Corvos
3hr ago
But the Middle East is awful! The whole point of remigration is that you don't have adopt the Middle-Eastern mindset and can readopt the wholesome, high productivity Lockean one.
It's relevant because American power projection and global export economy relies on other countries preferring to have you as patron vs. the alternatives. If the choice for Iran is genocide and America running their country vs. letting China come in and run some chunks of their country, which do you think they're going to pick? And what are you going to do when making Iran play nice involves bombing Chinese citizens and tripwire forces?
Likewise the Gulf States. They don't like each other much and America has been pretty good at keeping things stable and paying for oil - far from perfect, but good. When it's a case of "any American President may genocide us because half the electorate considers us enemies", guess how fast they will seek a new Patron? And guess how fast they will seek nuclear weapons?
America has up until now made the calculation that one uppity little regional power that is fairly isolated is much better than big groups of regional powers who agree on little else except the need to have tripwire alliances and patrons to guard against the US, and are happy to pay for it with resources that America's global adversaries want.
TLDR: America's foreign policy has always been founded on putting together lots of NATOs that allow it to project influence, and to avoid becoming the target of NATOs owned by other superpowers. That means being careful how you escalate.
Why should the world be so convenient? Give Albert Einstein enough alcohol and you can make him a slurring, slumped vagrant. But there is nothing you can drink that will turn you into Albert Einstein.
Corvos
20hr ago
It's perfectly possible that bad education can ruin good breeding, but bad breeding can't be improved by good education. In short, the relationship may be asymmetrical.
Anyone can make a tall man short by cutting off his legs, but good luck making a short man tall.
There was also the death of Harry Dunn who was struck and killed by a woman from US Intelligence because she was driving at speed on the wrong side of the road. She fled the country and America refused extradition. The US declined to charge her with any crime and she was never punished.
Another incident happened in 2023 but this time the US extradited and the driver was jailed for 32 months. Likely because the driver was a private citizen without diplomatic immunity and with no institutional shielding from the intelligence community.
Corvos
1d ago
I have strong memories of reading first-hand accounts by preppers after Katrina explaining that they were forced by government officials to give up their stockpiles to feed hungry people nearby, which I interpret as 'in times of hardship, it's better to be in a weakish position with the vast majority than put yourself in a position where you are visibly richer and safer'.
I can't now find those accounts and Google is telling me that this is misinformation, so either my recollections are wrong (entirely possible, I read this years ago) or the internet is being curated again. Assign low epistemic confidence.
Corvos
1d ago
Fair. This is overlapping partially with my thoughts to the effect that, given the future is more radically uncertain than usual, and I don't have enough money to meaningfully aim for FIRE or something like that, it would be wise to obtain things now that have long-term utility in the event my salary drops sharply. So I've been thinking about what those might be.
OP includes the premise that social security is going to be gone when he reaches retirement. I am not optimising for 'what financial instrument will hold up best if the US goes into recession'. I am optimising for, 'what can I do/buy to make my life as happy and comfortable as possible without standing out from the crowd in times of severe financial hardship'.
Ultimately, in my opinion, if the US ends up being divided into the 20% of people who have full savings for retirement, the 20% who have partial savings, and the 60% who have nothing, then the US is going to go full socialist at lightning speed. It will not be a good time to have lots of money in an accessible pot that the government knows about, no matter how sophisticated the contents of that pot. Britain has already gone through multiple rounds of reneging on benefits and discounts and tax deductability on pensions, because pensions are big lumps of money and there are lots of voters in the UK who don't think they have enough money.
In short, however sophisticated your financial instruments are, it won't matter if the US institutes a wealth tax. I still remember all the breathless enthusiasm about how crypto was going to break Americans free of the government's stranglehold on the money supply, and make taxation impossible because the government won't know how much BitCoin is in your anonymous wallet or what income is going into it or what you're spending it on. Needless to say, none of that has happened, because the government got one whiff of that kind of thing and now mandates full exchange reporting of all transactions, plus using analytics to match activity to users. Anybody who handles crypto anywhere that touches the US is dead meat; there is nowhere you can put value that won't go the same way.
(There is also simply the issue that as you get older and wealthier, more and more people and industries have an incentive to sponge on you. From family to carers to hearing aid providers, everyone knows that the elderly are the easiest segment of society to milk.)
Fine china and furniture are things I recommend not because they keep their financial value but because they keep their actual value. Having bought them, they will stay basically as nice and useful and pleasant to use for the next 50 years. Likewise, the government cannot tax your memories, nor your social circle. If you are interested in time and autonomy then I would suggest attempting to arrange for sabbaticals now rather than saving up for retirement under circumstances that you do not yet know.
Antique / good furniture is a gimme - long-lived, beautiful, utilitarian. Similarly good china, good cutlery. A nice bathroom. Appliances, tools, robovacs. Jewellery can be a pleasant way to store value in a way that's more visual than a stock certificate. A good fountain pen.
Social clubs/events likewise. (Note that this is a do as I say, not as I do, kind of situation :P). The kind of hobbies that require some equipment. I have friends who fly Cessnas and that seems awesome. Balloonists often co-buy balloons.
Travel isn't a bad way of spending money. You can get too into it, but IMO occasionally going to a nice hotel and getting a couple of tours is still a pretty good way of seeing 'oh, that's what is like...'. I can't be arsed with all the budget backpacking stuff, I'm far too soft for that.
Corvos
2d ago
The thing is, you're going to die somewhere and if you are one of the only 5% of people still with enough money to support themselves when they get old, guess what the tax on your pension is going to be? It's like being a prepper after Hurricane Katrina.
Spending money now at least guarantees you'll get something for it, and that something won't be an extra year being cranky and yelling for somebody to change your urine bag.
They rip you off so badly. I got something like 300 yen for a barely used (admittedly somewhat dusty) and fully functional Tiger rice cooker that was 30,000 yen new. In general I made something like 2000 yen from all my home stuff + books, it barely covered my share of the car rental.
My friend made 20,000 at the same time from a figurine collection. I could have killed him.
Corvos
2d ago
Interestingly, Denmark, with its incredibly restrictive migration scheme, is No. 1 least racist country in the world.
Corvos
3d ago
Oh, wow, I thought this was one of those silly 'psych!' posts that's a trick where there's two people with the same name or something, but no, he really did that.
Corvos
3d ago
I believe the latter. Physiological arousal triggers a bunch of stuff, as does the first drinking/eating of the day.
Corvos
4d ago
You don't think the two were somewhat related? I don't mean the trolling argument you mention, more that like Joe Biden's habit of sniffing women it was a case where applying woke principles became clearly problematic from woke's own perspective (utilitarian in the case of Biden, moral in the case of the BBs) in ways that couldn't be blamed on the Right, and produced a measurable reduction in enthusiasm from woke activists.
Either we are talking about different things, or your disgust is stronger than many. Are you okay with a chaste yuri manga that depicts two middle school girls kissing? Or are you talking about depictions of raping a baby?
(Sorry to get sordid, but one sort of has to given the context. Another reason why these discussions get increasingly difficult when they have real stakes.)
You also just have to deal with the fact that not everyone wants to bite your bullets. I have read said yuri manga, and think OP's trailer looked fine, and I don't feel bad about this and have no intention of going to jail for it. I am therefore incentivised to a) dismiss any arguments of this kind in any other field knowing that one day you will try to come for me, and b) look very very carefully for any of your behaviours that could be used to divert the mob. (I don't mean that as a threat, obviously, I'm discussing the general case.) Are you sure that a critical number of your countrymen aren’t concerned with you (hypothetically) playing a game where you can murder prostitutes? That you post here, in this known den of sluggishly schizophrenic incel right-wing racists?
In practice everyone kind of understands that pursuing these kinds of cases with vigour gets really nasty really quickly which is why we still have a broadly-permissive society. I would strongly encourage you to read this post about how Australia's laws unintentionally drove one of our posters to attempting suicide. This stuff has real consequences.
I'm not familiar with countries that ban possession of ivory, although its sale is often illegal.
You're usually banned from importing it, even when it belongs to you, which is sort of a compromise. There are nasty cases of hundred-year-old pianos being destroyed by having the ivory hacked off the keys, things like that.
I mean, surely people always knew that those people were slavers? It's not exactly a secret what they were up to.
There's people and people. In the UK, the pressure to repatriate the bronzes and the buzz around them came from the progressive crowd who I think were pretty surprised to learn the historical context (I personally didn't know until maybe 2021?) and the pressure to export seems to have dropped considerably. You're right it's not the same, and maybe I was muddying the waters, but I don't know that many torture porn cases so I was feeling out the area.
there's other arguments that apply to fiction.
There are, but they're very far off "you are literally watching with pleasure a terrible thing being done to a real person that actually happened". And consequently their force is hugely diminished. Masturbating to George Floyd being suffocated to death is not the same as reading a KKK fantasy novel, even one in which equally lurid things happen.
The argument that "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may eventually move on to producing or consuming real disgusting material" has been trotted out many times and tends to come off very badly. DnD didn't make people satanists, nor did Doom. Grand Theft Auto did not product a wave of, well, grand theft auto. Porn is blamed for lots of nasty new sexual behaviours - mostly choking - but the direct evidential link seems weak and not in the direction that is given (it's a girl-desired thing not a guy-desired thing).
Likewise "People who produce or consume fictional disgusting material may have something wrong with them and belong in an institution" generally doesn't pass the smell test, unless you're willing to lock many, many people into a mental home and you're confident that your definition of 'disgusting' is widely shared and not going to come back to bite you.
In practice, many people privately consider these arguments hackneyed and their force has been dropping through the last century. There will always be crusaders and busybodies but equally there's a reason why governments generally avoid going on loud crusades against immoral private sexual acts that aren't actually crimes. Such crusades aren't popular and the government knows half its MPs will become collateral damage.
Corvos
5d ago
It's pretty normal to ban distribution or possession to prevent production - look at ivory.
Also, it's pretty normal to treat something produced by serious enough harm to be somewhat tainted by that harm. Interest in the Benin Bronzes declined considerably as it became known that they were essentially made by the worst slavers in Africa, we don't particularly like dealing with the outputs of Nazi 'research' labs (such as they were), etc. etc. That by itself isn't usually considered enough to merit a ban by itself, but e.g. consumption of actual torture porn or gore stuff is both rare and heavily frowned upon even when that doesn't affect production.
Neither argument applies to fiction, though.
Toilets are organised by SEX, as reified by multiple legal rulings. If you would like toilets to be organised by GENDER, then argue for it.
You're allowed to pretend you're a different SEX, but we'll sometimes still treat you as your birth SEX because that is what is relevant, that is what people care about, and that is the biological reality. It is different from not being allowed to pretend you're a different sex because that's disgusting and you're disturbed.
The original poster, who is actually trans, is sane and recognises this fact and wants to discuss how we might live with it while minimally distressing trans people. I don't agree with him/her on everything but I appreciate his/her candour. You are unfortunately proving why it is not viable in the real world, because you refuse to be clear in your language, you constantly make weaselly efforts to misinterpret mine, and you act as if asking people to use the toilet three steps to the left is a terrible, sinful thing rather than a necessary compromise if people want to be treated as a different sex elsewhere.
Women are being forced to use men's toilets and men are being forced to use women's toilets
Women are being permitted to use women's toilets. Men are being permitted to use men's toilets. All fine and dandy.
Again, come on. You didn't just spring into existence in a Bay Area cuddle pile three years ago. You know perfectly well that using biological sex has been the norm for humanity since Adam lost a rib one day. You can talk like normal people if you try. If you would like to make an argument for using your stupid circular definitions then you can, although I've seen enough of those attempts to be pretty sure it won't go well. If you'd like to make a new word for gender-woman then you can. But stop wrinkling your brow every time people use 'women' and 'men' to mean precisely what they've always meant, or hostilely redefining them to make it sound like there's a problem when there just isn't one. After six years it no longer works.
even being banned from using public toilets completely
This has not happened and nobody has mooted making it happen. Even the ruling you cited, whilst not a good ruling, was saying that maybe bringing a bearded male-impersonator into a therapy group for people traumatised by males might sometimes be inappropriate. That was it. Frankly, I doubt it's ever going to be relevant since I've known a trans man and they were fooling nobody. But no, women should use women's toilets even though for relevant biological reasons people care about this less.
the question of trans men?
They're women who want to be (treated like) men. As with trans women, sometimes we can harmlessly and voluntarily indulge this desire, other times not.
The original poster was pointing out that saying, "look, we understand your desire to behave like / be considered as the opposite sex, and don't wish to give you shit over it or impede your daily life, but we both know that biologically this is not true and we need you to use the toilets associated with your biological sex" is considered just as TERFy as "y'all are freaks and perverts, take that dress off".
People are sensitive to the biological sex of the people in whose proximity they are expected to take their clothes off and make themselves vulnerable, especially when that space is by necessity closed off and unmonitored. Therefore, we require people to use the toilet (right there, free, easily accessible) associated with their own sex.
This sensitivity has been heightened by cases like Isla Bryson, the rapist turned trans lady, very blatantly discovering transness to get into female spaces, and heightened even more by the complete inability of many authorities and activists to even acknowledge this possibility, much less to make any plans to mitigate it.
You wade in going 'people are being BANNED' as if this is some terrible deprivation of liberty, and I genuinely don't know if you use this language because the actual requirements are so trivial and so uncontroversial that you need to punch it up a bit, or because you have worked yourself up so much about the issue that you unconsciously act as if trans people are being made to wait on the pavement until their bladders explode.
That ruling is bullshit caused by the UK government's inability to ever tell women no, and I do not support it in any way.
As for the rest, trans people are permitted to use the toilets concordant with their sex, as are we all. You know this is what I meant. You may disapprove of my invisible rider that this is a good thing, but saying that trans people are being banned from using the toilet is straight up 100% rubbish and you know it. If you would like to argue that forcing trans people to take two steps to the right and use the toilet associated with their sex is evil, please go ahead and do so.
Corvos
5d ago
They're banning trans people completely from using toilets or doing other sex-segregated activities
...unless they use the one given to them right there, same as everyone else.
It's like saying that you're banning me from using the toilet because I'm a compulsive germophobe and you refuse to have the bathroom extensively fumigated after each person goes in. The facilities are there for trans people, they're allowed to use them, they're throwing a massive tantrum at the way they're allowed to use them. That is not 'banning'.
Well, yes. That’s why it amuses me.
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