The modern nanny doesn't really care about raising the children, because they're not her children after all. It's enough for her to make sure the children can't hurt each other; it's not her role to teach them manners or responsibility.
nomenym
1yr ago
It's one of the things I find utterly contemptible about the UK and its people. The mongal horde will rape their daughters, pillage their cities, and pull down their idols. Hard times are coming.
nomenym
1yr ago
There was a brief moment when "alt-right" just meant anyone broadly right-wing but outside of the Republican establishment, and it included a lot of dissident right figures from social media that are still going. However, the broader meaning didn't last long.
nomenym
1yr ago
Nobody thinks she's black. She's black in the same way that you ain't black if you don't vote for Biden. It's more of an honorific than a description, and the charges of racism are transparently cynical. To assert that she is black is to signal tribal allegiance and dare anyone to point out the madness. This is a very real case of see deer, say horse. It is perhaps fitting that your trans colleague would insist on doing so the most strongly.
I am reminded of how in Northern Ireland there are Catholic atheists and protestant atheists. If someone tells me they are non-binary, I immediately think, "yeah, but which one?"
nomenym
1yr ago
So what you're saying is that London is clean and polite, except for the assholes.
nomenym
1yr ago
Oh, that's nice. I'll have to throw that in the sock draw next to my British passport.
nomenym
1yr ago
The problem here is that Twitter has rescinded the bluecheck as a form of punishment against users they disapprove of and seemingly denied it to many others for similar reasons.
nomenym
1yr ago
I think the claim is that our methods of testing are inherently biased in favor of diligence over brilliance. Therefore, relying solely on test scores will tend reward the former too much and the latter too little. If true, then some kind of counterbalance may be desirable.
nomenym
1yr ago
The objective test for brilliance is lifetime achievement, and it correlates with but is not the same as being good at academic tests.
This is happening because incentives. We now have established that "hate speech" is an exception to free speech everywhere but the upper courts and The Motte (for now). Only one side can effectively wield this hate speech exception, so when an event like this happens we get each side trying to blame the other. While the left might lose a smidge of credibility when the facts turn against their narrative, the right will be subject to ever encroaching bans and censorship. The right, therefore, will collectively sigh with relief when it turns out the latest murdering lunatic didn't watch Tucker Carlson. However, this ratchet only goes in one direction (Elon Musk notwithstanding), because the hate speech exception almost exclusively applies to right wing values and beliefs only. The activists, whether by Machiavellian cunning or just authoritarian instinct, see an indirect (but obvious) causal link between the utterences of their ideological opponents and these types of mass shootings, and they see an opportunity to cast a wider net for the hate speech exception. This strategy been working quite well for them, and the right doesn't really have a counter.
It's really bad news when one of these shootings really does turn out to be some gun-toting Trump cultist, and I am relieved when it is not. Because when it is, the ratchet will move again, with more institutions enacting incremental bans and censorship of ever more ordinary right wing views and opinions, because their words are literally killing people. It doesn't happen everywhere all at once, but is rather just a slow grinding down of free speech. Once these rules were established, the game to disown violent radicals on your own side, particularly if your on the right, and to try and pin it on the other side, is the correct and only sensible move
nomenym
1yr ago
I wonder where that places Iranian trans women. Infamously, Iran has a very high rate of transwomen, because it's the legal alternative to homosexuality. However, this is clearly an instrumental motivation, even if it often coincides with significant efforts to present and live as women.
It's also an interesting definition, because much of what is driving opposition to the rise of gender ideology is the belief that social pressure, contagion, and misdiagnosed mental illness are the primary drivers trans-identification right now, and these are seen as extrinsic motivations that are often misunderstood as intrinsic by those who temporarily self-identify as trans. If the activists truly believe as you say, but then they pretend otherwise for politically strategic reasons, then they are fundamentally untrustworthy on the very important factual question of what is actually driving increasing rates of trans-identification.
nomenym
1yr ago
People usually get away with a lot before they're caught, so I would assume he's done this, or something like this, before.
nomenym
1yr ago
This is essentially why I think the 2020 election probably was "stolen" from Trump and there really isn't anything to be done about it.
There were too many people with motive and opportunity to break or bend the rules, and they don't need to be centrally coordinated or even explicitly communicate with each other. They all just need to be on the same team and know they're fighting against fascism. The cheating is going to be opportunistic, contextual, usually bending rather than breaking the rules. There isn't going to be a clear pattern or smoking gun, because this process exploits the local knowledge of motivated individuals in positions of responsibility who know what they can get away with in each circumstance.
Thia incident at Twitter is the kind of thing I expect to be happening everywhere, and most of the time it goes unimpeded or unnoticed. This also applies to the midterms and all elections going forward for the foreseeable future, because they learned their lesson in 2016. There is nothing that can realistically be done about this.
nomenym
1yr ago
A large part of the anti-trans side, such as the religious people you mentioned, wouldn't accept Jane as a woman even if we had magical-level medical technology.
Ironically, they're not the only ones to believe in a immutable gendered soul.
nomenym
1yr ago
The best way to understand this ideology is to assume its trying to destabilize society by trans-ing as many people as possible. The purpose of destabilization is to facilitate a revolution toward some nebulous utopia. The individual agents of this ideology may or may not explicitly recognize this, and even fewer say it out loud and in public. Most have internalized some incoherent set of arguments which superficially appeal to liberal principles, and they intuitively understand what they are expected and forbidden to say and think. It is low status to be seen to disagree or oppose this ideology, and the worst fear of many people is to be mistaken for the wrong sort of person.
The arguments are just tools deployed strategically to increase the number of trans people given the context. There are no unifying principles, and there is no explanatory theory that ties it all together. Water is wet when saying so increases the number of trans people, and water is dry when saying so increases the number of trans people. Those individuals within the fold who try to stick to a principle or rationalize the theory inevitably find themselves as outcasts, because at some point they derive a position that doesn't increase the number of trans people.
Incoherence is swept away by continuously redefining and coining new terms. Both the theories and social dynamics encourage dogmatic thinking and suppression of wrongthink. Agents are led to enmesh their personal identity, their sense of self-worth and purpose, with the ideology, such that they cannot be separated. Attacks on these ideas are then reflexively construed as attacks on people. Objectivity is impossible. Rational discussion is prohibited. Conflicts can then only be resolved by manipulation and power relations.
These are the dark arts.
nomenym
1yr ago
Well, the elephant in the room is the inexplicable and ongoing high level of excess deaths being reported among all age groups and across continents. These deaths do not appear to be driven primarily by Covid itself or at least not directly.
Naively, one might have predicted excess deaths to be unusually low, perhaps negative, following a pandemic which disproportionately and prematurely killed off so many elderly and unhealthy people. Instead, we have significant, consistent, and prolonged increases across all groups. There is a clear signal in the data, and it is not wrong to suspect the mRNA vaccines as a potential culprit. Unfortunately, the institutions which we depend upon to research these questions have strong incentives to avoid particular results, and they have proven themselves quite untrustworthy where such conflicts of interest are in play. We're left with a lot of anecdotes, hear say, conspiracy theories, and gut instincts to guide our action.
Covid will never be gone, nevermind suddenly gone. By that logic, the pandemic will go on forever. But almost everyone has had the virus; it's endemic now. We lost. The question is now just discovering how badly we lost, and how much of the damage was self-inflicted (if the virus was made in a lab, then I guess it was all self-inflicted, but you know what I mean).
nomenym
1yr ago
It's like a psychological allergy. Growing up in an environment that's too clean prevents your immune system from calibrating appropriately, and it seems that growing up with too much psychological safety has a similar effect. Unfortunately, this trait has become a kind of status signifier among women, and so they're now actively cultivating their psychological allergies.
There's a difference between being teased for "looking like a dude" and having people quietly suspect or assume you're attempting to "pass" as the opposite sex has rather different implications.
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