vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
Trump pardons a bunch of regular Americans who were targeted for political reasons and given heinous sentences way above any treatment similar situated people who weren't targeted for political reasons have ever received, and this was done after embarrassingly unfair clown-trials, and leaving the 14 most serious convictions to only be commuted. What were the facts of each case? Who knows, the trials were tainted and corrupt with the government lying and hiding evidence.
think whatever you like about the Biden pardons, but the Trump pardons were entirely justified and further reinforce just how important the pardon power is and why it should remain
I'm willing to use the hypocrisy standard here. Biden claimed he wouldn't pardon Hunter, then he did. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of himself, but he did.
J.D. Vance, when clarifying Trump's intention to pardon the January 6th protesters, said they obviously wouldn't pardon people who committed violence on the day of January 6th. He didn't have to make a hypocrite of the Trump administration he was going to be a part of, but he did.
I'm okay with holding both administrations to their own standards in this case, and saying that they both acted wrongly. I don't share your belief that we simply can't know the facts of each case. Trump isn't stupid. If he had wanted to actually investigate all of the people with violent offenses, he could have, and I bet he would quickly arrive at a gut feeling about which were legitimate and which were actual gray areas. I don't believe for a second that the number of unambiguously violent protesters was 0 or 14, given that 140 law enforcement officers were injured and 15 were hospitalized.
The following statements can all be true:
- There are similar lawless acts carried out by more left-sympathetic perpetrators that should have been prosecuted more vigorously than they were.
- Many peaceful January 6th protesters were treated unfairly in some way, and it was appropriate to pardon them.
- Many violent January 6th protesters probably should be in jail in a fair and just world.
- Trump acted irresponsibly in pardoning the vast majority of the protesters and commuting the sentences of 14 others.
- Biden's pardons were worse abuses of power than Trump's.
Biden attempted to direct the Archivist and the Office of the Federal Register to declare they had received sufficient documents to proclaim an Amendment has been added to the Constitution, but they refused.
I'll bite the bullet on this one. I don't have to carry water for Biden - he did wrong here, and I'm willing to walk back my weak defense of his actions.
I think I could weakly defend my original words, because even during Trump I, a lot of the cases where he didn't actually end up following through on his stated intentions was because underlings refused to follow his unconstitutional orders. But, "I couldn't get my underlings to violate their oath to defend the constitution, so I didn't violate the constitution" is still really bad, and I think I'm more willing to say even here we should strongly condemn both Trump and Biden.
vorpa-glavo
7mo ago
My preferred standard is based on legal status, not mere identification. That's what stops your "just long enough self-ID" hypothetical scenario.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
We live in an age of active shooters and I’m not going to keep someone around who sees the solution to a difference of opinion in a gun.
Isn't the media constantly telling people that Trump is a once in a generation threat to our democracy? If one of the basic justifications for the 2nd Amendment is being able to overthrow corrupt governments, or prevent the rise of tyrants, then I fail to see how this is out of line with that basic philosophy, at least in the mind of person doing it. They wouldn't see it as a mere "difference of opinion."
Honestly, I'm someone who is able to sympathize with both the sentiment that political violence is bad and destabilizing and should generally be avoided, and the general idea that gun rights are justified as a remedy for tyranny or oppression, though preferably as a matter of last resort. To use a relatively neutral example of the second kind of violence that I find acceptable, I'd point to the 1954 United States capitol shooting by Puerto Rican nationalists. Puerto Ricans don't have representation in Congress, and can't vote for President, so I think that some of them violently attacking the politicians responsible for their undemocratic state is somewhat justified. There is at least a line of argument that it will at least possibly make Puerto Rico enough of a thorn in the politicians' sides to make them have more autonomy or better conditions, even if they remain a de facto colony of the United States.
The problem I have is that there's always going to be differences of opinion among a citizenry. I bet a lot of Puerto Ricans in 1954 thought that violence was tactically the wrong move, or fully condemned both the tactics and motives of the Puerto Rican nationalists who shot at Congress. Who, then, gets to decide when the use of lethal force is justified to fight oppression?
I understand the basic reality that any government is going to try and shield its political class from violent retaliation. But I also think that the United States is a country founded on a violent revolution grounded in a (at the time) radical ideology, and it is hard to actually draw boundaries of when an attempted revolution or an assassination is acceptable. By definition, if you allow guns into enough peoples hands, you're effectively trusting their individual consciences and judgement to make the call for themselves, regardless of what anyone else thinks. The foundational ideology of our country is that it is worth risking ones own life for an end to tyrannical government, and we're just lucky that almost no one actually thinks this way most of the time.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
While big institutions occasionally get hit, cancel culture has always been mostly hitting individuals, and this lady was by no means guiltless.
What was she guilty of? Saying some mean things?
If she was announcing a serious plan to harm the president, then she should be prosecuted for her attempted murder. But if all she did was openly wish death on a political rival, then I think that shows a lack of decorum but is hardly worth her getting fired over.
I'm sure most people who see a given politician as an obstacle to their desired political outcomes have entertained the idea that the world would be better if that politician would die peacefully of natural causes, and I don't think that feeling bleeding over into violent situations is strange. I think pearl clutching and acting shocked when people darkly joke about a near miss being a hit instead is a bit silly. Is it everyone's first week on the internet or something?
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
My running theory is that the causal arrow runs from not being neurotypical to not fitting into the very narrow social role for men (which is hard to navigate as an autistic person) to very rationally deciding to just start identifying as trans so you have more flexibility in how you present yourself. I'd be interested to hear Mary or another highly capable trans person talk about if this resonates with them at all (I'm always too sheepish to state this belief in polite company).
I wonder about this myself. I know a transman who is likely autistic, and from what I have gathered talking with him, it really seems like part of the motivation for transitioning was his difficulty fitting into the female social role as an autistic person. He was raised a conservative Christian, went to a Baptist college, and was married to an emotionally abusive man for 10 years, so I wonder if he didn't experience the female role as rather more restrictive than most women experience it?
I would be curious to find out whether trans people are more likely to come from communities which emphasize hard-to-navigate social rules (for either sex) in the modern day. I could easily imagine a pipeline that looks something like: born autistic in a community with strong gender norms > doesn't fit in to natal sex role due to autism > labels that difficulty "gender dysphoria" and questions if they might be the opposite sex > transitions and enough people give them a bit more leeway for them to learn the rules of their new sex role > they're much happier in their new role as a result.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
That still sounds similar to John Bohannon's hoaxes, where he fabricated fake studies with serious issues that got through peer review. But the problem with those studies was not as obvious as the Sokal hoaxes (where a cursory reading of them is enough to show they're nonsense), the problem is the peer reviewers were obviously doing a shoddy job and not actually engaging with the studies or numbers they were asked to review.
The problem with the idea of "within the spectrum of sillyness" thinking, is that there's always the possibility that a lot of the evidence is bad or misrepresented in the first place. You see a similar phenomenon in the way some online grifters present lawsuits against themselves to their audiences. To hear the grifters tell it, they're always persecuted martyrs, but often if you actually dig up trial transcripts they're being reasonably charged with a crime they actually committed. (I am not suggesting that no one is ever targeted politically, or unfairly charged with things that someone on the other side of the political aisle wouldn't be. I'm just saying that the pattern I observed occurs a lot as well.)
I'm not that committed to defending TWG here in any case. If the consensus is that he acted as a partisan hack, and that his stress test was badly conducted, I'm happy to accept that judgment. I just think that there are ways he could have done something similar to what he did that would have been defensible, and for the epistemic good of everyone involved.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Please expand on the reasons you believe Africans cause issues for humanity. What do you consider the three most solid pieces of evidence for your view that Africans are a net negative for humanity?
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
But will the people accept that? When I say there's no easy levers, I'm thinking about how hard it would be to enforce some of these things in practice.
The US struggles to stop illegal drugs from coming over the border from Mexico. How would we stop oral arbortifacients and condoms from coming over the Southern border? How would we stop women from making intellectual salons for teaching college and technical topics - and stop employers from letting these qualified women work for them? How would we stop women from poisoning husbands they can't divorce?
I'm not saying it's absolutely impossible to be brutal and efficient here, but I'm not actually sure the state capacity to do all of this actually exists.
vorpa-glavo
7mo ago
Jumping up and down on the “defect” button is not the kind of humanity I appreciate.
How is this more defect button than Trump pardoning the Blackwater massacerers? I think killing 14 civillians is bad, and I don't want private security firms representing America to do that on the world stage. I definitely don't want the world to get the message, "we'll accept any level of misconduct, and the perpetrators won't even face a tiny amount of justice."
I don't think Joe Biden should have lied about pardoning his son, and if Joe himself was personally involved in corrupt dealings, I want all of that information set before the American people. However, I don't think the mere act of pardoning his son is a bad thing. It is only bad if Joe Biden was personally involved in corrupt dealings, and is now pardoning his son so that Joe's connections are never made public.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
My point is that there is no "they" you're negotiating with, though. "Democrats" do not speak with a single voice. Even if you look at majorities, that Pew survey I linked indicates that a majority of Republicans agree with preventing people with mental illnesses from owning guns, raising the minimum age to buy a fire arm to 21, and oppose allowing people to carry a concealed fire arm without a permit. Put that way, there is no party that is universally against gun rights or for gun rights.
The Democrat blob is not a monolith, and neither is the Republican blob.
If you're trying to make a point that Democrats who won't pass their preferred gun control policy (but limited to registered Democrats only as a compromise) are being hypocritical, I'm not sure the argument straightforwardly gets off the ground. First, I don't think the vast majority of gun rights advocates would be in favor of such a compromise, so you're not putting forward a live proposal that is really worthy of consideration. And second, there's reasons for wanting to oppose such a proposal apart from believing in gun rights. It's stupid to unilaterally disarm yourself, in a society where 40% of your "enemy" is legally armed.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Do you know something the rest of us don't about the woman LoTT got fired?
Rush Limbaugh targeting the specific individuals who were targeting him, feels like a somewhat reasonable and proportional response. What did this random Home Depot employee do to anyone? How is she the correct target? What did she actually do except say some distasteful things online?
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Take it with a grain of salt, but the Wikipedia article for ROGD currently opens:
Rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) is a controversial, scientifically unsupported hypothesis which claims that some adolescents identify as transgender and experience gender dysphoria due to peer influence and social contagion. ROGD is not recognized as a valid mental health diagnosis by any major professional association, which discourage its use due to a lack of reputable scientific evidence for the concept, major methodological issues in existing research, and its stigmatization of gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
Which at least seems like a decent indicator that ROGD is currently considered a fringe position, since once the dust is settled most Wikipedia articles tend towards whatever is considered "mainstream" opinion of experts over time.
Doesn't mean that ROGD isn't true, just that it is considered fringe.
Secondly, I'm pretty damn contrarian / anti-authority, and even I wouldn't say that I "don't believe you can find the truth in the authorities", rather I don't believe authority determines truth.
Right, I agree. Authoritativeness-fringeness is orthogonal to truthfulness. Fringe things sometimes turn out to be true, authoritative things sometimes turn out to be false. Continental drift was a fringe theory until it wasn't.
My larger point was more about what people tend to do when they feel like what the authorities are saying doesn't make sense, and decide to do their own independent investigation. Existing fringe theories form a Schelling point for the people rejecting authorities on a particular point, since it is often hard to build original theories and syntheses of one's own. As an example, I've always found Blanchard's typology incomplete and inadequate. It's not that I think autogynephilic and "homosexual" transsexuals don't exist, but that I'm fairly certain there are at least one or two other categories that exist as well (especially in the modern queer community.) People who believe in Blanchard's typology as a complete explanation of transness often remind me of Karl Popper's criticism of Adlerian psychoanalysis:
As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. 'Because of my thousandfold experience,' he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: 'And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.'
I could easily replace the references to Adlerian constructs with reference to "AGP." Heck, we even have /u/KMC doing it in this very thread. I don't know how people who have never met the person under discussion, have never tried to get to know their thoughts or why they transitioned are so sure that they know the person masturbates in women's clothing. It feels like AGP-totalizers take advantage of the fact that there will usually be silence about a person's sex life due to social mores, and fill in the gap with whatever best fits their preconceptions.
I'm fairly willing to accept that some number of "trans" people are AGPs who lie to fit the most acceptable societal narrative, but I'm less willing to assume that literally every trans person who transitions later in life is one of them. Especially because, for every seeming confirmation of AGP online when people are speaking candidly, there is always a chorus of people saying, "Eh, I've considered the AGP and HSTS hypotheses, and I think I've actually transitioned for reason X", where X is something completely plausible as a component of human psychology and desire.
vorpa-glavo
10d ago
I'll concede that "I have to shop around for banks that will give me credit in my own name, and I might not get it in the end" is less oppression than, say, "Society is structured so that the entirety of my future is decided by another person", but I think it still qualifies as oppression.
The nature of this discussion is that there is going to be some point where the oppression falls below a threshold where it makes sense to draw attention to it, or where the benefits of paternalism and freedom outweigh the downsides of oppression.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that women were oppressed as late as 1974, and that things may have tipped over towards very slightly favoring women on net starting in 1979 (when women became a slight majority of people enrolled in college), but I wouldn't think a person was wrong for choosing slightly different dates for those things either, or for saying that there is rough equality of the sexes in the United States, because both sexes have problems and they mostly fall under the threshold of attention worthiness.
Your understanding of the bill and mine are the same, though I certainly see that I didn't word it correctly in the post you responded to.
But even reduced, uneven access to credit is a form of oppression.
Like, are we going to pretend that the moment Esso started serving gas to black motorists nationwide in the 1930's, that suddenly black motorists were completely unoppressed as a group? Having to navigate an environment in which you can get an essential good from some firms, and can't get an essential good from others limits your options and often mean you're left with a worse set of choices.
Edit: Typo
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
I've never understood the argument the US customary units are "human-centric".
I mean, I find it really easy to work with some units because I know their origins. It's much easier to know that a "league" is about as far a person can walk in an hour, and it is 3 miles, and then to work from that fact to how far my D&D party could walk with 8 hours of travel on flat terrain, than to do anything involving distance with metric units.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
(Because that's when we can start talking about the ACTUAL cause of violence, aside from guns)
What's your theory of the case? What, say, three interventions do you believe would have the largest effect on societal violence and crime, and be implementable within a little-l liberal constitutional republic under the rule of law?
vorpa-glavo
8d ago
Did you reply to my comment by mistake? It feels like a bit of a non-sequitur.
vorpa-glavo
10mo ago
I could get behind 1, but I don't know if I agree that institutionalization's biggest problems aren't inherent to the system. Sure, we can make very nice madhouses with blackjack and hookers, but at the end of the day there's always going to be people who straddle the fuzzy line of "too crazy for society" and "able to safely exist in society", and if those people are forcibly robbed of their liberty, they'll often be able to mount a justifiable case against any system that exists, no matter how nice.
We can always ignore such voices of course, but enough sob stories will almost certainly end at them being shut down again, no matter how nice they are. People don't like being stuck in a cage, gilded or otherwise.
With regards for 2 - surely you'd only want to set a high cash bail for violent crimes with a chance of recidivism or something? A crime of passion that's unlikely to have a follow up probably doesn't need a $1 million dollar bail.
As for 3, I'd certainly be open to letting communities police themselves. I was interested in the proposal someone put forward here about a neighborhood all chipping in for private security to supplement what the state provides, and I find that an interesting idea as well.
Here is what I actually think a reasonable framing of this question is: "can men with a cross dressing fetish involve non-consenting women in their crossdress-play?" In a reasonable society I think the answer to this question should be: no, obviously.
I would propose an alternative framing of the question: "Can people who have official government documents that document them as women, involve non-consenting members of the public in their use of spaces for women?" To which the obvious answer is: yes. Just like my driver's license is valid whether you think I should have one or not.
What is your proposal for how trans men (biological women) who have medically and legally transitioned should be dealt with? Do you think most women who are scared of men would be comfortable with this guy sharing a bathroom with them? While I certainly could imagine a standard that looks like:
- Bathroom 1: For men, trans women, trans men, and any iffy dykes who freak the chicks out.
- Bathroom 2: For feminine women
I can't see how you could actually write or enforce the laws and social norms around that in a consistent way that actually works out in pratice. The only two reasonable standards are "biological" or "legal documents" in my opinion. Either standard will involve some women sharing a bathroom with some people that they might read as "men", so that can't be the deciding factor.
Bathrooms are extremely vulnerable places; they usually have one exit, you are often in there alone, and you are often doing something which makes you physically vulnerable (using the toilet). It seems completely reasonable for women to want to keep men out of these spaces.
How far are you willing to take this? Should we systematically look at how certain rooms are used, and if it would ever be the case that there's a woman alone in the room with a man, should we relocate activities or force the man to stand outside or something? Should we have far more women's only spaces than we currently do in society? What rooms besides bathrooms should we be sex-seggregating?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Er, but "man" and "woman" really do have an objective scientific meaning, unlike "relative", which is a social convention.
I'm not sure that I've heard the objective, scientific meaning of "man" and "woman" that doesn't fall prey to the Diogenes-style "behold Plato's man" objection.
I think a gamete-based definition is a strong option (and Trump seems to agree, based on his EO) or a cluster-of-traits definition. But even those have their flaws.
And even aside from core definitions, I think this ignores the way words often operate at many levels. A "bear" is centrally an animal, but if I call a bear-shaped toy or a fictional bear character a "bear", I'm stretching and skewing the word in a way that is immediately intuitively understandable to an English speaker, even though in a real, literal sense I'm not actually talking about any kind of bear at all.
A "woman" could centrally be an "adult human of the sex that produces large gametes", and we could still allow for stretched usages like calling a particular type of game piece in a board game a "woman", or granting trans women the status of honorary "women."
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I think that the terminology problem that arises here is the difference between social truths and mind-independent truths about reality.
If I was speaking colloquially, I would allow social truths to be called "objective" in some sense. But I think there is a difference between a sentence like "The speed limit here is 75 miles per hour", and "The sun is mostly made of hydrogen and helium." The first is referring to an intersubjective agreement about a rule in society, and the second is a fact that even Martians could discover about the universe.
In most everyday conversations, we do not make a distinction between social truths (intersubjective), matters of personal taste or opinion (subjective), and mind-independeng facts about reality (objective.)
I think these sentences are mind-independent truths:
- Adoptive children are not the biological offspring of their adoptive parents. Augustus is not the son of Caesar.
- Trans women belong to the class of people who produce small, mobile gametes. Trans women are biological men.
But they are completely compatible with the social truths:
- Adoptive children are the children of their adoptive parents. Augustus is the son of Caesar.
- Trans people are honorary members of their identified sex. Trans women are women.
I agree that social truths lend themselves to falsification. If I make a move in chess, it is either legal or it is not. But chess is not a mind-independent part of the universe that a Martian scientist could just discover "out there." It exists as a set of intersubjective agreements between humans, who agree to abide by the rules of chess.
So too, every society decides the rules by which they judge the validity of adoption and honorary sex transition. The Islamic world rejects the concept of "adoption", replacing it with a legal construct of "guardianship" with different implications for inheritance, for example. "Adoption" is not a legal move in the game of Islamic jurisprudence.
Right now, honorary sex transition is in a state of flux - finding acceptance among some in the Western world, and rejection among others. People are playing different games, and may or may not converge on a single game some day.
I think this is a good example of the difference between the Goddess of Cancer and the Goddess of Everything Else.
Evolution had one chance to program our values, but it is imperfect and hackish. So instead of optimizing us for "make lots of babies with your own genetic code", it optimized us for the intermediary, "have sex with an attractive member of the opposite sex." For most of human history, those two notions were connected, but then we invented birth control and contraceptives, and we switched from the rule of the Goddess of Cancer (who says "KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER") to the rule of the Goddess of Everything Else.
While hanging out in rationalist and pronatalist spaces has helped me to appreciate the appeal of Bloodtopia more, I think my heart is still in Ideastan. I just can't commit to calling childless people like Sir Isaac Newton or George Washington "failures" in some ultimate sense. I think in spite of the fact that they didn't have biological offspring, they altered the future trajectory of humanity so radically that the contribution of some random breeder just can't compare.
I would rather give in to the excitement and mystery of where the Goddess of Everything Else takes us, than stick to the tried and true, but stale world of Bloodtopia.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Sorry, this is just tired philosobabble, which I have no patience for.
I don't think you can avoid doing a little philosophy when you are talking about rigorous scientific definitions.
I think you and I are in near complete agreement as far as empirically verifiable reality surrounding trans women or biological sex is concerned.
The Turing test has been performed with GPT-4, and it passed 54% of the time (compared to humans being suspected as human 67% of the time.)
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