vorpa-glavo
No bio...
User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
The issue is society needlessly and uncomfortably contorting itself to accommodate Lizardmen.
I think this phrase conceals a lot of different things, not all of which should be considered in the same breath. All of the following are different:
- A private software company deciding to include a pronoun prompt.
- A private Hollywood movie studio deciding to include a trans character in their next movie.
- The Federal government making discriminating against trans people in housing, public accommodation, employment, and banking illegal.
- Companies doing the bare minimum to comply with Federal laws.
- Companies going above and beyond to comply with Federal laws.
- Your local hobby community having enough scolds to make it difficult to talk about trans people the way you think is most accurate.
I'm sure I could split out thousands of more specific scenarios, but you get the idea. My overall response would be that where "society" is doing something you don't like, it is important to distinguish between private individuals, groups of private individuals, private companies, or the government. If your complaints are about the first three, then I don't really know what to say. Society is allowed to drift from social norms you would find preferable. I don't like tipping culture in the United States, but I do participate in it in spite of that. You have to choose how much you're willing to interface with larger society, and dealing with the consequences if you step away from the most common social norms around you. You can make the choice to be the guy who never tips anyone out of some principle, but you'll deal with the social fall out of that choice.
If it's the government's actions, or their follow on effects then the answer is "simple", but not "easy." Organize, win over the hearts and minds of the voters, convince the Supreme Court to undo all the laws you hate. There are plenty of laws I don't love in their current form, but if they're relatively small burdens on me I don't spend a ton of time worrying about them. If Federal trans legislation is hurting you personally, then find specific places you can move the legal regime in your favor and work to make it happen.
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
I think some of the issue is that film as a medium is closer to a raw pretended reality than other storytelling mediums. In an opera, a young man might be portrayed by an adult woman, and in a Shakespearean play a woman might be played by a boy, but in a film we expect that the world being portrayed is fairly close to what is "actually happening" in the story, and when that expectation is challenged it might pull us out of the story.
But there are plenty of exceptions to this rule. Musicals are an obvious example, where something completely unrealistic happens all the time. And some forms of Indian cinema might have breaks from reality that would be jarring to Western viewers, but completely natural within that cinema tradition.
That said, it's not hard to imagine an explanation like "fantasy world genetics are different from real world genetics" or something along those lines. That's obviously more of an issue for something like LotR, which is an imagined past for our world, but with enough epicycles you could pre-authorize any changes along these lines.
vorpa-glavo
8mo ago
All a statute of limitations does, conceptually, is move step 1 up to some more recent date, though. If we say that any claims older than, say, 100 years will not be recognized, then the new "foundation" of the current system of property ownership is just 100 years in the past. I think a statute of limitations can certainly be a procedurally just rule for a society to adopt, but that doesn't mean the outcomes that it produces will be substantially just.
Also, it's awfully convenient for a group in power to say, "Hey, we've gotta let bygones be bygones, alright? You wouldn't want endless vendettas and re-litigation of this whole thing every generation, would you? Good, good, I'm glad you're seeing reason, now go back to your hovel and eat your gruel."
Joe Studwell's How Asia Works makes a case that land reform (AKA "stealing" land from some people and giving it to others) was an important part of the transition to being a middle income country for many Asian countries. And we even have examples of land reform under the Gracchi brothers in ancient Rome, so the issue of land concentrating into a few hands and leading to issues in society is a well-trodden one. To avoid the kind of stagnation that tends to result from that, why shouldn't we adopt something like Georgism, which would weaken land-based property ownership within society but attempt to make it fair going forward?
Human beings naturally break into two groups if not fucked with by some unfortunate mutation/condition or fucked with by the various means of mimicking the other category.
The more I've thought about the concept of disease and disability, the more I've become convinced that there isn't actually a good philosophical grounding for talking about variation and difference in normative terms.
To take just one example, being left-handed is a variation that occurs in a minority of humans. Is it an "unfortunate mutation" or a "normal variation"?
Does it matter that it occurs in 10% of people? If being left-handed had instead occured only in 0.01% of people would it then be correct to say something like, "Humans are a bipedal, right-handed species"?
We can be descriptive and speak in generalities, but in a lot of cases I don't think we have a sound basis to say something like, "A human body should work this way, but yours is working wrong."
I think if we're being as pedantic as possible, the best you could say is something like, "Your body works in way X, most people's body works in way Y, but with a surgery Z we can make your body work in way Y as well."
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
The social convention of a large part of society is that gender identity is nonsense, and transition is impossible. They reject your approach, and you definitions, and by imposing it on them you are doing the "point deer make horse" thing.
I'm okay with people saying the "wrong" thing, or believing "wrongthink" - whatever that may entail from my own point of view, or from anyone's point of view, really. I think there are many domains where it is undesirable for the government to enforce uniform speech or metaphysical ideologies, and this is one of them. If that means that in the world I propose, trans people will be treated with respect and acceptance in some parts of some big cities, but be in an iffy situation elsewhere, then so be it.
Just as a racist hotel owner is free to call a black man the N-word as he hands the purchased hotel keys over, a gas station attendant will be free to use whatever slurs they want while they let a trans woman use the women's restroom. Or to simply "misgender" her. If we already have the government forcing public accommodations to work a certain way for the public, then I see no reason why it shouldn't do this for trans people.
Now, I'm open to general arguments that the government should never have been involved in non-discrimination laws in the first place, but I tend to think this is one of the weakest planks of hardcore libertarians. Yes, in theory capitalist greed alone could be enough to not want to discriminate. But I think once you have a world with racially segregated hospitals and race-based banking discrimination, no matter how you got there, it kind of doesn't matter if there were technically no violations of the Non-Aggression Principle at any step in the process, you've ended up in a space where some people are meaningfully less free than other people, since bodily health and finance are basic components of freedom in a free market capitalist system. The free market is already not doing its job.
Even from the perspective of merely fixing a "market failure" I think whatever minimal form of government must exist would have a compelling interest to step in and regulate a handful of high-impact domains to preserve the freedoms of citizens living under such a system. Now, I'm definitely open to arguments that bathrooms would not be a part of this if we were building a society based on rational principles from the ground up, but when the precedence is already there as it is in our society I see no reason not to expand it.
I'm not sure who you thinking is fighting for the right to scream at strangers in supermarkets.
Surely you can't believe that the ecosystem of videos of "obviously trans woman does embarrassing and socially unacceptable things in public" is the totality of what exists online? I'm sure there are plenty of "red neck yells at butch cis woman for trying to use women's restroom" type videos as well. Neither side has a monopoly on embarrassing loud mouths.
And regardless of any of that, I think it's a form of "Chinese robber" fallacy. Most people (cis or trans, trans activist or anti-trans) are probably keeping their head down, and trying to use their best judgement with how to deal with any social situation they find themselves in. The government probably isn't the right tool to deal with breaches of social etiquette.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I'm curious about where you draw the boundaries around "fascist." Are there any circumstances you would consider it acceptable to restrict freedom of movement of individuals or groups?
Would any of the following be acceptable circumstances to restrict freedoms, while qualifying as non-fascist:
- The government has credible intel that a terrorist attack is planned at a particular airport on a particular day.
- It is wartime, and the government is concerned about enemies entering the country, or traitors leaving the country to fight for the other side.
- The government of an island nation, like Australia, starts to hear reports about a new Black Death-like plague with a 40-60% mortality rate in Eurasia
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
While I don't discount that it wasn't random happenstance that Hbomberguy looked into the particular creators that he did, you're sort of ignoring that the fact that the main target of the video (indeed the person to whom the last 2 hours is entirely devoted to) is James Somerton - a leftist, queer content creator broadly on the same "side" as him.
I don't think you need an excuse to not spend 4 hours of your life watching a drama video (even if it is a thoroughly researched, well-presented drama video.) However, I don't think Hbomberguy's political commitments left him unable to mount his attack. On the contrary, because he's doing a bit of an own goal with the main target of the video, I'm inclined to give greater weight to his claims that James Somerton engaged in plagiarism and therefore wronged the community he belonged to.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Sure, I'd be okay with treating something like Bitcoin as money in some cases, since it bears enough of a resemblance to money.
So before I debate anything else you've said, you're going to have to convince me that these attempts to make nice, neat, perfect rules are necessary in the first place.
I don't think even my proposal was "nice, neat and perfect", but I can touch on why I think well-made categories are important (if not "necessary.")
I think that the issue you're going to run into with poorly conceived categories is that "everyone knows what an X is" only actually gets you so far. Language is a tool for communication, and communication is harder if everyone is using different definitions, which is kind of the default if people haven't made a formal convention of some kind to get everyone on the same page.
It's obviously not a very serious example, but the argument that people sometimes have over "Is a burrito a sandwich?" can illustrate some of the problems. Everyone knows what a sandwich is. Everyone knows what a burrito is. But in spite of "everyone knowing that" there are people who seriously argue that burritos are sandwiches, and people who argue that burritos are obviously not sandwiches. If we have all this confusion with a trivial subject like sandwiches, imagine what it is like for something more important, like who you're going to spend the rest of your life with.
Finnster is not a woman. Even if he doesn't appear as a man at first glance, you being successfully deceived does not change the essential nature of an thing.
I agree - Finnster is a man. He's never denied this, and I'm not even sure he's trying to deceive anyone, since he's open about being a cross-dresser. To the extent that he "deceived" me, it was at the same subconscious level that a cloud might "deceive" me by resembling a face.
But I'm not sure your "essential nature" thing gets off the ground. If we're getting into a philosophical concept of "essence", then it should be possible to create a "nice, neat, perfect" set of rules that define an essence of manhood and womanhood. If we can't do that, where do we get off claiming we all "know" anything about these topics at all? I don't think you can claim to implicitly know someone's essence, and not also be prepared to explain what the criteria for that essential nature are.
I think a person should be prepared to put forward their metaphysical commitments. Was Casimir Pulaski, who was "observed" to be a man, lived as a man all his life, and who was only discovered after death to possibly have had congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a man? You might say that all his contemporaries were deceived or mistaken, and he simply was a woman with an intersex condition, or you may say he was indeed a man - but either way you can't just wave him away as a weird edge case. Either you know what the essential nature of a man is, or you don't. A single edge case is all one needs to make the case that thinking there's an "essential essence" to something much more fuzzy, in spite of how much we might want the world to consist of nice, neat, and perfect categories.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Homosexuality is, conjecturally, naturally disgusting for the heterosexual. This doesn’t seem learned — no one taught me that two guys kissing is gross, it was just gross to consider until the normalization propaganda reduced the innate “disgust” alarm.
I think it is similar to training cats to be okay with being picked up. Most cats' natural disposition is to not like being picked up by a large primate, but with the right training you can use steps to make them more okay with first having your hands on them, then getting their paws on you shoulder, then picking them up all the way.
My guess is that cats might still have slight discomfort with being picked up, but they can be trained to accept that it is safe enough that the discomfort is dialed down to the absolute minimum.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I don't know. I've seen several trans skeptical people bite the bullet on trans suicide rates.
The attitude seems to either be "the threat of trans kids committing suicide is emotional blackmail meant to shut down the argument from society and parents and force them to go through with mutilating their child against their will" or occasionally even "if they commit suicide at higher rates, then completely ignoring the issue solves the issue (through the self-removal of trans people from the population.)"
I mean, there's nothing stopping both claims from being true (to the extent they're empirically testable.) It could hypothetically be that social contagion and permissive doctors are allowing large numbers of cis children to ruin their bodies through transition followed by inevitable detransition, and that from a purely medical perspective the most effective way to prevent the suicide of enduringly trans children is to allow them to socially transition and take puberty blockers until adulthood when they can make the choice of whether to undergo hormonal therapy and cosmetic surgery. In that hypothetical world, the difficulty would be with separating cis children from trans children in a reliable way that minimized overall harm to both groups.
The empirical case can only solve so much without models of what is happening. The DSM-V's intro talks about how it models mental disorders, and it basically says that they are useful perspectives for treatment and not necessarily a single "real" disease with a known cause or set of causes. That is, ADHD is "real" to doctors using the DSM to the extent that it has been found that patients coming in complaining about a common cluster of issues, tend to have those issues resolved through a common cluster of treatments. And it's no different for gender dysphoria. When it comes to a gender dysphoria diagnosis today, there is no need for brain tests or an "intersex brain" hypothesis or anything more empirical than, "have they had 2 out of these 6 listed symptoms for at least 6 months?"
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
I actually have a question for you. Would you be more okay with a regime like the Weimar republic had of transvestite passes? They were doctor's notes that smoothed out the act of cross-dressing in public for people, and made it less of a hassle to interact with authorities.
I might be misinterpreting you, but given the above I don't know how to interpret statements like that other than "unless the issue affects a statistically significant portion of society (or abolishes the current economic system, I suppose), you should not oppose it". If this is the argument you're making, I want to point out that it's symmetrical. You should have no problem with a complete ban on gender affirming therapies for minors, because the issue is exactly as tiny as those therapies being prescribed to them.
You are misinterpreting. A better construction of my position is a more classical liberal position along the lines of, "We should consider the amount of harm done to unrelated parties before we consider banning a practice." There are plenty of things that are legal that I think are best avoided such as getting a face tattoo, but I recognize that I don't have access to the One True Way of living life or organizing society, and I think that it is best to keep a diversity of experimenting viewpoints within society for the following reasons:
- New technologies have cropped up so quickly that we've barely had time to adapt to them as a culture. I think that cancel culture and victim culture are two maladaptive social technologies that have come up in that environment, and I think legally allowing a greater variety of viewpoint and lifestyle diversity makes it more likely that some group will through experimentation create social norms that make for a functional human society alongside modern technologies.
- Even without considerations of us adapting socially to new technology, I think that the economic effects of new technologies have also created a need for considering a wider variety of approaches in order to weather the coming storm from automation and a thousand other disruptive technologies. I welcome the idea of dominionist Catholics choosing Exit over Voice in order to form their own small scale societies that might outlast the collapse of society, I welcome the idea of Mormons creating granaries to outlast an ecological disaster, I welcome the idea of young LGBT people attempting to create fulfilling communities and found families within an individualist framework, etc. etc. I might have my bets on which ones are more likely to be around in 100 or 1000 years, but I'm open to the idea that I'm wrong.
At the federal level (speaking in a US context), all I advocate for is that adult trans people have the ability to use public accommodations of their adopted sex, except where that would be biologically impracticable. I get that even this position is controversial, but it makes no metaphysical or scientific commitments that can't be justified, and it leaves the more controversial issues of trans minors and things like trans participation in sports to be dealt with as each state wishes.
For me, it is simply a recognition that if any form our society or species is going to survive, then we can't put all of our eggs in one basket when it comes to how we organize society, and allowing trans people to use their preferred public accommodation is a part of making something like what Scott calls Archipelago a more practicable reality.
I fully appreciate that someone who believes strongly in the social contagion hypothesis might consider the mere idea of trans people to be a form of harm being done to people. Personally, I don't know if the social contagion hypothesis is true, and I don't know if I've seen any evidence that makes it particularly more likely than the:
- Social Acceptance/Medical Advancement Hypothesis: As social acceptance of trans people has increased, and likelihood of passing has gotten better for people who medically transition, the number of people who already would have had relatively strong, consistent and fixed desires to live as a member of the opposite sex has stayed the same, but appeared to grow since more people are willing to take the risk of being open about it.
Heck, there's nothing stopping some form of both being true. The number of detransitioners is only evidence of us being bad at doing differential diagnoses, and not really evidence of social contagion as the major driving force of the uptick. There will always be hypochondriacs, or people with OCD who obsessively fear they might have some disease or condition, or teenagers learning a bunch of new medical or psychological terms and wondering if one of those explains the trouble they've been having in life.
My response to this is that the scale of the issue is not small at all. The numbers you cited eclipse the number of unarmed black men dying at the hands of the police, they dwarf unethical medical experiments like Tuskagee, and unlike the campus rape epidemic, they are actually happening.
I tend to think most of the other things you listed are also a bit overblown, and in our efforts to "learn from" them and create rules for avoiding them we might have done more harm than good. Do you disagree?
Even then I'm aware of 3 separate clinics - Jaime Reed's, Tamara Pietzke's, and Diane Ehrensaft's. The claim isn't that the children weren't vetted "hard enough", the issue is that they made no attempt to rule out gender dysphoria at all. People running these clinics either belong in jail, or at the very least should have their license to practice medicine stripped from them.
I'm not so naive as to believe doctors will always do the right thing, or that current best practices will always be good for the health and well-being of patients. Lobotomies are the perfect example of a medical scandal that I think we should strive to avoid in the future.
If there are bad clinics, I'm not against the idea of shutting them down, stripping a bunch of people of licensees, and letting families affected sue. I have acknowledged in other posts that I think the replication crisis has undermined the basic trust we might place in medicine, and so I don't find it unreasonable for a given person to weigh the evidence and come out against large portions of trans medicine and healthcare.
However, my basic position is a separate one to almost every other part of the trans debate. I think we could allow trans women to use women's restrooms even in a legal regime where cross-sex hormones and surgeries were 100% illegal. There is no contradiction there at all.
Let the best practices in medicine evolve how they will as more, higher quality evidence emerges. We're always making judgements under uncertainty anyways.
Sure, just like I'm not impressed with claims that there is an ongoing transgender genocide. Now, do you want to take a wild guess which claim is actually being made by activists, and which isn't?
I don't control what bad arguments or bad tactics people broadly "on my side" make. Obviously, if I had my druthers such people would only ever use good, convincing arguments and honorable tactics, and never use bad, unconvincing arguments and dishonorable tactics. It is beyond my power to make that happen. All I can do is try my best to articulate what I think are the better reasons for this position.
I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong, and I get that people who don't share some of my underlying commitments or values might validly arrive at different positions in spite of us looking at broadly the same evidence base.
That's just not true. We've had this conversation before, I responded to your points. In fact, you were the one that got quiet after that. I don't hold it against you, it's normal for interest in a conversation to drop off if it's going on for too long / you get responses from multiple people, but you shouldn't act like no one ever addressed your claims.
Fair enough. I understand I might not have responded to every point you raised in past posts. As you say, it is often hard to respond when I get too many responses.
I actually think this passes a basic sniff test.
A quick search reveals that Philadelphia has 1703 voting divisions, and that Obama and Romney combined had 5,670,708 votes in Pennsylvania as a whole in 2012 with the resulting map looking like this. Philadelphia is the bright blue part in the lower right part of the image, and it is obvious just looking at it that Obama's support in Pennsylvania is concentrated in a few highly populous municipalities, including Philadelphia. The claimed oddity is that 59 of the 1703 voting divisions in Philadelphia amounting to 19,605 votes all went 100% to Obama. But why is this strange?
Each voting division in Philadelphia seems to have about 332 voters, so all that needed to happen was around 332 voters in a single voting division all decided to cast a ballot for Obama 59 times in a city where around 560,000 total people were casting their vote, and 80-90% of the votes were going to Obama. With voter clustering, does this seem that unlikely of an outcome?
We've just experienced an episode of high inflation due to government stimulus. If anything, we've learned just how dangerous MMT can be.
I'm not sure the government stimulus is the best single explanation for the high inflation of the last few years. If you want to blame the government, then I think overreaction to COVID would be a better angle of attack, since a recent Indicator episode looked at why there is a disconnect between ordinary Americans, who claim to be miserable, and economists who say that despite what Americans say in polls they're spending more like they're happy (high spending on travel, etc.), and it concluded that a lot of indicators of Americans being happy with the economy are actually due to pent up COVID spending. Basically, people didn't get to go on vacations for a year or two and now that things have opened up they have a bunch of money saved up that they're still spending, in spite of inflation.
If this explanation is correct, it might mean the government stimulus is part of the saved up money that Americans are now spending, but I somehow doubt that one time payments of $600 per person in December of 2020, and $1000-$3000 in 2021 are the best explanation for a sustained increase of prices across the economy. That just doesn't seem like a parsimonious explanation of what we're observing.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
Part of my argument is that this is de facto the standard you're using if you use your brain's sex determination module to get information about men and women in the world. Since the evidence on humans having pheromones is mixed, and the existence of porn seems to indicate that the mere visual presence of a woman is enough to arouse a man, I think the argument that there is something like a sex determination module that leverages visual information is pretty strong.
The visual information is based on a subset of the morphology of a person being looked at.
Now, it has been a broader trend in science to move away from morphology as a primary basis for classification, as we have developed more sophisticated tools for observing "hidden" things like DNA, hormones and microscopic structures, so I understand why genetic or gametic models of sex are popular among people who want solid and fixed definitions. But part of my argument is that the "hidden" things we can now measure are less psychologically fundamental than the visual (and thus morphology-based) sex determination module in the brain.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
If you ask me how many billion people I would rather die than my cat, my emotional response is I’m okay losing the three billion+ people in Africa and China and India and such. I don’t know those people. My cat loves me.
Logically though, there’s gotta be a better way to strike a balance between partiality and self-interest, alongside recognizing it’s pretty hard to justify a moral system that values my cat so much. If you recognize that other moral agents exist and that you should seek fair compromises as much as possible, then that seems better than any alternative I’m aware of.
Yeah, as someone who has long been roughly aligned with utilitarianism as an ethical philosophy, I've wondered if it's not better to think of it as one answer to what can happen when a lot of people with policy-making power come together, and want to justify their policy goals in a way that most people would consider "fair."
Basically, if a politician wants to build a road, and they're going to have to tear down your house to do it, it's easier to swallow if they justify their decision by saying they took everyone in the country's well-being into account, and they think the new road is going to do more good than your house in its current location is doing. (It is also easier to swallow if they try to be fair to you by giving you enough money to relocate, so you can reap the benefits of the new road as well.)
I've long wondered if "discounted utilitarianism" or "reflective equilibrium hedonism" would be a better philosophy for individuals to adopt instead. Basically, acknowledging that you don't value the life of 1 foreigner the same as 1 person from the same city, and you don't value that person as much as you do a family member or friend. So you just discount each circle of concern by the amount you don't care about them. You might say, "Well a person from China might make my phone, and that has some value to me, so I value their life at 0.001 times that of one my friends." And then you can do the utilitarian calculus with those decisions in mind. Let the 1-to-1 values be in the hands of politicians and diplomats who have to work out fair policies and justify them to their constituents.
vorpa-glavo
1mo ago
nobody is currently arrested for cross-dressing
While this is technically true, I don't assign 0 credence to the reports from some underclass trans black women that they get stopped by the police on suspicion of prostitution more often than the average person. While the so called "walking while trans law" law (properly the "loitering for prostitution" law) I'm most aware of in New York was repealed in 2021 after years of efforts going back to at least 2010, it wouldn't surprise me if there are several other jurisdictions where anti-prostitution laws accidentally catch innocent trans people in their nets.
I think part of the problem is that underclass trans women probably are more likely to be prostitutes, and a police officer is going to Notice The Pattern whether he wants to or not, and then he's going to act on his experiences and stop non-passing trans people more often as a result.
I fully admit that this issue could be solved with reforms to prostitution laws, without any reforms of existing legislation around trans people (including transvestite passes), but that doesn't mean it's not a problem for underclass trans women right now.
vorpa-glavo
2mo ago
I don't think this has ever been anyone's position in the history of getting things banned by a government. A far more consistent way of understanding bans is that they are used as a way of hurting or disadvantaging people that they don't like, or social engineering attempts at removing undesirable behaviors.
I mean are you talking about those actually wielding power, like legislators, or the ordinary citizens? Because, while I disagree with you somewhat on both counts, my strongest disagreements come on the topic of non-politicians. I'm sure that politics is an unreflective team sport for many (most?) people, but I do think that one of the "advantages" of being a non-politician is the theoretical (if rarely exercised) ability to have truly consistent principals, since you don't actually have the ability to implement your proposed political program in the real world, and thus never have to deal with the complexities that real world implementation entail.
I do think your theory likely does explain some of why a given politician decides to vote a particular way, but do you really believe that no one has ever wanted to ban something just because they thought society would be better without it? Like, what outgroup did the drunk driving ban target? What outgroup does the FDA target?
I really feel like your theory is a little undercooked.
We were talking about just Philadelphia.
I agree, but I think it is worth taking a step back and asking at the meta level why we were talking about just Philadelphia.
A newspaper report saying, "Some people think it's suspicious that 59 voting divisions in Philadelphia went 100% to Obama" doesn't just come from nowhere.
If I imagine Joe the Reporter, trying to craft a story of this kind (perhaps even for noble reasons!), I have to wonder about adjacently possible worlds. Imagine the counterfactual world where the 2012 presidential election as a whole was a sufficiently fair election on the whole, with whatever meaning you assign to that idea. However, even in a fair election, just by random chance, we would expect there to be voting patterns that were "suspicious" for one reason or another.
Assuming Joe the Reporter's methodology isn't far off from:
- Open up a spread sheet of the US election by voting division and play around with the numbers, until he finds something that feels "suspicious" to his gut.
- Report about the most strikingly suspicious thing he finds.
Then I just think that if we weren't talking about Philadelphia having 59 voting divisions going 100% to Obama, we'd be talking about some other state or city or whatever that had "odd" voting patterns of some kind, even if it could well be completely innocent, and we just happened to end up in the world where a very unlikely happened by chance, because something had to happen.
I think a very similar thing happened with 2020, and the people who claim it's strange that some states were counting ballots and Republicans were in the lead as they counted the in person votes, but at some point in the night they counted the mail in votes and suddenly Democrats jumped to a decisive lead when all the votes were tallied. I admit this could be suspicious, but you have to realize that nobody pre-registered the opinion that Democrats would stuff the ballot on the back end by faking a bunch of mail in votes in the specific counties where that was the reporting pattern. I just have the intuition that if things had gone slightly differently and the mail in votes in those counties had somehow been counted before the in person ballots, then people wanting to call the election fake would have found some equally hard to explain thing halfway across the country that might have any number of innocent explanations.
vorpa-glavo
3mo ago
I'm not sure you're thinking about it correctly.
First, the math you're doing implicitly assumes who any two people vote for is an independent event. But there might be social, political and economic reasons why the people in a single small subsection of a city all vote a particular way. If the type of people who live in a single neighborhood isn't completely random, and the type of political messaging that appeal to a person aren't randomly distributed throughout a state, then you might completely be wrong to treat the voting events as independent.
In addition, even if you assume that the events are independent, then the real comparison you're making is all of the votes cast in the entire United States. You might be right to say that there's a generous 3.5% chance of a single voting division of poor black people going for Obama. But the question really is, how many of this kind of black voting division are there in the entire United States? How many degrees of freedom did the people looking for claimed irregularities have? If they hadn't found 59 majority black voting divisions in Philadelphia going to Obama, are there similarly striking "irregularities" that might occur entirely by chance that they might have looked for instead?
While I believe there is a lot of truth in what you say, I think there is one other wellspring of "natural rights": social status games.
Sure, sometimes social status games are backed by violence, or the threat of violence, but consider something like accessibility laws for disabled people. There is no risk of disabled people violently uprising against the state, and the vast majority of people would not raise arms against the government if the government got rid of wheelchair ramps, etc.
So, why do we have accesibility laws in most of the developed world? It is because throwing a bone to disabled people imposes a small enough dead weight loss on the economy, and a large enough increase in the prestige of Western institutions among Western elites that the ruling party is willing to use political capital to do it. (Or the reputation and prestige lost for undoing it is too large to truly contemplate.)
Violence is important, but it isn't everything.
vorpa-glavo
11mo ago
The first point you highlighted is an example of a "trait cluster" sex model, and I think it can form one basis of accepting trans women as women.
How feminized does a male body need to be before it is "female"?
I do think you're right that some sci fi technology may come along to throw a wrench in the current form of the debate. What will people say when you can do gene therapy and grow a new set of genitals to order for a person?
vorpa-glavo
6mo ago
Modern Greeks are actually descended from ancient Greeks and so you promoted here nationalist propaganda against various ethnic groups.
Fair enough, I stand corrected on this point. It doesn't fundamentally undermine my position that nations are artificial.
So in a very real sense we can see that the the nations you primarilly focused upon which were european nations are fake. Not whether all ethnic groups are fake. But much more so the real issue in regards to influential organizations that pretend indigenous europeans are not indigenous.
I considered including a few paragraphs on things like Hindutva in India, and the erosion of diverse languages and cultural groups in Indonesia, but I didn't think it was necessary.
My basic opinion is that humans are social primates with hardware designed for groups of ~150 individuals. Using this hardware, we've managed to create social technologies that allow for greater numbers to be part of organized wholes: religions, nations, etc. Really, it's remarkable that we've been able to create social technologies that allow millions or billions of humans to work together. Whatever else you might say about the current capitalist world order - its ability to coordinate the actions of billions of humans is truly remarkable.
Nations being a social technology does mean that they're "fake" - we did have to invent them. I don't deny the existence of "clans" or "extended families", but I do think once you've reached a certain size it is only ideology and centralization of power that allows us to conceptualize such things as "Han", "Yamato", "French" or "Mexican."
htps://www.themotte.org/post/667/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/137944?context=8#context
Yourself have said in regards to a mod race swapping from non white to white:
If someone in your orbit decides to add a mod that turns all the characters into BIPOC they/thems, and you became aware of it, would you not immediately jump to a conclusion on why they might have done such a mod? Modifying the media you consume is theoretically morally neutral and apolitical, but once your media habits become public they are subject to public scruitiny.
So you are willing to think a sinister motive for race swapping in general when it is from non white to white but not for the opposite.
There is no contradiction between what I said there, and what I am saying now. I was then and am now in favor of people making and using mods for video games of any kind.
My post there was descriptive, not prescriptive. I was saying that media habits that become public are subject to public scrutiny. This is undoubtedly true. I said nothing about myself attributing "sinister motives" to other people either way. People's private "vices" are their own business.
Even if there were unabashedly white supremacist mods being made, they don't seem to have lead to any real world harm, and so I don't see a need to prioritize them as an issue.
It is bothersome that you dodged in your support of race swapping the issue of discrimination, and how race swapping involves a heavy dose of a choice to discriminate against whites for blacks.
Anti-identitarianism can be seen as the genuine and not motte and bailey, only if it promoted to begin with in a manner that disrespects the progressive sacred cows too
I apologize if I've misread you, but I don't think you've understood where I'm coming from. My entry point into this topic is much more tied up in my aesthetic philosophy than any pro- or anti-identitarian sentiment.
I didn't omit discrimination in my argument because it somehow escaped my notice as a possible motivation for race swapping. I omitted it because it is completely immaterial to my reasons for supporting the creation of new artistic expression inspired by what has come before.
I'm fully in favor of roasting progressive sacred cows as well, if that is something someone wants to do. Nothing I said implied I wasn't, and I have consistently maintained that I would be in support of things like white Othello or white John Henry when pressed.
As big Hollywood movies, maybe not. But even I am sometimes surprised at what people are able to come up with.
Miku Binder Thomas Jefferson might have been super cringe, but I also think it was 100% sincere and "organic", even by your own standards. Some Gen Z artist saw Hamilton, and liked that depiction of Thomas Jefferson by a black actor in a play enough to take it one level further. That's just how people interact with media in this day and age.
Look at this list of Undertale AU's. All of that seems completely organic to me. Some people just like imagining their favorite video game characters in a cozy coffee shop, or as vampires, or whatever. This is only even scratching the surface - there are Undertale AU's that have their own Undertale AU's that have their own Undertale AU's with videos on Youtube that have thousands of views. It's a wild rabbit hole.
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