sodiummuffin
No bio...
User ID: 420
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Instead, he started messing around with the service itself
No he didn't.
By then, Musk’s sympathies appeared to be manifesting on the battlefield. One day, Ukrainian forces advancing into contested areas in the south found themselves suddenly unable to communicate. “We were very close to the front line,” Mykola, the signal-corps soldier, told me. “We crossed this border and the Starlink stopped working.”
They are geofenced to not work in Russian-controlled areas so that Russia can't use them. Starlink continually updates this to match the situation on the ground, presumably with some allowance for contested areas. Occasionally Ukrainian advances have outpaced Starlink employees knowing about the situation and updating the geofence, particularly during the period being referred to when they made rapid advances. "Appeared to be" is the giveaway to be maximally skeptical even if you don't already know about the incident in question. "The media very rarely lies" but "appeared to be" here functions as journalist-speak for reporting Twitter rumors without bothering to mention whether those rumors were true. The New Yorker doesn't feel the need to verify the factual accuracy of the claim because he's not saying that appearance was true, just referring to the fact that it seemed true to thousands of people on Twitter who already hated Musk for his politics and jumped to conclusions after hearing about some rapid Ukrainian advances having their Starlink service cut out. The only plausible story of political interference (aside from sending the Starlink terminals at all) has been the claim he refused to disable Starlink geofencing for proposed Starlink-piloted suicide drones striking Crimea, out of fears of escalation.
alleged to have engaged in a little amateur diplomacy that resulted in his publicly proposing a settlement to the war that he had to have known the people he was ostensibly helping would find unacceptable
The article doesn't mention it but of course he has said exactly why he wants a settlement: he is concerned about a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia escalating into nuclear war and posing a major risk to humanity. His way of thinking here should be more understandable to this forum than most, since he has taken considerable inspiration from the same intellectual environment as LessWrong/Effective Altruism/Scott Alexander. His underlying motive is the same as his motive for Tesla/SolarCity (global warming), SpaceX (mitigate existential risk by making humanity a two-planet species), OpenAI (mitigate AI risk by having the developers take the risk seriously), NeuraLink (mitigate AI risk through interfaces between AI and the human brain), and Twitter (mitigate political censorship and the risks that enables). Not to mention sending the Starlink terminals to Ukraine in the first place, though that was more small-scale than his usual concerns.
He didn't try to personally negotiate a settlement because he sent the Starlink terminals and felt that gave him the right to, he would have done it anyway. He did it because, having made more money than he could ever personally use, he has been working to defeat what he perceives as threats to humanity. You might criticize his arrogance in believing he is capable of doing so, but Tesla and (especially) SpaceX have accomplished things that conventional wisdom considered impossible so it is perhaps understandable that he thought it was worth trying. There is obviously nothing wrong with criticizing him, I think he has made plenty of mistakes, but I wish people actually engaged with his reasoning rather than being like this article and rounding him off as Putin sympathizer or whatever.
During the pandemic, Musk seemed to embrace covid denialism, and for a while he changed his Twitter profile picture to an image of the [Deus Ex protagonist], which turns on a manufactured plague designed to control the masses. But Deus Ex, like “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” is a fundamentally anti-capitalist text, in which the plague is the culmination of unrestrained corporate power, and the villain is the world’s richest man, a media-darling tech entrepreneur with global aspirations and political leaders under his control.
I just skimmed the latter part of the article but this bit stood out. We get a "seemed to" and it's implied he...believes in a specific conspiracy theory because he once changed his Twitter avatar to the protagonist of an iconic videogame in which a bunch of conspiracy theories are true? But at the same time trying to claim Deus Ex as an anti-capitalist game that he is implied to be missing the point of? If Deus Ex is so leftist why does using it as a Twitter avatar signal a specific conspiracy theory rather than signaling leftism, not to mention signaling neither?
sodiummuffin
11mo ago
Same as everywhere else, the people who made the decision are true believers who think this is a great idea for the Navy and/or for their moral/ideological goals.
As I see it, the military is probably the last place that would be under pressure to go woke - the Left hates it unconditionally and passionately anyway, it is impossible to "cancel" it in any meaningful way, you can not really orchestrate an ideological boycott against the military...
There's a weird tendency to personify institutions and act like principal-agent problems don't exist, like how people will tie themselves in knots trying to come up with explanations about how corporations with SJW institutional capture are actually profit-maximizing. Why would someone with a Navy recruitment job care more about "doing the best job possible to slightly improve Navy recruitment numbers" than "making the world a safe place for LGBTQ+ people"? Even more importantly, why wouldn't someone with such an ideology sincerely believe that he can do both? People are biased about the merits of their ideology in other circumstances, they don't turn that off when they're making decisions on behalf of an institution. They can tell themselves something like "This will boost recruitment by showing the Navy is an inclusive place for young people, anyone bigoted enough to object is an asshole who would cause problems anyway." and believe it.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
Here is a graph of both traffic and homicide deaths by race and time. Here are the black deaths by week, in which we see that both kinds of deaths spiked at the exact same time: immediately following the death of George Floyd. (Both graphs courtesy of Steve Sailer, the only person of note I've seen discuss the traffic component of the Floyd Effect.)
The simplest explanation is that it is still 100% the Floyd Effect. Police pull over black drivers less than they used to so dangerous drivers stay on the road until they kill themselves or others (as well as it possibly affecting deterrence and so on). The alternative explanation is that it was the Floyd effect originally but some other effect has taken over since then. I haven't looked at the most recent data, if you wanted you could check if it has become less racially skewed than the period covered by those graphs. But with the timing I'm not going to give credence to any explanation in which it was never the Floyd Effect and the spike just happened that week and primarily among black people by coincidence.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
It's called "representation" and while it has assorted supplementary arguments (e.g. "minority children benefit from seeing people like them in fiction"), at its core it isn't anything as coherent as a proposition. Like Scott discusses in Ethnic Tension and Meaningless Arguments:
In a way, when we round people off to the Philosophy 101 kind of arguments, we are failing to respect their self-description. People aren’t out on the streets saying “By my cost-benefit analysis, Israel was in the right to invade Gaza, although it may be in the wrong on many of its other actions.” They’re waving little Israeli flags and holding up signs saying “ISRAEL: OUR STAUNCHEST ALLY”. Maybe we should take them at face value.
If it was a specific proposition it might have a stopping point. But it isn't "demographics in fiction should match the demographics of your real-life country", it isn't even "at least 50% of characters should be non-white'. It's that SJW types cheer or boo characters based on whether they're members of their favored or disfavored identity groups. So fiction influenced by them often ends up with demographics ranging from noticeably influenced to completely absurd. (And that isn't a stopping point either, even completely absurd levels of representation are often criticized for the representation being problematic in some way, having attracted a SJW-inclined audience that doesn't notice how hard it's trying to cater to people like them.)
Of course, this sort of sentiment regarding identity groups is not limited to fiction. For instance a major stated reason why the CDC recommended a COVID-19 vaccine-prioritization scheme that depriorited the elderly relative to "essential workers", contrary to their own estimates on what would save more lives, was because the elderly are more likely to be white, as I discussed in this post. Similarly various governments such as Vermont prioritized non-whites outright. As a matter of strict logical argument it doesn't seem like these things should be related, but in reality someone predisposed to like arguments in favor of the "underprivileged" will generally apply that bias whether the stakes are "realism in a fictional setting" or "many thousands of lives".
As with other gender diverse individuals, eunuchs may also seek castration to better align their bodies with their gender identity. As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care (Brett et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2007; Roberts et al., 2008).
I think the biggest takeaway here is exactly how little evidence is required for WPATH to declare something a "gender identity" requiring "medically necessary gender-affirming care". I've read academic papers from forum posters talking about their forum buddies before, but I've certainly never seen a case where the resulting paper was considered notable, let alone sufficient basis to create a medical standard of care. I previously wrote a post about otherkin/transracialism/plurals as a control-group for gender-identity, in the same way that parapsychology can serve as a control group for science. This serves a similar function, but on the medical institution side of things.
Also, take a moment and consider exactly how big the gap is between the quality of evidence and the boldness of the claim. Presumably the author thinks gender identities are fixed/inborn:
Like other gender diverse individuals, eunuch individuals may be aware of their identity in childhood or adolescence. Due to the lack of research into the treatment of children who may identify as eunuchs, we refrain from making specific suggestions.
So apparently for all of human history some people have been born with a eunuch gender identity (separate from actual eunuchs who generally had no choice), and we're only now finding out thanks to the guys writing the WPATH standard of care happening to post on a related fetish forum. And that's just it as a scientific claim, but this isn't even about whether a hypothesis has a 51% chance of being true, it's about medical care. Medical care carrying severe and permanent side-effects demands use of the precautionary principle and very strong evidence that it will benefit the patient. But it goes beyond even that because of course this isn't him treating a specific patient he has met, it's him establishing a medical standard of care. His internet surveys of his forum buddies are sufficient for WPATH to declare that patients diagnosed as having a eunuch gender identity (which is presumably any patient who claims to identify as a eunuch, which I suspect would go up orders of magnitude if psychiatrists started telling patients about the idea or the it got any cultural traction) will benefit from "gender-affirming care".
This tells us very little about eunuchs, but it tells us a lot about WPATH's decision-making processes. It also tells us important information about the institutions that continue to reference other WPATH recommendations as if they're significantly more meaningful than a sheet of paper with "Yes X is a gender-identity, prescribe gender-affirming care." printed on it. Or for that matter institutions that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
He mentioned Soros, who is Jewish. Anti-semitic conspiracy theorists on /pol/ also don't like Soros, so complaining about him must mean DeSantis is dogwhistling to them. Unlike when people complain about the Koch brothers or Peter Thiel, which is just expressing justifiable anger at billionaires subverting our democracy.
On a largely unrelated note, it just occurred to me that the whole "vampire harvesting the blood of the young" smear directed at Peter Thiel (for the offense of investing in medical research companies that did longevity research investigating the thing where mice given blood transplants live longer) would 100% have been pattern-matched as "anti-semitic blood libel" if he was Jewish. Somehow I never made that connection before. Here's a list of articles I had saved for those unfamiliar:
Peter Thiel Is Interested in Harvesting the Blood of the Young - Gawker
Billionaire Peter Thiel thinks young people’s blood can keep him young forever - Raw Story
Peter Thiel Isn't the First to Think Young People's Blood Will Make Him Immortal - The Daily Beast
Peter Thiel is Very, Very Interested in Young People's Blood - Inc
The Blood of Young People Won’t Help Peter Thiel Fight Death - Vice
Hey, Silicon Valley: you might not want to inject yourself with the blood of the young just yet - Vox
Peter Thiel Wants to Inject Himself with Young People's Blood - Vanity Fair
Is Peter Thiel a Vampire? - New Republic
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
The obvious response is that this guy is voicing an unusual/contrarian view among people who vocally complain about left-wing internet censorship, most of whom believe that internet companies getting to control what political views/information people are allowed to express is bad in general.
The more complicated response is that there is a false-dichotomy between SJWs and a subset of right-wingers as the relevant comparison. Traditional mainstream right-wingers don't even tend to be particularly vocal about left-wing censorship except for when they're censored personally, and there's a bunch of Republican congressmen who were shadowbanned on Twitter but have still never mentioned the issue. Youtube censored a mainstream pharmaceutical company at the behest of a NYT journalist because it was being used as a counterargument to an attack on Trump, and I don't think Trump mentioned it once. This is of course a dichotomy that SJWs very aggressively foster themselves, and anyone sufficiently loudly opposing SJWs tends to be tarred as "far right" and kicked out of any left-wing institutions (and lots of neutral institutions, and plenty of right-wing institutions). But the fact that mainstream right-wing institutions seem more prone to believing SJW claims and caving to SJW demands than anti-SJWs (including anti-SJWs who may qualify as left-wing or moderate in their general political views) seems like an illustration of why this isn't the actual axis. Marjorie Taylor Greene recently called for the censorship of Kiwifarms, does that mean "both sides" are pro-censorship or that the line doesn't really run from SJWs to MTG? And once you're considering the SJW/anti-SJW axis, remember that anti-SJW communities like /r/tumblrinaction (now banned by Reddit) are the ones who popularized "horseshoe theory" to describe how they considered SJWs the other side of the coin from groups like the Moral Majority.
For example the Gamergate surveys showed GG to have strongly left-wing demographics - but who would you trust to not fire you if a media campaign was screaming about how you were a racist, a group of Republican activists or a group of Gamergators? And this combination of views is pretty common with anti-SJWs, including the most common views seen in surveys of TheMotte itself. SJWs would of course say that pro-GG people are right-wing regardless of their votes for Obama or views on gay-marriage/abortion/government-spending, but you can't have it both ways. Either the anti-SJW and pro-free-speech people are right-wing, in which case it seems like the contingent of right-wingers most vocal on the issue are pro-free-speech. Or they're left-wing/moderate/oldschool liberals/etc., in which case this isn't about "the liberal left" vs. authoritarian right-wingers.
Now, once you get into political alliances and self-identification this gets more complicated. Undoubtably there are an increasing number of people who consider themselves "right-wing" precicely because they oppose one or more SJW doctrines or behaviors. This is understandable, since SJWs have rapidly progressed from co-opting groups like the Something Awful forums to co-opting groups like mainstream political parties. Lots of those people are going to place more trust on right-wing sources and be sympathetic to whatever they consider the right-wing position on any issue they don't have another reason to care about. And of course few actual politicians care about free-speech, or many of the issues relevant to the SJW/anti-SJW axis, so when SJWs do something unpopular enough that it shifts votes to Republicans the politicians aren't going to be perfectly responsive to their new voters. There have been a couple attempts at some sort of bill modifying Section 230 to get sufficiently-large internet companies to not arbitarily censor their political opponents, but they haven't gone anywhere. Politicians seem not to regard it as very important, unlike those in the trenches of social media, though that might eventually shift after enough big incidents like the censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story. Politics is chaotic and it's hard to guess how things will go. But it's not uncommon for relatively small groups of invested people to end up dictating policy, and in regards to internet censorship those most invested in the issue seem to be those sincere in their opposition.
require gas, which is a fossil fuel – do I need to explain why fossil fuels are bad?
Gas stoves are burning gas to produce heat. This is dramatically more efficient than burning gas to turn a turbine to produce electricity to send over the electric grid before turning into heat. (Even the couple percent of gas lost to leaks is less than the 6% loss on sending electricity over the grid.) It's not like an electric car where power plants are much more efficient than a portable gasoline engine (plus regenerative braking) so electric cars end up being more efficient. Making heat is inherently very efficient because you're not fighting thermodynamics, making electricity isn't. As a result, under the electricity-generation mix currently typical in the U.S., induction stoves cause more CO2 emissions than gas stoves.
https://home.howstuffworks.com/gas-vs-electric-stoves.htm
The clear winner in the energy efficiency battle between gas and electric is gas. It takes about three times as much energy to produce and deliver electricity to your stove. According to the California Energy Commission, a gas stove will cost you less than half as much to operate (provided that you have an electronic ignition--not a pilot light).
Now, maybe the higher CO2 emissions to power induction stoves is worthwhile for whatever indoor air quality benefits there are. And maybe power-generation will change so that generating marginal electricity rarely involves spinning up a gas turbine. But remember stoves don't last forever, if this change doesn't happen for a while then the induction stove will emit more CO2 over its lifespan regardless. I get the sense that a lot of people are vaguely anti-gas-stove because they assume it causes more CO2 emissions due to directly burning a fossil fuel, even though this is the opposite of the case.
Regarding the indoor air quality aspect, it would be nice if there was a decent literature review of the issue, like Scott's "Much more than you wanted to know" series. As a matter of common-sense, it seems like gas stoves must be at least marginally worse. But from what I've read this doesn't seem dramatic enough to show up in aggregate health outcomes for more rigorous studies. The main difference is only in terms of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, not the particulate matter you might expect. Most particulate matter comes from the food, so it's plausible that consistently using a range hood that vents to the outside is actually much more important than gas vs. induction. But it's hard to synthesize the available information into a general sense of how much of an issue it is.
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
You start out talking about not writing a political statement but then end up talking about how to write political propaganda that, unlike most political propaganda, isn't poorly-written or obnoxious. Those are different goals that involve going down diverging pathways. In particular, if you're going to spend time and effort thinking about this sort of thing, how about spending it thinking about the ideologies that exist within your fictional world? Not as an allegory, not as an insertion of current issues with or without commentary, but as part of the worldbuilding. And then instead of deciding ahead of time whether an ideology or political faction is "right" or "wrong" or "it's complicated" based on how it maps to the civil-rights movement or transgenderism or whatever, evaluate it (and let your audience evaluate it) on its own terms, as an outgrowth of relevant issues in the world you have created.
Jeff Vogel of Spiderweb Software talks about something similar:
I put a ton of politics into my games, but I write political philosophy, not comments on current events. My games are not about any one Big Issue Of The Day. They are about the base principles we have that help us make our own opinions about those issues.
Instead of looking to contemporary political controversies for your inspiration, you can try looking elsewhere. You can look to history, to political conflicts where every side and even the issues they consider important are likely to be one or both of "alien" or "timeless" to modern perspectives. Similarly you can look to old political philosophy. Or to fiction that is at least old enough to not be part of the current political zeitgeist. You can look to science and technology, to the sorts of things that societies could theoretically be doing if they had different values or structures. You can look at all the setting elements you have for other reasons, for game mechanics or because they're cool or because they're part of the genre or because you had to make some sort of map/factions/history, and seriously think through how people in that world would relate to them.
Think about questions like what views are functional, whether functional for society or the individual or for some subgroup. For a recent example imagine if, before the invention of AI art, you wrote a setting where AI art was possible. I think you probably could have predicted the backlash from some artists, on grounds like economic self-interest and their self-conception, and predicted a lot of the specific rhetoric. Or, if it was invented a while ago, there's other questions like what sort of economic role it ends up fitting into long-term. I don't think this would necessarily be the most compelling setting element, it probably wouldn't be central, but I think it would probably be more interesting than inserting either contemporary politics or a metaphor for them. Maybe some reviewer would interpret it as you criticizing real-world automation as stripping meaning from work, but I don't think it would benefit from you approaching the writing as a metaphor, except perhaps by using history as a reference for how these conflicts can play out.
You don't have to do this, not every work (especially videogames) needs to have ideologies and political conflicts invented for its worldbuilding. The Law of Conservation of Detail is a very real concern, though it can enhance even briefly-mentioned details if you've put more thought into them than the audience expects. But if you don't want to do this you probably shouldn't be wasting your time and the audience's attention-span on contemporary politics either. In that case just use the superficial details that seem to match your setting/genre/aesthetic and don't do anything more. It is unlikely anyone will care. Yes there have been cases like Kingdom Come: Deliverance (targeted by Tumblr psuedohistorian medievalpoc and then game journalists for not having "POC" in their piece of medieval europe) but there are too many games coming out for people to create controversies like that about a meaningful fraction. Especially if you're not dumb enough to respond on social media or release a statement/apology.
I'm trying to figure out how I would make either characters that are never called attention to, or characters that are an allegory . . . for trans people.
One reason transgenderism tends to be particularly badly written in fiction, particularly fiction not set in a western country in 2023, is because it entails an ideological framework that is highly specific and restricted to a particular place and time. People will write a medieval fantasy setting and give characters views popularized on the internet less than a decade ago. Even people who don't think they're writing fiction, like Wikipedia editors writing about historical women who disguised themselves as men, will try to fit it into the trans framework (sometimes resulting in the Wikipedia article having male pronouns). Historical eunuchs and the ideological viewpoints regarding them are more genuinely alien than "what if aliens had...4 genders" or "what if aliens were genderfluid shapeshifters", because neither eunuchs nor the viewpoints regarding them were based on contemporary ideas like gender identity to begin with.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
This doesn't really seem antagonistic to me? He's using "sexist" as a neutral descriptor, not an insult. In the sense he means wanting to restrict sports teams or nude spas or bathrooms by sex is sexist, the same way that restricting them by race is racist. (Whether sexism is justifiable is another matter.) This is contrasted by how she doesn't actually seem to support any measures discriminating by transgender status, just dividing them by sex like everyone else.
This is particularly relevant to subjects like discrimination law, where some rulings have found that (for instance) a law banning discrimination by sex (and not mentioning transgender people) doesn't prohibit keeping separate bathrooms by sex but does prohibit preventing trans people from using the bathrooms they prefer. There is an extent to which stuff like "obviously X isn't what people mean by sexist discrimination" is just smuggling in the current Overton window, and under somewhat different social conditions it would be considered similarly obvious that prohibiting MTFs from competing in women's sports isn't discrimination against trans people.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
In the same way that parapsychology serves as a control-group for science, I think identities like otherkin, transracialism, and systems/plurals/headmates function as a control-group for gender identity. The results don't look good: otherkin used the same framework and seemed to genuinely believe they were experiencing things like feelings of dysphoria at not having their true identities as animals (or sometimes celestial bodies or fictional characters) be accepted. Plurals are a social-justice reimagining of Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder, a condition now heavily discredited and typically considered the product of social contagion from therapists themselves or media portrayals. (Something the plural community doesn't appreciate.) Moreover the number of people identifying as plurals seems much greater than the ones who identified as having MPD during its heyday, presumably thanks to the idea attaching itself to social-justice ideology and spreading through internet communities. People will attest to psychological experiences as extreme as "being multiple people" because of a bit of social influence, but we're to believe vaguer supposed feelings of "gender identity" aren't subject to the same phenomenon?
Like a scientist running 20 tests and reporting one of them positive at P<0.05, we should take notice that there were a whole bunch of communities for special social-justice-related identities and "non-binary" is one of the few that happened to pass the test of getting acknowledgment from mainstream institutions. Even the non-binary concept itself has been noticeably optimized, like how there used to be much more of an emphasis on neopronouns and the terrible "misgendering" of not being called "em" or whatever. Despite being acknowledged as legitimate by a decent fraction of the social-justice community, otherkin still got mocked enough even on websites like Tumblr that they adopted a set of "secret" tags for their posts so it was harder to find them by searching "otherkin", while non-binary identities ended up performing better socially. Non-binary identity also ended up getting much more mainstream acknowledgement than those other identities, presumably because they fit more easily into the same framework of "gender affirmation". Unsurprisingly it is nonbinary identities that have exploded among the young to the point of being mainstream rather than niche internet communities or obscure diagnoses (especially among groups like college students, particularly students at elite colleges).
This brings us to another use for control groups. Binary transgender identification has also exploded among youths/minors (to a lesser degree). If 3.48% of 2021 college students identify as some form of non-binary/genderqueer/agender despite all or most of them not experiencing anything besides a social phenomenon, it seems likely the same phenomenon would be influencing binary transgender identification as well (which has a higher likelihood of spurring medical intervention). I don't know if the correct way to model this is some sort of hard "truscum vs. transtrender" division, the whole model of "gender identity" being wrong, and/or something else. But the combination of rapidly changing statistics (including/especially in communities where transgender people were already so accepted that traditional "closeted" narratives don't work well), seeing how it spreads through peer-groups or various communities like speedrunning, and seeing how the sausage of social/institutional recognition gets made has made me extremely skeptical.
sodiummuffin
2mo ago
I found an article with a detailed timeline. It says that the attorney general gave officials the go-ahead for the execution at 7:56. It then says that Smith "began to shake and writhe violently" at 7:58, and that this lasted around 2 minutes. It then says he began taking deep gasping breaths and that his breathing was no longer visible at 8:08 (unclear if it was visible at 8:07 and then stopped, or if that is just when the journalist first noted it was not visible). It quotes the Alabama Corrections Commissioner as saying the nitrogen gas flowed for 15 minutes. So the most obvious possibility, assuming that he held his breath and then began to shake either when they began the gas or after he started running out of oxygen, would be that he lost consciousness in 2-4 minutes and took 10-12 minutes to stop breathing. It is also possible he began to shake before they began administering the gas, in an attempt to get the execution delayed again like had happened previously, in which case the timeline would be less clear.
The BBC article quotes Alabama journalist Lee Hedgepeth as saying that "Kenny just began to gasp for air repeatedly and the execution took about 25 minutes total.". My first thought reading this (and the beginning of the post I was writing before deciding to try finding an actual timeline), was that "total" could include the time before they began administering the gas, the time after he lost consciousness, and the time after he was dead when they still had the mask running or were otherwise doing something that the journalist considered part of the execution process. In classic "The Media Very Rarely Lies" fashion, mentioning "total" execution time after mentioning him gasping for air makes it sound like he was living/conscious/suffering for 25 minutes after they began the gas, but does not actually say so. The timeline confirms it, there was 22 minutes between when they opened the curtains at 7:53 and closed them at 8:15. So the 22 minutes includes before the execution was ordered, after he was unconscious, and after he was dead (and then Hedgepeth rounded up to 25).
This is completely false, shadowbanning has been for used for many years to refer to any kind of ban or hiding of someone's posts that is hidden from the shadowbanned user even if they are still possible to access to some degree. The website everyone used to check if they were shadowbanned on Twitter was shadowban.eu, which specifically checked for "Search Suggestion Ban", "Search Ban", "Ghost Ban", "Reply Deboosting" and (until it was deprecated) "Quality Filter Discrimination". Today other websites like this one also use the term shadowban for the same methods.
Nobody tweeting about how they were shadowbanned was claiming that their tweets were completely invisible - obviously so, since there would be no point in tweeting about it and everyone would have already noticed. Reddit-style complete shadowbans are trivial to see by just looking at your own posts with an incognito window or TOR, and on Twitter would be immediately noticed for anyone with followers, making them a much less effective form of shadowbanning. Reddit's shadowban system was originally designed for use against spambots, while Twitter's was designed for use against humans.
EDIT: Also this is the opening of the Wikipedia article which calls Twitter shadowbanning a conspiracy theory:
Shadow banning, also called stealth banning, hellbanning, ghost banning and comment ghosting, is the practice of blocking or partially blocking a user or the user's content from some areas of an online community in such a way that the ban is not readily apparent to the user. For instance, shadow banned comments posted to a blog or media website will not be visible to other persons accessing that site from their computers.
By partly concealing, or making a user's contributions invisible or less prominent to other members of the service, the hope may be that in the absence of reactions to their comments, the problematic or otherwise out-of-favour user will become bored or frustrated and leave the site, and that spammers and trolls will be discouraged to continue their unwanted behavior or create new accounts
The "less prominent" part has been in the article since 2017, since before the "conspiracy theory" part.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
That's about what I would expect from UN Women, I assure you they're quite sincere and behave with similar intellectual rigor in more consequential ways than just tweets. Off the top of my head their responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak comes to mind, a search finds this blog post summarizing it. Archive of their report:
In Ebola-affected communities and quarantined areas women should be prioritized in the provision of medical supplies, food, care, social protection measures and psychosocial services.
Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority, you can count on that being their conclusion regardless of situation. Some news articles reported this as if they were more medically vulnerable, but mostly UN Women meant they were vulnerable in some vague social sense, along with implying they might be more medically vulnerable based on some dubious early data (ebola deaths by gender ended up being around equal). That blog post also has some links regarding the UN's decision to only distribute food to women after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good luck getting food if you don't have any living and friendly female relatives.
On a lighter note, the "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls" report from the UN Broadband Commission with "editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU" was laughably terrible. Most blatantly regarding the citations, which ranged from "literally blank" or "citing a file on your own hard drive" to referring to "Recent research on how violent video games are turning children, mostly boys, into ‘killing zombies’ 118" based on citing a 2000 article published on a LaRouche website raving about "killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style games, such as the game Pokémon,", "satanic video games", etc. For whatever reason feminism within the UN seems unusually incompetent and written without considering potential criticism, the tweet doesn't seem too surprising with that history.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
At the least it's "let's end the nation of Israel and physically remove the Jews to somewhere else", at the most it's ordinary universal anti-Semitism that someone is playing search-and-replace games with.
The mainstream western anti-zionist position is that jews would not be removed. The most popular anti-zionist position is a one-state solution where Palestinians get full citizenship in Israel, often alongside Palestinian right-of-return. Now, zionists would argue that such an outcome would cause problems such as a group like Hamas being elected as the government of Israel and ethnically cleansing jewish people, or at least committing terrorist attacks once they are all Israeli citizens with freedom of movement. But the standard anti-zionist position is that this wouldn't happen, that palestinians are resorting to violent resistance against oppression and would no longer need to do so once they are no longer oppressed. The standard comparison is to South Africa, where terrorist leaders such as Nelson Mandela became the new government but didn't outright ethnically cleanse white people. (The South African government discriminates against white people through heavy affirmative action, is now failing to keep reliable electricity and clean water going, has the 3rd highest murder rate in the world, and sometimes has the leaders of political parties talk about mass-murdering white people. But they haven't actually done it and many anti-zionists would be unaware of these things anyway.)
I think this is an important distinction because otherwise you don't appreciate the extent to which anti-zionism is an extension of standard anti-racist positions. They believe Israel would do fine even if it was majority palestinians just like they they believe majority-white countries would be fine if they opened the floodgates for arabic/african/etc. immigration. They believe ethnic conflicts generally have a good weak side (the oppressed) and a bad powerful side (the oppressor). They believe violence by an oppressed group is ultimately the result of their oppression, like how "riots are the language of the unheard" and thus the BLM riots indicated how badly african-americans are being mistreated by the police. Even if they got their one-state solution and there was continued conflict, they would advocate not for ethnically cleansing jews to make a more homogeneous state but for affirmative-action policies and reparations favoring non-jews until they are no longer oppressed (which would at minimum require they have equal outcomes to jewish Israelis).
sodiummuffin
8mo ago
Red requires 100% cooperation for the optimal outcome, blue requires 50% cooperation for the optimal outcome. It is near-impossible to get 100% cooperation for anything, particularly something where defecting is as simple as pressing a different button and has an actual argument for doing so. Meanwhile getting 50% cooperation is pretty easy. If blue required 90% or something it would probably make more sense to cut our losses and aim for minimizing the number of blue, but at 50% it's easy enough to make it worthwhile to aim for 0 deaths via blue majority.
If we are to compare to politics, I think the obvious comparison is to utopian projects like complete pacifism that only work if you either have 100% cooperation (in which case there is no violence to defend against or deter) or if you have so little cooperation that everyone else successfully coordinates to keep the violence-using status-quo (akin to voting for red but blue getting the majority). Except that such projects at least have the theoretical advantage of being better if they got 100% cooperation, whereas 100% cooperation on red is exactly the same as 50%-100% cooperation on blue.
In real life serious crime is almost always a self-destructive act, and yet people do it anyway. "Just create a society where there's no incentive to do crime and we can abolish the police because 0 people will be criminals" doesn't work, not just because you can't create such a society, but because some people would be criminals even if there was no possible net benefit. We can manage high cooperation, which is why we can coordinate to do things like have a justice system, but we can't manage 100% cooperation, that's why we need a justice system instead of everyone just choosing to not be criminals.
It might help to separate out the coordination problem from the self-preservation and "what blue voters deserve" aspects. Let us imagine an alternative version where, if blue gets below 50% of the vote, 1 random person dies for each blue vote. Majority blue is once again the obvious target to aim for so that nobody dies, though ironically it might be somewhat harder to coordinate around since it seems less obviously altruistic. Does your answer here differ from the original question? The thing is, even if you think this version favors blue more because the victims are less deserving of death, so long as you place above-zero value on the lives of blue voters in the first question the most achievable way to get the optimal outcome is still 50% blue.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
Sure, but what makes you so sure it's not a Chinese cardiologist issue?
The part where a bunch of prominent anti-GG figures lined up to cover it up, despite clear proof. Anti-GG communities like GamerGhazi too, where the moderators set related threads to only show posts individually approved by moderators, not letting through any posts linking proof that the accusations were true. It is not a matter of a single semi-prominent individual being a pedophile who groomed an 8-year-old and shared pictures of her with other pedophiles online. It is the strong tendency in the SJW community (and SJW-aligned organizations and media outlets) to defend or censor mention of bad behavior by those with the right identity and/or enough SJW ingroup affiliation.
This is a tendency among many groups, but with social-justice it seems much stronger than normal, and they have more power to do so. The exception of course is violation of SJW taboos, so there tends to simultaneously be a witch-hunt atmosphere for harmless, trivial, or unproven behaviors even as worse and more proven behaviors are denied or excused. An unproven accusation of sexual harassment made decades after the fact against a white male non-SJW is damning, but someone like Donna Hylton can become a well-regarded activist despite having spent days torturing, raping, and murdering a man. This is part of it being a totalizing moralistic ideology, in which adherence to the ideology takes precedence over all other concerns. This was the root cause behind GG itself, the drive to cover up or defend the bad behavior of Quinn/Grayson and SJW-aligned game journalists in general. But we also see this tendency at work in countless other areas, from UK police being more concerned about racism than shutting down rape gangs to scientific journals and dataset providers adopting censorious policies that prioritize the censorship of ideologically-inconvenient research over the pursuit of science.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
In other words, for an extremely broad offense that was created to use against people interfering with trials and has never been used against protesters before, despite it being common for protesters to disrupt congress or other government proceedings.
Congress intended § 1512(c) – which was enacted as part of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 – to broaden punishment for document destruction. As the Supreme Court explained in Yates v. United States, this was prompted by revelations of Enron’s massive accounting fraud and of the fact that the company’s outside auditor, Arthur Andersen LLP, “had systematically destroyed potentially incriminating documents.”
There is nothing in the legislative history that supports the notion that Congress enacted § 1512(c)(2) to criminalize the disruption of a Congressional proceeding by persons engaged in a political rally.
While that statute prohibits individuals from “corruptly obstructing” official proceedings, courts have interpreted those terms to include making false statements (see here, here, here and here), encouraging others to do so (here and here), falsifying documents, destroying evidence, thwarting a criminal investigation, or intimidating witnesses in a criminal proceeding.
None of these things happened on Jan. 6.
Further, demonstrators often disrupt congressional proceedings. Here are some examples:
The use of § 1512(c)(2) to prosecute demonstrators is novel. Other than the Jan. 6 cases, no reported cases prosecuted under § 1512(c)(2) since its passage in 2002 have involved a claim that demonstrations that disrupted an official proceeding committed an obstruction offense under § 1512(c)(2).
Speaking of tech company censorship: Youtube deleted a video from pharmaceutical company Aytu Bioscience about a proposed technology for using UV light inside the lungs, which they released a press-release about a few days before Trump's comments and was developed by researchers at Cedars-Sinai who had been working on it since 2016. Their Twitter account was also suspended for a little while. (I wonder if there was any internal discussion about that the Twitter Files journalists could look up?) Given the timing it seems very likely it was what Trump's comment was referring to (or at least the part of the comment mentioning light), it was probably mentioned to him in one of his regular coronavirus meetings. Youtube deleted the video because a New York Times reporter reported it to them:
I contacted YouTube about this video, which is being shared on tons of replies on Twitter & on Facebook, by people asserting that it backs up Trump's idea throwing it out there that UV rays kill coronavirus. YouTube just said it removed it for violating its community guidelines.
He also wrote a NYT article about it in which he talked to a Youtube spokesperson, which confirms the removal was intentional rather than purely automated. You'd think that if nothing else Youtube would have sufficient double-standards favoring credible institutions to not censor pharmaceutical companies talking about research they're involved with in cooperation with Cedars-Sinai, but apparently not.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
years of therapy where someone is consistently exhibiting being gender dysphoric
“Given the distress that can be associated with Gender Dysphoria, we have also included information on puberty blockers that can be started prior to their initial appointment. We have included a Lupron Depot® Information sheet.”
Children’s Hospital, London, Ontario.
I suppose if the hospital's "Gender Pathways Service" is already prescribing puberty blockers so freely that there's no requirement for diagnosis beyond the child or child's parent getting a referral by saying something about transgenderism to the family doctor, giving them before the first appointment saves time. While doing so based on 0 appointments is obviously unusual, quite a few of the anecdotes I've heard mention prescriptions after the 1st appointment. The way you describe it used to be much more standard, I remember trans-activists complaining about previous requirements like living for 6-months to a year as the opposite gender, but doesn't seem common anymore.
It's possible they justify this with the argument that puberty blockers are much less significant than opposite-sex hormones and are just "giving the child time to choose" or some such thing, but that seems heavily contradicted by the evidence. For one it amounts to much the same decision: 97% of children put on puberty blockers go on to take hormones (page 38), but around 60%-90% of trans children who aren't given any intervention (the previously standard "watchful waiting" approach) grow up to not be trans. For another puberty blockers themselves, particularly when used to avert puberty entirely rather than delay precocious-puberty a couple years, are serious business. We know about them impacting bone density based on the use with precocious-puberty, but we also have reason to believe they impact brain development but have zero research on what that impact is in humans. The best I've found is this study on sheep. A concern mentioned by the NHS's independent review:
A further concern is that adolescent sex hormone surges may trigger the opening of a critical period for experience-dependent rewiring of neural circuits underlying executive function (i.e. maturation of the part of the brain concerned with planning, decision making and judgement). If this is the case, brain maturation may be temporarily or permanently disrupted by puberty blockers, which could have significant impact on the ability to make complex risk-laden decisions, as well as possible longer-term neuropsychological consequences. To date, there has been very limited research on the short-, medium- or longer-term impact of puberty blockers on neurocognitive development.
Given how the medical system is normally so obsessed with the precautionary principle (like the FDA shutting down early unapproved COVID testing) it seems crazy that something as significant as preventing puberty entirely has become standard practice based on no more than the same drugs previously being approved to delay precocious puberty. There's a severe lack of research on even the safety/side-effects of using those drugs that way, let alone a randomized control trial of effectiveness indicating it actually performs better as a treatment of trans-identifying children than doing nothing.
sodiummuffin
5mo ago
That's a big part of how the ADL does it at least. Of course others might use other methods to get the results they want. Here's a Reddit comment I wrote some years ago about the ADL's report "Murder and Extremism in the United States in 2018". This methodology is then used to justify splashy graphics about how "Almost all of the 2018 extremist-related murders were committed by right-wing extremists." (page 13), a claim echoed in many headlines citing the report.
Check out the actual list of murders on page 23. No actual ideological or racist motive is required and it seems any murder by someone involved with a white prison gang is counted, but murders by people involved with black or latino prison gangs are not. I started listing ones that seemed obviously dishonest to include but ended up with the majority of the list:
Robstown, Texas, July 27, 2018. Richard Starry shot and killed four relatives at a local nursing center and at his home in an apparent act of domestic violence before killing himself. According to local media, Starry had been a member of a white supremacist group while in prison.
Sumter, South Carolina, August 11, 2018. Demetrius Alexander Brown, a self-proclaimed Moorish sovereign citizen, was arrested for the fatal shooting of Sharmine Pack following a dispute about a vehicle sale at an auto repair shop.
Camden, Michigan, June 30, 2018. Anti-government extremist Joshua Daniel Miller was arrested for the shooting death of Eddie Coleman Heathcoe. Miller allegedly got into an argument with his ex-wife at the home she shared with Heathcoe. Miller was involved with militia and Three Percenter groups.
Dothan, Alabama, June 4, 2018. James Mathis, a member of the Georgia-based white supremacist prison gang Ghostface Gangsters, and his wife, Amanda Oakes, allegedly killed their six-month-old son and put his body in a freezer in a hotel room. The couple fled to Florida where they were arrested following a carjacking attempt.
Renton, Washington, September 19, 2018. White supremacist Jeremy Shaw, who owned a small roofing business called Aryan Enterprises, was arrested along with his wife, Lorena, in connection with an alleged plot to murder Steven Morphis and steal his property through an adverse possession scheme. Morphis was beaten with a blunt instrument and his throat was slashed. Detectives who searched Jeremey Shaw’s home found a number of Nazi- and white supremacist-themed items. He was charged with homicide, burglary and arson; Lorena was charged with burglary, arson and rendering criminal assistance.
Athens, Georgia, May 11, 2018. Following a family argument, Malachi Qaadir Dorns, 19, stabbed his mother and older brother multiple times, wounding his mother and killing his brother. In an earlier arrest, Dornss told police that he was a sovereign citizen.
Abingdon, Virginia, May 4, 2018. Roger Melvin Tackett was charged with first degree murder and other crimes after fatally shooting an acquaintance following a dispute. According to police, Tackett has multiple white supremacist tattoos.
Nashville, Tennessee, April 22, 2018. Travis Reinking opened fire inside a Waffle House, killing four people and wounding or injuring four more. Reports from co-workers and police officers who had previously known or encountered Reinking stated that he was a sovereign citizen. However, Reinking also has a serious history of mental illness and the shooting appears to have been non-ideological in nature; he has been ruled incompetent to stand trial.
Parkland, Florida, February 14, 2018. Nikolas Cruz launched a deadly shooting spree at his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, killing 17 people and wounding 17 more. According to CNN, Cruz, 19, belonged to a racist Instagram group and hated blacks and Jews, even claiming Jews wanted to destroy the world. Cruz also allegedly referred to women who engaged in interracial relationships as “traitors.” A South Florida Sun-Sentinel article reported that Cruz had racist and Nazi symbols on his backpack and that he had etched swastikas onto ammunition magazines left behind at the school after the shooting. However, little evidence has so far emerged to suggest that the MSDHS shooting spree itself was conducted as a white supremacist attack
I remember that last case, keep in mind Cruz also had Soviet and satanic symbols on his stuff and told authorities he was ordered to commit the shooting by demons, his interest was more towards anything edgy than towards any particular ideology. In any case, the list of cases seems drastically different from what most people would expect after seeing the graph or hearing the supposed percentages.
sodiummuffin
9mo ago
Is that your real objection? If it was instead a serial killer who you believe doesn't have any particularly inaccurate beliefs about his victims, but simply enjoys killing people and has been hunting the person you're hiding as his next target, would you tell him the truth or would you come up with a different excuse for why it's acceptable to lie?
It seems like probably the real reason you don't tell the truth is simply that if you do it'll result in someone's death and no real gain, just adherence to the "don't lie" rule. But if that's your reason then just say that's your reason, rather than obscuring it behind excuses specific to the situation.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
"Immunized" is taking it much too far given how the percentage of teenagers who identify as trans/non-binary/etc. has exploded. And I would guess that, by most measures, their net positions on trans issues are more pro-trans as well. Rather I would say that they are much more polarized due to the increased salience of transgenderism and transgender ideology.
If your contact with the concept of transgenderism is learning that the T in LGBT refers to crossdressers and once hearing a joke about thai ladyboys, you are likely to be tolerant and not care about weirdos doing weirdo things. If instead it is seeing a whole friend group at school trying to convince a member that he's trans/non-binary because he has long hair and isn't masculine enough, or seeing an attention-seeking person go trans and police "misgendering", or encountering the trans part of the online SJW community, or seeing public figures like Cosmo/Narcissa and Jim Sterling blow up their lives, or at least hearing about it in the media with the constant drumbeat of pro-trans rhetoric and with news stories like MTFs competing in women's sports, you are going to approach the issue in a different way.
sodiummuffin
1yr ago
Gender = a set of roles, behaviors, etc, generally expected by society of the members of each sex.
Using "gender" to refer to this instead of "gender roles" or "gender stereotypes" conflates it with the idea of "gender identity". The idea of "gender identity" claims that people have some inherent deeply-rooted "true" gender separate from both their bodies and what societal roles they fulfill or stereotypes they match. This then comes with a whole set of ideas about "misgendering", about "deadnaming" if the non-binary identification accompanied a request for a name change, etc.
Note that actually basing it off gender roles would be completely different, for one because it would be based on society rather than the individual. Nobody advocates calling every woman in the military "he" even though the job is a male gender role. Similarly someone might believe in stereotypical correlations such that he's surprised to see a female programmer of a white NBA player, but that doesn't mean he thinks those people are actually becoming male or black, not even partially.
One of the problems with excusing misrepresentations that you think are directionally correct is that many of the people doing so don't know how their own views have been shaped by lies or misrepresentations, building a new layer of bullshit on top of the old one. For instance:
This is how it is often described, but sending your children to residential school was optional.
https://fcpp.org/2018/08/22/myth-versus-evidence-your-choice/
Now if you lived in a location without local schools residential schools were the only ones available, and the percentage of natives living in such locations was higher. But conversely getting out of sending your children to school was easier than it is today, and indeed native enrollment was low:
And absenteeism among those enrolled was high:
The punishment for your children being truant was mild, seems easily avoided by giving an excuse like chronic illness, and most importantly hardly ever enforced to begin with. That is not the sort of coercion required to get parents to send their children to a concentration camp. Native children didn't go to residential schools because they were "kidnapped", they went because their parents believed it was better than the alternatives, including the alternative of not going to school at all. That is compatible with them being low-quality schools, it isn't compatible with the insane rhetoric about them that is prevalent today.
Many deaths resulted from native americans being biologically more vulnerable to diseases like tuberculosis. Is there even any evidence that the death rate of native children at residential schools was higher than the death rate of native children elsewhere? Skimming chapter 16 ("The deadly toll of infectious diseases: 1867–1939") from the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, it looks like the closest they come to an overall comparison instead of talking about individual outbreaks is this:
https://publications.gc.ca/site/eng/9.807830/publication.html
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