a good look, especially when you pile it on top of her infamous failure to define "woman."
In fact Sotomayor's legal reasoning is noticeably weak, and Jackson makes her look bright by comparison. That this encompasses two-thirds of the Court's left wing can make this sound like a partisan dig, but in fact Kagan has no trouble holding her own (though I have seen speculation from both the right and the left that she has taken to "phoning it in" when she sides with someone they don't like). Judson Berger's "Weekend Jolt" from National Review last week had this to say:
Importantly, Roberts retains an ability to influence the conservative wing of the Court sheerly through his position as chief justice. (As such, he may assign controversial opinions to himself if he joins the majority.) But one other thing that deserves emphasis . . . is how intellectually outgunned the Court’s liberal wing is relative to the conservative side. It’s not merely a matter of numbers so much as a stark matter of judicial ability and temperament. Elena Kagan is a genuinely brilliant liberal justice with the ability to persuade those in the conservative majority as to the soundness of her views, but she has of late seemingly been phoning it in. Meanwhile Sonia Sotomayor is (to put it generously) notoriously lacking in the “intellectual outreach” department, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, though she may develop on the bench, is at this early date depressingly outmatched rhetorically and argumentatively even by Sotomayor.
So then it can seem like a race/HBD thing except of course that Thomas is black and seems to do fine. That may be substantially a matter of accumulated experience, at least in comparison with Jackson. But also, when it comes right down to it, he's no Scalia.
I do have an alternative explanation, but I'm not sure whether it's more charitable, or less. There is a tradition on the political left that leans in to the who/whom divide. As long as you're fighting the right bad guys (or in other words, attacking the right targets), truth is not only irrelevant, it might actually be something you should actively reject. Representative Cortez famously placed being "morally right" above being "factually correct", and was defended by the media on that. As a life-appointed justice, Jackson could very well be calling a deer a horse for all to see; what are we going to do, impeach her for it? By enshrining false claims about American racism into the canon of SCOTUS jurisprudence, she launders those claims into respectably citable assertions for generations of scholarly grifters.
So like, pick your poison? Jackson might just be so immersed in critical legal theory that she just looks like an idiot to people who think that intelligence is measured by one's grasp of empirical facts--when actually she's more Machiavellian, an "idiot" only to her enemies and a great manipulator of the levers of power for her friends. On this interpretation she is also a horrible justice who should never have been allowed anywhere near SCOTUS, but so long as she minds her Ps and Qs, she will never be removed and so the criticism is now moot. All anyone can do in response is vote Republican and pray.
On the other hand... she might just in fact be an idiot. Occam's Razor suggests that we should probably peer past the pomp and circumstance of pretending that the political appointment process is in any way meritocratic, and just call a spade a spade. And if this is that case, why, she should never have been allowed anywhere near SCOTUS, but so long as she minds her Ps and Qs, she will never be removed and so the criticism is now moot... ah. Looks like elections have consequences, and appointing justices explicitly for the color of their skin and the shape of their genitals does, too. And once that's done, there's surprisingly little anyone can do to fix it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The Great Awokening as a Global Phenomenon (PDF warning!)
I'm never entirely sure what to make of linguistic analysis--partly because it is very much outside my expertise. But it seems worth noticing when quantitative research is conducted on issues many of us take for granted. For one thing, there have been a couple of highly publicized "you can't even define woke!" takes injected into popular discourse recently, but the author of this study doesn't seem to have encountered any serious difficulty with the definition (though presumably not everyone will agree with the definition on offer, it strikes me as at least plausible).
For another, the timing and differences across cultures is interesting to me. I have always kind of assumed that the Great Awokening was something that happened in the U.S. and then caught on elsewhere, to varying degrees, but while that may in fact be true, it doesn't seem to show up strongly in this data. I guess one question might be whether this just shows that the Internet has really flattened the world in surprisingly strong ways.
Relatedly, the author's questions re: causation also seem important, though I have no idea where to even begin answering that. I do regard the Great Awokening as mostly just a re-re-rebranding of Marxism, focused on social relations instead of economic status, in much the way that so-called "cultural Marxism" did in the late 20th century. But then, why has it caught on now? If it's because of the long march through the institutions, shouldn't we see less of an effect in non-Anglophone nations with dramatically different political histories? Or is this again just the Internet working its dark magic?
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
The case law on redistricting studiously avoids recognizing that the problem with "one man, one vote" is exactly the problem the Framers recognized when reaching the Great Compromise. Urban and rural populations have different interests. Majority rule is mob rule. Protecting minority interests by creating a bicameral legislature with separate apportionment rules, instituting the electoral college, implementing an independent judiciary, etc. are all moves aimed at preventing "one man, one vote" from being the law of the land.
Then I assume you have an example?
Every single "strict scrutiny" case overturning state legislation grounded in a "suspect classification" is a concrete and often explicit example of a protected minority being given veto power over state legislation.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition?
To say nothing of using the Supreme Court to impose abortion and same-sex marriage on every single state. Or "not my president"--there was even a 2016 campaign to recruit faithless electors. The idea that Trump is the blatant norm-violator requires an awfully selective memory. I don't like Trump, but thanks to him I have been mostly satisfied with what's coming out of the Supreme Court for the first time in my adult life. The idea of returning to an activist Court, but with fresh Wokist judges instead of merely Liberal ones, is in my mind the most realistic bad-and-lasting effect of a Harris victory.
(Which, by the way, I do think is inevitable at this point, if not necessarily without some of what Time once called "fortification" from a "shadow campaign.")
That said, I think Scott's endorsement is 100% in-character for him, and it's probably worth noting that the reasoning he provides is in response to a case he has first worked to steelman. I suspect it is not a steelman he actually buys--just the best he was able to come up with. Rather, think of what the New York Times put Scott through the last time Trump won a presidential election. I don't know that it was this way for everyone, but in 2016 and 2017 I personally lost about 25% of my social media connections after Clinton's loss, and I didn't even support Trump--I just expressed clear criticism of Clinton. So I suspect that a lot of what we're seeing from Scott here is a kind of rhetorical, anticipatory flinch. Particularly given his somewhat defiant direct link back to "You Are Still Crying Wolf." (Insert Straussian reading here?)
So my biggest concern for this election is not really to do with either candidate, but with my suspicion that either way, the country comes further apart. The one thing I have appreciated from Harris is her bumbling attempts to appeal to the garbage deplorables. Even she (or at least her campaign) realizes that the culture wars are moving the nation in a potentially disastrous direction (not that this seems to have inspired the Left to pump the brakes--yet). But I have to wonder, climate-change-style, if we're not already past the point of no return.
How do you gatekeep medical procedures against the well resourced?
Well, first, you can't. But second, who cares?
I don't mean that in a dismissive way--I mean, has "but that law seems difficult to enforce" ever been a legible reason for striking down (or refusing to adopt) a law against something dangerous? There are countless laws against illicit drug use. Many of them are, at least arguably, stupid, but their stupidity is a political question, not a question for the courts. (At least until an activist court decides to get fancy with "arbitrariness," I suppose...) People use drugs, and it's bad for them, and explicit government disapproval of their activity does seem to actually reduce those harms (see: Oregon) even when it can't be said that the relevant harm can be eliminated entirely.
Ultimately, if enough people are down with transing the kids, the kids are gonna get transed. The threshold of "enough" is simply a question of power: if you've got a lot of money, then just knowing one willing (or venal) doctor will probably suffice. But if you're a middle class parent hoping to engage in a little light Munchausen's by Proxy for internet karma and GoFundMe credit, you're going to need some extra assistance via e.g. insurance, tax subsidies, and maybe some government bullying of recalcitrant health professionals. Conversely, simply making a law against transing the kids will suffice for 99% of the population, just like all the other laws that rich people so often find themselves free to disregard.
At best we can rely on professional ethics, but, you know, lol. What's the strategy here?
Sending a message. Having a government that doesn't directly contribute to harming children based on dubious pop culture trends and the elevation of mental illness to a virtue. Protecting children from abusive parents. "But they don't think it's abuse!" Fucking tough; I'm happy to outlaw genital mutilation (including male circumcision), too, because my conception of child abuse is unmoved by appeals to moral relativism. If states can't outlaw transing kids, then they can't outlaw the genital mutilation of infants, either--not in any principled way.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I just took another batch of IQ tests for some poor suffering undergrads and felt that they were hilariously swingy.
Were they IQ tests, or were they just researching cognition and making sloppy estimates? An actual IQ test is standardized and normed, and administered by professionals (not, generally, undergrads).
I have no doubt I am "intelligent" enough to be somewhere near where I test on the bell curve, but 97th percentile feels way too high to me.
In my experience, it is often incredibly difficult for smart people to truly grasp how stupid most people are. This is an extremely pesky fact because it's almost impossible to discuss without sounding hopelessly pretentious, but the fact remains--a good portion of American college students, who statistically represent the "best and brightest" ~40% of their generation, cannot follow or construct a formal argument without extensive coaching.
And I mean this in the most basic, technical sense of identifying premises and relating them to conclusions. For example, I once made a presentation about LSAT success to a room of undergraduates aiming for law school. I grabbed some sample questions from the LSAC website, that I figured would be easy enough to serve as a clear example of "what to expect" without scaring the audience too badly. In an audience of about 20 upperclassmen, there was one student (a physics major) who was able to answer the questions. Everyone else was totally mystified. For reference, here is a recent LSAC sample question:
The supernova event of 1987 is interesting in that there is still no evidence of the neutron star that current theory says should have remained after a supernova of that size. This is in spite of the fact that many of the most sensitive instruments ever developed have searched for the tell-tale pulse of radiation that neutron stars emit. Thus, current theory is wrong in claiming that supernovas of a certain size always produce neutron stars.
Which one of the following, if true, most strengthens the argument?
A. Most supernova remnants that astronomers have detected have a neutron star nearby.
B. Sensitive astronomical instruments have detected neutron stars much farther away than the location of the 1987 supernova.
C. The supernova of 1987 was the first that scientists were able to observe in progress.
D. Several important features of the 1987 supernova are correctly predicted by the current theory.
E. Some neutron stars are known to have come into existence by a cause other than a supernova explosion.
Now, the LSAT is not an IQ test, but the point is that I work with university students all the time, and I am actively aware of things like how many struggle to pass the logic classes, algebra classes, etc. But even then I constantly find myself overestimating their ability to just engage in basic reasoning tasks. And no, I'm not an ivy league professor, I'm not teaching our nation's elite, but estimating from SAT ranges most of my students are generally within the 110-130 IQ range. With a bit of coaching and regular study, they can be trained to do things like pass an algebra class, though most will forget what they've learned within a decade or two, especially if they don't put it to use in their professions.
In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, Scott Alexander writes a bit about the strength of "filter bubbles" that separate the "red tribe" from the "blue tribe." In my experience, there are also filter bubbles that separate people by IQ. I have red-tribe friends running a wide range of apparent intelligence levels. I also have many blue-tribe friends, but all of them are either lawyers or college professors or similar. Low-IQ blue tribers might as well not exist, as far as my social experiences go. I'm sure they do exist--I am reminded of their existence any time I accidentally read reddit without logging in!
...am I just biased against them for some reason?
If you're testing in the 97th percentile I can't imagine why you'd feel biased against IQ tests, which seem to be telling you something most people want to hear: that you're really special! This may be muted because you don't feel special (possibly as a result of IQ filter bubbles), or because the way in which you are special doesn't amount to much if it isn't paired with some mixture of conscientiousness and luck. But finally it is probably important to remember that, as a statistical measure, IQ is of much greater use when discussing populations than when discussing individuals. Yes, knowing an individual's professionally-established IQ probably gives you some information about them, but IQ ranges in professions are nevertheless quite broad.
It is... interesting... to see all this discussion about "progressive male role models" given that the progressive memespace has long been, and mostly still is, dominated by gender eliminativists. The elevation of fringe-of-a-fringe transsexual issues to the "cause du jour" has of course introduced irreconcilable metaphysics into the discourse, but coalition building has ever been thus. The philosophical work underpinning extant views on gender goes back over a century, to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's declaration that
people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men
and philosophical feminism has been broadly gender-eliminativist pretty much ever since.
All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men. Sure, sure--ask your local progressive, they might very well deny it. But this is the standard motte and bailey that exists between thought leaders and political movements everywhere, the disconnect between political theory and political practice. You can't read feminism without stumbling over gender eliminativism, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. "Eliminate gender" is right up there with "abolish the family" on a list of things progressives explicitly and actually want to accomplish, even if these are things they're willing to compromise on for the moment, for the movement.
And you can't really believe that gender needs to be abolished, while simultaneously believing that anyone needs male role models. At best you might say something like, "well, we have to meet the little troglodytes where they are, so we need some... mannish... role models--but not too mannish! Nothing, you know, toxic, nothing overtly heteronormative..." and you've already lost the plot.
This is just another clear case of progressive dreams running headlong into the unyielding embrace of biological reality. People are incredibly plastic! And yet we are not, apparently, infinitely plastic. "Cultural construction" can do a lot, but it cannot lightly obliterate thousands of years of natural selection.
Talk of "misogyny" simply misses the point, and the problem. The only really committed misogynists I've ever met have been women. The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women. You cannot use "role models" to train people away from this kind of behavior; heterosexual men denied access to women will never just accept that fact. At best, maybe you build sexbots sufficiently indistinguishable from tradwives or something, allowing biological women to pursue whatever bland "non-binary" life they imagine lies at the end of the eliminativist project, but until those bots can do particularly biological things like have babies, there will still be men who dedicate their lives to finding a woman--and, sometimes, going off the rails when faced with sufficiently brutal failure.
Or so it seems to me. I think the progressive response is probably retrenchment on the idea that, surely, anyone can be taught to be anything, given sufficiently quality teaching methods. ("We just need more government!") But their real goal isn't to make better men, it's to make a world where there are no men, in the sense that the social gender binary has been eradicated. Recruiting masculine role models to achieve that end is flatly contradictory.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
You linked to their website, but there is nothing there about Catholicism at all.
...you don't think a panoply of wildly caricatured Catholic nuns is about Catholicism "at all?"
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
Then it sounds like you don't have an example
I just gave you all the examples. I can't tell whether you're being deliberately obtuse in hopes of setting some rhetorical trap, or whether I have mistakenly attributed to you a substantial knowledge of the law that you don't actually possess. (For some reason I thought you were a lawyer, but now I'm thinking I must be mistaken about that. If so, my apologies!)
You are advocating for giving rural voters veto power over ALL legislation, not the tiny minority of legislation that intentionally discriminates against them
What reason would they have to use a veto power on anything else?
Or maybe more importantly--why are you advocating for rural voters to never have a veto over ANY legislation, even legislation that intentionally discriminates against them? Because that is clearly the result of "one man, one vote."
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
...aaand I hit the character limit. Well, I didn't have much more to add. But as political figures go, Rebekah Jones was not on my list of people I expected to ever hear about again. How is she still out there participating in society? How does she continue to get attention from the news media? As far as I can tell, she's never accomplished anything meaningful, ever. Her fifteen minutes of fame consisted in raising a large sum of money by being a critic of DeSantis who was willing to take dramatic liberties with the truth. And now there are likely thousands, even tens of thousands of Twitter and Reddit users whose priors just got updated in favor of "DeSantis is a facist" based on a kettle of lies and exaggerations amplified by institutions that will turn around tomorrow and warn us about misinformation.
I'd like to discuss the best ideas my political opposition has, but I'm increasingly concerned that "signal boost liars" is the best idea my political opposition has--or, if not their best idea, maybe just their most pragmatically effective.
More Olympic culture warring: Olympic Games official has accreditation revoked for...
Honestly, I can't even complete the headline, it feels too much like giving credence to the delusion. Can you guess? Here's a hint: think 2017.
Yes, that's right. The rest of the headline is "‘white supremacy’ hand gesture."
Dictionary.com has a whole entry on the "circle game" which is mostly not about the circle game, but is about the "OK hand gesture" that in almost no context has ever been a genuine signal of white supremacist beliefs. The Telegraph article asserts without evidence that "its use as a far-Right symbol is apparently on the rise." And from Dictionary.com:
Even the ADL's own expert had this to say about the "OK hand gesture" in 2017:
Of course, the ADL has since changed its tune, because, well, if you're not a part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem, I guess. I honestly kinda thought this particular meme had run its course when it got misapplied during the Kavanaugh hearings. It got new life when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in 2019, but that was more than 5 years ago, now--an eternity on 4chan. I don't know--did it actually catch on in Europe? Apparently it caught on in Brazil, kinda--
I hadn't heard the Brazil story before now. "The crime of racism" sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me, but I live in the land of the First Amendment... people do things differently in foreign countries. I'm also a little taken aback by the actions of the Brazilian journalist, who did not report a man saying racist things, or a man harassing people, but a man who might have been positioning himself on camera while making a hand signal that has sometimes been associated with having beliefs outside the Overton window. I already hold journalists in pretty low regard, generally, but this Brazilian displayed all the dignity of a classroom snitch, minus any compelling evidence that there was anything to snitch about.
For whatever it's worth, offensive hand gestures are nothing new for the Olympics--not even for these Olympics. But flipping the bird in each case appears to be pretty context-informed. As far as I can tell from the story, the dude maybe playing the circle game and maybe not doing anything especially deliberate at all was booted without hesitation:
I have never been much of a sports fan, but the Olympics in particular really get me conflicted. I've seen some remarkable displays of athleticism; Olympic gymnastics and figure skating are events I have on several occasions watched on purpose and with some interest. But I simply have no good feelings at all for the IOC. They are intellectual property trolls; they have for example attempted to use their trademark to prevent criticism (fortunately they lost that case, but the First Amendment doesn't reach everywhere). Other, specific cases of corruption are pretty well known. I, personally, would never spend any money in direct support of the Olympics, despite my occasional interest over the years.
Though I've little reason to care too much about one subcontractor getting an unceremonious boot for what, to my eyes, looks like playing a silly game he probably didn't even know had been at the center of a culture war flare-up five years ago--I do have reason to care about a slow, global slouch toward Orwellian big brother/little brother behavior. When people talk about "threats to democracy" and "the rise of fascism" I don't see Nazis goose-stepping down main street; I see progressives enforcing ideological conformity through everyday acts of institutional bullshit. This is "cancel culture," writ small.
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