naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I would like to call for naraburns to commit to not calling people names for disagreeing
Sure, I commit to not calling people names for disagreeing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Lol what.
This is low-effort and antagonistic. You're welcome to ask for clarification on a claim that confuses you, but this is not the way to do it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
conservatives still mindlessly repeat
But
There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. General groups include things like gun rights activists, pro-choice groups, and environmentalists. Specific groups include things like The NRA, Planned Parenthood, and the Sierra Club. Posting about general groups is often not falsifiable, and can lead to straw man arguments and non-representative samples.
So please don't drop low-effort group smears.
That is pretty rich coming from someone who refuses to own up to the fact that he erroneously said that 303 Creative is a religious freedom in commerce case.
I did explain, already, that my phrasing there was a somewhat tongue-in-cheek inversion on the many people erroneously insisting (often, in news headlines) that this is an "LGBT rights" case, since of course the jurisprudence on suspect classifications is, let's say, 95% separate from the jurisprudence on Free Speech. Sorry you didn't feel that was sufficient "owning up."
I don't really understand why you're being such a sourpuss about this. I really tried to keep it light when I noticed your initial response, in which you classically ignored any point of interesting substance in favor of seeking boring nits to pick out of some misguided sense of tribal enmity. You always, always make me regret talking to you, in ways that have nothing to do with the substance of our disagreements, and I don't know what to do about that. Often you're pretty good at correcting the ways that people sometimes apply distorted interpretation to various facts, but you seem totally unwilling or unable to apply that ability to your own arguments, or indeed the arguments of anyone you perceive to be your ingroup.
But, if makes you happy, instead of saying that they are "completely different issues with completely different jurisprudences", perhaps I should have said that they are 99% different. Or even 95% different.
Cool cool. Glad we could reach some accord on your error.
What you and /u/FCfromSSC both dance around here ...
The only person dancing around anything here is you.
Should the law require have required my teacher to tell this parent that his son was gay, thus subjecting the kid to homelessness?
Too fucking right it should. It's not the teacher's place to manipulate families based on her own personal values. Schoolteachers are public employees and ultimately answerable to parents. Concealing material information from parents is pedagogical malpractice.
Laws saying teachers don't have to disclose aren't there so that teachers can keep secrets to groom children. They're there so that teachers can use discretion and judgement to figure out what the right course of action is.
That's not a level of discretion government employees get to have over families, not in any sane system. If a child is being physically abused, malnourished, etc. then the law might get involved, and it's tragic and messy but sometimes understandable. If a child is confused about sex or sexuality, that is not the government's business to decide how to address that. By making it the government's business, Democrats are actively grooming children.
If you think it's "abuse" to tell a child that they don't get to date or have sex or wear inappropriate clothing, like, we just have a clear values disagreement. I do think many "transgendered" children are actually victims of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is enough like sexual abuse that I might be persuaded that child protective services should also be allowed to intervene in such cases... but even then, absent any other concerns I'm reluctant to get the government involved. I don't know--do you think I should be more willing to get the government involved in such cases?
Show me what's objectionable in these books, and tell me what age you think you should be in order to access this material, and why.
I mean, for starters. Children's libraries are no place for these materials. Making such materials available to children is textbook grooming. Do you honestly advocate for distributing such things to children? If so, you're a groomer, too, by every definition offered in the thread thus far.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
And the constant whiny bitching and crying by artists about AI art has made me suspicious of the motivations of these so called "artists"
Write like you want to include everyone in the conversation, please. This is unnecessarily heated.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2mo ago
I'm not going to dig up the post where you made this "joke," but one way to follow the rule requiring charitable interpretation is to take people seriously even when you're unsure about them.
I'm not going to dig up whatever post it was where you did this, but if I see you doing it, I'm going to moderate you for not speaking plainly.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
If other people are racist against me how does it help me to unilaterally stop being racist against them?
Being racist mostly imposes costs on you. Not being racist is better for you. If other people are racist against you, they are assuming costs they need not pay. (This is a standard argument re: the fictitious "women's pay gap." If women actually accepted less money to do the same work, then non-sexist companies would out-compete by hiring less-expensive female employees instead of more-expensive male employees. The same is true of racism; if you're a racist company, you're leaving money on the table.)
We already tried the race blind thing and every group except white people kept relentlessly advocating for their racial interests.
We still mostly do the race blind thing. It mostly works fine. The people relentless advocating for their racial interests (whether they are white, black, or otherwise) need to be told, as clearly and repeatedly as possible, that they are wrong.
South Africa tried the same thing with identical results.
No, South Africa is a disaster today because black identitarianism was allowed to overwhelm a liberal status quo that was actually working to everyone's benefit, for a little while.
No truce is possible because the other side will shoot you in the face the instant you lay down your gun.
I'm not saying we should surrender to the identitarians on the left. Of course not! I am very critical of leftist identitarians. But in this thread I am saying that surrendering to the identitarians on the right is in the end the same basic mistake.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm missing something, but I'm not sure I see your point. The plaintiffs in Lawrence had a harm to bring a case over: they really were charged with sodomy.
To the extent that I have a point at all, it's that the jurisprudence of homosexuality--and perhaps, we might infer, many other things--is substantially fictive. I think many people are suspicious of forum shopping, fewer are aware of plaintiff shopping but people do seem to be a bit suspicious of that, too. Most people are aware of civil disobedience, though, and don't necessarily think of it as problematic, even though it does involve ginning up a case rather than addressing the law from a position of organic (so to speak) social interaction. I do think CNN's "just asking questions" article is too coy by half, but as I noted in another reply, I don't have any serious objections to how these cases turned out. Just--if you're (the general you, not you personally) going to raise doubts about one SCOTUS case based on its loose connection to real events, you might not like where that leads (or, more likely, you're just engaged in isolated demands for rigor).
That seems different from the claim that no gay marriage website was ever ordered, so the whole case was actually about a hypothetical harm
While I don't think SCOTUS mentioned the "chilling effects" doctrine in 303 Creative, the Court has long recognized that the law does actual, rather than hypothetical, harm in cases where the law is clearly intended to "eliminate disfavored ideas" (p. 25).
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Everything past that is sophomoric mental masturbation.
Maybe, but you haven't added enough light to the conversation to justify the heat you're bringing. Assume for the sake of argument that the objectively correct response to transsexual choices, behavior, or advocacy is mockery: here at the Motte, you can argue that this is so but you are not permitted to actually deploy the mockery. You can say "we should call freaks freaks" but you cannot nakedly assert "these people are freaks." I assume that people find it challenging to walk that line since almost everyone I know, here and elsewhere, is really quite bad at it. But it is the line that has been drawn around this space so you need to adhere to it here.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
Pretty sure this is already tabooed in LGBT discourse, "there are no gay recruitment drives" etc. But may be worth a shot anyway.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
The standard interpretation of "grooming", as I understand it, is gradual manipulation of the underage and otherwise mentally inadequate with the purpose of normalising the idea that they will be sexually abused or exploited by their adult handlers
I commented on this a bit up the chain, but it bears repeating--I regard putting children in skimpy clothing and throwing money at them while they dance as sexual exploitation per se. You don't have to touch a child to sexually abuse them; in most jurisdictions, just exposing them to pornography counts. Participation in "family friendly" Drag Kids is grooming toward participation in more sexualized drag events. To my eyes, this is a comfortable fit for the term "grooming."
naraburns
nihil supernum
4mo ago
I guess you just want to play childish games.
No: I want you to stop pouring your disdain on this community, and I'm quite serious about that. It's one thing to raise legitimate criticism in a charitable and effortful way. It is something else entirely to go about darkly hinting that mere racism rather than legitimate reason is at the heart of any group's political concerns, but especially the group you're directly talking to, of which you are a part.
And if somehow it was not your aim to air your disdain--though if you said so I could plausibly accuse you of playing "childish games"--then you need to speak plainly. You're a very sharp and educated person, so even if you do this sort of thing by accident it just isn't credible to make that excuse. This is the curse of competence.
So just knock it off. Your comment was out of line, contributed no light, only heat, was not worded plainly, was low effort, take your pick and take the L. I'm not going to get into a philosophical debate with you over what it means to be "bad" or whether there is a difference between saying someone is bad and just hinting at unflattering characterizations with two winks and a nod. I'm telling you, don't post like that, or I will mod you a second time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
Sexual perversion is bad. Full stop. Every person knows it deep in their gut, even if they construct elaborate philosophical frameworks to obscure that truth from themselves.
This is about as clean a violation of the "consensus building" rule as it gets. Please don't do that.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7mo ago
I had not previously encountered that meme. It seems like a pretty on-point criticism of "edgy" academics (who are often ensconced in some of the cushiest institutional sinecures available to anyone who is not literal royalty or a token minority).
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
This is unnecessarily antagonistic, and also oddly specific, which I suppose tracks.
If you would like to talk about the specifics of your personal difficulties, we do have a weekly Wellness thread. Though even there, you'd need to be seeking advice (and be open to gracefully receiving it!) rather than just venting. I don't think I could draw a bright line between "expressing frustration over CW-adjacent issues" and "aimless heated venting," but your posts seem to lean more toward the latter than the former, and if you can't rein that in, you're going to eat a ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
That's due to a derangement in your value system
You are free to explore value disagreement, but dropping to accusations of derangement is too much heat. I might let it slide if it were some passionate rhetoric in the midst of an effort post, but this comment seems to just be pure heat. Three day ban.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
When racists in the US government diverted vaccines away from white people to black people did that hurt black people? I think it helped them.
Sure. So we should complain about racism, not divert vaccines away from black people instead.
When Harvard gives black people an advantage in admissions does that hurt or help them?
To hear Clarence Thomas tell, it hurts them. But perhaps more importantly, trying to judge "hurt" and "help" in terms of who gets to be a Supreme Court justice or Yale law professor, and who is instead relegated to graduating from a top-10 law school and making millions of dollars as a partner at a top law firm (but who doesn't get to tell her friends she went to Harvard) seems like piss-poor reckoning. It's not as though the Asians "harmed" by Harvard's racism (whites actually appear to benefit very slightly, or at least not be harmed, by Harvard's preferences) are facing a choice between Harvard and never going to college. The real harm is so slight as to be essentially invisible, except for the part where we decide to reject racism on principle instead of on the basis of who gets to have the most desirable status signals. Rejecting racism on principle is good.
If I own a store and exclude people of race X because I think they shoplift a lot and are a net drain on the business then that is racist
It's not racist to see facts. If there is an ethnic propensity for antisocial behavior, there's nothing wrong with taking reasonable action as a result.
...and illegal
Right, you can't just say "because black people are more likely to shoplift, all black people are excluded." Instead you should say "we need to construct a law enforcement system which makes it easier to detain and punish shoplifters." There's nothing racist about that. Oh, sure, an identitarian will say there's something racist about that when it turns out that a bunch of mostly non-white kids are the ones who end up actually doing time, but I am not an identitarian, I'm the one arguing against identitarianism.
To use your example, if I own a business and I think women are worse workers and hire them with a lower starting salary then I'm being sexist.
No, that's wrong! This is exactly my point. To call that sexist is the problem with identitarianism! Pay people whatever you want! As a job creator you don't owe it to anyone to pay a penny more than they are worth! And if they are worth more than that, someone else will pay them more. But if you're sexist, you're at a disadvantage versus others who are gauging merit instead. There are of course inefficiencies in the market, this won't work perfectly, but your responses to me are completely mis-targeted because I'm the one arguing against identitarianism! You're criticizing certain bad social practices and telling me "to combat racism and sexism I have to be racist and sexist" but all you've done is accepted the wrong definitions of racism and sexism. Once you do that, it's just "ingroup versus outgroup" all the way down, you lose the ability to complain persuasively about racial and sexual preferences because you've shown that you want racial and sexual preferences for yourself. A black-hating racist and a white-hating racist are just engaged in a game of power, there's no principle to appeal to, just pure in-group preference. But very often it is cooperation, not competition, that we need to coordinate if we're going to get stag.
Or another example, if I know race X commits crime at a high rate and I find myself walking around an unfamiliar city at night in an area with a lot of X, what should I do? Leaving the area is racist
I cannot emphasize this enough: you are just buying the wrong definition of racist here. If you disagree with left-identitarians, why would you let them define your key terms? This is what makes me crazy about the alt-right: they allow their enemies to set the poles of the debate--and that means they are destined to lose. They have lost the game before they have even begun to fight.
Identitarianism is always going to win in a democracy because embracing identitarianism gives you a bloc of perfectly loyal voters.
I agree that democracy is mostly bad and even the small protections of minority rights built into the U.S. system (Supreme Court, Bill of Rights, the original selection method for senators, the Great Compromise, the electoral college) have been much eroded by identitarianism. Proposing to fight fire with fire, however, too often just ends up getting you burned.
...you can't have race blindness because sooner or later one political party is going to learn that they can win by abandoning it.
This is a different problem, though. You're no longer arguing for "the good kind of racism," now you're arguing against the practice of democracy. Because if political parties can't divide people along racial lines, they will just divide people along some other lines. The blues and the greens of the Roman chariot races are the canonical example, I think.
The United States began as an uneasy alliance between a bunch of "white" abolitionists and a bunch of "white" slavers. Later came Germans (now "white"), Irishmen (now "white"), Chinese immigrants (now "white adjacent" for purposes of college admissions), Hispanics (usually "white" within two or three generations)... Native Americans who don't maintain sufficient blood or cultural purity become "white," many blacks "pass" as "white," the way these lines get drawn is political.
And sure, you can say "I would like these lines to be drawn to my benefit," but then you're just doing the same stupid thing the people you're complaining about (indirectly, in your selection of examples) are doing, in reverse. And intelligence is not reversed stupidity.
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
And likewise, I agree to an extent. But I feel like the examples you give, and the more complicated ones you didn't give, fall into "just so" stories, narrow selections of what-might-have-been.
For example: by young and try buying a house. "Depending on where you live" is doing a lot of work in your example of price and other pressures. Houses today are bigger and in other ways far more luxurious than they were 50 years ago, or even 30 years ago. Anti-growth environmentalism and government overregulation (including various government subsidies for, especially, first-time home buyers) have far more to do with anyone's housing woes, than immigration. And even so, "Generation Z" is actually tracking as more likely to own a home than their parents were at their age.
Are the streets meaner, crime higher? Well, "depending on where you live," no, for example violent crime has gotten a little worse since the Great Awokening (thanks, Obama!) but is still way down from its peak some 30 years ago. Immigration has probably suppressed some wages, but in the United States the people who seem to be most economically harmed by Hispanic immigration are black Americans who are the next most likely demographic to pick up the manual labor. Oh, sure, maybe some white kid has a harder time getting a good wage at a coding job because the government is handing out H1B visas like Halloween candy, but people have been predicting the total implosion of computer science as a viable career choice for at least two decades that I know of; still doesn't appear to be happening and young white kids with CS degrees are still making a lot more money fresh out of school than, say, me as an educator. There are no solutions--only tradeoffs!
In other words, it's not about what you could have in multiracial America, it's about what you could have in monoracial America.
But what do you lose in a monoracial America? What do other people lose? The identitarian position for white nationalists and black separatists and those who make "stolen land acknowledgments" is always the same: "my people would be better off if everyone else would just submit to our demands!" Well, maybe that's true, but history tells a very different story: trade and liberty (in particular, of movement and commerce) leads to widespread increases in quality of life, in ways that nothing else ever has in all of history. If it is true that white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to non-white people, and non-white people can be better off, overall, by denying some liberty to white people, and both groups set about denying liberty to the other--then the practical result is that neither group is going to be better off in the end, they're just going to constantly be fighting about which group gets to be on top. Better to find intelligent ways to cooperate, than to compete in a zero-sum game (that might not even pan out empirically in the end). Especially since white people are a small and shrinking global minority.
Of course, there is a global ethnic minority that did attempt to build itself an ethnonationalist homeland, and I don't know what history has in store for Israel but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's not "peace in our time." Likewise, casino operation has changed this in some places to some degree, but ethnically pure Indian Reservations are in general riddled with poverty and cultural malaise. Even Japan, arguably a shining beacon of ethnonationalism and certainly an economic powerhouse, is struggling with demographics and economics in ways that are changing their historically xenophobic culture rapidly. There just aren't any positive examples of "purge the undesirables" I can find anywhere in history; the most successful one that comes to mind is the ethnic divorce of Greece and Turkey in the 20th century, and neither of those countries are today places ripe with golden opportunity.
Because you can have good things in both Americas. But one of them has some very obvious downsides the other one does not have.
The other one has some very obvious downsides, too.
Those foreigners imagine a better life in the White Mans Backpack. I've never encountered any righteous indignation directed at them, telling them to stop being so envious. "I want more. I deserve more!" Why can't they just accept their lot? Why aspire for an environment where you are more likely to flourish?
Everyone below a certain reasonable threshold should aspire for an environment where they are more likely to flourish. They just shouldn't aspire to get there by hurting other people. And this is where the identitarians always end up, tweeting ("ironically! to start a dialogue!") about ethnic cleansing of one kind or another. It has been tried, it doesn't work.
naraburns
nihil supernum
10mo ago
We aren't here to be your therapist.
While @yofuckreddit would probably have been better off making their post a bit less rant-y, sneering at them does not help matters. Please avoid this level of antagonism in the future.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
I don't care, and you shouldn't either. At least not here, in the Culture War thread, made for talking about the Culture War.
This is unnecessarily antagonistic. Under the circumstances, the rule corralling human biodiversity (including sex differences) and sexual harassment into the CW thread makes this an appropriate place to raise the discussion, given OP's stated belief that
This will be used as an excuse for some weirdo on the edge of sanity to stalk you.
If a topic doesn't interest you, that is a good time to practice the virtue of silence. But contrary to your claims, you seem to actually in fact care about these discussions--at least enough to complain about them.
This is the culture war thread, so the potential for any given conversation to "devolve, immediately" is always quite high. That's why we have the engagement rules that we have. Please adhere to them.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
So, you are literally advocating that every numerical minority -- bookkeepers, etc; heck, even every individual! -- get veto power over legislation?
Well, in a way.
Meaning that no law ever gets passed?
Why should it mean that? Laws do pass unanimously in the House and Senate from time to time, and if we were voting on very basic matters I think we could often generate consent--especially if we limited citizenship to people who could pass a test of reasoning. Anyway I don't believe in direct democracy but so long as you have robust property and personal rights protected by a minimal government, a single person or group's decision to not participate in this or that regulatory scheme doesn't seem worth getting worked up about.
I am pretty sure that that is not what the framers had had in mind.
Well, probably not all of them. But some of them do seem to have felt approximately as I do. The "Great Compromise" is, I remind you, the best evidence we have available that, whatever else they believed, the Framers did not think "one man, one vote" was going to work for the United States.
Black and Hispanic districts are the same size as other districts, right? So, why should rural districts be an exception.
Black and Hispanic districts are created specifically to maximize Black and Hispanic impact. It's harder to do this with rural districts primarily because the sheer size of cities makes giving equal power to rural voters basically impossible under "one man, one vote."
That's an odd claim for someone who is arguing that urban voters should be the political slaves of rural America. I have yet to see a principled statement of why that should be the case.
Now you're just being pointlessly absurd. Nothing I have said implies that urban voters should be the political slaves of rural America. You're the only person here arguing that a certain minority deserves to be coerced because it is a minority. I think the Great Compromise was an interesting move. A bicameral legislature, with one house apportioned by population and one apportioned by geography, seems like a very functional resolution. It was so brilliant that many states copied the move with their own state legislatures--until the Warren court attacked.
So, if you are starting from the premise that there are any government actions from which "everyone benefits," your argument rests on rotten foundations.
This is bullshit. Laws against murder, rape, arson, theft, etc. are all to the benefit of everyone. Even a stable monetary system is arguably to the benefit of everyone. I see no need to pander to the last standing contrarian; people who don't want to participate in the government should be afforded maximum opportunity to do that, for example through aforementioned strong protection of individual and property rights. We live under an absolutely outrageous amount of regulation and government bloat today. None of it is necessary. Most of it is actively harmful to many while being slightly beneficial to a select few. There is nothing just about that; there is certainly nothing constitutional about it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1yr ago
you incorrectly claim I uncharitably characterized it with my question
No, on review I was definitely correct.
4 other people are replying to my question, "Yes, absolutely that is what influential gay people are doing"
Yep, you can definitely reply to them about what they have said. That would not be uncharitable. This was.
The thing that draws my notice in the housewife and Judy Garland examples is the makeup. The earliest arguments I'm aware of that makeup is inherently sexual are from feminists critiquing objectification; for example:
The final category of the disciplinary practices, Bartky holds, are those that are directed towards the display of a woman’s body as an ‘ornamented surface’: women must take care of their skin and make it soft, smooth, hairless and wrinkle-free, they must apply make-up to disguise their skin’s imperfections. Our culture demands the ‘infantilisation’ of women’s bodies and faces.
More recently we see makeup tracked as inherently sexual by Jordan Peterson, who is arguably a 2nd or 3rd wave feminist (via his work coaching women for career advancement) but would likely be disclaimed by most feminists today.
That's a pretty broad culture war spectrum agreement on the idea that makeup, at least in the classic foundation-lipstick-blush-eyeshadow configuration, is inherently sexual. It's not strongly sexual, and I think many, maybe most people do not consciously think of it that way, most of the time. But I think that's one of those ways people kid themselves about our inescapable nature as sexually-reproduced members of a sexually-reproducing species. Noticing that makeup is inherently sexual breaks the kayfabe, but that doesn't mean it's a mistake--to the contrary, what generally breaks the kayfabe is the truth.
Now, I do think @Gillitrut's phrasing is a little ambiguous; I'm not claiming that every man who participates in drag is doing so for personal sexual gratification. But the phrase "inherently sexual act" strikes me as inescapably inclusive of either doing or parodying things that are historically about sexual attraction and value. The objectification of women is not accidentally sexual. (I think this also accounts for much of the discomfort people express at seeing makeup on young girls, e.g. in beauty pageants.)
The best objection I can think of, right now, to my view is that men doing drag could claim to be somehow defusing the objectification of women, by making makeup and sexy dresses just another thing humans do with no sexual connotations whatever. But this would strike me as on par with holding minstrel shows for the purpose of fighting racism. I occasionally hear people claim they are trying to "break down the gender binary" by doing gender-nonconforming things, but sex and sexuality have such a (so far) inescapable biological grounding that it would be very hard to persuade me that this is even an achievable result (modulo transhuman levels of body-mod tech), much less a likely one.
@anti_dan's low effort comment was, indeed, low effort--to the point where it might have drawn moderation if it were more directly antagonistic or uncharitable or somesuch. I don't think it quite rises to the level of calling for a wrist slap, but on a different day, maybe it would.
But you uncharitably characterizing a position on which someone else was insufficiently specific does not improve matters at all. Especially when you acknowledge that there is a broad range of interpretations, here. Picking the most outrageous, least plausible version of that and then asking for evidence has some very "have you stopped beating your wife" kind of energy. Please don't do this.
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