quiet_NaN
9d ago
There are a couple of perplexing things here. First, and most pedantically, the mention of "external barriers" implies the possible or likely existence of "internal barriers." What would that be?
For example:
- "I was in the middle of transitioning, but then I found god and knew that she would not want me to take hormones."
- "I am trans, but I am not transitioning because I do not want to put chemicals into my body."
Second, if "external barriers" like discrimination, limited "access" to gender-affirming care, and (the very non-specific) lack of support cause a person to totally halt their transition, am I allowed to question their commitment in the first place?
Sure. I mean, you are also allowed to question the sexual identity of a celibate closet gay in Kabul, or the faith of a Christian in Tehran who does not try to preach the gospel to the locals.
For most people, a faith, gender or sexual identity is not their whole utility function. There is probably a trans person somewhere who would emigrate to Somalia if that was the only country where they could transition, or be willing to murder people for their wallets if that was the only way they could affort HRT. But almost all people have more complex utility functions, where trade-offs exist.
Physics determines part of how easy or difficult maxxing certain terms in one's utility function is. If visiting the Moon was as easy as taking a tram, you can bet I would visit the Moon, and if changing your sex was as easy as picking another option in a drop-down menu before going to sleep, I would certainly experiment with being a woman. But giving the constraints of physics, both of these things have significant tradeoffs, so I am very unlikely to gaze at Earth or grow tits.
But on top of that, societies can incentivize or disincentivize the maxxing of certain terms of one's utility function ("self-actualization"). I like to eat licorice sometimes, but if my society places it on Schedule I, I will not spend half my paycheck on getting some from the darknet. Likewise, if the penalty for the possession of redhead porn was death, that would definitely affect my porn habits. Or if the government decided that unlimited vanilla ice cream was a Basic Human Right and heavily subsidized its sale, that would likely lead to me changing my ice cream habits.
If we ever get to the point as a society where we really deeply subsidize mental health services, we're going to be broke overnight. Think about that - that's creating a free service for when you feel bad. Absolutely uncapped demand.
If your model of mental health services is that they will give people whatever will make them feel better, then I totally agree that no society could afford this. "Doc, I am a bit down, but I think a {new dress|adventure holiday|blowjob|fancy dinner|MMORPG item} would cheer me up" - "Sure, let me just write you a voucher for that".
In the real world, the mental health services do not work like that. Feel free to visit a psychiatric hospital sometimes and check. Engaging with mental health services because you feel bad is like using a life buoy because you are wet. Either system is designed to keep you alive, not ensure your comfort. Unless you are wet to the point which we call "drowning", or feeling bad to the point we call "clinically depressed", your best option very likely does not involve these emergency nets.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Personally, I think that spicing together two sentences with "and" in them is the kind of thing which should never be done. That is a very different ballpark than the Reagan free trade ad, which simply elected to reorder a few sentences.
Also, this seems as pointless as making up a story about Trump eating toddlers. The unedited quotations from Trump speak for themselves (and picking soundbites out of a longer speech is 100% accepted journalism -- let Trump whine about how the quotes are not representative of the overall speech and taken out of context, nobody will give a fuck), but someone apparently thought they could make Trump look 20% more evil with their clever manipulation, with the predictable result that Trump can now claim to be the hapless victim of the evil manipulative mainstream media.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
While there exists at least one non-Republican senator who is not willing to blindly vote for any Republican proposal, a shutdown is obviously never 100% the Republicans fault in a very technical sense.
Still, the general rule in parliaments is that if you need someone's votes, you have to make them some concessions in exchange.
One might as well claim that on a technical level, both a rapist and (sober, adult) rape victim could stop a rape from happening by either stopping the act or just giving consent (at which point it would no longer be rape).
However, I am about as inclined to buy "it is the evil Democrats fault because they wanted some material concessions for their vote" as I am to buy "she is to blame because she did not give me consent", because the social expectation is neither that you vote for your opponent's budget out of the goodness of your heart nor that you must consent to any sex act others might afflict on you.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I do not see the contradiction. As an analogy, consider the Ukraine-Russian war. I think it would be fair for Ukrainians to claim that this is Putin's war. However, it seems also likely that if the top eight military officials of Ukraine conspired to unconditionally surrender to Putin, the war would be over in very short order.
Would that make you go "Ha! This shows that it was Zelenskyy's war all along, he could have stopped it any time by surrendering!"?
Now, if the Democrat party line had been that they would never vote for a budget while Trump was president, I think it would be fair to call it a Democrat shutdown. But from what I can tell, they just wanted a few token concessions around the ACA, hardly something completely outlandish. In such cases, it falls to the party which controls the government to negotiate, and their failure to do so reflected very badly on MAGA. In fact, Trump pointed out the very same thing during an Obama shutdown.
I am realist enough not to expect the Dems to watch a million Americans starve to death before they decide to "put the country before partisan politics" or "be the bigger person". But from what I have heard, the number of citizens which died from lack of SNAP benefits is basically zero.
At this point, what MAGA should do is announce that any time a bill of theirs will not pass, Noem will kill another puppy. That should be enough to get the spineless Democrats to vote for it lest they be complicit in puppy killing.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I do not have strong intuitions either way. Presumably, there is a difference between a JHP bullet hitting a steel barrier and a FMJ getting more gently stopped in ballistic gelatin.
In theory, this could be tackled through careful statistical analysis, same as DNA, so we would at least know if the results are strong or not. In practice, I suspect that methods are selected for convincing juries rather than the scientific-minded community. Hence "lie detectors" etc. I would probably read an article "bullet forensics: much more than you wanted to know", but am too lazy to research it myself.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I think that you are correct in you assessment of the probabilities. However, another consideration is that the gait analysis evidence was reported on simply because it was found to be somewhat significant, so it is subject to p-hacking considerations.
Fundamentally, I am not sure how a Bayesian should update on true but potentially adversarially selected evidence. As an intuition pump, consider two persons A and B which are in a relationship which is supposed to be exclusive. A suspects that B is cheating. B proposes to send A screenshots of their text messages. Normally, a random sample of texts which contain no evidence for misbehavior would be at least weak evidence of the absence of such misbehavior. But A will not get a random sample, but potentially a curated subset selected for being misleading. Thus A should not update at all on receiving harmless screenshots (beyond the signaling value of going through the effort of sending them, at least). If A is willing to update even a tiny bit on such a screenshot, B can take them for a ride.
On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument. Most of the evidence which we use to build a world-view does not come with a strict chain of custody to guarantee that it was randomly sampled and reported without publication bias etc.
I have no good way to resolve these two viewpoints. In criminal justice, the idea to allow both sides to make their best case certainly seems helpful.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
While I can not speak for the OP, I think that the information "people have been panicking over franchise and education for women leading to lower TFR for a very long time" is in itself valuable.
Like, when older people complain about the youth of today, it is fair to quote ancient Greeks complaining about the same thing. This does not disprove either, but it is Bayesian evidence that complaining about the youth of today is just normal baseline behavior.
The last 120 years since the popular science text have been the most successful ever for Western civilization, absolutely speaking. They were also quite good for mankind as a whole, albeit with some big dark spots at the beginning. Ironically, half of these dark spots were caused by people overly worried about the Future Of Their Race.
The places on Earth which still oppress women to breed them at maximum efficiency (e.g. Afghanistan) are not even in remotely the same league as the low fertility countries.
Personally, I believe that civilizational infertility is self-regulating and that life will find a way, if we do not invent artificial wombs for robot waifus first or kill ourselves with ASI.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
This feels like Culture War 101. Arguments as soldiers. If an official source if bolstering your side, take what they say as gospel. If they oppose your side, find a reason why they can not be trusted.
The Red tribe does this. The Blue tribe does this.
Expecting them to have good epistemic standards, to even be interested in the truth for its own sake, is like expecting a bank robber of caring about the Gini coefficient.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Did you know transwomen have the same rate of sex crimes as any other male?
That is somewhat surprising. I guess that being trans is probably correlated to sexual deviancy (and generally to a strong emotional tie to gender and sex?). On the other hand, I would expect that people on T blockers would commit fewer sex crimes, and a significant fraction of trans women are on T blockers. If these two effects cancel each other out, that is curious.
Still, my initial point was that if we care equally about every rape (as we should), then the risk of a trans woman raping someone in women's prison can not be considered in isolation. Presumably, a lot of prison rape is prevented because most of the would-be rapists are straight men who are really not into fucking other men. If you give them the opportunity to rape dick-girls instead (or even fully transitioned women), I guess many of them would take that. So putting a transwoman into any prison will lead to more expected rape than for a cis person, but we should still strive to minimize it by placing her wherever the risk increase is smaller.
If you want a possible implementation, you can take blood testosterone as a proxy. Make a study, find the crossover point for the relative risks.
Or we could just roll out the tech to stamp down prison rape and leave this as a largely irrelevant CW sideshow.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Males in female prisons significantly increase the risk of sexual assault in prisons.
And I would guess that trans-women in men's prison also significantly increase the risk of sexual assault in prison. My point is that there are certainly some people where the one effect is larger, and certainly one where the other effect is larger.
Or are you implying that a trans woman getting raped in men's prison is less of a big deal or that they were complicit by being trans in the first place?
quiet_NaN
15d ago
Of course that organized religion will meddle in matters of state. There is no other possibility, as organized religion impacts moral stance and worldview of adherents who in turn then apply these ideas in their lives - including things like how to vote, which laws to pass etc.
Granted. It would be weird if a moral framework never influenced how people vote.
However, there are different stages.
-
The religion teaches tenets (love thy neighbor, blood for the blood god, etc) and leaves it to the individual member of how to interpret them in the voting booth.
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The leaders of the religion routinely endorse political candidates, and their followers mostly vote for them.
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A religion or groups of religions form a large voting block.
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Religious organizations are a load-bearing part of the countries power structure. (Think medieval Europe, Iran, Taliban).
In short, I think that the Christian wall between liberalism and state protects liberalism as much as it protects the state.
It took me a while to parse that sentence, because I took "liberalism" as a founding principle of the US, not as a group of political ideologies such as democratic socialism or social justice progressivism.
My reply is that SJP is just a political ideology. If its proponents do not meddle with politics, there is no point to it at all. And of course that means that it attracts plenty of sociopaths who play status games. But they have literally nothing worth protecting by keeping out of politics.
By contrast, the founders of the US had experienced life under a state religion, and they knew that this was not what they wanted. I would guess that their thought process went something like this:
Even if we enshrine my favorite flavor of Christianity as a state religion, as a state religion, its dogmas would be subject to pressure from realpolitik. In a few generations, it will become watered down and corrupted to be morally indistinguishable from the Church of England, and because it will be a load-bearing part of society, religious dissent will not be tolerated. It is much better to suffer an Union with heretical sects than to end up in a situation where heresy is state-mandated.
The tenets of a religion being twisted under the pressure from realpolitik the way the SCOTUS has twisted the text of the constitution (e.g. commerce clause, Roe) is not something I would wish on my worst enemy.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
I think that one advantage that Christianity has is that in the beginning, it was not married to temporal authority. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. Early Christianity thrived in an environment much more hostile to it than anything the SJ or MAGA people are likely to inflict on it.
It rising to a position of temporal authority only came later, starting with Constantine. As an atheist watching from the sidewalk, I have to say that I liked the version of Christianity before the sociopaths took over better.
It might be illustrative to compare Christianity to the other religions of the book. Judaism started out as a tribe/state religion, but thanks to the zealots picking fights they could not win, they got a head start of 2ka in learning to live as a religious minority. (Again, from the outside view, diaspora Judaism seems a lot more palatable than whatever orthodox factions are bent on Making Israel Great Again.) Islam started out with strong claims to temporal authority, Muhammad was a warlord as well as a prophet, after all. While there are certainly Muslims who are good citizens to secular nation states, my feeling is that it is that they have an even harder time justifying that stance theologically than Catholics do.
In short, I think that the wall between religion and state protects religion as much as it protects the state. If organized religion meddles in matters of the state, the consequence will be that it will attract the kind of people who look for temporal power, and before long your religion will be run by sociopaths who sell indulgence to their believers, burn heretics and organize crusades.
It helps that (from my understanding), in Christianity you can be saved even if you live in a sinful state in this fallen world. If you believe that eating seafood or gay/unmarried sex or abortions condemn you to hell, liberalism is very compatible with not committing any of these sins. (Things do get a bit hairy around religious objection to military service though, or if you object to paying taxes which finance what you consider to be sinful behavior.)
quiet_NaN
17d ago
Austria might even be closer to Germany than the Netherlands.
I am the first to admit that borders are accidents of history. There is no good principled reason why Austria should be its own thing but Bavaria should be part of Germany. The status quo is sacred merely as a Schelling point. If people want to move borders through democratic means, such as the Scottish movement to leave the UK, that is fine. But after two big industrialized wars, the world has largely realized that moving borders through military action is not worth the effort any more. Eventually, such actions became seen as defection from the club of civilized countries.
For Europe, "stick to the borders however stupid and unfair they are" has been a marked improvement over the ancient, previous method of resolving land disputes, "bash your neighbors heads in every 50 years to see who gets to own the disputed territories".
quiet_NaN
17d ago
TIL that Galicians have trouble with gaining independence from their cultural overlords from Iberia to Eastern Europe.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
In Germany, we had a natural experiment of being either a client state of the US or Russia. The outcome makes it very easy to understand why a lot of former Warsaw pact countries desperately wanted to join NATO as the cold war ended.
For all your whining about Jews enacting the Great Replacement of the White race, I would wager that orders of magnitude more have fled from Kiev to the safety of London to escape the war than have fled from London to Kiev to escape the Great Replacement.
In general, one would think that Belarus would be some White supremacist utopia. No Black or Brown people ruining everything. Nobody replacing anyone. No social justice types pushing gay, immigrant or women agendas (at least outside the labor camps). High religious conformity, in particular 0.1% Judaism and 0.2% Islam. Strong political decisions instead of endless bickering. They would probably let in White guys in exchange for a few years of military service.
But for some reason, while people in most wartorn countries are generally willing to emigrate or seek refuge in a safer country, the victims of the atrocities in London you mentioned are generally reluctant to do so, compared to Ukrainians or Syrians.
The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.
I think the party line of Moscow is that culturally there is no such thing as Ukraine, and that they are just a cultural splinter group of Russia which has to be brought back home into the Reich. At best, Ukrainians under Putin can hope to survive as 2nd class Russians with a weird backwater accent.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
This is Putin being better at playing chicken than the West.
Putin will not start WW3 over some Taurus hitting his infrastructure. It is not exactly on par with Kennedy's fear of Cuban nukes hitting US cities. Of course, it does not help that the commander in chief of the largest nuclear NATO power is seen as an unreliable ally, especially for a non-nuclear country like Germany.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
I think that your view is too cynical by half. Your view, which I would paraphrase as
Strong countries sometimes invade weaker countries, so the international rule-based order is obviously fiction and we are still living in interstate anarchy.
is not so different from
US residents murder each other all the time, some even get away with it, so any claim that we have a rule of law can be disregarded, and we are still in a Hobbesian nature state of perpetual war of all against all.
Both the IRBO and the state of law in the US are not perfect, but they are clearly distinct from their respective baselines.
While some of the conflicts you have mentioned were clearly waged by powerful states for ulterior reasons, and I have been opposed to GWBs adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq from the start, I also notice that most of the wars waged by the left were not for outright conquest and annexation. A few of the wars might even have been net positive, like interfering in the genocidal mess that was the Yugoslavia civil war. In retrospect, I can not say I am especially proud of NATO for sitting out the Rwanda situation, for example.
Russia's war in Ukraine is one of straightforward annexation. This is markedly different to what GWB did. Thus, it is in the interest of the proponents of the IRBO to make Russia pay as high a price as possible, to deter both them and other states from trying the same in the future.
If this also means that Putin fails to conquer Ukraine, that is a bonus, but for the international supporters of Ukraine that is not the essential outcome. The goal is to make the war net negative for Russia by making them pay a high price in blood and economy.
As long as the Ukrainians are fine with dying for that, it seems like a no-brainer for the West to give them the materiel to continue their war.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
That is why I wrote my 2nd paragraph. Again, if the woke mob decided that every American who is a member of an anti-abortion organization deserves to be bombed, and that if others die in the bombing attacks that is acceptable, and turned most of the US into rubble in their quest to eliminate all the abortion opponents, then you could claim that the woke mob is hypocritical when opposing the IDF. But if it is just the odd assassination, that is very different in scale.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion. It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian.
While I am not one of these people (and think that Kirk's murder was wrong for both fundamental ethical and dumb for strategic reasons), you are equating political assassination with what is perceived to be genocide.
If the IDF only used snipers to take out public figures who expressed pro-Hamas sentiments, or if Kirk had been killed by a rocket along with his family and neighbors as collateral damage (whose intendedness could be disputed), your comparison would be more on point.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
My opposition to violence against women is precisely why I am opposed to housing convicted male rapists with intact genitalia in women's prisons,
This seems like a motte, with the bailey being "all prisoners should be segregated according to their birth gender".
I am opposed to violence against women as it is violence against humans. My estimate is that prison rape is mostly XY-on-XY, with the likelihood of being a victim increasing an order of magnitude for XYs who are MtF.
Obviously all prison rape is bad. It is not part of the punishment, and it is certainly not a privilege for the stronger prisoners -- we do not even allow free men to rape, after all!
Gender segregation plays an important part in prison rape prevention, even though it is clearly not sufficient. As such, I would propose simply extending the intend -- minimize rape -- towards trans people.
So rather than a "one size fits all" solution where the serial rapist only has to yell "I identify as a woman now" to get into the women's shower, or where we place a big-chested bottom surgery MtF with a conviction for bank fraud with a bunch of gang members, I would assign prison genders case by case based on minimizing the overall rape risk.
Take into account physical strength, testosterone level, convictions for violence and especially sexual violence, feminine presentation, etc and determine if the MtF prisoner is more likely to be raped in men's prison than they are to rape in women's prison.
This solution also has the advantage that it will likely piss off both sides of the culture war.
quiet_NaN
17d ago
The steelman is that 1st and 2nd generation immigrants sometimes have great success for selection effects.
After all, most people do not migrate. The ones who are happy doing the same job their grandfathers did are unlikely to migrate. If you select for people who look at the lives of their forebears and decide that they want their kids to have a better life, it is not surprising that some of them will be very smart and many of them will be willing to put in a lot of work into securing their place in their new society.
quiet_NaN
19d ago
Reading the interview, the interviewer was on a warpath. KJP seems to have stepped outside the party line with her book and now she needs to be brought to heel or pushed aside.
I think that some claims are more difficult to defend than others. If you write a book without controversial claims, perhaps a work of fiction or a textbook on a well established field, then an interviewer would likely not feel the need to cross-examine you.
But if you published a book about how Trump is secretly a lizardman, I would hate to see an interviewer who just goes "interesting opinion, man".
Claiming that Biden was forced out of the race for some nefarious reasons while he was mentally fine to be president is trying to claim an 'alternative truth'. I hate it when Trump does these things (starting from the size of his inauguration crowd), because I feel that people should strive to agree on facts. I do not like it any better when some lefty makes claims which seem factually wrong, and I applaud efforts to probe if she has extraordinary evidence for her extraordinary claims.
I do not think that "Biden had dementia which made him an unappealing candidate" was a particularly Democratic party line. It was basically the consensus reality. Anyone who pushes back against people trying to make our collective map of reality worse is doing god's work.
To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala.
I think that by the time of the TV debate, the Democrats had already maneuvered themselves in an unwinnable position. Running with Harris as a candidate was not great, but running with someone who had been seen on TV as suffering from dementia would not have gone better.
quiet_NaN
20d ago
I think that ACX mentioned that some pro-Palestinian Muslims were announcing that they were going to vote for Trump because Harris was too Israel-friendly. I am unsure how they are feeling about Trump's ME policies now.
The obvious choice to fixing situations where some voters can not credibly defect from their party because the other party caters to their interests even less would be to get rid of FPTP and get a multi-party system.
But without that, "always vote for the party which is most closely aligned to you" seems like a bad meta-strategy which will see you voting for the marginally less evil ones. Sometimes it is good not to engage in trades which are only slightly net-positive to incentivize the other player to offer you better trades instead.
quiet_NaN
22d ago
I think that the proportion requirement is also disputable.
Basically, I think that an innocent should not be expected to offer a fair fight to an aggressor. If there is an advantage to be gained by moving a step up on the escalation ladder, then stepping up on the escalation ladder should be fine. Probably not that many steps, though.
Here in Germany, there is no balancing of the legal interests of the attacker and the attacked, with only an exemption for a massive disproportion of the act of self defense. If you need to kill a criminal to stop the theft of valuable property (like a car), German law is generally a-ok with it. Of course, you are still taking your chances with DAs and judges which generally do not like that.
Personally, I have an intense dislike for non-consensual violence. In my opinion, when an adult makes the decision to assault another person, they are taking their life into their own hands. If it ends with the aggressor bleeding to death on the sidewalk, that is sad, but not upsetting. It is not that the attacker deserved to die, but we do live in a world where people can make bad decisions which will cost them their lives. If someone drives 300km/h on the highway while drunk and ends their life in a crash, that is similar -- sad, but not upsetting. Upsetting would be if they killed someone else with their stunt.
To be fair, I think that bodily autonomy generally makes a good Schelling point. There are certainly limits, few would argue that the psychotic who is stabbing himself to kill the spiders crawling inside his skin should get bodily autonomy, but for the most part respecting bodily autonomy seems like a rule which leads to beneficial outcomes.
Nor is the solution of non-interventionism in the absence of a sound mind preferred by the natural law people and cishumanists very coherent. They might excuse the mother who kills her child by refusing the measles vaccine because she does not want her child exposed to chemicals, but get really upset with a mother who does a better job of protecting her kid from chemicals, even though death from oxygen deprivation is the natural fate of a human almost anywhere in the observable universe.
At the end of the day what is an act and what is an omission depends on your subjective moral frame of inertia (obligatory xkcd). Failure to prevent the onset of puberty is not meaningfully different from purposefully inducing puberty, just like killing a patient by turning off their ventilator is not meaningfully different from killing them through the injection of pentobabitone.
Naturally, that does not mean that any intervention is good, just that there are no moral shortcuts which save you from looking at the outcomes. (On the object level, I do not have a race in the "gender interventions in minors" topic, my suspicion is that likely no short and simple rule will maximize utility.)
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