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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   35652 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 11, 2024

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Mineral Bluff is a small, isolated, unincorporated community in Georgia (US, not the other one) of around two hundred souls, six miles away from the big city of Blue Ridge--a proper city of over one thousand people (yes, more than ten hundred), the seat of the Fannin County (population just a tad over 25K). Demographics-wise, Mineral Bluff follows similar trend and makeup of its larger neighbor and its county, with almost a 100% non-Hispanic White back in 2000 Census, with that percentage dropping to around 90% by 2020 as more identifying as multiracial.

Mineral Bluff is in the news because a local 11-year-old boy walked about a mile to its center, by himself which precipitated a chain of decisions and actions that led to the arrest of the child's mother:

  • While the boy was walking along the road (speed limit 25/35 miles), a woman stopped and asked him if he's OK. He said yes. She called the sheriff's office anyway.

  • A female sheriff from Blue Ridge picked up the boy and called the mother. The mother told the sheriff that she didn't know that her boy went off to the town, and was upset he didn't tell her, but was not worried since the boy knows the area and there are plenty of family living within walking distance. The sheriff dropped the boy off at home (a house on 16 acres of land) and left him in the care of his grandfather, who lives with his daughter and her four children (while the husband works out-of-state).

  • Later that evening, the sheriff and a back-up came back to the house and arrested the mother--in front of her four children (of which the 11-year-old boy is the youngest)--who after booking was soon released on $500 bail.

  • The next day, a case manager from Children Services came to investigate. That investigation resulted in requiring the mother to sign a Safety Plan that requires her to install an app on her son's phone that would track his location, and to designate a Safety Person who will oversee the the children whenever she's not home. Again, the youngest is 11.

  • The assistant district attorney says that he'll dismiss the charges if she signs.

But no, that's not why the case is in the news. The case is in the news because the the woman got smart, lawyered up, and told the Assistant DA and the Children Services to take a hike. She got the lawyer who heads ParentsUSA and she ain't gonna sign nothing.

Five years ago, Utah passed a law that parents cannot be investigated for child neglect based solely on the fact that they let their kids walk alone, play by themselves, or wait in the car by themselves. Several states followed suit. I hope that more do so, and that publicity of this case in particular--and cases like it--precipitate adoption of similar legislation.

Because what this case so aptly illustrates is that, under current laws, it takes one stranger with safetyist mindset to see the child unaccompanied and make the call. In this particular case, the call went to the sheriff's office, landing on a sheriff who agreed with the exaggerated sense of danger for the kid (I checked the FBI stats for the county, it's not a dangerous place), which led to the dramatic arrest of the mother.

But the more typical case bypasses the law enforcement and goes to the child protection agency, which is stuffed with social workers that, charitably, over-train on the worst of parenting, and who like all bureaucrats feel the urge to To Something. That potential harassment means that even parents who themselves do not have a safetyist mindset must rationally conclude that the probability that there is one such person in the area where their child would walk or play is so high that they better not allow it. Which leads to fewer kids walking by themselves; which leads to every kid that does walk by itself being a glaring exception, which leads to higher probability that a well-meaning adult with a deranged sense of danger will call the authorities...

I don't have a Culture War angle to this. I mean, I have heard of cases like this happening in urban areas (coded Blue), but this case happened in a rural place (coded Red). When all it takes is one deranged stranger (to report, not to kidnap!), coordination becomes near-impossible. Thus the need for explicit laws like Utah's: This Is Fine And Thou Shall Not Investigate.

I would have thought the culture war aspect would have been obvious.

a woman stopped and asked him if he's OK

A female sheriff from Blue Ridge

My life, over the years, has taken weird turns, and put me in contact with people are are decidedly outside the norm.

Nothing best exemplifies this by my most recent job, which has put me in close contact with law enforcement around the country, Sheriffs Office's most heavily.

What I've learned is that Sheriffs actually have a very broad range in how they can enforce the law. Complaints from constituents can result in everything from just a general wellness checkup to brushing the matter off('I know the guy, he's fine, and I know the person complaining, she does this all the time') to putting out a warrant for someone's arrest.

So when I see something like this;

Later that evening, the sheriff and a back-up came back to the house and arrested the mother

That makes me raise more than a few eyebrows.

To put it bluntly, what the hell happened here to cause this reaction? Was the person filing the complaint a political bigwig who could have stirred up a massive fuss and the Sheriff wanted it taken care of properly to quiet a reaction? I've seen this happen before, so it wouldn't surprise. Or, more unfavorably, did the female Sheriff get a particular bee in her bonnet that made her bring the hammer down? I have no idea. An uncharitable part of me wants to lean in this general direction, because this entire thing is odd, no question, but who knows?

And on top of all that, this entire commotion was brought about by an 11-year old boy walking a mile in an area where a mile really isn't that big of a deal. Hell, I walked more than a mile away from my home when I was a kid, and I certainly don't live anywhere near the Blue Ridge mountains!

What an absolute mess and embarrassment for the Sheriff's Office.

Nybbler is going to shoot me as a back-the-blue conservative normie for this, but it's also the case that sheriffs know who the troublemakers are, and use stuff like this to go after them.

It's unfortunate, but there's going to a lot of free range kid incidents that do involve genuinely negligent parents or feral kids, and from our perspective 30,000ft above the media firestorm we'll never see it.

Where I live there's a group of tweens+teens who roam around breaking into empty summer houses. The sheriff can't really even arrest them, and even if he did the leftist prosecutor wouldn't do anything about it. So naturally his only leverage over the parents is going after them with CPS. So far this seems to be working, with little pushback because the local head of the ACLU isn't inclined to start a fuss due to her summer house being broken into.
But if it did blow up, I can already write the reason dot com article about "rural kids reported to child services just for riding their bikes to town!", and the resulting shitstorm would distract from any real conversation about how law enforcement got like this in the first place.

See this locally famous case for another example. Any attempt to do something about the kid before his crimes escalated to international aeroplane hijacking would have been based around a CPS investigation, because realistically there was nothing else the police could do about him. Many such cases, and a lot of them end in deadly carjacking rather than just hilarious levels of property damage.

So for the "free range kids" movement to win, it's going to need to help solve the youth crime problem that incentivizes helicopter-parenting mandates. And since a lot of the big media figures are left-libertarians like Radley Balko who also went all-in on BLM, the odds of them owning up to this are low.

Nybbler is going to shoot me as a back-the-blue conservative normie for this

<BLAM!>

You're just-worlding this nonsense hard. You've got no evidence, aside from blind trust in authority, that this 10-year-old kid was up to anything troublesome.

That's the thing: you're right in general, and I don't have any evidence about specific cases other than the ones in my local community. But CPS is still a tool to "do something about those damn kids" that normies find a lot easier to stomach than caning the little shits, so unless you can deal with the underlying problem your CPS-reform movement is going to be resisted by people who are sick and tired of having all their shit stolen by 17yr 364day & 23hr old minors who get away scot free.

But CPS is still a tool to "do something about those damn kids"

And it was used to exactly that end in this case.

I don’t think @SteveKirk was claiming, nor even implying, that the specific kid from OP’s story was up to no good. I think the actual point he made is that it would be very dangerous to dismantle law enforcement’s ability to deal effectively with actual cases of child abuse, just because sometimes those powers will be overfitted to apply to benign cases. It’s no different from the general discussion about tradeoffs regarding how much power to give law enforcement and how much risk of overapplication of that power you’re willing to stomach.

Iterate that sort of advice for several generations and you end up right where we are now. You can't improve things by being afraid to dismantle harmful institutions.

In any case, he's not talking about these laws being used to deal with child abuse; he's talking about using these laws to punish parents for crimes of their children which somehow the cops can't do anything about otherwise.

Not so much "dangerous" because a) the benefits of cps-elimination for good kids might outweigh the harm done by yobbos anyway, and b) taking away that specific tool would encourage people to support real solutions to youth crime.

It's mostly that a lot of people are going to see cps-elimination as taking away the one thing they see actually being used against ferals in their community. And people are so sick to death of unpunished crime right now that you don't want to become an acceptable target for their anger. (It's a lot safer to attack white libertarian free-range kid activists than it is to give a physical description of the Youth who stole your bike.)

It's "you can't take my broken stapler; what else will I use to pound nails?" You need to at least hand the guy a rock if you want him to give up his stapler without a fight.

Any attempt to do something about the kid before his crimes escalated to international aeroplane theft would have been based around a CPS investigation, because realistically there was nothing else the police could do about him.

The law is far too soft around young children who commit serious crimes. Deadly carjacking by under-age girls? Death penalty!

Not:

The 15-year old received the maximum sentence allowed by law and was remanded to the care of a youth agency until deemed rehabilitated or reaching the age of 21; the younger girl (age 14 at time of sentencing) received the same sentence on July 6, 2021.

If swift use of the death penalty returns, people will be amazed at how quickly the random stabbings of 3-year-old children ends, how these violent carjackings and armed burglaries get squelched. These 'mentally deranged' people rarely try stabbing attacks or pushing-onto-the-tracks against 190 cm bodybuilders or big, tough construction workers. They go for women and children or they bring weapons. They know what would happen, even within their esoteric, legally fortuitous 'unable to understand the consequences' mental state. They do understand consequences, we just don't inflict the necessary punishment.

If all else fails, the death penalty will cull the problem people out of the population.

If swift use of the death penalty returns

Technically speaking, 2A + property rights is the death penalty. It's distributed (and you'll get prosecuted if the perp fails the paper bag test and you live in a jurisdiction that conducts them), but it's still there.

I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses. Worse, they created a situation in which activities that are not only not dangerous, but actually good for kids are forbidden lest some overactive Karen decide to insert themselves into your life and use CPS to punish you.

Helicopter parenting has been shown to causing negative effects (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2018/06/helicopter-parenting). Ordinary milestones like being able to play without a parent present, let alone walk to a neighbors house, are now pushed so far forward that a child is likely to be a pre-teen before doing anything away from the prying eyes of parents. This is something that harms kids because the normal avenues for learning to problem solve and be independent are now pushed to nearly adulthood where the stakes are much higher. At ten, outside of edge cases of kidnapping (which are pretty rare) the worst a kid could do is maybe stay out later than he should or cause minor trouble. At 16, the kid can get into drugs and alcohol and vandalism and so on. He hasn’t yet learned to handle peer relationships, knowing what is dangerous and what isn’t, and has no skills to handle himself.

I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses.

It's not just "safety" enforcement - enforcement of any standard is easier against the ordinary than against the willfully noncompliant. The battle against anarcho-tyranny is constant, and the temptation to slide down is extremely high on multiple axes.

to report, not to kidnap!

Reporting is just kidnapping by proxy, is intended as kidnapping by proxy (much like swatting is), and children today are at a higher risk of being abducted by the State than they ever were of the more typical criminals.

You want to fix the birth rate, this heckler’s veto needs to go. But then again, parents have gladly, like good conservatives, sat back and had their rights stripped from them over the past 50 years, and that was pretty negligent on its own…

But then again, parents have gladly, like good conservatives, sat back and had their rights stripped from them over the past 50 years, and that was pretty negligent on its own…

I strongly suspect this is downstream from increasing individual wealth, which makes the family unit less and less necessary as a locus of economic production and coordination.

I think that the propaganda machine is to blame as well. Look at just about anything on television or any movie, music, etc. The resounding themes are family is a drag, parents are idiots or don’t care, and that the point of life is hedonistic pleasure which things like family and religion are drags on. I’ve challenged people with this, and it’s hard to do it. Find four mainstream television shows that show intact, loving, and competent families. Find four such shows where religion and particularly Christianity is portrayed as good wholesome, and not full of hypocrisy and repression. When the entire culture tells you over and over that families and traditions and religion are a drag on your individual hedonistic pleasure seeking, and that the highest good of life is hedonistic pleasures, it’s not shocking to me that families are dying.

parents are idiots or don’t care

I mean, this part is 100% true- they have no parental rights, their kids have no human rights, and they for some reason appreciate that state of affairs.

Look at just about anything on television or any movie, music, etc. The resounding themes are family is a drag, parents are idiots or don’t care, and that the point of life is hedonistic pleasure which things like family and religion are drags on

Yeah "liberatory" culture and increasing wealth definitely work hand-in-hand on this.

Have you considered that those themes are popular because they contain a very large degree of truth?

Have you considered that having only the negative aspects displayed in media is pretty biased? I get that at least some families have negative aspects to them. Some families are neglectful or overly critical or strict or even abusive. But when looking at the mainstream media shows, I’m finding that you have to look pretty darn far to find a show that has a positive view of family life — present, active, competent parents who love and care for their children and know how to help them navigate through life. Likewise, it’s rare to find shows in which the parents are happily married and aren’t constantly spitting out one-line put-downs of their spouse and who actually seem to like being together. I would personally guess that less than a quarter of families are actually negative forces in each other’s lives. Maybe less than 10% are neglectful or abusive, maybe a bit more common to see people struggling a bit, though generally doing okay. Yet, to watch mainstream media, you have the opposite viewpoint. They show, at best, a Simpson’s style family that features a pair of idiot parents (especially a clueless dad) who don’t seem to like each other much and who are generally unaware of anything going on in their children’s lives or how to handle those issues.

I mean, I think a large part of this is simply the need to generate some type of conflict in order for there to be a plot for each episode. A happy family with two normal even-keeled parents assisting their kids with mundane life situations does not make for interesting TV.

As for TV representations of happy and well-functioning families with parents who are invested in their kids’ lives, I think Modern Family is a good example. Yes, the main dad is presented as a bit eccentric and gaffe-prone, but he’s clearly not a Homer Simpson level doofus, and he’s shown over and over to be a great father who makes a positive difference in his children’s lives. His wife teases him and gets mad at him sometimes - which, I think is realistic, and especially so given the sort of slightly-larger-than-life hijinks involved in some episodes - but she also very obviously loves him, and they’re shown to have a thriving sex life and a real love for each other.

I haven’t watched a ton of TV in recent years and can’t confidently comment on what’s going on in the current landscape, but it seems like Tim Allen’s most recent sitcom Last Man Standing also portrayed a happy and functional two-parent family.

From "The Simpsons and Cultural Decline" by Free Northerner:

The Simpsons family is intact and stable, if slightly dysfunctional, and hold to functional, almost traditional, family values. They all love each other, however much they might bicker. Homer is a flawed man, often selfish or stupid, but still loving and caring towards his family. Marge is shown to love and respect Homer, despite her occasional anger at his flaws. Bart disrespects Homer occasionally, but it is shown as a clear deviancy for laughs; it also clearly shown that he does look up to and admire Homer. The kids fight, but at heart care for each other.

Compare those family values that to the three highest-rated sitcoms of 2013: Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and Modern Family. The first is about a bunch of (fornicating) nerds and their slut friend who spend the entire show snarking at each other. The second is about a cad, his divorced brother, and his nephew who regularly snark at each other; the cad is shown as cool, while the ‘family man’ is shown as a loser. According to Wiki, the third is about a blended family, a somewhat normal family, and a gay couple; the ‘modern family’ is so screwed up wiki needs a chart to keep family relations in order.

The Simpsons has a subtext of Homer as patriarch. A few times in the first couple of seasons Homer makes a family decision, whether it is selling the TV to attend counseling, buying a new TV, or choosing a camping spot, to name a few examples. The rest of the family complains or looks unhappy, yet it is not even questioned that, however flawed he or his decision may be, it is Homer’s place to decide these things. The show just assumes the father makes the major family decisions. Other than Duck Dynasty, would any modern show simply assume the father’s position as head of the home?

The show assumes that normal people go to church on Sundays and say grace at mealtime. Prayer is a casually accepted part of the show, as is religion. Does any major show today, other than Duck Dynasty, so casually accept religion as a normal, unremarkable, everyday part of life?

Other, less remarkable, moral lessons are also included. The pro-family/loyalty message of Life on the Fast Lane. How Marge’s sisters constant denigration of Homer is shown as negative, destructive behaviour. In one episode, Marge is casually referred to as Mrs. Homer Simpson.

All this is not to say the Simpsons is a font of traditional values, it is a liberal show, it does have some fem-centrism, and is rather subversive, but it is a good example of just how fast our culture is collapsing. Just a couple decades ago, the Simpsons was a controversial show that was held up by the president as an example of family dysfunction. Yet compared to today’s cultural wasteland, where broken families are common, disrespect and degeneracy are the norm, and the husband as the head of the family is, at best, a joke, it is very tame, almost traditional.

25 years is all it took. In 20 years, will Two and a Half Men and Modern Family be relatively tame and traditional?

If I was looking for healthy and natural family values in modern television, I would turn to anime, where girls still dream of getting married and having a child is still a blessing. The spirit of Shinzo Abe lives on.

Bob’s Burgers is pretty good at this.

I mean, Leave it to Beaver managed. It seems obviously doable.

Oh, you touched a third rail for me here, Bro.

Modern Family is satanic. It's a show that makes fun of loser normies to their face in such a way that they, the losers, not only don't get that they are the punchline, but they actually like it.

The Phil-Claire family (the most "traditional" of the three featured) is a weird reverse domme fantasy wherein Claire, without a job, enjoys the success of her pliable and doting husband, Phil, as if it were her own. Phil is apparently a Real Estate salesman of some skill - how else can they afford their home in that part of California? But his success isn't the product of a shrewd and hard-working businessman - he's a human gold retriever who sells houses because he's just so darn nice!

And Claire hates his niceness and quirkyness. She is often, obviously, embarrassed by him. But the living is good and, gosh darn it, she just loves that big old goofball at the end of the day. Even in the infamous "Godfather" episode, wherein Phil is attempted to be portrayed as a cunning genius, it's all tongue-in-cheek and sophomoric. Simply put, Phil offers no real danger, competency, or capability and lustfully pines away for his father-in-law's second bride, Gloria. He's also financially stable and a devoted father. He's in good shape. He has his hair.

Phil is also an awful father despite, you know, being presented as a good dad. His oldest daughter dates a notorious dufus (in whom Phil sees himself) and is speedily on her way to Stripperdom. If I remember correctly, the later season had a literal teen pregnancy arc. The middle daughter, Alex, feels both a lack of attention from her parents and a sense of dread that she is obviously smarter than everyone she shares a home with. Although the show had to pivot once the actress playing her developed, that character was hurdling towards Sarah Lawrence levels of political lesbianism. Finally, Phil's son, Luke, is a profound idiot and bonds with his father, mostly, during his most intense bouts of senselessness. Remember, Phil is a multi-millionaire somehow.

I won't cover the other two families. The two gay men adopting an asian female child is so on the nose that the show makes fun of itself for that. The Gloria-Jay dynamic with the wise cracking Manny is some sort of weird Frasier redux. The eternal craziness of the original mother (name forgotten) is Hollywood stating firmly that yes, once you are old and a woman, the world hates you.

Modern Family is not a sincere gesture towards the changing realities of family life. It is a cruel imitation of all the dark patterns of family mis-formation that Hollywood feeds back to the masses to perpetuate a system that's already failed, but still has viewership to capture. We're starting to see this with fat people in health ads and perpetual man-children dating stand-in mom's in Taco Bell ads.

These people hate you, they will say it to your face, and then you will ask for more.

More comments

Many things are true, but which truths we emphasize is all the battle. Yes, families can be a drag. They can also be tremendously-joyous sources of shelter and respite. Parents can be idiots. They can also be wise and protective. Whether the positive or negative aspects of a particular social relationship get highlighted often follows resource generation and self-interest.

Yes, families can be a drag. They can also be tremendously-joyous sources of shelter and respite.

Yes, there are those for whom families are a drag, and those in the families getting the joy by doing the dragging.

People do not universally experience the same relations in the same valence.

Find four mainstream television shows that show intact, loving, and competent families

Well good television (and possibly all storytelling) thrives on conflict and problems - there are a zillion films and television shows set in wars, whether real or fictional, but that doesn't mean we all love war and want more of it, it's just a compelling backdrop for engaging media. Troubled families are simply more interesting than 'intact, loving and competent' ones.

I live in a suburban area where there is a group of children who run around essentially unsupervised. This past Fourth of July they set off fireworks in the street and hid behind the tree in my front yard(it’s a good tree to hide behind).

This should be the default, but it’s not. I suspect that if all the parents in the city decided to send their kids on mile long walks into main street, something similar would happen, and no one would think about calling in to report it. And that’s the solution, not some words on pieces of paper. Be the counter revolution.

and no one would think about calling in to report it

Texas has arrested mothers of 12 year old boys doing the same thing. They haven't yet fixed their law completely.

And that’s the solution, not some words on pieces of paper.

Yes, but that's scary.
The problem with telling Karen "fuck you" is that it's ultimately a risk- a risk that should be taken for the sake of your children (something most parents have forgotten how to do- it's a generational problem), but a risk nonetheless. Otherwise you're teaching your children to never take risks, which just pushes the societal balance further towards evil.

I’m saying no one in my neighborhood would think to call in and report twelve year old boys playing with firecrackers in the street(after all, they appeared to be taking appropriate safety precautions like hiding behind a tree, checking for traffic before going into the road, etc). No doubt in the woodlands and Frisco it is different. But in those places it is so much less common as to be highly unusual. No doubt a man wandering around in a bear suit singing the national anthem would generate a police report, despite not being illegal. Why? Because it’s weird. The solution is to make children playing without direct supervision more normal.

despite not being illegal

Unlike driving while black walking down the street while 10, apparently.

Gotta stay within a few feet of the head of the [long]house; you should be grateful they're not requiring the burka like they did a couple years ago.

That's to prevent sexual crime- don't you know literally all men are overcome with lust when they see a child? If they're not literally on a leash there's no limit to what perversion could happen. (The people who identify with this most strongly even have their own version of making boys into girls.)

It's no different than fundamentalist Islam. For the women who espouse this philosophy, the Handmaiden's Tale treatment would be an improvement for both them and the rest of us. And perhaps ironically, the first polity who have passed anti-Karen laws was the Mormon one.

My whole point, of course, is that things only generate a police report if they're weird. If you make ten year olds going out and about by themselves normal nobody will call the cops.

And perhaps ironically, the first polity who have passed anti-Karen laws was the Mormon one.

A bunch of mormonism's social technology(the mission year, subsidized BYU tuition, singles wards) appears based around being able to separate the young from their families, so that's unsurprising.

I suspect that if all the parents in the city decided to send their kids on mile long walks into main street, something similar would happen, and no one would think about calling in to report it.

I think you'd be horribly, horribly disappointed. And do you want to be the one who goes first, and risks having CPS remove your kids because some childless cat lady keeps reporting you for "neglect"?

I mean, I live in a neighborhood where I won't have to go first, and I find that a very minor benefit towards expanding my house over moving. But I also live in a filter bubble of people who have gone first and gotten away with it- mine own parents were among them, once upon a time, for letting me bike to 7/11 or the library on mine own far younger than the other children in the neighborhood.

So I think if I had to make that gamble I'd feel comfortable rolling the dice. Lots of people I know did, and it worked out for them.

I mean, I live in a neighborhood where I won't have to go first, and I find that a very minor benefit towards expanding my house over moving.

And we were talking about "parents in the city" — if you lived in such a place, instead of where you do now, would you still take such a risk? If, in that scenario, a bunch of busybody Karens call CPS on you for "neglect" by insufficient helicopter parenting, what then?

mine own parents were among them, once upon a time, for letting me bike to 7/11 or the library on mine own far younger than the other children in the neighborhood.

That, of course, was a different time, when people — especially cat-lady "karens" — were less likely to report people to the government for being more permissive than the norm. This is the age of "see something, say something (caveat: unless "seeing" would be racist)."

And we were talking about "parents in the city"

The city in this case is rural Georgia. I doubt whoever reported the kid was a ‘childless cat lady’.

I have heard of cases like this happening in urban areas (coded Blue), but this case happened in a rural place (coded Red).

I agree this is strange.

I think there's something we aren't hearing in this case. Mrs. Patterson is a real estate agent in the city of Blue Ridge. She even has an office in the charming main street of the mountain-lake town. She probably has a billboard somewhere. She places Emerson quotes in her real estate biography.

Blue Ridge has boomed as a tourist destination the past 25 years. The city government and county surrounds it has all the typical trappings of a quiet place finding more and more money flowing in. Every small town has petty feuds, power struggles, and usually some corruption and/or incompetence. Add in the fact that New York millionaires and retired baseball players are setting up shop there it seems to raise the stakes.

The place is being gentrified. It wouldn't surprise me if local authorities might go out of their way to make trouble to the people selling out their culture as agents of change. It could also be something pettier, too. Maybe Patterson did someone's cousin dirty in a wrong way. Officer Powertrip happened to hear all about this story and never liked the woman or anything she represents. So she finds her kid wandering, decides to drop him off with gramps, and when she finds out that was her-- a quick call to Cousin Jimmy. A Sheriff that either looks the other way or himself was the one to receive a phone call and Make Things Happen. Bam. She done got what was coming.

That's all fiction, but it makes a heck of a lot more sense than Blue Ridge police demanding parents keep their kids on a leash at all times. As far as I know it is a place where the locals will give little Sam a deer rifle for his 13th birthday. The charge is one thing, but the follow through makes me think Patterson has upset someone at some point. It is a place where you do business, make friends with the local powers, do County Commissioner Rick a solid, and stuff like this never happens.

Could also be overzealous enforcement by Officer Karen. All the follow through is the typical signifier of loyal backing. Cops can do that. I don't blame Mrs. Patterson for assuming she lived in a safe place where her 11 year old could enjoy some freedom. Very strange.

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left towards safetyism. I've considered myself allied with the right against leftism for quite a while now, and everyone here could have been Blue I have no problem imagining conservatives all around... well probably not Children Services. There have always been many Karens on the right and piece of shit sheriffs who last year grilled in MAGA caps.

Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left towards safetyism

"I swear officer I didn't mean to send those poor people gibbering and screaming for the insane asylum!" "Tell it to the Deep Old Ones, Chtulhu. We've finally got your number this time!"

I was saddened this morning to read of the resignation of one of the founders of La Leche League from that organization.

La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States. Many people are unaware, or do not fully grasp the implications of, the fact that the mid-20th century was an era of hyper-medicalization and scientific interventionism. Probably most college students today know how to make the proper noises concerning the historic exclusion of women (or racial minorities) from medical studies, but few could tell you why in 1965 Robert Bradley made waves by arguing that childbirth shouldn't be such a medicalized process. It would be a good half century before skyrocketing c-section rates persuaded the AMA (etc.) to take seriously the idea that medicalization was harming mothers at least as frequently as it was helping them.

Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at. One is probably just that breastfeeding does not typically present quite the same "life-or-death" questions that childbirth sometimes can. Another is that, historically, not all mothers have been successful breast-feeders, whether by chance or by choice; relying on other mothers to feed one's own infant, at least for a time, is attested cross-culturally. Breastfeeding has well-established health benefits for babies and mothers both (in particular, nothing else is more decidedly protective against breast cancer), but between the availability of adequate (if not really optimal) substitutes, psychological difficulty some have treating breasts in non-sexualized ways, and a sometimes steep learning curve, many mothers find the whole proposition... unpalatable.

La Leche League's most visible influence (at least in my experience) has been their gratis lactation consultants. Some mothers, and some babies, take to breastfeeding like the proverbial ducks to water, but many, maybe most women have at least a little difficulty. Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing, what if I don't produce enough milk, are there foods I need to avoid, etc. are things women once shared with their daughters, or learned from their midwife, and aren't necessarily things your average OB/GYN has any grasp on. (It's not unusual for full-fledged OB/GYNs to spend 6-8 weeks (or less!) in their entire training learning about normal pregnancy and childbirth; their job, after all, is to fix such problems as may arise.) For women who are willing to accept input (and, I suppose, for women who capitulate to the sometimes, er, zealous lactation consultants), La Leche League has filled the gap left by the steamrolling of familial bonds by cultural "progress."

So why, as a 94-year-old woman, would Marian Tompson denounce decades of work brought about, in large measure, by her own efforts? Here is what she wrote:

From an organisation with the specific mission of supporting biological women who want to give their babies the best start in life by breastfeeding them, LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men who, for whatever reason, want to have the experience of breastfeeding, despite no careful long-term research on male lactation and how that may affect the baby.

This shift from following the norms of nature, which is the core of mothering through breastfeeding, to indulging the fantasies of adults, is destroying our organisation.

Helen Joyce of British women’s rights charity Sex Matters commented:

By including men who want to breastfeed in its services, LLL is destroying its founding mission to support breastfeeding mothers.

It also goes against the wishes of many mothers, group leaders and trustees around the world, who have been fighting to convince LLL International to hold fast to its woman-focused mission...

Conquest's Laws win again. La Leche League has been profoundly nonpartisan, but it was not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing, and so "another previously innocent activity" heads toward "World War I style trench warfare."

What is there even left to be said at this point? You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."

The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations. If people would just affirm being racist, sexist, and transphobic as positive things then so much of their power would evaporate.

EDIT: Just to head off some potential misunderstandings caused by my imprecise phrasing: I'm not saying to turn yourself into an evil caricature. Don't make yourself adopt positions that you don't sincerely hold in the first place. What I meant was that, the ideal scenario would be, you lay out your position as honestly and truthfully as possible, and if you are then informed that your position is sexist/transphobic, etc, your response would be: "ok, point accepted. I am. Now let's move on to the actual substance of the issue."

The left only has as much power as they do because people are deathly afraid of their accusations.

Also very much recognized by the left.

A perennial question in online spaces is "Why do leftists spend so much time critiquing people who agree with them on 90% of issues when they could instead focus on people who disagree with them on 90% of issues?" and the answer, beyond standard narcissism of small differences, is that the people who disagree with them on 90% of issues usually aren't going to give a shit about their critiques or outrage.

You really just have to put your foot down and tell these people (the men, in this case) that they're not welcome. And when they inevitably respond with accusations that you're being sexist, transphobic, and exclusionary, you say: "yes I am sexist, yes I am transphobic, yes I am exclusionary, yes yes yes, it's all true; now please, the door is that way, if you don't mind."

On social media, you get banned at this point. If the moderators controlling the forum in question don't bend the knee, they get removed.
IRL, these conversations don't really happen. Presumably there are a lot of legal things happening behind the curtains but you only find out when you're already being sued.
And frankly, 'trans' advocates were never interested in having a real conversation in the first place. They only act like they want to talk because they think that will get them the most influence. They don't actually believe there's anything to discuss, they already know they're right.

Okay! You go first.

Right, obviously I’m not going to do that! I didn’t say it was easy, or even feasible.

In fact when questions like “when will woke end?” or “what can we do to stop wokeness?” get raised on this forum, I’m usually in the position of being the bearer of bad news: wokeness might last for a very long time, and there’s probably nothing you can do as an individual in the near-term to hasten its downfall. There was probably nothing that any one individual could have done to hasten the end of communism in the USSR. If someone did speak out publicly, we might admire it as an individual act of heroism, but ultimately it would have accomplished nothing in historical terms. Deciding to arbitrarily burn all your social credit one day is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish anything. Probably you could make a bigger difference by staying under the radar and putting your talents to use elsewhere.

But nonetheless. The biggest historical changes still have to start as individual, isolated thoughts. Just letting someone know that they have permission to think heterodox thoughts, privately, to themselves, can be very powerful. If it wasn’t, then TPTB wouldn’t be so obsessed with censorship and deplatforming. Tiny messages communicated from one individual to another can go on to have ripple effects. Or so we have to hope, anyway.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.

Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.

nearly two decades ago, I was introduced to the term "titalitarian" specifically in reference to the La Leche League's emphasis on breastfeading.

I was introduced to the term "titalitarian"

Fun, and barely relevant anecdote, I was born very premature, like so premature that it was unlikely I was going to survive. I'm told I also cried nonstop for milk but never could latch on. The La Leche consultant (Activist) was absolutely nasty to my mother about allowing me to be bottle fed. It didn't matter if I died to her as long as I was breast-fed. Sufficed to say she reduced my mother to tears and a breakdown and my father almost got arrested throwing the activist out. I can totally imagine these people as the sort of crusaders that then get infected with woke-beliefs, but this is very much leopard-eating-my-face for them.

Breastfeeding has not received quite as much cultural attention as childbirth, for reasons I can only guess at.

Yes, yes it has. Screaming about breastfeeding has been A Thing for a while now.

I'm well aware, which is why I said "not . . . quite as much . . . as" rather than "none at all."

Will the baby latch, will the latch hold, how to avoid painful latching, how to deal with chafing,

Doesn't pumping solve all 4 problems ?

My wife actually relied on LLL circa 2019 with our daughter. She had a lot of issues with latching and LLL helped, but unfortunately our doctors scared the crap out of my wife and talked her into pumping. After that started, the latch was basically permanently broken. This resulted in my wife being stuck pumping for hours a day while struggling with post partum. It served as a daily reminder that she wasn't having the breastfeeding relationship with our daughter that she had dreamed of. She sank into a pretty deep depression, and had a lot of feelings of inadequacy.

This is apparently not uncommon.

Damn, Post partum is rough. So easy for it to sneak in.

We humans really aren't made for nuclear existence huh. Can't imagine how women do it without a more traditionally-sized community.

If you prefer pumping every two hours day and night to cuddling a baby. But, also, it’s pretty hard to pump enough, since babies are more efficient after the first week or so, and they cluster feed to increase production. Mixed pumping and formula is, of course, an option, but less convenient, at night especially.

Pumping only didn't work out in my ime, but we had a bunch of things that complicated the entire process. I remember reading some paper saying that mothers who try exclusive pumping fail to establish sufficient production more than mothers who breastfeed.

following the norms of nature

Would these be the same 'norms of nature' that killed 40-50% of all pre-20th century children before their fifth birthday?

I think putting 'mothers breastfeeding their children' in the same category as cholera, dysentery and smallpox is a bridge too far.

Technical interventions that remove lethal diseases aren't the same as qualitative shifts in the operation.

I'm just saying that 'we shouldn't try to change this because it's natural' proves too much.

The category is 'we want P, nature imposes ¬P, we figure out how to change ¬P to P.'.

When we make distinctions between 'nature wants half of our children to die, we want it to be rare for a parent to bury a child' and 'nature wants breast-feeding to be exclusive to women, we want men to have the option', we are merely haggling over the price.

Prices are important in the weighing up of costs and benefits. When it comes to prostitution, I am sure that most women would sleep with a man for a high repayment in money or power. Would it be rational to turn down billions of dollars that she could use to vastly improve her life and her loved ones? Would it be rational to marry a charming and pleasant life-long loser who lives in his parent's basement, as compared to a somewhat more boring but well-off computer technician? If that's whorish behaviour then the standard is awfully high.

Marian Tompson wasn't saying she was opposed to male breastfeeding just because it is unnatural but also because it is a distraction from the core goals of the organization. She also says that there's no long-term research into its effects on the child, which is basically a steelman of unnatural.

Women are the ones best equipped for breastfeeding, it should belong to them. If there is a bucket of time and effort for breastfeeding work, women should get all of it since they're better at it. Raising children is complicated, it's not really understood and we have many more important areas to invest resources in than helping men breastfeed.

Likewise, men are best suited for war. Men are stronger and more martially inclined, war should be their prerogative. History has shown this, let's keep it that way.

How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here? Are they doing big group lactation sessions and don't want men to see their breasts? Is it a budgetary issue? The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.

  • -15

Notably, there is no reason for including men. While men can be given drugs to cause lactation they cannot be mothers, even if they wear a dress and grow their hair out and insist on going by ‘she’. It is impossible for a man to give birth.

Notably, there is no reason for including men.

You can make an argument regarding "mother is unable to breastfeed because dead/mastectomy following breast cancer; father can't arrange a wet-nurse and thus tries to do it himself". It's a shaky argument, but it's an argument.

It is impossible for a man to give birth.

The consensus IIRC is that:

  • you can implant an IVF embryo in a man's abdomen and it's capable of attaching to something (abdominal pregnancy - in women - and placenta percreta prove this);
  • you can presumably take it out again via surgery, as with an abdominal pregnancy in a woman (and live babies from the latter are known).

The reasons nobody's done it are:

  • nobody knows what the different blood chemistry of a man would do to the fetus;
  • Placenta percreta and abdominal pregnancy are extremely dangerous due to massive bleeding and/or organ damage, and here you're talking about causing them on purpose
  • post-WWII medical ethics are too restrictive to allow something with such extreme risks as this without medical necessity, and I don't see how this could plausibly be medically-necessary
  • Mengele and Unit 731, who would totally have tried it anyway on Jews/Chinese, were out of the picture by the time IVF was actually achieved.

Mostly, modern formula is basically fine, the effects are there, but small, and almost no fathers are willing to go to the lengths necessary to try producing milk rather than relying on donor milk and formula.

It is impossible for a [natal-anatomical] man to give birth.

Impossible with today's medical technology. Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

More man-made horrors beyond our comprehension is a safe bet

Okay, but this isn't about mothers, this is about breastfeeding. If men can be made to lactate, what stops them from breastfeeding? The second sentence of the post made this pretty clear: "La Leche League was founded in 1956 to improve breastfeeding rates in the United States." Men breastfeeding seems like an obvious win there; previously there were zero, so even one is an improved rate!

  • -10

From what I recall of this issue, male "milk" isn't even really milk, is it? Does it have any caloric value? What is the actual benefit of men engaging in this behavior? It seems to me to be pretty obviously fetishistic, and if I were the founder of the company and on the council, I would resign too if I had to pretend it isn't fetishistic and actually worth talking about.

How exactly do men wanting to breastfeed cause a problem here?

The League was founded in part on specific concern for infant and maternal health and development. Men don't lactate without hormonal intervention (or, in some cases, cancer) and studies on the health impact of such choices are... not nonexistent, I suspect, but almost certainly some combination of weak, bad, or politically motivated. The difficulties a new mother might have with breastfeeding may have some overlap with the difficulties a lactating man might have, but there are no clear health or infant development reasons to help men who lactate, the way there definitely are with new mothers.

The article just assumes this is Clearly A Bad Thing because Men, but it never actually articulates any specific objections.

When you create an organization specifically to address women's issues with a natural feminine process, then "Men" clearly articulates a pretty damn specific objection. I assume there would also be frustration with women who present as masculine, if they keep trying to police the language of breastfeeding with absurd neologisms like "chestfeeding." If you make an organization dedicated to breastfeeding and a bunch of entryists show up to tell you to use a different word, failure to address that swiftly and unapologetically will probably result in, well, pretty much what the article describes.

I mean, if guys had a Shaving Club, I'd imagine some women with PCOS might benefit from showing up. If the club is really about shaving, that shouldn't be a problem, should it?

The article didn't say anything about language policing or otherwise acting rudely. It's just upset that there's women at the shaving club.

Presumably learning more about male lactation would help the mission of infant health and breastfeeding: either it turns out to work and we have a cool new option, or it turns out to be a bad idea and now we can articulate specific concerns and help people understand why it's a bad idea.

I mean, if guys had a Shaving Club, I'd imagine some women with PCOS might benefit from showing up. If the club is really about shaving, that shouldn't be a problem, should it?

This is a remarkably terrible analogy. Consider instead a support group for sufferers and survivors of prostate cancer. Having a bunch of women show up to talk about their experiences with cervical cancer would not really fit the discussion prompt, even though there would be some obvious overlap in experience of, say, chemotherapy or medical malpractice or whatever.

The article didn't say anything about language policing or otherwise acting rudely. It's just upset that there's women at the shaving club.

No, it's upset that there are Men at the Women's club. It's upset that an organization dedicated to the advancement of women's health is being co-opted for the advancement of men's preferences and desires.

Presumably learning more about male lactation would help the mission of infant health and breastfeeding: either it turns out to work and we have a cool new option, or it turns out to be a bad idea and now we can articulate specific concerns and help people understand why it's a bad idea.

I am doubtful that you will ever find anyone who is able to do the actual science without their political biases fucking it up. But if you could, like, okay? That has nothing to do with this case; if you want to make this argument, do the actual science first, instead of doing the activism first by filling women's spaces with men.

No, it's upset that there are Men at the Women's club.

Why? LLL shifted to invite them in. No one is forcing LLL here. To quote the exact quote here in this thread: "LLL’s focus has subtly shifted to include men". Why are you so upset at the women's club voluntarily choosing to shift their focus?

If the prostate support group wants to evolve into a cancer support group, is that really so awful?

It may not be good for the babies. Hormones around childbirth and breastfeeding are fairly complex, and show up in the milk.

Wouldn't learning more about that be a good idea, then? If it's a bad idea, it would be valuable to know that and be able to explain to these men how they're potentially risking the kid's health. And if it turns out to be a good idea, then cool, more people to help with breastfeeding

To the extent that there are breastfeeding trans women willing to participate in a study, then yes, someone should do the study. Not necessarily LLL.

Right, but what's wrong with LLL being the ones to do it, if they so choose?

If the article was "law requires LLL to admit male members", I could see why you're upset, but this seems to be the organization voluntarily changing. Not once does the article suggest anyone is forcing their way in.

They can. But it's kind of against their core mission, which is about less reliance on medicalization and corporations for childbirth and feeding. So they'll advocate for things like placing the baby on the mother's chest immediately after birth, without taking them to weigh or clean first, starting breastfeeding as soon as possible, because it's way harder to breastfeed when starting later, and babies get nipple confusion, slow flow bottles so mixed fed babies don't get impatient with the breast, being patient with growth spurts and cluster feeding, and so on. This is related to breast milk being a better food, immunological interactions, and not being reliant on formula (I was very glad to not be trying to buy it during the shortage a few years ago, for instance).

(I am currently doing mixed feeding, about 1/3 formula, 2/3 breastmilk, both because baby was in the ICU a few days his first week of life on formula, and the hospital was making me do some terribly depressing triple feeding, and because I'm working full time. I am not a breastfeeding purist, and have found some lactation consultants press too hard and have caused problems for my babies when I returned to work.)

On the other hand, modern formula isn't all that bad, actually. Adoption and surrogacy at very young ages are central examples of times when donor milk or formula are good choices. LLL has a video on their homepage showing someone who's face is cut off (unusual in their materials, which usually feature an entire mother and baby), a "baby" with a full head of hair, and something about dripping milk down the breast from a syringe. It is an extremely non-central example of breastfeeding. Then there's an article about non-gestational parents breastfeeding, which admits that it's quite hard, and most parents who do it are not able to do exclusive breastfeeding.

The whole regime of taking hormones, pumping, getting a partial supply, trying to get an adopted baby who's more than a few days old and not previously breastfed to go along with it, but still supplementing a lot, maybe more than half... sounds terrible, exhausting, expensive, and just probably like a bad idea for most people. I do not think it's a good idea to be advocating for breastfeeding among parents who are not the birth mother for "bonding". Babies bond with caregiver fathers just fine. Formula is fine. They look like they've lost the plot with breastfeeding extremism.

Mobile sports gambling is like, really, really bad, mmm'kay

Color me in the not surprised category. The article, and the additional one's it links at the bottom, do a good job of toe-ing the line between "people should be given the freedom to make choices" and "holy shit this is sentencing those with addictive personalities to lives of poverty."

I'm not super interested in talking about sports gambling itself, although I welcome any good anecdotes, and would instead like to invite comments on the concept of "digital addiction."

There's enough literature out there now that there's a strong enough case to be made that digital technology - very specifically smartphones - can cause behavior patterns that can accurately be described as addictive. However, there is still a delineation between digital addiction and physical/neurological addiction of alcohol and drugs. As a society, we acknowledge the basic danger of these substances by age-limiting some and outright prohibiting others.

My general question would be; what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids? For all of society?

I think this is a textbook case of the wisdom of keeping things that will be addictive as hard to ge5 as possible. Sports gambling in a casino might not be so terrible. The steps necessary to get to a casino for any sort of gambling serve as an important brake on the behavior. The fact that such gambling can now but done using stored credit card information on a device that is carried in the pocket makes it almost impossible for anyone with the proclivity to addiction to ever have control. And this is true of other potentially addictive behaviors— if you have your addiction always available, you can’t easily say no to it.

Yep. Physical barriers to harmful behaviors are a pretty decent brake to keep them from proliferating throughout a society. Low agency people are more susceptible to those behaviors, but also probably less likely to go to the trouble of accessing them if its difficult enough.

In Florida, most gambling was relegated to Seminole Tribe casinos, so they necessarily couldn't proliferate beyond the boundaries of the reservations. Florida has a deal with them where they pay up a chunk of the revenue and the state bans gambling elsewhere in its territory. It in theory keeps gambling minimized in the rest of the state and makes it easier to supervise and regulate the places where it does occur.

Now, the Seminoles have worked to make it maximally enticing to come out to the Casinos, and maximally difficult to leave once you're there, but at least it required you to physically drive there, and at some point you'd have to go home. So in a sense it beat, and still beats having a mini-casino on every street corner, which is harder to regulate and will probably ruin more people.

Las Vegas does this on a much grander scale, of course.

Digitizing the casinos... man. Its the rough equivalent of hooking up a pipeline to everyone's house that could dispense heroin, meth, and/or crack cocaine on demand. If you don't have to venture into the seedier parts of town and risk getting mugged to get your fix, I'm sure more people will partake.

I'm not sure this reasoning makes sense. People still blow their life savings in casinos, le famous twitter video. If 5x fewer people go to physical casinos, and as a result 5x fewer people blow their savings, does that actually make in-person gambling worth keeping legal? There could be a relative effect, but I'm not sure there is - I could easily imagine the opposite argument, where online gambling, relatively, makes it easier for casual to spend a little, because the friction of going to the place is relatively a higher cost if you only want to spend $20 vs being addicted. Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)

Well, the more friction you can place between you and your addiction the better. Yes, people can and do blow their life savings at casinos. But that’s worlds harder than blowing through your savings when the casino is on an always online phone you carry in your pocket. When you have to go to a casino to gamble, you need to get dressed, get your wallet, drive for 10-15 minutes to the casino, walk across the parking lot, into the casino, find a machine and put in the credit card. Those actions probably mean about 20-30 minutes of being able to talk yourself out of it.

This kind of thing in reverse is true of exercising. The more friction between you and exercise, the less likely you are to actually do it. So they advise keeping your gym clothes and shoes on your dresser, having any needed equipment at home, etc. because at every step you can talk yourself out of it. Do I really feel like fighting traffic to get to the gym? And if the answer is anything other than a very firm yes, chances are you’ll be on the couch Motte-posting instead of exercising. Or maybe you want to eat healthier. The standard advice is stop buying junk food and instead buy the healthy stuff. The reason is that inertia will work in your favor here. You’ll be hungry and all the food in your home is healthy, you don’t necessarily want carrot sticks, but getting potato chips means getting in the car, driving in traffic to the store, walking to the chip aisle, buying the chips, paying, driving through traffic back home before you can finally eat them. The extra effort isn’t worth it most of the time, so carrot sticks it is.

Imo experience with all sorts of addiction has taught us that almost nothing works once people are already addicted, and getting addicted can happen quite easily once you get in contact. If legal platforms block access, the addict will find another way. The key is to generate less addicts in the first place.

Low friction = more addicts = more problems. This is extra true for gambling, since it doesn't get you near-instantly chemically addicted the way some drugs do, it needs some time to be cultivated and re-enforced. If you need to repeatedly, physically go to a casino, people around you will notice, you might have to explain yourself to your partner or parents or close friends, and for yourself it's easier to notice when you start losing significant money. And noticing it early is important to get people to stop before it's too late. If you play on the phone, you yourself might only notice much, much later how much you have played and how much you really lost, and others notice even later, if at all. Not that this is impossible to happen with casinos, it's about the ease it happens with. There's related approaches, such as requiring casinos to change a fixed sum into a number of chips that you play with (which makes it obvious how much lost every time you go) vs just directly playing with cash (easier to lose more than you wanted to play with) or just pay by card (extremely easy to blow a lots of money), or to require limits on how much someone can lose in a specific time frame, and so on. All of these have the purpose to a) give a legal outlet to avoid the proliferation of a black market b) reduce the generation of addicts by increasing friction c) reduce the negative impact of being an addict by making sure you can only lose x money per hour or so spend.

For similar reasons, nowadays I feel like the old approach of having a small amount of a drug being mostly legal or at least not super punished, but if you were caught trading significant amounts you were fucked, was a certain sweet spot. The friction to even start drugs was quite significant. There is an argument to institute a similar ban on gambling, where small-scale private gambling is explicitly legal, but once you do it large-scale it becomes illegal full-stop. You can then still meet with friends and play a round of poker with real money but still mostly low stakes, but you don't get this industrialised pipeline of addict generation we have now.

I think the argument is that people who have an edge and are thus gambling rationally are much less likely to be dissuaded than gambling addicts.

Probably better to just have the state assume the job of blocking compulsive gamblers from all gambling platforms (physical or not)

Zvi says that the online platforms would be unprofitable without preying on compulsive gamblers, so I'm not sure that this cashes out to a difference in worldstate.

I've run sportsbooks both legal and frontier and I'm a pretty big gambling prohibitionist in my day-to-day life. If you're a wise guy, you're toeing a very fine line (yaddayadda promo arbitrage, soft books etc bit more leeway but even then) where even if you've got an edge you're likely going to run into issues in the medium/long-term if you get accustomed to high stakes gambling. If you're on the fish side, it's far too accessible and risk of ruin is very high especially in this current economic moment where most people feel a near-obligation to gamble in order to advance their socioeconomic situation.

I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts. Maybe a step further, banning them from possessing smartphones altogether (yes, enforcement would be a bear. No arguments there). Give them a basically functional blackberry-esque device that can send and receive messages and has GPS functionality and bluetooth, and no app store.

I think there has been vastly insufficient discussion of superstimuli and policies that address the proliferation of ways one can completely wreck their life in short order. Just like drugs are more potent than they were 50 years ago, marketing companies are much, much better at their jobs and barely-legal scams are more efficiently predatory than ever before. And meanwhile, humans are, if anything, a little dumber on average.

Like, I am libertarian as fuck when it comes to social issues, but I've experienced the rush that gambling brings and my sincere belief is that we HAVE to provide some 'friction' in place to prevent people from slipping into deep, DEEP holes from which there is no escape, or at least they'll be stuck climbing out for years.

Consider if you owned a property with an extremely deep sinkhole on it, that was surrounded by smooth, polished rock with low friction coefficient on a 20 degree slope, so that anyone who wants to approach the edge of the pit would find it very difficult to climb back out without special equipment, and some % of people are going to slip and fall into the pit. If you're charging admission to view the pit, I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.

ESPECIALLY if you were enticing people to come view the pit with the promise that some small number of guests would get fabulously wealthy, and the closer they get to the edge of the pit, the more they could possibly win.

Even my deepest belief in personal freedom doesn't require that the pit must be tolerated as-is, in its maximally dangerous state.

But metaphorically speaking, we're apparently allowing thousands of these sorts of pits to dot the psychological landscape, with bright flashing advertisements drawing in patrons and no mechanisms in place to 'rescue' those who fall in.

It is bad enough for adults who get sucked in, kids whose entire development was awash in these stimuli might not even develop basic defenses, since this is what they would consider 'normal.' The kids these days have gambling mechanics in ALL their video games, they've already made and lost minor fortunes in Crypto, they can gamble on literally any sports event they want, and they grew up watching influencers shilling them on the most harebrained of get-rich-quick schemes.

And meanwhile, financial literacy is barely ever taught.

Also, it is patently absurd that the rules as they exist allow anyone over 18 or 21 to throw money away gambling, but if they want to invest in early-stage startups they have to have a certain amount of wealth built up already.

The 'problem' such as it is, if we start investigating and making rules for those who have addictive personalities, or are easily manipulated, or simply don't understand odds/statistics and restrict their ability to use their own money in ways they wish. Maybe they have restricted bank accounts that limit them to, say $500/day withdrawals. Maybe they're not allowed to take on long-term debt, or we legally cap the amount of debt they can take to some specific % of their net worth. Or require them to pass an annual financial audit to exercise certain rights...

Because if we don't, there's a certainty that many of them will blow up the entirety of their savings and becomes a burden on the rest of us later on. And thus we can only do our best to mitigate this externality.

Well, we're essentially carving out a different class of citizens with reduced individual rights due to their vulnerabilities. What's the justification for letting such people vote? Or have a bank account at all? Or have kids?

I think the most palatable change would be something akin to banning those under age 16 from having social media accounts.

They're trying to legislate this in Australia right now.

Does everyone need to show their ID to get a social media account up? Do I need to show ID for this website? Who is storing my information and where is it going? What about VPNs (every second youtuber is shilling them, kids could easily set one up) to bypass the ban and log in from a more permissive jurisdiction - ban them? What about 4chan or its derivatives - they can't be bothered to do age-verification (and don't have the resources) - ban them? Xbox and Playstation have online chat, thousands and thousands of games have online chat. Are they all social media? In a stroke online privacy is greatly diminished, along with all small web forums.

At least in crypto you have marginally higher chances of making money and it's not inherently rigged against you. Down with sports betting, up with Shiba and Doge.

Societies' restrictive energies should remain focused on drugs, they cause much more harm than gambling does.

Thanks, hadn't picked up on small sites not being excepted. I think some of the smaller players could say "bite me" due to lacking assets in Oz, but that's not the ideal solution.

I find that I agree with you across the board, but one footnote on my annoyance with the current state of affairs:

I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.

I feel like these online services already do this. They advertise, but they close with a line about gambling addiction. Everyone is simultaneously bombarded with advertisements for gambling and admonishments about how you need to be really careful. To me, this feels like the worst of both worlds, where we legalized something that's apparently quite destructive for quite a few people, but with the caveat that everyone has to be antagonized about how dangerous it is. I bet $2 on Josh Allen to score a rushing touchdown because I think it's fun. Leave me alone. Stop telling me over and over and over that I'd better watch out about how addictive it is. Either let people ruin their lives or don't, but don't do this stupid in between thing where we all acknowledge that it's ruining lives and therefore everyone needs to hear about that.

Overall, I guess I just increasingly believe that the typical person should pretty much not be extended credit on much of anything. They just don't seem to be able to conceptualize how credit lines work, what interest is, and so on.

For me, it is fine. I can gamble once a week a couple of dollars and it is fun without causing me any harm.

But I can’t help but note the business doesn’t really run on people like me. I don’t make the house enough money. It is dependent on the whales. Those guys lose a ton of money. I the business is unseemly.

Yep. I have a reflexive dislike for ANY business model that is entirely reliant on a small number of customers spending 10-100x of the average to stay profitable.

Has at least something to do with me being EXTREMELY sensitive to attempts to hack my psyche, which is the hallmark of such places. Oh, your game is "free to play?" Pardon me if I don't want to spend mental effort resisting the 1001 ways your game is constantly trying to convince me that spending in-game money is more important than food.

On the other hand, when I play such games I do not feel having to expend any particular mental effort to resist shelling out cash, any more than I feel compelled to take any Nigerian princes up on their offers. If you're not in the susceptible target audience, those games really are free.

But it kind of feels like free riding off of people who are destroying themselves.

'Zactly. On the one hand I don't mind free-riding by, say, using ad-blocker on sites where I was never going to click the ads anyway.

On the other, I really don't like to think that I am getting something for free because somebody else is vastly overpaying relative to the value they're getting. It is easy to imagine they're some rich loner who has endless spare cash, but it is still a predatory model. Also, in game settings, the 'free' players are arguably there just to be easy opponents for the overpowered paid whales. Not really a fan of playing the role of disposable mook so some other guy can live out his power fantasy.

I think those disclaimers are a fig leaf in this case. At best.

Its like having people sign a waiver that they understand "Gravity is a powerful force that pulls you downward" before you enter the pit zone. I don't think psychological "nudges" are actually a real thing, honestly.

To me, a 'guardrail' is something that physically prevents you from falling in. Unless you climb over it. In this case that may be something like a restriction on your bank account that prevents you from depositing money into an app or withdrawing cash at a Casino after a certain period of time or above a certain amount.

There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.

And of course, degenerate gamblers will just borrow money from 'friends' or loan sharks if their bank cuts them off, so there are no 'foolproof' solutions.

There's a (strong) case that banks shouldn't be peeking over their clients' shoulders and judging what they use money on, so I'm really trying to think of ways to put something TANGIBLE in place that might allow someone to slide right up to the point of absolute ruin, but stop at the edge and have a chance to retreat, or at least think over the implications before jumping in.

Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Finally, if a customer tries to transfer more than X to online gambling companies this month, the system pauses the transaction and suggests the customer sets up a monthly gambling limit.

I don't think this kind of meddling is more bothersome than the previous ones.

Here's an example: if an elderly customer suddenly tries to withdraw a large sum of money, the system pauses the transaction and directs the teller to arrange an interview with a security officer that ensures the customer is not being scammed by someone impersonating their grandchild in sudden financial trouble.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

Another example: if a customer suddenly tries to transfer a large amount to an account that doesn't belong to them, the system pauses the transaction and directs the customer to upload a document that explains the purpose of the transaction.

Is this kind of meddling permissible?

Depends on what you mean. Such transfers may be interrupted by fraud detection and the customer might have to prove his bona fides (which is annoying enough) but having to write an essay explaining to one's bank why you're spending your own money isn't really acceptable.

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

It's standard procedure in Europe. It actually saved me money when someone managed to clone my wife's card.

No, and making it so is likely to result in a wave of exit from banks and into cash-stuffed mattresses.

It’s pretty common and most people don’t keep Benjamins under their mattress.

I personally would like to get rid of the two examples you mentioned as well. The kind of big brother monitoring banks do is obnoxious as hell and I'm not convinced it is an overall value-add for society.

That's because your parents haven't yet deposited their life savings into a "secure account" because a helpful "FBI agent" told them to.

It turns out that I do not hold opinions on policy based on whether or not the negative consequences of said policies personally impact me or those I love.

But why?

More comments

Imagine being a very smart and disagreeable 15 year old stuck in a small town somewhere. You want to be on the internet, learning to code, arguing about politics, and making friends similar to you ... except social media is banned, lmao. The internet is where the future is, and where power is, keeping kids off it isn't advantageous to them.

My guess is in most cases he would be better off learning to deal with his disagreeability in a way that does not prevent him from forming meaningful relationships with his local community, as opposed to fleeing into an online bubble of like minded people and becoming atomized and terminally online and building an identity about being very smart. If anything your example makes me more convinced kids should not be on social media, not less.

Also, the fact that in some very specific circumstances social media might have a positive effect on children, does not necessarily mean it is a good idea to have children on social media. I have not looked into it too deeply so I am open to having my mind changed about it, but I have the impression Jonathan Haidt shows pretty convincingly that social media have had a catastrophic effect on teenage mental health, so if that is true it might still be a good idea to ban or at least disincentivize social media for children.

Finally, banning social media is not the same as banning the internet. In a world where social media is banned, your hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that. This would raise questions about the definition of social media. Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content, so kids could look up stuff about coding or politics or find an online community that they like, while not being allowed on tiktok or youtube or whatever and be exposed to algorithms that are basically trying to get you addicted to the platform's content. Or this type of algorithmic feed could become a separate 16+ feature of these platforms or whatever where everyone can use these platforms and look up stuff whereas you have to validate your account and prove you are 16+ before you get access to the addictive features. I am just fantasizing on the spot about specific policies, but trying to get kids off of addictive social media platforms does not have to mean a blanket ban on everything fun and useful on the internet.

I think there are some confusing claims being made here.

How is meeting people who are closer to your level of intelligence online "fleeing"? These are people who you can do more with, who can teach you more, who can expose you to future occupations that properly use your talents. There are some people for whom the average poster on this forum (which isn't that high of a bar) is significantly above anyone in their small town. "Building an identity around being very smart" - what? - being very smart gives you access to different careers, many of which are significantly higher paying and many of which are, most would agree, more satisfying than those the average person has.

hypothetical very smart child can still get on the internet and look up information of coding and such, without having to be on tiktok or anything like that.

Yeah, but not make friends with people with the same interest! I think that's a pretty basic thing to want!

Maybe it would be feasible to treat platforms that have some sort of addictive recommendation algorithm differently from places where you look up your own content

This is a tangent but I think 'recommendation algorithm addictiveness' is insanely overstated as the cause of any internet badness. The thing optimizing videos for view counts isn't the 'algorithm', it's the people. MrBeast is supposedly the culmination of internet algorithms taking advantage of people, and the formula he converged on was ... game shows, which were a thing on TV too. Internet content would have all the same problems if there was no algorithm and you had to manually click links tbh. The problem is in large part the consumers who demand the stuff.

Do you think the modal teen fits that description?

Of course not, but someone here's more likely to have been like that in the past

Yes, but the policy debate is going to have to consider that the damages being caused to a majority of the teens out there might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access.

might outweigh the loss to the comparative handful of teens who benefited from unrestricted internet access

Which is just another way of saying that they don't have the right to benefit from that ability, and that ability should be redistributed to everyone who doesn't. (It's ironic that the types of people who complain about more rules being "communism" are directionally and trivially correct, yet most of them aren't smart enough to explain why.)

I think a social media ban for this subgroup is likely to pass in some way, shape, or form, but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being (more like 3/5ths of one). And because it's going to be the Boomers doing it, it's going to be something stupid and ham-fisted that includes stuff like 4chan and StackOverflow (i.e. the places high-value teenagers are more likely to visit) but excludes YouTube Shorts-type content factories (which is what everyone over 30 thinks 'social media' is, and is more about dealing with the Evil New Media that they can't get their kids off of because there's basically nothing else for them to do).

At least there's a playbook for defeating tech-illiterate Boomers that more or less just needs to be dusted off. I think there's a real future in distributed social media among people smart enough to insert an SD card into a Raspberry Pi and edit a few configuration files.

but that's mainly because we don't think anyone under 18 (21? 25? 120?) is actually a human being

I mean, it shouldn't be controversial to say that youth is a form of 'mental disability' that most people overcome through age and experience.

I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense, rather than having a blanket age of consent.

that most people overcome through age and experience

The sheer size of my political outgroup is clear evidence to the contrary. Most of them are over 18, too.

I'd be in favor of there being some kind of basic test that someone can past to 'remove' that disability in a legal sense

Oi, where's your freedom license?

I am too, but the problem is that society won't tolerate it being an actual, legible test (mainly because muh disproportionate impact, but also because there's a lot of ego/conscience-approval involved in the assumption of righteous disenfranchisement by default, much like there is with all the -isms).

This is currently fulfilled by "having enough common sense to lie to the website about his or her date of birth, and intelligent enough not to contradict that lie after the fact". Fake IDs serve a similar purpose, or at least they did back when they were easier to make; half the problem I have with this scheme is that it makes this much harder (they are/were natural escape valves), as in the face of -ism-driven lawmaking the question of who it actually applies to and what they'll be doing instead won't be seriously considered.

If one values the experiences of the most talented and capable at the same order of magnitude as the least, it's probably not a good policy, sure.

I question whether there’s a difference between addiction to drugs and addiction to gambling. If gambling induces an endogenous release of dopamine at a level commensurate to the release of dopamine from cocaine, then there is literally no reason to treat cocaine as “more addictive” than gambling. It’s the same addictiveness. One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.

what are the major culture war angles on digital addiction? For kids

Every child allowed to play a modern video game is being trained for a life of gambling by way of lootbox mechanics. It’s really the ultimate disproof of liberalism. We shouldn’t give people free choice where (1) they lack wisdom to discern the complicated costs and benefits, (2) their instincts overrides rationality. That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.

My first instinct was that drugs categorically different because they cause physical dependence and withdrawal symptoms. A quick google search tells me that gambling withdrawal is a thing, but all the sources are treatment centers, and all the symptoms are psychological. Withdrawing from amphetamine left me pretty much non-functional for weeks. I doubt gambling can cause that sort of nervous system damage.

One involves cognition, but that doesn’t alter the addictiveness.

The argument perhaps goes that you can mentally train yourself to resist the effects of a given stimuli when the source of the neurological effect is entirely local to your own brain. End of the day, you can make a 'choice' to stop pushing the button.

But there's no training yourself to resist the introduction of exogenous drugs.

That’s because the choice is not actually free. It’s either coerced by an illusion or coerced by an animalistic instinct.

I'd object to the use of the term 'coerced' here, but otherwise mostly agree. I think its mostly based on the idea that they are not psychologically or philosophically prepared to give 'informed consent' to behaviors that have complex long-term implications. They literally cannot comprehend the effects, so while they can 'agree' to the terms, the consent lacks the actual 'comprehension' which is necessary for someone to truly consent to and accept the risks of a given transaction.

And the world has only gotten more complex, not less, so normal legal standards around 'age of consent' are, arguably, entirely outmoded for addressing this issue.

Restricting minor’s access to digital media- especially social media- is very much a culture war of the future. In the USA this is a thing we’ll increasingly associate with republicans.

At least in Australia currently there's an attempt to ban social media for your under 16. Not super up to date on Australian politics but this effort appears to be coming from Labor which is supposedly the center left party

Well yeah, I didn’t say ‘globally this will be a right wing crusade’. I said ‘in the US restricting minor’s social media will be increasingly associated with republicans’. Other countries might code it differently; I’d expect Japan, Germany, Hungary to make it a center right policy, and most of the rest of the Anglosphere+France to make it a center left thing.

Well, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez removed her pronouns from her twitter bio. Does this represent Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability? In addition to her we have a representative from Massachusetts, Seth Moulton facing criticism over expressing sympathy with the anti-trans in women's sports position, and in part blaming the election loss on some of the demands of ideological purity on this issue in particular.

Even Reddit seems to be sensing this shift and top comments are reflecting unease with trans orthodoxy. Even the comments from many Democrat supporters on Reddit seem to be avoiding a full-throated defense of trans orthodoxy and instead blaming Republicans for making an issue out of something that hardly affects anyone.

Is this a sign of things to come? Will they actually move against gender orthodoxy or just make it slightly less visible while pursuing the same policy goals behind the scenes?

Edit: Just wanted to share this clip as well as it seems germane

I've long since lost the reference, but probably 6 years ago I saw some segment on The Hill about a study done by a trans advocacy group. And basically it was a policy document pointing out that putting penises in women only spaces, especially women only spaces with minors, is about the most unpopular policy you can possibly run on. So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.

No matter what mouth sounds Democrats make, I will never trust them on this subject ever again. And unfortunately for them, until all my children are over 18, it's literally my number one priority. We already live in a world where Democrats sanctioned the state taking kids away from parents, and putting them on a path towards mutilation and sterilization. You don't just get to walk away from that and hope nobody brings up all those children you sterilized.

So what needs to happen is that trans friendly politicians need to lie, and then quietly do it anyways. Don't worry, trans friendly advocates in media, and trust and safety teams on social media will cover for you.

I've noticed that trans advocacy seemed to be copying along with the successful gay marriage advocacy of the past, and this looks like another possible example. Back in 2008, when presidential candidate Barack Obama came out explicitly against gay marriage, it was considered just common knowledge among my peers that he was lying in order to help the good guys gain power. Obama's stance on gay marriage hasn't been relevant in a long time, but as of the last time I talked about it with friends, they seemed to still believe that Obama had been lying at the time, rather than that his position changed at some point while he was in office.

I have no idea how many people actually believed his lie, assuming that it was a lie, but certainly telling such lies in order to sneak in more "extreme" positions wasn't disapproved of and, by my perceptions, quite lauded. So it does seem reasonable to suspect similar things going on with trans advocacy. However, this doesn't seem to be working in this case for a variety of reasons, including the fundamental physical differences between what gay marriage and trans advocacy demand. There seems to be a sort of cruel cosmic joke here with trans advocates trying to follow in the successful footsteps of the gay marriage movement but as a cargo cult just copying along the superficial aspects.

Ezra Klein actually brought up Obama's lie to the Pod Save America guys who worked for him. No one contested that it was a lie btw.

He identified a different reason the trans stuff sunk Harris: both Harris and the ACLU are fucking stupid.

That sounds harsh but that was the tone. He was as angry as Klein gets, furious that the ACLU would even send out an exam (a paper trail!) on a policy that was almost designed to be maximally offensive and that Harris was dumb enough to say she supported and actioned it on tape instead of ignoring it or simply handing it in.

In essence, they didn't lie as good or as smart as Obama did.

I think the trans thing legitimately is a heavier lift but I think he has a point.

Obama had a somewhat similar paper trail https://time.com/3816952/obama-gay-lesbian-transgender-lgbt-rights/

In another questionnaire for Chicago LGBT newspaper Outlines, Obama says he supports same-sex marriage. In 2009, a copy of his typed responses was unearthed and printed in the Windy City Times. “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages,” reads the questionnaire bearing his signature at the bottom. Later, Obama aides will dispute that he actually filled out the questionnaire himself.

It's harder to get away with a lie the second time.

I think even if they “distance themselves” this one is going to be hard to get trust back on. They’ve already been caught several times outright lying on this issue, and worse, lying about exactly what they’re doing in schools. Millions of parents are not only aware, but angry. I know a person I’m working with who has a daughter who briefly decided she was queer. Her mother was absolutely terrified of this because she knew what would happen the minute a psychiatrist heard any sort of gender confusion from her daughter. At school, this stuff was encouraged. The girl seems to be growing out of it now, bullet dodged. But multiply that by all the parents out there knowing that the schools are teaching this and going behind their backs, who know that trans identified men can go into any locker room they want, and that books that are nearly pornographic are available to grade school kids. I don’t think you can slip one by here.

What books are you referring to?

At the time that Ron Desantis was running for president, there was a huge controversy about him banning books. Specifically many of these kids books were pro-LGBT. They also contained very graphic descriptions of sex acts. There was also a series of fantasy books written by Sarah J Maas that contained descriptions of sex acts.

https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/roughly-300-books-were-removed-from-libraries-in-florida-last-school-year-heres-the-full-list/3113184/

Note this is school libraries, not public libraries.

And unfortunately for them, until all my children are over 18, it's literally my number one priority.

Agreed. This is more than people with dicks dominating women's sports. And it's more than a few perverts stealing women's underwear or using women's locker rooms.

Those stories understandably get the most engagement, but they are relatively rare.

The bigger issue is how the spread of trans ideology has resulted in some pretty huge number of children getting placed onto the trans gender track which, if not quickly arrested, results in awful life outcomes. I think the best comparison is anorexia, which is similarly terrible for one's health and mostly the result of social contagion.

In my mind, Democrats are permanently tainted on this issue. We need more than a minor pullback in wokeness. We need investigations. We need groomers to get fired and potentially prosecuted. And we need clinics performing gender surgery on minors to be shut down, their owners sued into bankruptcy, and their practitioners delicensed.

putting penises in women only spaces ... is about the most unpopular policy....

What if one frames it as "Outside the bedroom or the doctor's office, other peoples' genitals are none of your business, and should not be taken as an input to whether $PERSON is allowed to $VERB_PHRASE."?

That was the propaganda they lead with. A few obviously preventable rapes later, people started to see through it.

The problem with that, naturally, is that one’s genitals are an unusually effective predictor of certain undesirable behaviors when they introduce themselves into places where the opposite genitals congregate, especially when they insist upon a certain kind of obvious lie.

Now, of course the same argument naturally applies to racism too. But for racism we sacrifice that predictive knowledge on the pyre of “so that maybe advantaging the people of race X that don’t act as predicted eventually changes the circumstances”, and that’s very emphatically not what’s meant to happen in the genital cases (because it’s pushed with the intention of bullying everyone else by proxy).

Assuming that instead of trans advocates losing ground, it's shadow-speak, or fingers crossed in the background.

Seems like a particularly miserable way of viewing the world. It's a victory for your team. Take the W.

We already live in a world where Democrats sanctioned (...) putting them on a path towards mutilation and sterilization.

I really doubt you can find anything from a major politician that supports that claim. This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.

  • -23

Some schools secretly socially transition children. Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition. This is not all right wing paranoia.

They almost certainly know that. It's just mouth sounds.

Some schools secretly socially transition children.

Can you provide a source for the claim that schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition? Or are you just searching for the maximally inflammatory way to say "some kids don't trust their parents not to disown them"?

Some locales will take children out of parents' custody if they fail to support transition.

Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?

This is not all right wing paranoia.

Neither of those is an example of "mutilation"

  • -20

Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?

Without doubt, the former. There's a high profile case of a sex-trafficked teenager that the authorities refused to release to her grandparents, because they used her birth name, which resulted in her being sex-trafficked again.

This is without going into the question of whether there are any relevant medical treatments to begin with, or if it's just glorified cosmetic surgery/intervention.

If you can only provide one example, that's hardly supporting your case. If anything, that suggests the opposite: this is so incredibly rare that it made the news.

The medical community, the scientific community, and the community of people who have actually undergone the process all recommend it, so I'm not sure on what grounds you would claim that it's not a valid medical treatment.

  • -13

If you can only provide one example, that's hardly supporting your case. If anything, that suggests the opposite: this is so incredibly rare that it made the news.

Originally you said it doesn't happen, and the reason why authorities do it, is because the child is denied medical care. At the very least I'd expect you acknowledge that it happens sometimes given the evidence. The reason this was such a big story was it's particularly egregious nature (the double sex-trafficking part), but there were other stories of custody disputes based on nothing more than pronouns / identity affirmation. It was almost enshrined in law in California but for a veto.

The medical community, the scientific community, and the community of people who have actually undergone the process all recommend it, so I'm not sure on what grounds you would claim that it's not a valid medical treatment.

This is false. Anybody that made a comprehensive review of evidence came to the conclusion that the evidence is of poor quality. This includes WPATH, which commissioned several systematic reviews, and refused to publish them when the evidence didn't say what they wanted to say it.

Originally you said it doesn't happen

No, I said no one is getting mutilated. That has nothing to do with custody. I expressed skepticism about the idea that the majority of these cases, or even a significant minority of them, are really just "failing to support".

The California law said that pronouns could be a factor, not that they were the only factor. That seems reasonable to me. If I kept misgendering you, I'm sure you'd consider it insulting. I'm not sure why insulting your kid and being generally hostile to their medical needs wouldn't be a factor in such a decision.

A custody case also isn't a locale "taking a kid", it's a court deciding which parent provides the better environment for the kid. The whole process is initiated by the other parent, not the courts. If courts were just swooping up and fostering kids because a teacher reported a pronoun violation, we'd be having a very different conversation.

There's a recurring theme here, where responsibility is out-sourced from the people actually initiating things. "Schools" don't transition kids; kids transition. "Courts" don't take away kids, the other parent is bothered enough to demand a divorce and argue for full custody. The courts aren't responsible for someone's wife thinking they're a shitty husband. This doesn't just happen out of the blue. Another adult, one deeply involved in the situation, looked at it and said "I need to protect my child from this person".

  • -11
More comments

Do you think parents who love their children and will not disown them, but refuse to go along with either social or medical transitioning, should lose their parental rights? Do you think they should not be allowed to veto the school facilitating transition, without their knowledge or approval?

If a kid is in horrible pain, and their parent refuses to do anything about it, and the kid is actively looking to escape? Yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable to remove the kid. Would you tolerate a parent neglecting a broken leg because they think all surgical intervention is blasphemous butchery? Are you okay just watching a kid die from cancer, a totally preventable cancer, just because surgeries carry a bit of risk?

Heck, let's go mental illness specifically. A kid is starting to develop schizophrenia. We just invented a magic pill that can prevent it from getting any worse. The parents refuse to medicate them. You're cool with this? You don't think, at some point, somebody should step in and help the poor kid?

If a kid is terrified their parents will find out about them getting a tooth fixed, wouldn't you be a bit concerned about how the parents are treating that kid? Would you really feel guilty for sneaking your son's best friend to the dentist to help him deal with a cavity that's been getting worse for years?

I'm not saying every kid is right, but you don't get that sort of fear of your parents from nowhere. I was a horrible gremlin of a kid and I never went anywhere near that far to cover something up.

If you can point me to an epidemic of kids getting abducted against their will, I'd probably change my tune. But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.

  • -14

If a kid is in horrible pain, and their parent refuses to do anything about it, and the kid is actively looking to escape? Yeah, I think it's pretty reasonable to remove the kid.

Here's the problem - it's very much debatable whether this "horrible pain" is actually something requiring medical treatment. I know you think it does. We are all familiar with the rhetoric that gender dysphoria is so real and urgent and painful that not allowing the child to transition is likely to lead to suicide, and akin to refusing to let a child receive treatment for schizophrenia. So you frame it as, essentially, parents letting their children die because of their bigoted religious beliefs. But this is almost never the case. Parents almost always treat a child being "trans" as a psychological issue, a child in distress who needs help - but you will not accept that "help" could be anything other than affirming their entity and even allowing them to begin medically transitioning, when there is good reason to think help should actually be helping them work through their gender dysphoria (if it is really gender dysphoria), becoming comfortable in their bodies, and perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need. Can you at least acknowledge that this is a reasonable, loving, and non-abusive response, even if you think it's not the correct one?

If a kid is terrified their parents will find out about them getting a tooth fixed, wouldn't you be a bit concerned about how the parents are treating that kid? Would you really feel guilty for sneaking your son's best friend to the dentist to help him deal with a cavity that's been getting worse for years?

Again with the "terrified." I'm sure there are children in abusive households who still face abuse, or being thrown out on the streets, if they are revealed to be gay or trans. This happens and those are extreme cases that may require state intervention, as with any other abuse. But almost all the cases I have seen are not of trans kids with parents who will reject and abandon them for being trans, but parents who simply don't agree with putting their kids on hormones, wearing binders, planning to get surgery, etc. Refusing to change the pronouns they use for their son or daughter might upset the child, but it's not abuse!

If you can point me to an epidemic of kids getting abducted against their will, I'd probably change my tune.

I don't agree with @WhiningCoil's framing of hordes of children being abducted by the state, but I would ask you in return, do you have any numbers regarding parents who are actually abusive and neglectful of their trans children, such that state intervention is required? Do you think schools should socially transition children secretly if the child says their parents won't go along?

But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.

You "get the sense" that most of the kids are quite happy with the decision, but this seems to be vibes and personal bias. I think the actual level of regret is very hard to evaluate. I'm sure you hate Jesse Singhal, but I have yet to see a trans activist who can actually dispute his numbers and his deep dives into studies on the subject.

helping them work through their gender dysphoria (if it is really gender dysphoria), becoming comfortable in their bodies, and perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need.

That's... basically exactly what the actual standards of care say to do? You start with therapy and just discussing the issue to get a feel for where the kid really is. You don't just drop them on HRT instantly. There's puberty blockers, so that they can make an informed choice as an adult in either direction, rather than make any permanent changes. For the kids who have a really clear sense of who they are, AND whose parents support it, you might see HRT before 18, but again, the parent IS actually involved in that decision. Basically no one is getting surgery before 18. Getting surgery usually takes YEARS of waiting, even as an adult who knows exactly what they want.

What part of that process are you objecting to?

Refusing to change the pronouns they use for their son or daughter might upset the child, but it's not abuse!

Would you be okay if I consistently misgendered people on this forum? You're an adult who can walk away from the conversation, so presumably this is a thousand times less bad than having it come from your own parents. I think most people here would get pretty reasonably upset with me if I leaned into trolling like that.

And if you won't tolerate it here, why in the world should we expect kids to tolerate it?

wearing binders

I mean, c'mon, you're objecting to an article of clothing? Teach the kid how to do it safely rather than forcing them to risk it with ace bandages and overly tight compressions.

planning to get surgery

What happened to "perhaps choose to transition when they are an adult if they still feel that's what they need"?

You "get the sense" that most of the kids are quite happy with the decision, but this seems to be vibes and personal bias.

I read scientific studies, hang out in trans communities, keep my ear out for about news, and so forth. I mean, if nothing else, I'm involved in numerous trans communities, have numerous trans friends, and presumably have a much better vantage point into the community than you do. I'm the sort of person that shows up here, looking for people who disagree with me, so I'm clearly not cherry-picking my sources. Short of being a credentialed expert, I'm not sure how you get a better perspective than mine?

If people really regret it so much, it should not be nearly this difficult for me to find those people.

I have yet to see a trans activist who can actually dispute his numbers and his deep dives into studies on the subject.

Is there some specific source here, or am I just supposed to spend a week deep-diving him? I'm happy to take a peek, but I will absolutely admit that I don't think he's a source worth investing a lot of time in, right now.

  • -12
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But I get the sense that most of the kids in question are quite happy with the decision. I haven't seen anything that suggests they're particularly prone to regretting it later, either.

There are a few issues with convenience-sampling transfolk in trans-friendly spaces and claiming this to demonstrate effectiveness of the treatment.

  1. It is not clear that those kids have a correct picture of what the counterfactual actually looks like. If you have a mistaken impression of what the "no transition" picture looks like in the long run, you might be happy with the decision in spite of it being the wrong one from a god's-eye view. To quote Aslan, "no-one is ever told what would have happened".
  2. Selection bias: trans-friendly spaces tend to expel or repel ex-trans like myself (usually not as a deliberate choice, but as a consequence of these people usually wanting to avoid others following in their footsteps which trips the "transphobic" response); you'll tend to find them only in places like here that don't purge transphobes.
  3. Survivorship bias: remember that transsexuals who do transition still have a very high suicide rate; a decent chunk of the regretters just kill themselves and will be missed by even accurately sampling survivors, despite their large contributions to the utility calculation.

Oh, woah, I hadn't realized that you were ex-trans. Have you given a description of what things were like for you somewhere? Your life history? (If so, where? If not, I'd be interested.)

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I mean, you can say #1 about everything. We can never know the counterfactual of any decision we make. We still have to make decisions. And it's not like there aren't TONS of decisions out there that people DO regret.

#2 doesn't explain the general absence of ex-trans spaces. Keep in mind I'm the sort of person who does look in places like this.

#3: If the suicide rate goes down post-transition, then we have clear evidence that transition helps even if it isn't a perfect cure-all. We have no evidence that "alternate" treatments work. From my own biased standpoint, I'd say we actually have plenty of evidence against alternate treatments. Can you pull up a study from any sort of vaguely-neutral (or positive) organization that suggests a specific alternate treatment actually has anywhere near the success rate in reducing suicide rates?

I'll throw out #4: There are scientific studies on regret rates, and they suggest remarkably low numbers: https://theconversation.com/transgender-regret-research-challenges-narratives-about-gender-affirming-surgeries-220642

I will admit, I have not checked the methodology, but I also haven't seen any studies that suggest a concern here. I'll also say that number is low enough to make me a bit suspicious. I think the real number is probably higher than 1%. But I do think this is pretty solid evidence that, in general, transition results in good outcomes and that if anything, we're being overly cautious.

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schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition

I certainly never claimed that, so I won't be championing it. You may not take my statements, make an exaggerated looney version of them and then foist that wild view onto me.

Whether these are valid medical treatments for minors or horrific butchery that we will look back on like elective lobotomies for strange children is the matter under dispute.

You're the one that said the schools are "secretly transitioning" kids, like the kid wasn't involved in the process.

You haven't made any argument for butchery - it's not like kids are getting surgery. The usual treatment for under 18 is hormone blockers at most, and often just a safe space. My understanding is that it's still illegal to prescribe actual HRT without parental consent. All of this ignoring that people on HRT generally stay on it, and prefer their new life.

  • -13

You're the one that said the schools are "secretly transitioning" kids, like the kid wasn't involved in the process.

Surely it's obvious to you that he meant secret from the parents? It's clearly logically impossible to transition someone secretly from them themselves.

Again, it's not the school doing this. The school is not "secretly transitioning" anyone. The kid is secretly transitioning, and the school is merely respecting their privacy.

The alternative is that the kid doesn't tell the school because they know their privacy won't be respected, and has absolutely no adult support. That seems way worse to me.

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There are laws that require public employees lie to parents about what their children are doing at state institutions.

it's not like kids are getting surgery

Yes, they are. They literally are, hundreds if not thousands a year.

The usual treatment for under 18 is hormone blockers at most

These drugs are abhorrent, and only made less so by comparison to the absolutely insane cosmetic surgeries that are more extreme. You can't pause puberty, and disrupting it because children don't like the changes is malpractice.

My understanding is that it's still illegal to prescribe actual HRT without parental consent

You are wrong. This is not the case.

Yes, they are. They literally are, hundreds if not thousands a year.

You are wrong. This is not the case.

As always: citation needed? What jurisdiction are you in that allows this? Do you have any actual articles speaking to that? The world is a big place, and I'll admit I don't know every region of it.

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Secretly transitioning as in a secret from the parents. How could a socially transitioned child not be aware of their new name and gender presentation?

it's not like kids are getting surgery

Some minors get sex reassignment surgery. We've moved past "that never happens" to "its not that common". Next stage is "of course that happens and its a good thing". And of course there are advocates for more minor sex reassignment surgery. Such as the leaked documents from Biden's Department of Health and Human Services.

Or much more commonly these kids get irreversible and badly harmful puberty blockers. A parent failing to support this harm of their child can lose custody in some locales.

Neither of those is an example of "mutilation"

To be fair, the parent poster only talked about a "path towards mutilation". I assume that the "mutilation" in question is gender reassignment surgery, which typically involves cutting off external sexual characteristics. Is it not fair to say that this is a typical or at least commonly desired endpoint of transitioning, so actions that make it more likely that someone will reach this endpoint in the future could be fairly described as putting them on a "path towards mutilation"?

Can you provide a source for the claim that schools are forcing uninterested, non-consenting children into transition?

I figure the assumption of the anti-trans side is that children can't meaningfully consent, nor be held accountable for their interest or lack thereof in the context of a managed social environment like school that may encourage or discourage said interest. Either way, the poster you are responding to didn't claim anything about interest or consent, did they? They are only talking about secrecy, presumably from the parents.

Mind you, it also seems strange to first claim that the driving concern is parents disowning the kid, but then to also defend a forced disowning if they refuse to let the kid access transition-affirming medical interventions. In a scenario where the parents find out anyway and are not willing to "own"/support a transitioning kid, your preference is evidently for the kid to be separated from the parents anyway. If you are willing to use deception to make the parents make a sacrifice (of money? time? support?) that they would not make willingly, why can't you instead support a policy that at least respects them as adult citizens and simply says that they will lose visitation/influence rights if they interfere with the transition but will still be compelled to provide financial support for the kid?

actions that make it more likely that someone will reach this endpoint in the future could be fairly described as putting them on a "path towards mutilation"?

In the sense that it's fair to describe doctors as "horrific butchers who have somehow gotten away with a brazen series of stabbings and mutilations", sure. Which is to say, no, that's not a fair way of phrasing things at all. That's an incredibly insulting way of phrasing it, and I can't imagine anyone who says that actually has a good opinion of trans people / doctors.

the poster you are responding to didn't claim anything about interest or consent, did they?

They said the school was transitioning them. The school is not the active party in this. The kid is. The kid is transitioning. The school is merely keeping that secret. That is a fairly important distinction.

If you are willing to use deception to make the parents make a sacrifice (of money? time? support?) that they would not make willingly

I don't really have any sympathy for the parent's "unwilling" sacrifice here. I expect adults to handle their obligations responsibly. Where I come from, becoming a parent means you're signing up to support the kid until they're 18. Sometimes that means dealing with twins. Sometimes that means dealing with a disability. That's what you signed up for when you became a parent. Six months of supporting your kid isn't likely to be anywhere near as bad as what you're putting the kid through.

I also think kids deserve a space where they can safely explore the idea without committing. I'd much rather a kid try on dresses for 6 months and work it out of their system, then go back to being a proper upright conservative. It would be awful if instead, that same kid get disowned and lost their family over what turned out to be a pretty typical childhood phase.

And, in the end, I'd absolutely support a process where kids could get placed in a safe alternate environment as needed, but sadly we do not have such a system yet. Foster care sucks. I can't blame a kid for trying to sneak by until they turn 18, get a job, and can move out safely. Even if you only expect to get a few months before you're caught, that's still time to try and line up someplace safer to go.

They said the school was transitioning them. The school is not the active party in this. The kid is. The kid is transitioning. The school is merely keeping that secret. That is a fairly important distinction.

The kid's decision doesn't mean the school isn't active, because the kid is a minor and the school is responsible for him at school.

I mean, if we follow that line of reasoning, I still don't see the problem. You've abandoned your parental responsibility and put it on the school while he's there. Fair enough. I don't see how you get to object when the school then acts in a responsible manner? The school agrees with him that he has a medical condition, and followed normal channels for helping him get help with it. The school has reason to believe you might endanger the kid if you find out, so they're doing the responsible thing and keeping him safe.

If the school runs a cancer awareness program, are you outraged when it turns out one kid does have cancer and gets treatment? What if the kid's parents are big believer in New Age healing crystals, and didn't want their kid to undergo chemo?

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Really? "Fail to support" transition, or "try to block their kid from accessing the relevant medical treatments"?

In the state of California there was a bill governing custody disputes between divorced parents, which would make a parent's decision to affirm the child's stated gender identity (or not) a factor to take into consideration in said disputes. Essentially, if a married couple gets divorced and their child has announced that they are trans, if one parent affirms the child's stated gender identity uncritically and the other parent is more sceptical and prefers a watchful waiting approach - all things being equal, the judge is meant to rule in favour of the former parent.

What do they mean by "affirmation"? "Affirmation includes a range of actions and will be unique for each child, but in every case must promote the child’s overall health and well-being." - so this isn't as simple as providing a child with medical treatment which has been recommended by a qualified professional.

This bill was voted on and passed in both houses, before being vetoed by Governor Newsom. Elected representatives in the state of California believe that if a child announces that they are trans, the correct position for the child's parents to adopt is to uncritically affirm the child's gender identity without question.

I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk. But that got me thinking... what if the Catholic Church leaned into LGBTQ+ shit 30 years earlier than they did?

What if, instead of covering up the priest abuse scandals, they leaned into it. Claimed they were just protecting young gay boys. In fact they had a moral duty to keep these young boys sexual behavior a secret from their parents. They might not accept them after all. Furthermore, the Catholic Church should probably just take custody of them from those bigoted parents.

It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.

I was thinking, gun to my head, I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk.

Your first comment got a lot of reports, which opened a mod conversation about whether to ding you for it. One mod said "not bannable, but warnable," another said "not even warnable." I tended to agree that it was not a great comment, but that it ultimately fell on the permissible side. The meta-moderation system agreed with me on this. However the low-quality responses you've generated certainly lend credence to the inclination toward moderation there.

This comment, though, fails the test of "write like everyone is reading, and you want to include them in the conversation." In particular, "your ilk" is a quintessentially antagonistic framing; we're here to engage with ideas above people, and watch our tone in preservation of content.

It's preposterous and totally insane. But that's what you sound like.

And this, of course, is worth moderating all on its own.

You do your substantive position no favors by cranking the rhetoric to 11. Your occasional AAQCs only get you so much lenience. It has been a while since your last ban, after which you became a quality-content machine for a bit! But recently your warnings have been arriving with increasing frequency. Let's try another week-long ban.

the low-quality responses you've generated

Were literally the product of a troll single-purpose-account, and you know it. But you can't let the place stray too far from leftist Orthodoxy, can you?

But you can't let the place stray too far from leftist Orthodoxy, can you?

I appreciate you.

It honestly warms my heart to know that I can still generate responses like this in the same thread where I'm getting responses like this:

Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction? Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?

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I'd rather my daughter was molested by a catholic priest (unlikely as that is, being a girl and all) than fall in with your ilk

Would you dare say that to your daughter?

You'd really rather her undergo a horrific, traumatizing experience that basically no one recommends... rather than do a relatively safe medical process that has numerous positive recommendations?

And you think this is a rational decision based on the facts, that your daughter should suffer horribly rather than grow a beard? What would you have done if the poor kid had PCOS or something?

It's preposterous and totally insane sounding because you analogized a situation where a child is raped without consent to one where the child willingly undergoes a medical procedure (regardless of whether you think it's warranted or not). That is a preposterous and insane analogy to make so it's no wonder that's what your conclusion is.

  • -13

That is a preposterous and insane analogy to make so it's no wonder that's what your conclusion is.

Frankly I find it more preposterious and insane that you don't see removing parental authority as the salient category.

What's your position on castrati? Willing undertaking of medical procedure or abduction of minors for sinister purposes?

Can you elaborate on what you want me to respond to? Are you referring to singers who in the past were castrated for their singing voices? I don't think that was a morally good practice.

I obviously would agree that 'abduction of minors for sinister purposes' is bad, you literally put sinister in the description. I suspect we disagree on what sinister purposes refers to, so you need to describe something more specific if you want to prompt my thoughts to see our differences of opinion.

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Your right, i forgot to include the priest telling some wild yarn about how the kids actually want it. Despite everything we know about kids not being able to consent to that. Good call. Now its perfect.

Do you actually not understand the difference or did you just want to get a cheap dig in?

Do you see all medical interventions in under-18's as 'grooming'? No? Just the one you already have a prior about not liking?

If I'm wrong please tell me how. There's a huge host of reasons why they are different, but I'm only going to bother explaining them if you're not going to respond with another sarcastic one liner that is indistinguishable from an inflamed partisan spouting nonsense about 'the transgenders grooming my kids to want to be raped'.

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Hello, and welcome to the Motte!

This response is not sufficiently charitable. You may note that I have banned the user to whom you were responding; one big problem with rule-breaking comments is that they tend to proliferate by encouraging further rule-breaking responses. But responding to a rule-breaking comment in a rule-breaking way does not excuse you!

...actually, looking through your rather fresh comment history, you seem to have a remarkable knack for sussing out problematic posts and making the discussion even worse by responding, not to the substance of the post, but to its rhetoric. Somehow that is, actually, most of your posts! The odds of this are so low as to not be worth contemplating.

Still, in the interest of charity, I will hold off perma-banning you as a suspected alt until the next time I notice this peculiar pattern. Once, after all, may be happenstance.

Is it not charitable anymore to honestly state your opinion on the analogy a user made (as opposed to their beliefs or character)?

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Hello, thanks for the welcome.

I won't deny I have a habit of responding to the posts that seem egregious to me with rhetoric in kind. This is true. I can work on my charitability.

I don't want to come across as if I'm complaining about the moderation (I think it's fine) but I am a bit confused about the rules of engagement here and would like some clarification before posting further so that I don't get unceremoniously permabanned. If this comment is unacceptable on the forum please feel free to delete and continue the convo in messages, but I am actually asking for clarification in good faith.

First of all, am I being moderated for the tone/content of my posts or for ban evasion as a suspected alt? I'm assuming from your comment that there was a previous user on this forum who used to engage similarly to me and was banned for it. If that's the case and you think this person is me, then what can I actually do to make you believe otherwise? I recognize as a moderator the need to restrict ban evasion from problem users, but from my perspective I am unaware of previous users having similar rhetoric (and it seems onerous to expect me to write deliberately in a different tone or avoid certain topics) so what is my recourse to avoid a permanent ban for this reason?

Secondly, my understanding was that as a new user all my comments have to be approved by moderators before becoming public. Until this comment I had not received any mod feedback. If it is not just ban evasion I'm being modded for, is it only this most recent comment that goes over the line into being problematic? If not, does this comment act as a warning that all of my previous posts were unacceptable?

I'm not trying to be deliberately difficult here, I actually don't understand or know the answers to these questions. I'd like to retain the ability to post here, and in order to do that I need to know where the line is.

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There is written record of the Secretary for Health demanding that the WPATH removes minimum age requirements from their Standards of Care so that the Biden administration can better pursue their goals related to trans issues. WPATH did comply, in violation of their own procedures of how the SOC is supposed to be determined.

Removing obstacles from a path is not "putting them on a path". Do you object to roads, because they put criminals on the path towards bank robbery?

Which "mutilations" had the minimum age requirements changed? What are the new requirements?

Removing obstacles from a path is not "putting them on a path". Do you object to roads, because they put criminals on the path towards bank robbery?

It sounds like arguing semantics to me. If one hand the public health administration is removing obstacles, and on the other the education system is telling kids they might be "born in the wrong body" if they don't fit into a given mold, and than hide the information about the child's transition from parents, that sounds like it all adds up to putting children on a path to transition.

Which "mutilations" had the minimum age requirements changed? What are the new requirements?

Draft of SOC8:

The following recommendations are made regarding the requirements for gender affirming medical and surgical treatment:

(...)

F. The adolescent has reached Tanner 2 stage of puberty for pubertal suppression.

G. The adolescent is the following age for each treatment:

  • 14 years and above for hormone treatment (estrogens or androgens), unless there are significant, compelling reasons to take an individualized approach, considering the factors unique to the adolescent treatment frame.
  • 15 years and above for chest masculinization; unless there are significant, compelling reasons to take an individualized approach, considering the factors unique to the adolescent treatment frame.
  • 16 years and above for breast augmentation, facial surgery (including rhinoplasty, tracheal shave, and genioplasty) as part of gender affirming treatment; unless there are significant, compelling reasons to take an individualized approach, considering the factors unique to the adolescent treatment frame.
  • 17 and above for metoidioplasty, orchidectomy, vaginoplasty, and hysterectomy and fronto-orbital remodeling as part of gender affirming treatment unless there are significant, compelling reasons to take an individualized approach, considering the factors unique to the adolescent treatment frame.
  • 18 years or above for phalloplasty, unless there are significant, compelling reasons to take an individualized approach, considering the factors unique to the adolescent treatment frame"

H. The adolescent had at least 12 months of gender affirming hormone therapy, or longer if required to achieve the desired surgical result for gender-affirming procedures including, Breast augmentation, Orchiectomy, Vaginoplasty, Hysterectomy, Phalloplasty metoidioplasty and facial surgery as part of gender affirming treatment unless hormone therapy is either not desired or is medically contraindicated.

vs. published SOC8

6.12.f- The adolescent has reached Tanner stage 2 of puberty for pubertal suppression to be initiated.

6.12.g- The adolescent had at least 12 months of gender-affirming hormone therapy or longer, if required, to achieve the desired surgical result for gender-affirming procedures, including breast augmentation, orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, hysterectomy, phalloplasty, metoidioplasty, and facial surgery as part of gender-affirming treatment unless hormone therapy is either not desired or is medically contraindicated.

There's also points A-E, but everything about minimum ages has been removed.

Edit: I think they mention the 18 years for phalloplasty when they elaborate on the chapter.

So, again, for starters: none of that is mutilation, just regular surgery.

Second, right there in the guidelines: this is the section for adolescents. Children is section 7. When your actual source makes the distinction between kids and teenagers, I feel like it's a bit disingenuous to keep calling them "kids"

Third, that's the section on "treatments requested by the patient". It's not putting someone on a path when they are already on that path and merely asking for help.

I don't see how this is different from anyone else trying to get medical treatment for their illness. Would you be horrified to learn that we also let children be treated for cancer and depression? Should there be a minimum age for those, too?

  • -15

So, again, for starters: none of that is mutilation, just regular surgery.

Unnecessary surgery that removes healthy body parts is mutilation, as are unnecessary hormonal treatments.

Second, right there in the guidelines: this is the section for adolescents. Children is section 7. When your actual source makes the distinction between kids and teenagers, I feel like it's a bit disingenuous to keep calling them "kids"

When people say "kids" they mean "minors", performing these treatments on even younger children is even worse, but a mastectomy performed on a 16 year old girl is still atrocious.

Third, that's the section on "treatments requested by the patient".

No one cares, the patient is a minor that doesn't know anything about what they're talking about.

I don't see how this is different from anyone else trying to get medical treatment for their illness.

There is no evidence that any illness is involved. The only criteria necessary to get a dysphoria diagnosis is:

  • Say you're trans

  • Don't change your mind for a few months

Even those loose criteria aren't always followed.

Would you be horrified to learn that we also let children be treated for cancer and depression?

Cancer has proper diagnostic criteria, so no on that, but if a doctor insisted I have to give drugs to 14 year old for "depression" (or "anxiety" or ADHD) I'd find it absurd.

Should there be a minimum age for those, too?

Probably. Psychology is very unrigorous, and we should not let these kind of doctors make decisions about children, that go against the wishes of parents.

Unnecessary surgery that removes healthy body parts is mutilation, as are unnecessary hormonal treatments.

I certainly didn't think it was unnecessary. What makes you the expert here?

No one cares, the patient is a minor that doesn't know anything about what they're talking about.

That might be believable if there was a huge number of people who regretted these decisions, but people actually seem pretty consistent. I challenge the idea that a 16 year old doesn't have any idea what they want - 16 is young enough to be tried as an adult or apply for emancipation. In most states, two 16 year olds can have sex, get pregnant, and have a child - a massively life changing decision that involves significantly more severe medical risks. We even allow kids to drive! Traffic accidents are one of the top ten leading causes of death, but we trust kids with it.

Are you saying that's all a mistake? We need to keep kids away from any sort of responsibility or freedom until they're a legal adult?

There is no evidence that any illness is involved.

There's plenty of evidence that this intervention results in positive outcomes. You're talking to one of the positive outcomes right now. I'm not sure what else to call it when you do a medical intervention and it fixes a problem?

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we should not let these kind of doctors make decisions about children, that go against the wishes of parents.

What if the parents are wrong?

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none of that is mutilation, just regular surgery.

There is nothing "regular" about surgery to remove healthy organs and tissue with the ultimate goal of ameliorating psychic distress. You're welcome to defend this practice, but don't pretend it isn't a major departure from the common practice of surgery as generally understood.

Do you object to roads, because they put criminals on the path towards bank robbery?

I'm sorry, but analogies are really not your strong suit.

That public roads can be used by bank robbers to escape from robberies is an unintended, unfortunate but unavoidable side effect of the existence of said roads.

Small children receiving "gender-affirming" surgeries is not an unintended consequence of Levine calling for the age limits on minor transition to be removed. That outcome is the sole purpose of Levine having done so. It is exactly the outcome Levine is trying to bring about.

Washington State literally passed this fucking law last year, please just stop lying to our faces that it's not happening (and also it's good), if only to prove you can notice it doesn't work and try some other tactic.

Funny how you can't actually quote the law or provide any reference to it. I bet the word mutilation isn't in there even once.

  • -15

Of course the Washington Democrats aren't going to use the word mutilate, they'll call it gender-affirming, and you will fall for the parallax.

Castration is mutilation. It's always been mutilation. It will always be mutilation. Calling it gender-affirming care doesn't change the thing one whit.

And the laws in WA are abominable and should be changed.

Are you opposed to all surgeries, then? Cutting out someone's heart is mutilation. It's always been mutilation. It will always be mutilation. Calling it a "pacemaker installation" doesn't change the thing one whit. We are creating heartless cyborgs out there! Why aren't you concerned about that too?

  • -12

I bet the word mutilation isn't in there even once.

What on earth is this meant to prove? "In their official communications, the IDF have never referred to their military operation in Gaza as a 'genocide': ergo, it can't possibly be one". Would you expect anyone in the world to be persuaded by such a facile argument?

This isn't even "making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike", it's just plain making things up.

This is not sufficiently charitable. Specifically,

we ask that responders address what was literally said, on the assumption that this was at least part of the intention. Nothing is more frustrating than making a clear point and having your conversation partner assume you're talking in circles. We don't require that you stop after addressing what was literally said, but try, at least, to start there.

It's fine to raise questions about source veracity, but if you're going to respond to others, you need to actually be responding to the substance of their posts--not ducking into your motte when they raise points you don't care to substantively address. Actually several of your comments in this thread do the "law of merited impossibility" and "Russell conjugation" thing, where you oscillate between "this isn't happening" and "it's good, actually" while rhetorically re-framing specific concerns. This kind of engagement creates frustration and lowers engagement quality, even though it basically keeps to the rules on tone. If done deliberately and repeatedly, it amounts to a kind of trolling. Please engage with what people are actually saying, rather than substituting your rhetoric for their substantive concerns.

I am responding to what was literally said. They picked the word "mutilation", not me. There is no actual mutilation happening.

If you want to discuss "children are transitioning", we can have a conversation about that. But that's a very different conversation from "children are being mutilated."

Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction? Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?

I am responding to what was literally said.

Your response was insufficiently charitable.

Would you really allow this sort of insulting language to fly in the other direction?

First, other people's bad behavior is irrelevant to your own. Second, I already banned WhiningCoil for comments in this thread. If that wasn't enough to stifle your whataboutism, then I don't know what else I could possibly do to assuage your persecution complex.

Can I talk about how conservatives are routinely voting to kill women? Is it fair to say conservatives have once again elected a fascist rapist?

There are ways to make substantive assertions along these lines, and people often do. But they have to do so within a context of following the rules, which you have failed to do here.

I already banned WhiningCoil

Okay, fair enough. My complaint was entirely that if "child mutilation" was considered acceptably charitable, I think I was more than matching that level of charity. If we're in agreement that "child mutilation" is an insulting and deeply uncharitable description, then my objection is pretty well resolved.

you oscillate between "this isn't happening" and "it's good, actually"

I do think I've been consistent in my stance: SRS is a surgery like any other, and calling it "mutilation" is ridiculous hyperbole. Calling it "child mutilation" is doubly ridiculous, since as far as I know, kids under 18 genuinely are not having surgery. I'm not saying kids don't transition, I'm saying they don't get surgery under 18, and that it's not mutilation.

If someone really has a source for SRS being common in kids, I'd love to see it. I've tried to find numbers, and basically every source has said "low enough to basically round off to zero."

If we're in agreement that "child mutilation" is an insulting and deeply uncharitable description, then my objection is pretty well resolved.

I agree that "mutilation" can be unnecessarily inflammatory rhetoric. I would stop short of calling it inflammatory per se, however. Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.

I do think I've been consistent in my stance: SRS is a surgery like any other, and calling it "mutilation" is ridiculous hyperbole.

That can be your stance, but you aren't entitled to its adoption by others. Many humans object to cosmetic surgery generally, and those kinds of surgeries do not usually interfere with bodily functioning. Interfering with bodily function seems to raise the stakes. "Mutilation" may be ridiculous hyperbole in some contexts, but it does not seem per se to be so.

Calling it "child mutilation" is doubly ridiculous, since as far as I know, kids under 18 genuinely are not having surgery. I'm not saying kids don't transition, I'm saying they don't get surgery under 18, and that it's not mutilation.

The main reason I am replying to you again, here, is that you still don't seem to have grasped where you went wrong in the first place. WhiningCoil did not say "children are being mutilated," but rather that children were being put "on a path towards mutilation and sterilization." You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated," but rather "children are being channeled toward life outcomes that eventually include sterilization and the removal of healthy organs." Demanding evidence of children having functional tissue removed for aesthetic purposes is failing to address what WhiningCoil actually said, and hence a rules violation.

(For whatever it's worth, "gender affirming mastectomies" clearly involve the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes, and do not appear to be terribly rare in adolescents aged 12-17. If someone were to call that "child mutilation" I would probably need to spend some time weighing whether I regarded the rest of the comment as inflammatory, "boo outgroup," or otherwise rules-violating, but that characterization of the data in isolation does not look like a per se rules violation to me.)

Referring to the removal of healthy organs for aesthetic purposes as "mutilation" seems like a supportable framing, but context and charity matter.

Referring to a major medical condition as "aesthetic purposes" also seems pretty uncharitable.

You cannot charitably read this to say "children are being mutilated,"

I disagree. A lot of posters here are in fact doubling down on "actual under 18 children ARE having surgeries". "Children are on the path to making a consenting decision, as a legal adult" really lacks the same oomph, but it would be a lot more honest if that's really what you meant to convey.

When people talk about tobacco companies putting kids on the path to a lifelong smoking addiction, I don't think they mean "kids might take up smoking when they turn 18." They're worried that actual kids are actually smoking cigarettes, right now, as kids.

do not appear to be terribly rare in adolescents aged 12-17

To quote the source: "A total of 209 patients underwent gender-affirming mastectomy between January 1, 2013 and July 31, 2020."

That's 30 people a year. Out of 150,000 trans adolescents, and, what, 25 million adolescents overall. So literally one in a million. I'll admit that's a lot more than I thought, but it's still incredibly, vanishingly rare. Those are exceptional cases, and I'd be extremely shocked to learn that a single one of those was done without parental consent.

I did say "low enough to basically round off to zero", in case you want to argue this is somehow moving the goalposts. I dare say 0.0001% rounds off to zero. Even 209 patients over 150k trans kids gives us 0.1%. So even given your kid is trans, this is still a vanishingly small subset of the discussion.

More comments

The reddit link has its top post reading "Removed by Reddit." God I hate what that site has become.

Damn, it was a pretty common take.

The user said something like he’s fine with adults doing whatever they want to do, but encouraging kids into trans stuff was a bridge too far for him, and that’s why Democrats lost his support.

A disproportionate percentage of Reddit powermods are trans, so of course dissent from trans-worship is not going to be welcome there.

https://archive.is/TrSMG

The trans youth issue bothers me. Girls sports, underage irreversible surgeries, and marketing to kids all get under my skin. Adults don’t really bother me

In terms of AOC, this clip of hers asking Trump voters for who they follow came up on my Twitter feed the other day, so she could be actually trying to figure out why the Dems failed this election. Of course, many have called this just a Hundred Flowers Campaign, though I'd think, as a NY representative, she just couldn't do a whole lot to negatively affect these podcasts and internet celebs, so I'd actually take her at her word on this, which is surprising to me. I don't keep track of her, so I'm not sure how much of a woke true believer she is versus a leftist socialist making shrewd use of the advantages bestowed upon her by her genes within the woke environment that she inhabits, but I could believe she's the latter and ready to drop the trans ideology stuff if they seem to be disadvantageous to her political career (edit: I also stumbled on some rumors that she's pregnant, which certainly could transform her views very quickly - we'll find out within 9 months, I suppose).

Whether or not this represents Democrats coming to see the extremes of gender ideology as a political liability, I honestly think it might. When I've checked out clips from CNN, MSNBC, or NYTimes, Washington Post podcasts, i.e. media where I'd expect the mainstream Democratic view to be heavily overrepresented, I've been pleasantly surprised by how much actual self-reflection there is about how not distancing themselves from the woke side of the culture wars hurt Democrats and how little of the more expected "it's all the racist/misogynist white/black/Hispanic men's fault" narrative there is (still too much of the latter and too little of the former). In terms of high budget failures, 2024 has been the year of the woke, with a number of films, TV shows, video games, and a political party that fit the woke profile having essentially wasted literally billions of dollars. In any given failure, it's been easy to cope by pointing to non-woke reasons for the failure, but if you're greedy or power-hungry enough, that kind of pattern won't escape your notice.

I don't think this represents some major pivot by the party, though. They're coming to see it as a liability and making small corrections. What I'm hoping for is that in 2026, we'll see Democrats in contested local and Congressional elections finding success from specifically distancing themselves from the extremes of gender ideology and the like, allowing them to defeat other, more extreme Dems in the primaries, and the Republican opponents in the close 50/50 races. That'd be a sign that some actual progress is being made. However, if the next 2 years turns out to be disappointing for the electorate - which I think is the modal case for any presidential election - that'd leave the Republicans vulnerable to losing to extreme Democrats, which could embolden the extreme gender ideologues once again.

AOC is gearing up early for a 2028 run. It’s obvious how the Democratic Party can increase its appeal to young men. Stop trying to overthink it.

Yeah they’re gonna run in 2028 on “man isn’t all this culture war shit about abortion and god and deporting random Mexicans kind of lame and cringe and try hard? Why not just, like, be chill, live and let live maaan”…and it’s going to work. The public has a short memory.

I’m okay with the DNC pivoting to “no step on snek,” but I’m not holding my breath.

We’re getting Newsom 2028 and we’re going to like it.

Dems must really be counting on Trump crashing the economy to go with Newsom

Well, this entire red-hot and starting to backfire economy is propped up by the laptop class looting federal money to subsidize their lifestyle spending. There's nothing else propping up demand, so if Trump kicks the chair out I suspect we're in for a crash just in time for 2028.

I have to say that the thought of letting Kamala have her win being the more prudent choice long-term did occur to me.

They don't need Trump to crash the economy, it's running on fumes already. He's just the one holding the bag when the music stops.

What’s wrong with the economy. All the big hedge funds and banks are projecting major growth for the next two years

When will the Dems learn? Coastal elites lose elections.

America only has 2 swingable regions that matter:

  1. The great lakes mega region [1]
    Includes Mich, Wisc & Eastern PA. All 3 states have swung together for decades.
  2. Southwestern Sun belt [2]
    This includes Arizona & Nevada. Both states are growing rapidly and have a massive (30+%) swingable Latino population. The tiny black population means that an alienated white populace + unenthusiastic Latino population will certainly lose you both states. They tend to swing together too. Both went Blue-senate, red-presidency this year.

AOC would be horrible for both these regions. AOC is young. No reason to force it. Show your wider appeal by becoming NY Governor. That's America's 4th most powerful elected position after President, CA Governor & Texas Governor. Big improvements to NY state should give her enough visibility and time to become a Presidential candidate.

But for the next decade, the democratic candidate must identify with one of the above 2 regions.

The 3 nationally recognized candidates from this region are:

  • Pete (Iowa)
  • Whitmer (Mich)
  • Kelly (Az)

Well, look at that. They are also the 3 most liked active democrats.

I am biased towards Pete because he's charismatic, doesn't treat republicans like idiots (has a solid fox news relationship) and is a pro-transit YIMBY. He is also Gay in a lowkey, pro-family way. I don't much about Whitmer. Kelly's dedicated husband + Top gun + Astronaut story is an incredible sell. If only he wasn't bald.

It's still very early, but among those who are more tuned in, how do people around you perceive these 3 politicians ?

Random insane stat:

In the last 50 years, every Republican president has been a coastal elite (Trump, Reagan, Bushes) and no Democratic president has been both coastal and elite (Carter, Clinton, Obama, Biden).

He is also Gay

That loses too much of the crucial black and Latino vote.

I would bet more on Whitmer. They really want a female president, it’s pretty clear. They’re itching for it.

Wouldn’t Obama count as coastal due to his Hawaiian roots?

Black Americans are like 30% at least bisexual imo and Latinos are just hiding it through machismo.

Pete would be down low enough for them

can increase its appeal to young men.

A nickname like "Momala" attached to AOC will take on a whole different sheen with Zoomer men, that's for sure.

Being hot worked for Trudeau.

I guess I'm not a political consultant, so I might be very wrong (then again, so are the consultants sometimes), but my visceral feeling here is that politicians that have previously staked out now-seen-as-extreme positions won't be able to just sweep history under the rug. Harris tried, and while it wasn't the only argument against, plenty of Trump campaign hay was reaped from her stated 2020 policy positions and Senate votes. I can't see AOC winning without a huge vibe shift back to 2016-2020 Democrats' values (not impossible if the next term goes very poorly, I suppose) or explicitly talking about why crying in front of border fences was good then but doesn't conflict with an immigration stance that isn't "open borders" now.

But of her generation of left-leaning politicians, I don't find her the worst.

explicitly talking about why crying in front of border fences was good then but doesn't conflict with an immigration stance that isn't "open borders" now.

If AOC had been running this year, she could have threaded the needle between "we don't need to enforce our borders" and "Trump's border enforcement was nothing to cry about" by asserting that Trump just did it badly. Harp on things like kids unable to be reunified with families because they didn't collect enough data when separating them.

How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.

On the other hand, the "I'll do what you want but I won't screw it up" card works in any player's hand. Even if Trump does end up taking the blame for any big problems, he won't be the one running in 2028, and it'll be easy enough for any Republican (except Vance) to simply say "well, he had good goals, and I'll be the one to achieve them, without any mistakes this time."

Harris tried, and while it wasn't the only argument against, plenty of Trump campaign hay was reaped from her stated 2020 policy positions and Senate votes.

It was a pretty good argument against. "My values have not changed" probably sounded like a tough focus-group-approved thing to memorize out of context, but without some explanation for Harris' changing positions it was just an obvious attempt to weasel out of an incredibly important question when she was asked about the changes. When someone is obviously trying to mislead you, the only safe thing to believe is that an honest answer would be the one you didn't want to hear, so it wasn't too crazy that many moderates and progressives concluded that Harris wasn't to be trusted.

How well that plays in four years will depend on how badly Trump's border policy is carried out over his second term, but since the worst case for her is "Trump's Executive Orders don't make any big photogenic mistakes and the civil service who has to carry out his orders also don't make any big photogenic mistakes", I'm betting she still ends up with some swing-voter-friendly territory to stake out.

No. The worst case is that the left makes mistakes and punches itself out trying to stop deportations of the wrong sorts (they love a lost cause) and blow all their powder.

Then Trump's deportations proceed and go even further, the numbers drop compared to Biden and the Overton Window is shifted because people feel deportation wasn't so bad. Maybe let little Elio stay but still.

Se my comment above, but AOC will have it a lot easier than Kamala, if only because it's a lot easier to backtrack from a position you took a decade earlier as an idealistic 29-year-old who was new to public office than from a position you took in the last election cycle as a 55-year-old sitting US Senator who had been in politics for 15 years by that point.

I mean, the "my values haven't changed" schtick wasn't good, but I can't imagine her saying anything that would have played better. California is an oil-producing state so she couldn't use ignorance as an excuse. The technology was old enough by 2019 that most of the specific arguments in favor of its environmental benefits had been made. There was no new information that came out between 2020 and 2024. If she'd been against fracking in 2012 and changed course in 2019 it would have been easy to give her a pass, but there's really no good explanation. The real explanation is probably that she's against a fracking ban now for the same reason she was in favor of one in 2019 — because that's the position her advisors told her would give her the best chance of winning, which leads one to wonder what her actual thoughts on the matter are.

Honestly, the immigration thing is the easiest issue on which to thread that needle. The people crossing the border are mostly normal people in really desperate situations who hope they can have a better life in the US. While there are practical reasons why we can't let everyone in, Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up. His political career literally rests on his belief that the vast majority of illegals are rapists and fentanyl traffickers who are only here so they can commit crimes. Her earlier positions were merely a reaction to Trump's policies at the time, and she was also young and idealistic. Ten years in politics has taught her the practical realities of governance, but we at least need to acknowledge that we're dealing with real people here and not faceless monsters.

Some of her other positions are going to be harder to backtrack from, but she has the advantage of coming into office young enough that she both gets a pass for her earlier positions and develops into a shrewd politician by the time she needs to.

Trump and the Republicans lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and have dehumanized them almost completely, giving them license to enact whatever brutal policies they can dream up.

This is the type of hyperbole that makes me find it completely impossible to hang out in online forums dominated by lefties for very long. Like, have you ever talked to a Republican? In person?

I dont think that was supposed to be Rov_scam's voice; rather, they were telling the hypothetical story of how AOC would sell the position shift.

Ya know, I had that in my mind at one point, and I know I had gotten busy and distracted last night, and I partially forgot it. And yet, I think I still had a point. We've talked here recently about how generally hyperbolic and castastrophizing many left-wing online spaces are (which is why I called that out in my comment). Like, just look at reddit. And then, if a potential normie waltzes into the space (think what's happening with young voters), they see that all this hyperbole is Obvious Nonsense if you've ever touched grass (or, ya know, watched a Pens game with a Republican). But they also learn that if you even think about disagreeing with the hyperbole, it's the banhammer for you. It's radicalizing, one way or the other; either you're radicalized to join the herd and spout hyperbole... or you're radicalized to hate those folks. In captured spaces, the hyperbole just ratchets one way, up ever further. They're not just wrong; they're dehumanizing or threatening your existence.

Honestly, the last thing folks like AOC need to do is quadruple down again with the catastrophic rhetoric. Especially because you're saying this in the process of moving your own position closer to theirs! Simply say what they're actually wrong about and why and how you'd do something better. Tarring everyone who has ever supported anything like what you're moving your own policy position closer to as having dehumanized entire groups of people is just gross and insulting.

Lol, I hang out with Republicans all the time. I watched election returns with people actively rooting for a Trump victory, and I watched the Pens game last night with a guy I often get into arguments with (though we didn't talk politics at all last night). By "Trump and the Republicans" I was referring to the habit of politicians to assign the attributes of the most visible leader to the party as a whole. There could be some media bubble where Fox News et al are repeatedly expressing compassion for migrants and the mainstream media simply isn't reporting on it, but to my knowledge, if any such rhetoric does exist, it's drowned out by statements about migrants all being criminals.

Does the guy you watched the Pens game with last night lack any sense of compassion whatsoever and dehumanize immigrants almost completely?

Two years ago, AOC didn't have pronouns on her Instagram profile, and when called out on it by rabid wokeists, she quickly apologized and put them in. It will be interesting to see if she will make a similar about-face here or if the pronouns are gone for good.

It's worth noting that she also changed her job title from “Representative” to “Congresswoman”, which could be viewed as either a return to sanity (it's okay to call women women again, rather than forcing gender-neutral terminology) or as a way of doubling down on her gender identity as a way to distinguish herself from the evil male majority. We'll see.

Two years ago, AOC didn't have pronouns on her Instagram profile, and when called out on it by rabid wokeists, she quickly apologized and put them in. It will be interesting to see if she will make a similar about-face here or if the pronouns are gone for good.

If she took them down, she's probably prepared to tell anyone calling her out to pound sand. But I don't think it will even be necessary, it's really starting to feel like this election result knocked the wind out of the Blues.... which I don't quite understand, it wasn't really a landslide so I don't see what warrants a repudiation of their old strategy, Trump didn't manage to take away power from them in his first term, so I don't see a reason why they should fear that this time around, and yet it seems like they feel the need to fall in line somehow.

I think it kind of smacks of desperation to take a politician changing her twitter profile as some kind of great paradigm shift. This reaction alone makes me think we have not yet reached "peak woke."

Aren't lots of high-profile people leaving twitter anyways? It might be more of a prelude to her jumping ship off the platform than anything else.

A prominent, vocal greengrocer taking down his "worker's of the world, unite!" sign is a big deal.

On one hand I agree.

On the other this took serious intent from AOC or her Twitter admin. It only took seconds, but why remove it at all? Thousands of software suites have been updated to allow pronouns and gender spectrums whenever dealing with people. They fought so hard for this - why back down on the signal?

To add onto the other replies, pronouns on the modern Internet contain much more information than the literal direct conveyance of gender identification. It's a potent nugget of information if you're willing to read between the lines...or letters, in this case.

UK left under Starmer already dropped the extreme pro-trans position before the election. Keir Starmer literally said he wanted to protect female-only spaces and that he would make sure “gender ideology” wasn’t taught in schools.

In general, positions adopted over the past 10 years in relation to trans issues and bail reform can be dropped pretty quickly. Positions that are 50+ years old on immigration (etc) are much harder to deal with and reverse.

AOC has just generally been on the ‘serious soul searching’ end of the election postmortem, and while I don’t give the lion’s share of the blame to democrats being the party of retarded gender shit, it’s pretty easy to see how AOC can overweight that factor. Like it’s very unpopular and doesn’t entail asking serious questions about the party’s stance on immigration, why abortion isn’t a magic bullet, or whether government economic statistics are fully trustworthy. Plus- disclaimer I am not a progressive and don’t move in very progressive spaces- it seems like trans activists are …difficult allies on a good day.

Is there a way to crawl profiles for pronouns? Just ran into a therapists saying she noticed it as a wider trend in her profession

I expect it will be rationalised as being the revised way to protect trans identifying people.

It's one more iota of evidence that we're past peak woke.

I was a little worried after the election that leftists would see it as vindication that moderation doesn't work, given how Harris had pivoted to the center. But overall that doesn't seem to be the case. Thank goodness.

Check the immediately preceding top level post before you celebrate.

"Past peak" only means the first derivative has turned negative, not that there will be no new examples.

My understanding on the basis of social media messages is that pronouns in bio have been on their way out in the American corporate world for months now.

Even the trans community has been somewhat bothered by the "pronouns in bio/email" stuff, so I'm not surprised to see it fading. There were a lot of complaints that, in practice, it just drew attention to the least gender conforming people in the office - plus it's not a fun question when you're still in the closet (do you lie? are you comfortable lying?)

Even the trans community has been somewhat bothered by the "pronouns in bio/email" stuff,

So howcome they did absolutely nothing about it for all these years? Why did they participate in dogpiles on anyone who did voice their concern (including the occasional trans person, funnily enough)?

We're not a hive mind. Some of us did speak up. Most of us have more important issues to speak up on. And we didn't want to get dogpiled either.

(And honestly, for a lot of us, when we do speak up, we don't get heard. The loudest 1% dominates both sides of the conversation right now, which sucks)

In lefty circles in the UK (and I assume the US is similar) the dogpiles were led by clueless cis allies and tumblrgendered headcases, not by actual trans people living as the opposite gender to their birth sex.

I can buy that cis allies were the majority of participants just due to relative sizes of each population, but if you're telling me that trans people were sitting it out, I'll need something tangible. Like, if I go to some trans subreddits and look up what they were saying about Gina Carrano's bip/bap/bop joke, do you think the prevailing sentiment is going to be "who cares"?

I'll also need a definition of "actual trans person" that is accepted by the trans community itself. If you're angling for limiting them to trans-meds, that is already dismissed as bigotry by the trans community itself.

Which would be more compelling if people weren't still getting fired because "it was obviously written in bad faith by a man."

Pity, where we've ended up. Oh well.


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