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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 7, 2022

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There is now a USA Election Day 2022 Megathread for all your deliberatively democratic posting desires.

It seems to me politics are especially bad at countering inflation. People may be pissed off the "government isn't doing enough" to fix it. However, the levers the government can easily pull to fight inflation (raising taxes/interest rates, cut transfers/subsidies, lower consumption/wages) won't gain them any popularity points. Even worse, there are plenty of socially-desirable policies that'll make inflation worse: tax cuts, raises, loan forgiveness, more transfers. I'm grateful our system is even capable of doing unpopular things like raising interest rates. If monetary policy had heavier democratic influence, I'd worry high inflation would just be the long-term equilibrium.

Ontario's leader is under heavy fire for playing hardball and preventing educational workers from getting large raises. I don't know the details well, but couldn't one argue this is what fighting inflation looks like?

The question remains: what mechanism would be especially good at countering inflation?

Say we have an nRX-approved philosopher-king who holds absolute political power. What are his options if he decides to keep inflation level? It doesn’t seem amenable to single, decisive actions, so he’s left with the same interest rate, tax, or command economy options. I suspect those will cause roughly as much suffering/ if implemented decisively rather than by a democratic half-measure.

Then again, I’m not terribly well versed in economic history. How effective was austerity at fighting inflation? If it failed, was that due to wreckers political will, or to outside economic forces?

austerity at fighting inflation? If it failed, was that due to wreckers

Very funny. But I don't recall persecution of enemies of austerity, as enemies of communism were. Thus this seems to be either a) minimizing communist atrocities or b) inventing neoliberal ones.

Say we have an nRX-approved philosopher-king who holds absolute political power. What are his options if he decides to keep inflation level?

The hypothetical dollar is now replaced with a centralized digital currency. All taxes are only payable in it and all payments on hypothetical soil are to be made in is, all physical bills are destroyed.

Once adoption is widespread enough, the King presses the inflation tax button and burns enough money in everyone's wallets to decrease the size of the money supply as needed. Or makes a given amount of them only spendable over a long period of time so that their velocity is reduced.

How exactly is this different from just raising taxes?

Taxes go into the government coffers and then get spent, creating welfare dependents.

Simply burning the money is much better, as that doesn't create a class of welfare dependents.

It's faster and you burn the proceeds so there's no chance they get back into the economy through government spending.

But yes you could very well replicate this using taxes and the national money hole.

I think the framing is wrong. Inflation is a trailing indicator resulting from either or both an increase in the money supply and a decrease in the supply of goods indexed. It seems like we've had both of these things, some from governmental actions and some from actions it would have been difficult or impossible for government to prevent entirely although could have mitigated them better. Inflation is prevented before it happens and just grown through after the fact. The nRX approved philo king would have done many things differently resulting in more manageable inflation, among which include more carefully managing the money supply and creating more robust supply lines, for example building these chip plants domestically a decade ago.

Keeping supply stable seems like something that could be achieved by an NAP-king. It’d be more expensive, in the short run, than our free market solution. That’s not inflation, but paying a price for antifragility. So that works towards keeping inflation down.

What does the NAP-king’s ideal money supply look like? Are you thinking of something as technocratic as @IGI-111’s digital deflation (or a more conventional version of literally decirculating currency)? I’m trying to get a handle on what deflationary policy looks like without the constraints of politics.

I'm unusually for liking crypto but also recognizing some inflation is probably ideal to shift the balance somewhat against creditors and in favor of borrowers. I would however like this rate of inflation to be stable and predictable, which is in theory what the current fed is tasked with as the problem isn't as simple as just having the money supply grow linearly because the overall size of the economy and number of participants isn't static. I think something like the fed should exist but with constraints, more than anything being forbidden from printing more money for the sake of paying for policy, perhaps the inflation targeted money would go straight to the federal budget as a base tax on all cash holders but anything more than the exact amount measured to keep inflation at an ideal level would need to be raised through taxes or debt.

I find @IGI-111's suggestion strange and don't think it'd work very well in practice.

To be clear I'm not for monetarism, my preferred way of doing it is to use sound money instead of trying to plan the size of the money supply.

But if you're going to plan, that's how I would do it.

instead of trying to plan the size of the money supply.

The money supply isn't set by God - someone is choosing it. If you use a gold standard, that is likely to be foreign gold speculators - or in the most famous case of an inappropriate monetary contraction with megadeath consequences, a foreign central bank.

Seriously, the reason why monetary policy is hard is that the use of money as store of value and money as medium of exchange conflict - money which is hoarded is not circulating. Stablish prices and fullish employment require a stablish supply of circulating money, but the demand for hoarded money can vary rapidly due to speculation. So you either need sufficiently and predictably high inflation that the demand for hoarded money is consistently negligible relative to the demand for circulating money, or you need to vary the supply of money to match hoarder demand.

The classical gold standard that actually existed, as opposed to the one which modern goldbugs think should have existed, depended on the ability of the big fractionally reserved central banks (the Bank of England, the Banque de France, the Reichsbank before WW1, the Federal Reserve Banks after WW1) to print money - particularly to carry out their lender-of-last-resort function. The NBER paper I link to makes the argument that when the Banque de France tried to move closer to a full-reserve gold standard without deflating the French economy (in effect by redeeming GBP and USD for gold and hoarding the gold), it crashed the system causing the great depression.

I don't think stable, predictable inflation shifts the balance between creditors and borrowers. Lenders would just increase the nominal interest rate to get the same real interest rate.

The reason economists today support a small, stable rate of inflation is that it keeps money circulating and prevents deflation, which would be disastrous economically.

It does shift the balance in favor of borrowers generally because it puts pressure on creditors to lend money or watch their capital depreciate. It's a component of why deflation would be disastrous economically. If it costs you every day you are cash heavy then you're going to be much more willing to lend.

As long as the long run rate of deflation is less than the real interest rate paid on other safe, liquid dollar denominated assets like treasuries that doesn't really matter much. I don't think you understand someone holding cash is essentially already lending their resources out at 0% interest.

This is the best explanation I can think of for what we're talking about.

Interesting. I’m seeing taxation as deflationary because it’s the government acting as a “sink” for excess dollars. Does that only apply if it runs a surplus, or can a cut from year to year have the same deflationary effect?

I’d also be interested in hearing more about said laws.

I feel like since an nrx government wouldn't have to buy votes for $10,000 a pop in handouts, inflationary spending wouldn't be a serious issue in the first place.

If prices started going up, the government's main lever would be sighing and delaying construction of the giant gold pyramid housing the AIngram of Charles I.

I don’t buy it.

Government spending isn’t the only (or main?) source of inflation; the whole process of lending adds money into the ecosystem. Even without any welfare or public payroll, if Charles I cranks down the federal funds rate, people will take advantage of “cheap” loans and circulate more currency. Whether or not that guarantees inflation...I’m not actually sure. I think so, assuming demand for goods doesn’t scale accordingly?

At the simplest level of understanding, inflation is the consequence of too much money chasing too few goods.

Since none of us are Scrooge McDuck, we don't have a need for money: we want the goods that money represents.

An NrX solution would be to appoint Jeff Bezos as a Czar of logistics with the intent of increasing supply. I would nationalize all food banks and related charities, and import German managers from Aldi to coordinate them. I would create biblical-scale, Josephian government granaries that are needlessly large - seven years worth? - enough to convince even the most ardent hoarder that there is a lot of goods to be had.

I would also enlarge the strategic fossil fuel reserve and convince oil companies to invest in extraction with a fixed, contracted price. Housing is more difficult, but the creation of a state-based stockpile of common building materials - ensuring a stable price for construction - would also work, too.

The best thing about all of these agencies is that their mission is very defined: and can be phased out when the need passes.

Taming inflation is pretty doable for a fiscally responsible government that can redenominate the currency. Aka reintroducing the gold standard while doing austerity. I mean, it wouldn’t be popular and it would have other drawbacks, but it would work.

Even worse, many people identify pro-inflation policies as tools that could cut inflation. The only realistic path to curbing inflation seems like aggressive monetary policy being less tied to public opinion. I suppose I could hold out hope that Republicans could cut social spending in 2025, but I'd expect that to come with tax cuts that would offset any savings anyway.

That's a terrible poll. Number 1 is "increasing domestic oil production", which depending on how you do it could increase, decrease, or keep inflation the same. The next one, "investing in strengthening the supply chain" is vague to the point of uselessness.

It's definitely not a given that monetarism and democracy are compatible, laying the fate of the nation on the idea that people are wise enough to vote themselves into misery instead of just throwing the whole system into the fire doesn't sound like a good bet to me.

I'd rather go the Austrian way and not trust anyone to plan the size of the money supply, but right now there's nothing to do but hope that we can ruin ourselves quick enough to avoid more ruination.

American Congress could stop funding the Ukraine war and stop sanctioning Russian energy and Russian business, and push for negotiations and the end of the war and that would ease some of the pain points.

A recent YouGov poll showed that, regardless of support of opposition, 55% and 52% of Americans respectively believe that increasing domestic oil production and "investing in strengthening the supply chain" would lower inflation. Increasing domestic oil production may lower energy prices but this is the kind of thing that takes years. Companies are intentionally limiting their drilling operations to avoid having a crash like in 2014, and they aren't going to drill beyond their current long-term plans unless there's some kind of subsidy, which would be inflationary in the short term. I don't know what "investing in strengthening the supply chain" means but any time people talk about investing in a political context it normally means more government spending which, again, would be inflationary in the short term regardless of its long-term effects.

Next up, 47 and 44% of respondents, respectively, thought that fining companies for price gouging and having the government enforce limits on price increases would lower inflation. I won't comment on the appropriateness of price gouging laws generally, but those that do exist aim to prevent sharp price increases of goods in limited supply in situations where there are acute shortages. It's hard to argue that price increases of a few extra percentage points annually (or even 20% annually) is price gouging in the traditional sense. Enforcing price controls sounds good in theory until you go to the grocery store and discover they're out of half of the items on your list. Those price tags look good, though.

Those are actually fairly reasonable, though, because next we have a couple of real doozies. 38% of Americans believe that cutting taxes would decrease inflation, compared with only 19% who believe it would make it worse and 17% who believe there would be no change. And 35% believe that lowering interest rates would curb inflation, compared with 25% who think it would make matters worse and 14% who believe it would have no effect. I'll let those ones speak for themselves. On the other side of the coin, 31% believe raising interest rates actually helps inflation compared to 32% who think it makes matters worse. 29% believe that reducing the number of foreign imports would cut inflation compared to 22% who believe the opposite. The only semi-reasonable position on the whole list is that 33% believe reducing spending on social services would help, compared to 17% who believe it would make things worse.

avoid having a crash like in 2014,

Was that one Saudi caused?

Is this the same poll the_nybbler was complaining about below?

It can’t just be poor phrasing, because some of those beliefs are pretty unambiguous. It probably isn’t mere partisanship, because Have You Seen Gas Prices Lately has been universal, and partisan criticism has been focused on doing something/anything rather than on efficacy. There’s a case for economic illiteracy—raising rates means I pay more, so it must be inflationary, right?

Regardless, it’s depressing.

Yeah, it's the same poll, and it's totally economic illiteracy. I'm no fan of Biden but when I talk to conservatives about inflation they assume that Democratic "big government" spending policy is the cause of this mess and that it will abate as soon as Republicans take control of congress. While there's certainly an argument for less spending these people inevitably point to Trump-era pandemic policies that have already ended. I don't know how many times I heard that the labor shortage was caused by enhanced unemployment benefits months after those benefits had ended, or how the eviction moratorium was an issue even though the hated Democrat Tom Wolf signed an order ending it well before anyone was complaining about it.

Keep in mind that elections are not just a tool for choosing forward-looking policies, but also for punishing or rewarding successful or failed policies. It may be the case that what inflation we get is mostly baked into the cake, but firing the chefs that mixed up that batch of ingredients (often enough, while denying that inflation is any concern at all!) is a useful incentive for future politicians not to make the same recipe.

Unfortunately the cake has been baking for a long time. Biden, Trump, and probably Obama have all contributed. But people don't understand this, and so they just blame whoever is in power when it happens. The Fed definitely screwed up not raising interest rates earlier, but making it subject to short-term political whims is not going to be an improvement.

Well, that is why the Fed is designed to be relatively immune to short-term political considerations; for example, Fed governors serve 14-year terms, and cannot be reappointed.

OTOH, it is worth mentioning that inflation affects different groups differently (eg: borrowers at fixed terms are helped by inflation, and the real value of their payments decline over time. Lenders and people on fixed income are hurt by inflation. And, since inflation affects different sectors differently, their are always relative winners and losers. And, of course, a recessionary anti-inflation policy harms some people more than others; some people are far more at risk of being laid off than others are. So, even a policy that says, "the Fed should prioritize fighting inflation, even if unemployment rises" is itself a political decision.

And since the Fed is supposed to be independent, I doubt they can just outright say to Congress "If you pass X bill, you're making our job harder, please don't do that."

Surely there's backchannels that allow the same communication to take place, but it would look a bit suspicious if the Fed was taking open policy 'positions' based on their supposed impact on the rate of inflation.

The Fed was openly asking Congress to do more fiscal stimulus during the last recession. They comment on this stuff all the time.

The government's policy economic policy has been so nutty that it's hard to believe inflation is not a policy goal. The trillions of dollars freshly printed and handed to people to *not * work immediately turbocharged the price of every equity and commodity. Instead of slowly raising rates early to counter the effect of unprecedented helicopter money and restrictions imposed on economic activity, they waited until a recession started so that they can see what it's like to hike into it. Energy is even worse. Governments are telling oil & gas companies that they need to invest in capacity, but also that they're going to shut it down in 10 years. I don't have a tendency to overestimate government officials, but nobody is this stupid.

I've been saying this for years, but every government policy makes sense if you assume they believe its going to fail in the next 10-15 years, and they're just looting all the valuables off to their hidden vaults while insisting everyone remain calm the eastern offensive is going to turn around.

None of the hard decisions about social security, Medicare, defense spending, the petrodollar, the deficit, the national debt, all the unfunded public employee pensions, the everything bubble, the housing bubble etc. are going to be solved before the next massive recession hits just as the boomers are all retiring...

This is the most favorable government cashflow is ever going to be (all the boomers are at the top of their career and peak tax paying) and the government's still insolvent. over the next 5-10 years all those valuable boomers are going to turn from the highest earning assets, into the largest liabilities any citizen has ever been in any nation...combine that with cold/hot wars with China and Russia, probably another Arab spring in 2023 with rising food costs, the subsequent hit to global oil markets... that's it.

The libertarians and fiscal hawks were saying we only had 30 years in the 90s, 20 years in the 2000s, 10 years in the 2010s... and now its next year or the year after.

.

This is why western governments passed trillion dollar bailouts and gifts to their friends in 2020-21... they expected it was the last time they'd have the power to do it. They're just extracting the last dollops of money and power before the next big political happening kills the golden goose and strips them of power.

Boomers are generally defined as the generation from 1946-1964. Assuming a retirement age of around 65, that would mean over a half of them being retired already, and the rest are hardly going to be at their career peak at this point either.

What's the point of letting r_tarded people restrict oil & gas production while at the same time draining the strategic reserve? Nobody wins except oil & gas firms themselves, and even then only in the short term. Given that these companies have been the favoured whipping boy for politicians everywhere in my lifetime, it would be strange to turn around and reward them now. Especially while the President (lol) simultaneously cries about price gouging on Twitter.

Unless they're simply paying a cost to kill Europe and reward OPEC, it makes no sense. The NS2 event and reaction suggests that this theory may have some merit.

The libertarians and fiscal hawks were saying we only had 30 years in the 90s, 20 years in the 2000s, 10 years in the 2010s... and now its next year or the year after.

Do you have a citation on this? (Especially the implied consensus)

I was hearing about how the entire system was going to fail from deficits, inflation, and the demographic collapse of social security since 2008 when i was still in Gradeschool.

The centrality of the looming death of Social Security and medicare under the boomer's mass retirement has been a fiscal hawk talking point forever.

David Stockman, Regan's Budget manager, has been talking about almost nothing else since the mid-90s. This is also a perennial obsession of anyone related to Austrian economics. Anyone who's work appears at Zero hedge... this a founding narrative of the modern American economic right... and the timeline has not changed like other doom predictions, though several tried to suggest the market wold correct early in anticipation and a lot of people lost money gold speculating that inflation would suddenly hit in like 2012-2014...

But the narrative arc and the timeline of when social security and the empire would collapse under demographic and fiscal weight... that's always been late 2020s early 2030s and maybe a bit sooner if the market notices the gravity kicking in

The trillions of dollars freshly printed and handed to people to *not * work

And not just that; but also in a global production/transit slow-down!!!

The truss case is a bit unusual: The inflation hit very quickly and her policies were a very apparent cause.

The average case is a lot muddier. Prices are sticky and it takes a while for inflation to get noticed. Most nations saw a steady inflation increase since 2020. Many of those nations, like the USA, have new leaders since the inflation started. It's probably the case that some leaders picked known inflationary policies before elections to get more votes (e.g. student forgiveness before the mid-terms), knowing the resulting inflation would be delayed and its cause nebulous.

The Liz Truss case is not particularly unusual for third-world countries - it is just that the post-Brexit UK is the only first-world country to be stupid enough to elect a government that is stupid enough to do what Truss did.

There are a number of relevant differences between the UK and US that mean the punishment for Truss' mini-budget was much faster than it would be for a similarly stupid US government:

  1. The US dollar is the global reserve currency, so it is less likely that a Liz Truss level of stupid would tank the dollar the way the actual Liz Truss tanked the pound.

  2. The US is a less open economy than the UK (mostly because big countries are more self-sufficient than small ones, not for any policy reason) so the impact of a falling dollar on Americans' cost of living is less than the impact of a falling pound on Brit's cost of living.

  3. British mortgages are much less likely to be long-term fixed rates, so the increase in interest rates has a much more immediate impact on household budgets than it would in the US.

Beyond the conflating of money supply inflation, asset price inflation, and consumer price inflation, everyone experiences the erosion of their purchasing power differently and seems to have a weak understanding of how leads and lags affect apparent inflation levels and the tools policy makers can use to combat it.

You can run through all the factors on the supply side, demand side, supply chain issues, protectionism, changing consumer behaviors, shortages & gluts, and so on, and then try to wrap your head around the way money and debt is created/moved/destroyed in the global financial system and how that impacts the money available to consumers with different spending habits, and you'll only realize this is too complex to comprehend.

The simple solution is energy. Energy is directly included in the CPI basket as electricity and fuel, has a significant role other items like transit and air travel, and indirectly affects almost all goods and services as goods need to be manufactured, distributed, stored, and sold, plus people need to move to perform most services.

Fighting inflation generally, but especially for Europe now specifically, can not be done without cheap abundant energy. Draining the SPR was/is the best tool available to the US government to have an immediate effect on inflation however poor a decision that may be in the longer-term strategic context of sustained low oil and gas capex, deteriorating relations with OPEC and Russia, and the strength of the anti-fossil fuel political/social movement in the west.

With debt levels where they are, continued elevated inflation (4%-6%, which doesn't seem like a lot, but it adds up fast) is really the only path forward for major sovereign governments to remain solvent over the coming decade. As long as we are able to produce enough energy, we should avoid major fiscal crises and severe inflation, but that is looking more challenging as time goes by.

Ontario's leader is under heavy fire for playing hardball and preventing educational workers from getting large raises. I don't know the details well, but couldn't one argue this is what fighting inflation looks like?

Only if those raises would otherwise come from new currency (i.e. the Canadian central bank prints new money), which I would assume is not the case. I don't think that has any connection to inflation.

It's not that simple. Tax cuts increase inflation without directly printing more money. Raises are a big component of inflation. If everyone got a 5% raise do you think prices would remain the same?

Monetary inflation isn't the only cause. Demographic turnover (large generation retiring/small-generation aging into the workforce), supply chain restrictions/problems, new regulatory compliance restrictions, and more all can cause wage/price shocks. While you're correct that the monetary solution to those shocks are not popular, there are other actions which can be taken (as appropriate) which combat non-monetary wage/price shocks - trade policy, onshoring of industry, immigration policy, etc.

American midterm election predictions?

Does anyone wish to use this space to register predictions for outcomes in tomorrow's American midterm elections?

Personally, I take a kind of efficient markets approach to this stuff, so I'll defer to the betting consensus. But if you want your time-stamped judgment registered as part of the official Motte record, here's your chance!

Mods - please feel free to remove if you don't think this is a good fit for the space.

I'll make the relatively tame, if potentially controversial here, prediction that we get a split congress just barely, 60% confidence. I think the incentive of pollsters has become to slightly favor the republicans because if they favor the democrats and the republicans win it's much worse for them than the alternative. Seems most places are giving R a slight edge so I'll give D a slight edge. I probably wouldn't stake more than a hundred bucks on this though.

edited:lose->win

If polling aggregators are a thing you find interesting, here are links to 538's 2022 Election Forecast page and RealClearPolitics' Election Central 2022 page.

If you're going to be glued to the television/internet tomorrow evening, and want to know what races to watch as early indicators, here's an hour-by-hour breakdown from Decision Desk HQ, and their General Results homepage. The night will begin at 7 PM EST with a trio of key Congressional races in Virginia, and the Governor and Senate statewide races in Georgia. At 7:30, start looking for returns from North Carolina and Ohio.

One of the reasons DDHQ is one of the best locations for US election returns is that their analysis pays particular attention to margins of victory, not just winners and losers, in forecasting outcomes on election night. Sure, a particular county might always vote Republican, but if the margin is R+5 on the night in question, that's very bad news for Republicans if the county was R+15 in 2016. You'll also see a lot of "if this race is called early for the Democrat, that's good news for the D party; but if the call is delayed, that's good news for Rs" or vice versa, depending on the race in question.

If you're going to be glued to the television/internet tomorrow evening, and want to know what races to watch as early indicators,

My plan is to turn off TV/devices in the early evening and review the results when I wake up on Wednesday morning. If experience is any guide, though, I'll be refreshing the standard real-time update feeds compulsively until 2 am.

If you're going to be glued to the television/internet tomorrow evening,

BWAHAHA nope. I'm going to find a way to enjoy the nice weather and literally not think about it. I'm also pretty confidence it won't have a major impact on my life either way. Besides, I teach a class at the gym and I like my students better.

Not passing judgment on anyone who enjoys it as a spectator sport, with the understanding they have no influence on outcome though.

I expect mild Republican 'overperformance' (defined here as 'winning a few races that were considered likely Dem wins). I don't think we see any surprise Dem victories at the federal level.

I officially expect the GOP to control the Senate. I will not be terribly surprised if they get 54 votes total. I'm with you as to believing the markets are correct. Indeed, I suspect the markets are a little underconfident. If they've priced in the risk of fraud and recounts then it's hard to see how we get any scenario other than GOP house and Senate, with small possibility of Dem Senate.

The two races I am particularly interested in as 'bellwethers' are New York and Arizona Governor. If Kari Lake wins I think that's proof positive of a 'red wave.' If Hochul loses... we're in a red tsunami scenario. I expect Lake to win. 60% confidence.

I also expect Herschel Walker to win by an unexpectedly large margin. Anyone showing up on election day that is undecided will be likely to go with him. He's got more name positive name recognition in Georgia than any other person I could try to name.

Oh, I am also officially predicting that Florida will get it's count done (i.e. able to definitely declare victory in all state and federal-level races) on election day or shortly thereafter (before noon the next day), there won't be a need for a recount, and there will be no major voter fraud (defined at 1000 or more 'false' votes in any given county) detected. 90% confidence on all of the above as a group.

PLEASE call me out on this if I'm wrong, I'm feeling extremely confident in my calibration, which is weird for me.

I'm going to guess that certain other states will have a harder time getting done on day of.

Oh, I am also officially predicting that Florida will get it's count done (i.e. able to definitely declare victory in all state and federal-level races) on election day or shortly thereafter (before noon the next day), there won't be a need for a recount, and there will be no major voter fraud (defined at 1000 or more 'false' votes in any given county) detected. 90% confidence on all of the above/

They did exactly that in 2020, because they allow counting of mail-in votes early. States which didn't allow such counting took several days. Apparently this was evidence of fraud despite being pointed out by 538 at least a week before the election.

Welllll they (which is to say, specifically, Desantis) also booted the Election Officials in Broward and Palm Beach County that made 2018 more fucky than it should have been.

https://www.flgov.com/2019/01/18/governor-ron-desantis-issues-executive-orders-suspending-palm-beach-county-supervisor-of-elections-susan-bucher-and-accepting-resignation-of-dr-brenda-snipes/

I'm not going to repeat my arguments around that, feel free to read the context here:

https://www.themotte.org/post/133/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/19658?context=8#context

Also, this is the first election year that the FDLE's Elections Crimes Unit has been active, so I can't see any way that attempting to cheat this year will be worth the risk.

When I say it was evidence of fraud, I meant it was asserted to be evidence of fraud in other states that went for Biden. One example can be seen here since the original was deleted.

AFAICT whether or not someone claims an election was valid or secure or whatever, is pretty much 100% determined by whether their preferred candidate one. It's just blatantly obvious confirmation bias from every corner, to the point where legitimate concerns probably end up overlooked. I don't have time to read your whole other post now, but "the governor instituted a bunch of election reforms right after almost losing an election" probably doesn't sound like the defense you think it does.

This is largely a prediction that the races in Florida won't be very close.

Yes.

I've been saying this for literal months.

https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2021/11/17/milestone-moment-republicans-officially-overtake-democrats-in-florida-1394072

Late calls require both a level of slow counting and a very close election. FL won't have any of the latter, and therefore they almost surely won't have late calls.

All you're telling me is that I'm being under confident at 90%.

Which sucks for FL voters who don't get a meaningful say in their government.

I find your addition of these little barbs to be mildly amusing.

Florida has, under Desantis, an absolutely insane amounts of economic growth, with generally minimal government intervention. Find me a single 'objective' metric under which Florida has gotten worse since 2018 and I might, MIGHT cede you a point.

The recovery from Hurricane Ian (ONE MONTH AGO) has been mindbogglingly fast considering the damage it did.

The Democrats haven't been able to put up anybody who could possibly pose a reasonable alternative to what Florida currently has. They're rerunning an old, formerly republican governor as their candidate.

I genuinely think you're bemoaning the fact that the population of a state actually likes their political representatives and is, therefore, rewarding them.

Which in my book means that most of the people feel like they have quite the meaningful say indeed.

More damning for the Dems, this appears to cross racial lines as well.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2022-election/floridas-hispanic-voters-back-desantis-crist-support-marthas-vineyard-rcna53493

https://news.yahoo.com/poll-florida-gov-desantis-approval-234111941.html

I don't think you have a leg to stand on in arguing that a GOP sweep is somehow not representative of Florida voter's political preferences.

It's not like some people in Florida don't support Democrats.

And they will have their representatives and they will have their local governments composed of dem-friendly candidates.

It would make no sense for them to have a majority if they aren't representing a majority of the voters.

It's bad when elections don't matter, and incumbents just get put back in office with no competition.

Hmm. I wonder what I'd find if I looked at those Dem-leaning districts and checked incumbent win rates, especially at local levels.

Your point is fine, but you're aiming it at a state where it might apply less than average. Florida was considered 'purple' for decades.

I don't think I need to make a point about the current makeup of the Federal Congress and incumbency advantages.

Which sucks for FL voters who don't get a meaningful say in their government.

I literally don't understand this, even reading your clarifications below. Does no voter get a meaningful say unless an election is close?

I live in Oregon, which is (usually) heavily weighted against my interests, and it does usually seem to not matter whether or not I vote. But that doesn't mean that the majority of progressives who win almost everything here didn't get a meaningful say, it just means I'm in the minority (hopefully not this time).

I don't necessarily believe in "if this happens, it's definitely a blowout" with regards to the NY governor race. I agree Hochul is likely to win but NY, like the rest of New England in a more exaggerated way, has interesting local political dynamics and because of the distribution of the city/suburbs/upstate split a relatively modest discontentment with the (perceived) weak-on-crime policies of the Democrats in the city and even moreso the suburbs could put a Republican in the governor's mansion.

Alls I'm saying is that I expect a Hochul loss to strongly correlate with a "GOP wins 54 senate seats" scenario.

I have paid virtually zero attention to the ground-level politics in New York.

Red Congress. GOP wins 52 Senate seats and 232 House seats. I'm basically going by Fivethirtyeight aggregations with an estimation of slight GOP overperformance.

Blake Masters has had shocking overperformance despite Mitch McConnel and the GOP establishment basically withdrawing all support from him (its a 50-50 race and they're spending nothing on it)

If there was anywhere I'd expect the republican leaning polsters to be systematically undercounting out of ideological affiliation and to demoralize it'd be there... Predictit has it at 47-53 odds against masters, so its already neck and neck and any ideological thumb on the scale of the polls would mean masters is positioned to win

Didn't Thiel spend $14M or something on Masters' campaign? Fair to note that establishment has abandoned him, but he certainly isn't unfunded.

Ya Theil will basically have his own private senator if masters wins... which we'd expect anyway, given Masters was the one who wrote his book

Kelly had spent more than twice that by July. Masters is extremely underfunded for a competitive Senate candidate.

With Milwaukee County giving other areas of the state the heads up that they're going to be reporting their final results after the rest of the state is done, I'm expecting another episode of whatever this is.

To clear, I'm not darkly hinting - I expect Milwaukee to count things up late, I expect that Milwaukee is 80% Democrat or higher, and I expect a similarly goofy looking curve to result. Republicans will look at this as obvious fraud, Democrats will look at it as a totally normal thing to happen with a large tranche of D votes dropping late at night, and it might be enough to push Evers and Barnes to victories. I don't really have a strong opinion on whether anything shady is actually happening, but I think it looks awful and should have been reformed as soon as the bizarre 2020 result happened. This isn't even difficult to do - nearby Dane County has almost as many absentee ballots, but counts them quickly because they don't centralize the process. No one familiar with Dane and Milwaukee Counties will be surprised that Dane's handling is fast and efficient while Milwaukee's is comically ridiculous and damages trust.

The 2020 election had quite a few actual irregularities in addition to the aesthetic I presented, such as a quarter million people doing an end-run around normal ID procedures by claiming to be indefinitely confined. The sitting governor has consistently vetoed bills targeted at reducing fraud; in some cases, I think the pretexts for doing so are incredibly thin and it mostly just comes down to oppositional defiance. Edit - In other cases, I think the bills are pretty stupid, I'm not saying these are all good measures.

If you want me to state my best guess, it's that I don't think there is very much actual vote fraud in Wisconsin. My reason for saying that I don't feel strongly about that position is that while I don't see great evidence for there being widespread vote fraud, I don't think it's great that we have a system that plausibly could be exploited and actual results that are pretty weird looking. In my dream world, we'd knock it off with the adoption of mass mail voting, or at least knock it off with the loophole that allows avoiding identification. Given the current procedures, I have no idea how you'd go about detecting many types of fraud; if I moved out of Wisconsin next year, it seems like I'd have zero trouble continuing to vote in Wisconsin and the governor opposes measures that would prevent that.

So again, I don't personally think there's actually widespread fraud, but I think we're going to have shaky optics and plausible reasons for Republicans to be pissed off.

That's one example, which almost certainly was (IMO) people saying "I'm staying at home due to COVID, so that's me being confined due to illness, sure."

I agree. I don't think that was actually legal and I'm highly skeptical that these people actually confined themselves to their homes indefinitely, but I will absolutely grant that this is both the mostly likely reason for the spike and could reasonably be tolerated in 2020. My complaint isn't that it was tolerated in 2020, but that this loophole wasn't closed in 2022, which gives the appearance of bad faith and allowing avoidance of IDs.

Wisconsin's election results don't have any of those weird patterns.

They actually did. There probably is some cogent explanation for the weird patterns there, but they are actually are weird!

Again though, I really don't need to relitigate 2020, I would just strongly prefer that we stop using a system that's more or less guaranteed to get results that have terrible optics when it's pretty easy to just not do that. The refusal to correct these sorts of things is actually more suspicious to me than anything that I see in 2020.

It was a recent switch. Note that the other two counties in the initial picture that were still counting (Brown and Kenosha) are also on the list of counties that switched. I'm sure there is a logistical reason that they wanted to do so and it probably simplified something, but it seems more like it should be, "we tried that and it worked poorly" than something that has to be maintained for historical reasons.

I read /u/walterodim as saying something like “Whether or not anything shady is happening, it’s going to look like it is. My point is that this appearance is bad in itself. However, I don’t want to get sidetracked into an object-level debate about whether anything actually shady is happening, so I’ll refrain from expressing a view on this” (probably because they have neither time nor inclination, something I can empathise with).

That was my understanding as well.

That was more or less my feeling, but here I am, getting sidetracked anyway! That anyone looks at that 2020 graph and thinks, "yeah, probably a good plan, let's run it back with no changes" is wild to me.

but I think it looks awful and should have been reformed as soon as the bizarre 2020 result happened.

I maintain, the best way around this trying to glean information out of vote totals almost minute by minute is simply that no vote tallies are released anywhere until all counting is complete. There is too much noise for anyone watching externally to know whether something is legitimate, fraudulent or just weird. All it creates is the opportunity for narratives to be fitted (either way!) We can do reveal parties with Red or Blue cakes or balloons or whatever.

The switch over doesn't happen for months. There is no need to actually know on the night who wins what.

I would also advocate mandatory free federal government IDs for all citizens, mandatory ID checking for voting and mandatory voting. Massively reduces opportunities for fraud AND boosts democratic legitimacy because everyone has to vote. Hits the Republican "make it more secure" AND the Democrat "Don't disenfranchise people" buttons. Then we can really see how America would vote as a whole.

Mandatory voting is probably unconstitutional and is in any event likely to be hugely unpopular with Republicans, since conventional wisdom is that Republican demos usually have better turnout.

Likewise, free federal voter IDs are likely to be opposed on pragmatic grounds (e.g. NC voter id laws, which were targeting at obstructing Democratic demos) and on ideological grounds (federal voter ID means federal voter ID database).

I know, that's why I had both in there. Things both sides want as well as things both sides don't want.

Almost certainly will never happen of course. If you want really good security when voting that means a Federal database. One pulling from the IRS and other things so that people who move are properly tracked. It's pretty much how it works in the UK when updating the electoral register we could pull directly from death registrations, Council Tax info, the equivalent of Section 8 (housing benefit records) and the like. If you want to be sure someone is eligible to vote in place A and cannot vote in place B, then you need to track where they are and when.

It would be a bitter pill for both parties to swallow, but also gives them something they want. Higher turnout for Democrats and Increased security for Republicans. Whether it is unconstitutional wouldn't be a problem because in whatever world we were in where both parties agreed the compromise they would have the ability to make an amendment or just kludge it at the Supreme Court level. That world just to be clear is not this world though.

It seems to me that this could be accomplished without compelling states to do anything - create a federal database, assign federal IDs, allow states to participate on a voluntary basis. I would certainly advocate that my state sign up for it, and by participating in such a system, you could increase confidence that your state isn't getting illegitimate voters.

I am vigorously against compulsory voting because I think the marginal non-voter is (to be blunt) an absolute moron. I would generally prefer driving down participation in any way that doesn't seem likely to cause social upheaval. Of course, at some point we're bumping into the more basic question of what the point of democracy is in the first place, but none of the answers that I come up with make true universal voting sound appealing to me.

I am vigorously against compulsory voting because I think the marginal non-voter is (to be blunt) an absolute moron.

Morons are citizens too. Smart productive citizens can navigate whatever setup happens. Morons should have a say in making sure their society is set up for them. Democracy isn't about getting the best answers in my opinion. It's about getting the answers that work for the majority of your people. And those may be stupid and counterproductive. And that is ok.

I've heard an alternative take, which is: "Democracy is how we get different groups of people with widely-varying value systems to live in the same place without violent conflict." It's like, every N years, we have a mini civil war, except instead of actually shooting/stabbing/punching each other, we just line up everybody's troops on opposite sides of the battlefield, and whoever brings the biggest army wins, and we all agree to go home without bloodshed until the next regularly-scheduled civil war.

One can argue that there's no point in including people who are indifferent to politics in this process, because they're not the ones likely to start an actual war over anything.

On the other hand, one can argue that if we did make everybody show up, the issues being discussed would be more mainstream and less fringe. Wedge issues like trans rights, gun control, and abortion might be much less salient.

That definitely is another consideration, agreed. I think though that people's level of disengagement of politics can be a warning sign. They might not start a war, but they may very well opt out of the social contract entirely, if they feel they are not represented.

Mandatory voting would permit massive law enforcement harassment, particularly if the mandatory voting is only in person (as insinuated by your id-check requirement). With that said, I think the free government ID and mandatory ID check to vote, plus "make election day a federal holiday" and "standardizing election days" would all be good ideas.

mandatory voting.

I have reservations about mandatory voting, but if implemented, I think it might have the effect of improving the quality of the national political conversation.

Basically, I get the sense that, at some point around the late '90s, national political campaigns came to understand that changing someone's vote from R to D (or vice versa!) is actually really hard, and it's more effective for the D campaign to encourage high D turnout. Driving D turnout requires impressing upon D voters that the upcoming election is crucially important, which means convincing D voters that an R victory will be a total catastrophe (the end of democracy).

Mandatory voting would change campaigns' incentives to reward actually changing voters' minds, which could help lower the temperature in the country.

I have high confidence that I will enjoy the lunar eclipse that morning (it's visible across most of the US).

I have much less confidence that the Republicans will somewhat outperform their expectations (at least 53 Senate seats and 235 house seats). The odd thing, is I live in an area that votes 70% for one party, and typically there are a half dozen signs in my neighborhood for that party's candidates. However, this year there has only been a single election sign put up in my neighborhood and it is for the candidate in the other party.

The betting markets diverge quite a bit from the polling aggregation / model at FiveThirtyEight, giving greater odds of Republican victories.

Some possible reasons for market divergence:

  • Shy Republican / Eager Democrat effects on pollsters. Perhaps those planning to vote Republican are more likely to hide it or decline the poll, and Dems are excited to have their politics represented in the poll.

  • Polls may be inaccurately weighting different demographic groups.

  • Betters may be overeager to see Republican victories and let that influence the bets they make.

  • Betters are using non-polling signals like early turnout figures to inform their bets.

What else could explain the divergence between the betting markets and the polls?

Betters may be overeager to see Republican victories and let that influence the bets they make.

I can't see how this can be squared with "and smart actors see this opportunity and place bets on the other side to drive the price back towards equilibrium" if true. Someone on the other side might want to jump on their miscalculation.

Although you can definitely argue the markets aren't fully liquid or something.

Betters are using non-polling signals like early turnout figures to inform their bets.

Seems likely. Possible that some of them have studied FiveThirtyEight's model and noticed factors it doesn't capture/underweights. I dunno.

How many smart actors are in political betting, anyway. I think it's mostly wishcasting by feverent partisans. It's best used as a gauge for enthusiasm of the core base. Ceremonially igniting your cash on a bonfire to signal faith in your tribe is worth something (and if you actually win, bonus!)

I bet in antiquity, people would watch the smoke rising from the temples to gauge which Babylonian cult was on the ascendency. It's much the same here.

I think it's mostly wishcasting by feverent partisans.

Uhhh if that's true, then you'd expect it to attract smart actors who want to fleece said partisans.

You're basically suggesting that there's a giant pool of suckers betting thousands of dollars and somehow this hasn't attracted predators seeking easy money.

Like, you, yourself. If you strongly believe it's just partisans, why not throw some money in there betting against the crowd and reap some profits?

It's all of the above, or at least that's why the betting market is the state that it is. Problem is that there's no way to know whether the 55% or the 65% of Republicans winning is correct.

Nate Silver has a very thoughtful write up about his own uncertainties regarding his model.

I'll go with slight Republican over performance against 538's predictions but not a Red tsunami. I do think abortion will cap the wave just a touch. Fundamentals point to a Republican Senate and House. Bad economy, unpopular president, mid-terms often swinging away from the governing party. Plus some unforced errors. Putting Fetterman into debate for example. Whichever aide allowed that should be fired. Ducking the debate looks bad, but his performance was worse. So they should have sucked it up, talked about how debating Oz not worth his time to give Democrat leaners an excuse to believe and moved on. He may still win but it is looks to be much closer than it should have been as Oz is not a good candidate himself.

So 53-54 seats in the Senate, 235ish in the house. But it does depend on how the pollsters have been adjusting their polls. Silver claims they have been trying to unskew the Democratic lean they had recently, but if they get that dynamic wrong (in either direction!) , with poll herding it is possible the whole thing is way off.

Registering a series of Texas specific predictions-

Republicans win every statewide office and every competitive local race, including federal house- 70%. I count federal house districts 15 and 34 as competitive, along with the Tarrant and Harris county judgeships. I do not count the Dallas county judge race as competitive.

Republicans have enough of a majority in the house that Dade Phelan is in serious danger of losing the speakership- 60%.

Cuellar loses reelection- 25%

No statewide Republican has less than a 9% margin of victory- 90%.

Abbott beats Beto- 99%.

Paxton beats Garza- 90%.

Democrats claim vote rigging centered around Harris county- 40%.

Harris county elections monitors do anything to justify their presence- 25%.

Republicans win a higher percentage of the Hispanic vote than 2014- 50%.

Federal investigation into Harris county elections monitoring- 20%.

Tarrant county goes red at the top of the ticket(all three of governor, county judge, and prosecutor)- 55%.

Harris county goes red in at least one statewide race- 50%.

Paxton is the lowest performing statewide Republican- 60%.

Beto wins less than 40%- 30%.

Notability threshold for claim of vote rigging- a statewide candidate, the statewide party, Lina Hidalgo, editorial board of a major dem-aligned newspaper(Texas monthly, Texas tribune, or Houston Chronicle), US house member from Harris County, or high ranking democrat(committee chair/former committee chair) in the state house.

Harris county elections monitors doing anything would entail a criminal complaint being filed, recount specific to a precinct or precincts, or an election-related case going to the courts that would change the outcome of at least one election.

I’ll also clarify the speakership prediction- Dade Phelan will be considered to have a serious challenger if there is a speaker candidate with support from at least 20 House of Representatives members who is a republican.

Beto wins less than 40%- 30%.

Hard to imagine him doing that bad but I guess the polls allow that in the margin of error.

That’s why it’s only 30%.

I would take the bet at those odds.

You pay 30 if above 40% I pay 70 if below.

Not saying you're incorrectly calibrated.

House: GOP win. As a matter of policy for the next two years, I don't really think the precise number of seats will matter much. Despite Dem's thin margin right now, I don't recall any crucial vote being held up by a handful of Congressmen the House over the last two years. Of course, having a larger buffer may make keeping the House easier in 2024 due to incumbent advantages, but policy-wise I expect all that matters is which party wins it and not by how much.

Senate: 70% 51 GOP, 30% Dem keep with 50-50 seats. I laugh at prediction markets that bet on 53, 54, or even more GOP seats. I mean yes, it's possible, but the realm of possible also includes 48 or 49 GOP seats. Senate control will matter tremendously for confirmations. If a SCOTUS justice dies or somehow retires before 2024, I expect a GOP Senate to refuse a hearing, unless Biden appointed a truly middle-of-the-road swing vote justice, which I expect he would not do, given he has shown very little inclination to moderation so far into his presidency. Appellate court appointees will probably get hearings, but I expect Biden would be forced to nominate center-left rather than left judges to these posts to ensure timely confirmation.

Governorship and state houses: Net gain for GOP. Besides favorable national environment, the GOP tended to invest more in state and local races. I don't have enough insight to predict how much the gain is or specifically where.

I've been specifically trying to avoid all but local/sports-related news for mental health reasons, but my read of the situation on the ground is that Democrats in my ordinarily "safe" blue state seem nervous. They've been really hammering on the Roe v Wade decision and "Election Deniers" but it doesn't seem to be getting any traction. Crime and the economy are issues 1 and 2 according to recent voter surveys in my state and the GOP has consistently polled better on those issues. I expect the GOP to significantly outperform polling/forecasts, but I am skeptical of this leading to a Reagan-esque "red wave". I'm guessing GOP takes the House, with an even-split/slim GOP majority in the Senate.

They've been really hammering on the Roe v Wade decision and "Election Deniers" but it doesn't seem to be getting any traction.

I realize that I'm incredibly biased in my own way and have my own information bubble, but it really seems like the whole "election denier" and "insurrection" narrative is just not very appealing to centrist normies. Regardless of the facts on the ground, the narrative just sounds weird and conspiratorial to quite a few people. I've seen people in my state's subreddit asking why Mandela Barnes doesn't pound how Ron Johnson delivering "fake electors" and I really think it's because the story takes awhile to explain and sounds super weird. That's kind of interesting in its own right - if there really was a failed coup attempt, I think most of the grilling class would look at people are really mad about it they're the weirdos.

Likewise, it seems to me that going on at length about January 6th too strongly invites people to think about which side of the political spectrum they seem to recall having some affiliation with riots in 2020.

To me it seems utterly tone deaf when the voters are concerned with economic instability to be focusing so much on events from two years ago and generally declining to lay out the plan for keeping the average person afloat in the next couple years.

Especially since so many of the participants in J6 are getting sizable prison sentences and otherwise being punished for their activities, so lingering on it this long seems excessive, especially to those who might have been sympathetic to the grievances that led to that 'insurrection.'

And there's definitely an undercurrent where touting trans issues has resulted in the Dems having the albatross of "you want to help pubescent children gender-transition and keep their parents out of the loop if necessary" tied around their neck.

I can barely think of a more hot-button issue than the safety and health of people's children which the Democrats have found out the hard way with Covid measures already, and I don't think the message that "your kids should be turned over to the state if you don't allow them to undergo invasive surgery and injection of puberty blockers and hormones" is a winner except for the lefties who are already bought into that particular narrative.

The narrative doesn’t appeal to normies because normies think they’re hypocrites. Older ones remember ‘the only difference between Hitler and bush is Hitler was elected’, Stacey abrams comes off as ‘fat black lady who claimed Georgia elections were rigged and then got mad at everyone for claiming Georgia elections were rigged’, most people don’t think J6 was a coup attempt, etc. Bothsidesism is a potent weapon for defusing ‘danger to democracy’ talk, and the grillpilled public believes it.

The omens favor Republicans. The meaning cannot be mistaken, none other than the spiritual death and overthrow of the King! I confidently predict that the tides will rise for the right, but a price will be exacted in blood.

53 R - 47 D Senate. Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania Arizona all go to the GOP but New Hampshire, Colorado, Washington, etc. stay Blue. Republicans end up at 235 seats in the House (give or take). Governorships are going to be where the biggest gains are. Republicans flip Wisconsin, Oregon, Nevada, and hold Arizona. They don't get Whitmer, Zeldin loses New York. Democrats keep New Mexico but it's closer than expected. Kansas might go GOP, it's where I'm most uncertain.

What if running a social media platform — that both turns a profit and does good for society — has a higher degree of difficulty than rocket science? I mean, rocketry demands deep understanding of the laws of physics, knowledge that few people have, but nonetheless knowledge that exists in a formally verifiable sense. Meanwhile, the laws of social science haven’t yet been well-defined, if they exist.

With 50% confidence, I estimate that Elon Musk has hit the “Peter Principle” — “Every manager rises to their level of incompetence.”

My reasoning: Mr Musk has a particularly unique perspective on the value of Twitter because he, even before he ever considered buying it, extracts more value from it than anyone else, perhaps excluding pre-ban Donald Trump.

While Tesla’s competitors have multi-million dollar advertising budgets, Elon Musk’s use of Twitter to promote Tesla (and SpaceX and the rest of his portfolio) works better and has historically cost him $0.

Certainly, Mr Musk has company in the set of people who derive “monetary value” (as distinguished from “entertainment value”) from Twitter. Most of his contemporaries in the tech industry — CEOs, investors — would happily pay $800/mo for Twitter. And NGO execs, journalists, “public intellectual” academics, and politicians who can expense the cost to their institutions will likewise follow suit.

But just how many members of the public actually derive significant value from using Twitter? I think that for many, Twitter usage gets thought of as “time-wasting while bored” or “compulsive behavior” or even “addiction”. Given a demand to pay in order to get any attention, I think that many people will feel grateful that they have been nudged in the direction of disengagement. But of course, I may be wrong, hence why I chose to write out my thoughts and share them with this thoughtful community.

What if running a social media platform — that both turns a profit and does good for society — has a higher degree of difficulty than rocket science?

Almost certainly. In fact, running a social network that does good for society may be intractable alone, putting profit aside.

This tweet by UN Women.

Of all journalists killed in 2021, 11% were women. In 2020, this was 6%. (Source: @UNESCO)

On the International Day to #EndImpunity for Crimes against Journalists, let us say out loud:

𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐏

𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆

𝐖𝐎𝐌𝐄𝐍

𝐉𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐒

I am still confused as to whether this tweet is a sincere sentiment felt by someone somewhere or an A/B tested string designed to be maximally infuriating/alienating to the largest number of people.

Here is my dissection as to why this tweet is especially infuriating.

  • No mention of base rates. Which would be a crucial piece of information to parse such a statistic. FYI, women tend to make up ~40% of journalists.

  • (Probably intentionally) misleading the usage of a ratio instead of a percentage. A percentage is a meaningful statistic when comparing a rate change of something. If x journalists were killed in t year, and x+a journalists were killed in t+1 year, you could say that the "more journalists were killed, a increase of b %"

    Instead have a look at the numbers.

    2020: 62 journalists killed (58 men, 4 women).

    2021: 55 journalists killed (49 men, 6 women).

    This is textbook 101, lying with statistics. Less JOURNALISTS were killed. Unless you don't care if male journalists are killed. Bonus: They calculated the percentages wrong (: - They rounded down so.. thanks for the fig leaf?

  • No regard for as to whether this change is "statistically significant" (FYI, well within less than 1 stddev).

  • Just goes without saying, the tone-deafness of it. Why not "𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐏 𝐓𝐀𝐑𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐍𝐆 𝐉𝐎𝐔𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐒"?

  • The childish assumption that people who LITERALLY KILL JOURNALISTS will be swayed in any way whatsoever even with a LOUD proclamation of "Don't do bad thing!".

Now jaded you might say "but this is the CW, this is what always happens and will continue to happen". I agree.

In the landscape of twitter/msm only the most ragebait of headlines grab any attention, however I would say that a lot of that ragebait can be just made by applying the principles of making the best clickbait, and they might occur to someone with a certain creative bent naturally.

This tweet on the other hand isn't mere creative distortion. It has all the trappings of being intentionally crafted. Think of it this way. Someone had to go through the statistics of various professions deaths by gender, probably something like;

SELECT occupation FROM occupational_deaths WHERE 2021 > 2020 AND gender LIKE 'Female' GROUPBY occupation;

and "journalist' was the only field that returned.

That is just especially hilarious to me.. The best trolls of our generation might not be 4channers but instead working for various corporate activist organizations.

No mention of base rates. Which would be a crucial piece of information to parse such a statistic. FYI, women tend to make up ~40% of journalists.

I'm guessing women are a much smaller proportion of journalists that report from war zones, piss off mob bosses, etc. It's possible they might get killed at higher rates than men when exposing themselves to such dangers.

However, agreed, this tweet is absurd and smells of p-hacking.

It's also possible that female journalists on average are getting more bold/desperate as the whole industry goes deeper and deeper into shit, and these are more likely to get clipped.

Does this dissection mean you’ve taken the bait?

Assuming that it’s trolling, writing a detailed takedown is a bit silly. If it’s serious, well, Twitter delenda est.

My argument is more along the lines of this is scientifically crafted bait, because you can't make up bait this good without effort.

The cynic in me says it could be serious. It's not like there aren't any priors for the woke coming to absurd conclusions in the past.

It seems likely that this is crafted bait to elicit a reaction that they can use to argue that the problems facing women stem from ‘misinformation’ or ‘lack of awareness’ or something else where the solution is hiring college educated women in first world countries to ‘advocate’.

Yes. From the companion Guardian article pimping the report:

The authors of The Chilling are calling for governments, as well as the news industry and the giant tech corporations, to do more to tackle what they say is “a crisis of online violence towards women journalists”.

It calls out “the victim-blaming and slut-shaming that perpetuates sexist and misogynistic responses to offline violence against women in the online environment, where patriarchal norms are being aggressively reinforced.”

Globally, the research found that nearly three-quarters of the female journalists surveyed had experienced online violence in the course of their work.

the abuse was highly gendered and designed to “humiliate, belittle and discredit” the journalist on both a personal and professional level.

Bontcheva called for the much-delayed online safety bill to be passed urgently as the report laid out a series of other recommendations.

TL;DR, journalists report that criticizing journalists should be a crime, and you criticizing this proves it.

It is the UN (Women's) official tweet. That gives it some gravity_.

Yes, I know that channel has posted other braindead things (is it weird that I can probably write that on reddit, but not 'retarded'?), but it's still kind of shocking to me that something so clearly bad got posted.

UN Women is just what you get when there are no men adults in the room and funding is guaranteed. Just a bunch of ladies trying to out-left each other.

EDIT: To elaborate, when there is zero external feedback, the organization's activities are purely internal status games. Whoever came up with the Tweet may very well have been daring some colleague to criticize it to give the author pretense for an attack.

EDIT: pretense for an attack.

That very well could be the case. However, I am not entirely sure if lowering the sanity waterline for office politics is any better than doing it for the express reason.

This is very strange, and I feel like to any normal person this should sound strange to them, even without knowledge of base rates. I think anyone looking at this would immediately say "wait, doesn't that mean that ~90% of journalists killed each year were men?". I also think that most people would make the assumption, if not stated otherwise, that women account for 50% of journalists and men account for the other 50%. And for it to seem like women journalists were being disproportionately targeted, women would have to account for less than 11% of journalists on a year that 11% were killed. So according to how I believe a normal person would think, anyone should look at this figure and either not care, or get outraged by the fact that they interpreted these figures to indicate there's some sort of epidemic of women journalists being killed or something.

This is one of my big issues with those do-gooder «world government» type organizations, whether incumbent or aspiring like the Effective Altruism blob. «Frightfully distant they are from the people»; they aren't just echo chambers as a result of their evolution, but they are born out of the disconnect with the hoi polloi. Their attitudes and aesthetics turn out alien to most of their subjects and one must wonder whether their values – not just formalizations, but deepest moral intuitions – are as well. They are unaligned collective intelligences.

I don't think this in particular is alien to most of the people. Male expendability is mainstream, and maybe apolitical.

this tweet seems aimed at, like, trump supporters on twitter, when the people who have journalists killed are mob bosses in foreign countries. just very out of touch.

Uh, what? How do you get 'aimed at Trump supporters' out of this?

How do you get 'aimed at Trump supporters' out of this?

We know it's aimed at Americans because Americans represent (a) most people on Twitter, and (b) the cultural / financial hegemon, by that token capable of actually doing something about it (like giving the UN money)

We know it's not aimed at Blue Tribers because Blue Tribers already handle "minority groups" (like women) with kid gloves.

QED, Trump supporters on Twitter

I doubt someone went through various occupations. I think the occupation being journalists is definitely part of the rage. If the statistic was over an increase in number of woman welders who died, that wouldn't spark the same response in the intended audience.

The tweet is a little confusing though, because these small percents really highlight how many of the killed journalists were men, so I'm not sure most people who see this will feel outraged at the dead journalists.

E: cursory glance at comments shows yes most people are a little annoyed it is about women, as opposed to just journalists. If this was crafted bait, it specifically was crafted to have a very slanted gender ratio. If nothing else, this is an effective way to talk about the number of journalists killed.

The violent death of women (and, in this case, presumably most of them are young and single) normally elicists an emotional response the violent death of men doesn't, so I think the sentiment is sincere in this case.

That's a context dependent ingroup justification for why we, the ingroup, happen to deserve our privilege. These arguments don't fly in any context where women are getting the short end of the stick.

The only sentiment that is sincere from feminism is that women are the ingroup and men are the outgroup.

That's basically the same thing. Whoever posted the tweet rather obviously starts from the assumption that the percent of female journalists getting killed in a normal world is 0.

As to whether this tweet is a product of gross incompetence or malicious competence is going to remain a great mystery. Duck test is certainly not working here.

You're giving me flashbacks to Angelina Jolie's campaign to stop rape in war zones. I mean why not just stop war itself while you're at it?

Out of context my first instinct would have been to assume this is a smear campaign designed to make feminism look daft. But I doubt such a smear campaign would have been authored by @UNWomen, unless there is some serious levels of internal fuckery going on.

That's about what I would expect from UN Women, I assure you they're quite sincere and behave with similar intellectual rigor in more consequential ways than just tweets. Off the top of my head their responses to the 2014 Ebola outbreak comes to mind, a search finds this blog post summarizing it. Archive of their report:

In Ebola-affected communities and quarantined areas women should be prioritized in the provision of medical supplies, food, care, social protection measures and psychosocial services.

Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority, you can count on that being their conclusion regardless of situation. Some news articles reported this as if they were more medically vulnerable, but mostly UN Women meant they were vulnerable in some vague social sense, along with implying they might be more medically vulnerable based on some dubious early data (ebola deaths by gender ended up being around equal). That blog post also has some links regarding the UN's decision to only distribute food to women after the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Good luck getting food if you don't have any living and friendly female relatives.

On a lighter note, the "Cyber Violence Against Women and Girls" report from the UN Broadband Commission with "editorial inputs by teams from UN Women, UNDP and ITU" was laughably terrible. Most blatantly regarding the citations, which ranged from "literally blank" or "citing a file on your own hard drive" to referring to "Recent research on how violent video games are turning children, mostly boys, into ‘killing zombies’ 118" based on citing a 2000 article published on a LaRouche website raving about "killings which are caused by the use of Nintendo-style games, such as the game Pokémon,", "satanic video games", etc. For whatever reason feminism within the UN seems unusually incompetent and written without considering potential criticism, the tweet doesn't seem too surprising with that history.

It's a UN entity working for the "empowerment" of "women," safe to say absolutely nobody who doesn't work for it gives one shit what they do, including those who fund it. If it's an entity that only exists for the benefit of its own members, I would expect it to become dumber and dumber over time. Women do not like hiring other women who are smart or disagreeable.

Yep, beat me to it. The UN has a history of gender-discriminatory policy favouring women, and justifying these policies with sophistry and extremely flimsy arguments. In Haiti, the UN's justification for distributing the food to women was to claim (without a shred of evidence) that women were more likely to distribute food equitably, and also that most men had women who would give the food to them. Here's a CNN article reporting on it and laying out some of the UN's justifications.

For my part, I would say it's incoherent to justify this policy with the idea that most men have women who will distribute the food to them, since it's not as if women don't also have men who will distribute food to them too - it can be used to justify it both ways. I for one also think it would have been infinitely better if they distributed the food equitably themselves instead of crossing their fingers and hoping the women would do it for them - maybe they should consider completing their job instead of only doing half of it. But it's mainly covered in a positive manner, with the gender discrimination brushed over as an afterthought or even justified. Even the CNN article approaches it from that angle, despite indications that there were men who were excluded from necessary aid (quoting one who stated "What about me? I didn't get anything. I need food. ... Many people could not participate", completely in contrast to the UN's lip-service claims that they would try to make sure no one in need was excluded).

Additionally, as this blog post from the same author notes, a lot of their already tenuous justifications for women-only food aid in Haiti might have actually been even more questionable in the context of that specific disaster because "due to the timing of the earthquake at 4:53 pm, a high percentage of casualties were women who remained in the household, while men and children were at work or in school, leaving a high percentage of single-male headed households and households with only one, or no remaining breadwinner."

Other mental gymnastics that the UN offered up to justify their actions in Haiti was to claim (again without any substantiation) that women were being pushed out of food lines, but even if we are to charitably interpret the UN and the WFP's statements and assume women being pushed out of line was actually a problem instead of a rationalisation created by an organisation desperately trying to justify their actions, they could've solved this by establishing different food distribution centres for men and for women instead of prioritising women, thus reducing clashes between men and women through sex-segregation while creating no such gender discrimination against men when it came to their food distribution. This is such an easy solution it's hard to imagine them not thinking of it unless all their staff and policy-makers are mentally challenged, and so this is not a satisfactory justification or explanation for the policy.

Rather, I think this is a blatant example of the UN's gender ideology bleeding into their aid programmes. Placing food in the hands of women is part of their attempts to Empower Women. In this 2001 discussion here they talk about the prospect of utilising humanitarian crises to push their gender agenda - and in it, specifically targeting women for the distribution of resources is touched on as one of the possible methods for "empowerment". The concept of using disasters to promote a gender agenda has existed in the UN for a very long time, and the 2010 Haiti earthquake and the 2014 Ebola outbreak were just the instances which the mainstream reported on.

EDIT: clarity

Women are "vulnerable" and thus need to get priority,

I think this may be a utility monster in the wild. That is, due to a group's vulnerable/marginalized/oppressed status, their situation as a whole is more tenuous, and so every harm hurts worse and every help helps better. Therefore they ought to be prioritized for protection from harm and allocation of benefits, because for them, every unit can do more good.

Sort of a triage situation: you want to help the ones (who can be helped and) who need it most.

The tricky thing is that sometimes, this may be true, but it is also something advantageous to get away with claiming whether it is true or not. See, in inverse, "privilege."

Shouldn't the call to action be to target more lady journalists, for equality?

I would have thought women would be as capable of dying as a man.

Hi guys! Have you heard about the Eunuch Archive?

The Eunuch Archive is a friendly support site for the Eunuch Community. Originally a part of the Body Modification E-Zine (with the tagline "the fetish is reality"), since the late 90's they've been hosting erotic fiction by and for people with a kink for being castrated.

Can't say I read a lot of these stories, but going through the titles there seems to be a some amount of "wife gets back at husband", or "help, I've been sold into sex slavery". One theme that stood out was the idea of castration being normalized in the future. For example the user "Jesus" wrote a story "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?", describing the procedure, and praising it's health benefits. The punchline comes at the end (keep in mind the story was written in 2002):

CONCLUSION

The answer to the title "orchiectomy: is it right for you?" is obviously "yes." Most males would benefit dramatically from this minor surgical procedure, adding years to their life expectance and producing a much higher quality of life. Loving parents should seriously consider giving the gift of a bilateral orchiectomy to their sons. They will be grateful that you care enough to do so.

READER'S DIGEST, August 2017, pages 37 - 43.

There also many stories that are far more disturbing, or as they put it themselves:

PLEASE NOTICE! The behaviors depicted in these stories, but not the stories themselves, are likely in real life to be illegal. The stories describe activities that may be considered by society to be abusive, harmful, unacceptable or undesirable. The authors neither advocate, condone nor engage in any such real life illegal behavior. These stories, as is all fiction, are fantasy and not reality. The collectors and authors do recognize the difference between the two. If YOU do not, please seek professional psychiatric care at once.

The summary for one states:

The boys finally meet Eric. The castration laws become more strict, and more boys are castrated.

Although fantasy taking place in an alternative Universe, this story is about minors that are sexually mutilated and contains descriptions of said minors having sex with an adult. If it's not something you want to read, please leave.

Yikes... you can't say they didn't warn you.

Well, I suppose it's better that people get their rocks off on some seedy website. After all it's just fantasy, and the people running the site make it clear they don't condone anyone actually trying to do this sort of stuff.


Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH?

WPATH is the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a non-profit, interdisciplinary professional and educational organization devoted to transgender health. It is often cited in academic literature, and invites the world's top experts in the field to write the standards of care for transgender people.

Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.

Well, I suppose I can't criticize what people do off the clock. Ok, so maybe their academic research was actually still on the clock, but isn't the whole point of academia to explore and document all, even the weirdest corners of society? If they can combine their work with their hobby, all I can say is: good for them!

As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.


Hey guys! Have you heard about the WPATH's latest Standard of Care?

As mentioned above the SOC is a set of guidelines developed by the WPATH with the goal to "provide clinical guidance for health professionals to assist transgender and gender diverse people with safe and effective pathways to achieve lasting personal comfort with their gendered selves, and to maximize their overall health, psychological well-being, and self-fulfillment".

This latest version has been the subject of some controversy. For example, the previous version contained "suggested minimum ages" for a number of procedures, like:

  • 14+ years old for cross-sex hormones

  • 15+ years old for double mastectomies

  • 16+ years old for breast implants, facial feminisation surgery

  • 17+ years old for metoidioplasty, orchiectomy, vaginoplasty, hysterectomy, fronto-orbital remodelling

  • 18+ years old for phalloplasty.

In the latest version the only one that remains is the limit on phalloplasty. In another controversial decision, they decided that children can move straight to cross-sex hormones – they will no longer be requested to start with a suppression of puberty. Perhaps most controversially, the latest Standards of Care now includes an entire chapter on eunuchs, and proposes a new "eunuch-identity":

In this chapter we describe the relationship between eunuch-identified people and other transgender and gender-diverse people and present best practices specific to serving the needs of people who embrace a eunuch identity.

...

For the purpose of the Standards of Care, we define eunuch as an individual assigned male at birth whose testicles have been surgically removed or rendered non-functional, and who identifies as a eunuch.

Well, I suppose it could be a coincidence. I mean just because they suddenly came up with a eunuch-identity, doesn't mean they got it from the regulars of the fetish webs-...

While there is a 4000-year history of eunuchs in society, the greatest wealth of information about contemporary eunuch-identified people is found within the large on-line peer-support community that congregates on sites such as the Eunuch Archive (www.eunuch.org) which was established in 1998.

...

Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚

This has been out there for months without gathering any attention outside of fringe right wing press like The Economist. It's been labeled a conspiracy to be ignored and sneered at, as it will be here. You don't have the power to confront them with it, so they can just pretend it's not happening until it's time to say "and it's good!"

Unsurprisingly, kiwifarms has all the deets and complete archives of their "research," which decisively answer all the deflection being done in this thread.

Yeah, I know it's old news, but I don't remember anyone bringing it up here. And if someone wants to call it a conspiracy theory, I'm very interested in their reasoning.

I think the only way you'll even get that response is by posting this as a direct reply. Otherwise it's just the usual tactic of "ignore, except to subtweet about the stench of evil right wing bare links posts getting worse"

Not exactly an original notion, but I'm always amazed at the power of the label "conspiracy theory" and the ineffectiveness of responding, "yes, this is a theory about a conspiracy".

Calm down, it is not conspiracy when everything is in the open.

It is the first I'm hearing about it as someone quite online, I think it's worth bringing up.

It's really amazing how flaccid the response was, isn't it? You'd think people would be screaming it from the rooftops, but it's like everyone's too demoralized to protest even the most deranged things being done to their children any more.

The most common response I saw on Twitter was saying "well, obviously this was the next step. We all saw it coming, but what's changed to make anyone listen this time?"

We (as in society, because I sure as hell haven't) accepted that sex was a private matter and what people did in the privacy of their bedrooms, or their imaginations, was no business of anyone else and certainly not the government.

We accepted that any and every sexual orientation was as legitimate and normal as default cis-heteronormativity.

We accepted that kink-shaming was bad, and fetishes were healthy expressions and explorations of sexuality.

We accepted that trans was real woman/real man and anyone who thought otherwise was a transphobe who probably engaged in the worst sin of sins, misgendering and deadnaming.

We accepted that kids could be and were sexual beings too, so contraception and abortion where necessary.

We accepted that kids could make informed decisions, just like adults, about their sexual orientation and gender identity.

We accepted that only religious zealots, bigots, haters, and slavering right-wing fascists objected to any of the above, and wanted to put limits on it because they hate women and minorities and want to control them.

So yeah, eunuch-identity as one more letter for the LGBTQ2+/LGBTQIA+ acronym is just the next step. There will probably be a new flag for them for next Pride. And yeah, eunuch-identity for trans kids, because what are you, some kind of hater? Don't you know about the 41%?

Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚

Can we not? Discuss the culture war not wage it is our raison d'etre. Your whole spiel would be much more fitting without the feigned Hey guys rhetorical device. State your point clearly. This might be interesting to discuss but with the partisan trappings splashed all over it why bother?

Both the ending, and the rhetorical flourishes were meant to be a bit of harmless fun. For whatever it's worth, this was not aimed at your tribe, or even trans people, if anything I was poking fun at habitual conspiracy-deniers.

To be clear, I am not even sure about what your accusation is supposed to be. That's the point of the state clearly rule. I assume you're saying that these people are driving trans changes because they have an eunuch fetish, but it might be because you think they are mentally ill or because you think they are evil. I certainly didn't get you were poking fun at conspiracy deniers.

I'm not clear on what your specific point actually is. Which is why stating it outright somewhere would be helpful, even if you have to keep the rhetorical flourishes. Just a suggestion.

but it might be because you think they are mentally ill or because you think they are evil.

You think my post would have been better if I called them evil or mentally ill? I didn't say any of that because I don't know, and it doesn't matter. The factual part "these people are driving trans changes because they have an eunuch fetish" is enough to stand, and be discussed on it's own.

I certainly didn't get you were poking fun at conspiracy deniers.

A common trope in dismissing conspiracy theories is calling everything a coincidence, and dismissing any personal connections as playing "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon". The point of the other rhetorical flourish - "well, I suppose" - was exactly the point of making fun of that, right up until you see the SOC document literally citing the fetish forum.

Which is why stating it outright somewhere would be helpful, even if you have to keep the rhetorical flourishes. Just a suggestion.

Duly noted, but it sounds like you got exactly what I was saying, it's just that you were expecting there's more to it.

I think your post would have been better if I was sure what your point was. What specifically was the conspiracy you are making fun of the deniers denying. Who denied it and when? What is the light that would come from the discussion?

I think your post would have been better if I was sure what your point was.

Yes I got that part. Sadly, I couldn't know ahead of time what you'll be able to catch, and what you'd find confusing.

What specifically was the conspiracy you are making fun of the deniers denying.

Any one that's plausible but lacking smoking-gun evidence. The one that's the most analogous is woke entryism into institutions with cultural influence, but any one will do - from Epstein running a child-prostituion Ponzi Scheme (before the evidence was released), Epstein not killing himself, to the COVID lab leak or Big Pharma collaborating to discredit ivermectin.

Who denied it and when?

What would be accomplished by listing all the times and places a specific conspiracy theory was denied?

What is the light that would come from the discussion?

  • That to move past shady thinking, I think we need to stop dismissing any hypothesis just because it's a conspiracy theory.

  • That we might need to increase scrutiny on our institutions, because they seem the be very vulnerable to manipulation by malicious actors.

What would be accomplished by listing all the times and places a specific conspiracy theory was denied?

Well if you want us to talk about whether it is a conspiracy or not (as opposed to just making fun of people who think it is) then that would be helpful, no? If your post was just to make fun of those people, then what is it's value here?

If your point is

That to move past shady thinking, I think we need to stop dismissing any hypothesis just because it's a conspiracy theory.

That we might need to increase scrutiny on our institutions, because they seem the be very vulnerable to manipulation by malicious actors.

Then why not just say that specifically? Those are good points and worth discussing. But you didn't actually mention those things in your original post. Are the eunuchs malicious actors? Are they manipulating the situation? If those are your factual claims then make your point around that. But your post doesn't say that. It kind of gives a wink wink nudge nudge in that direction. Which we should avoid in my opinion here, at least.

Is your position that these people are malicious actors? If so just say so. If not, then say that instead.

Well if you want us to talk about whether it is a conspiracy or not (as opposed to just making fun of people who think it is) then that would be helpful, no?

No? I don't see how citing every time someone denied these conspiracies would bring anything to the discussion.

Then why not just say that specifically?

The story in itself is pretty out there. I wanted to see what people think of it, before moving on to any big-picture ultimate conclusions I might have about it.

Is your position that these people are malicious actors?

Malicious in the sense that they're driven by their fetish rather than finding the best standards of care, yes.

If so just say so. If not, then say that instead.

Ok, and from my side: if something in what I wrote is unclear, can you just ask what I meant, so I can clarify it, instead of complaining about the original post 9 comment levels deep?

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But at least he did get you to acknowledge the post, if not to address the evidence in any way. That's better than the usual outcome.

Straw that broke the camels back. Nothing especially bad about this post compared to a number of other norm eroding posts I am seeing.

I guess we're on to the "ignore except to subtweet about the stench of evil right wing bare links posts getting worse" step already.

It's sad how predictable it is. Could you actually address his post, as a favor to me?

Nope. Nothing you are saying in anyway makes me think that is a good idea. Perhaps reconsider your approach?

No need to change my approach: you've already explained more than enough about your reaction to the evidence. All that's left is waiting for the "and it's good!" step in a few months.

It's amazing that the same tactics work for you over and over again, but why change what works.

I've explained exactly nothing about my reaction to the evidence. The only thing I have talked about is my critique of how the point was made. You are familiar with the Motte yes? This is very much our bread and butter. Nearly any point can be made, but we have rules and a culture around HOW the point should be made.

It should be plain, it should be written as is people you disagree with are reading and you WANT them to read. It should avoid Boo Outgrouping and should optimize for light and not heat etc. etc.

Could you help him rewrite his post so that people with a fetish for castrating children felt more included in the conversation? That would be a very helpful and productive alternative to complaining about his tone, and double as active engagement with the evidence.

You two could even do an adversarial collaboration on it!

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Mentioning this at all is very partisan. I liked how it was styled. What did he get wrong

Perhaps address what they were writing?

Or if it's not for you, maybe move on?

What are you adding here, except for style policing?

Style policing is a valuable part of building a discussion community like this one. That was the entire point of my comment! We have very specific rules and norms around tone and style, entirely separate from the content.

It’s unfortunate that discussing the link between transgenderism and sexual fetishism has been made taboo in public discourse. If you spend any amount of time in online transgender communities you’ll see that the fetishistic aspects are clearly a huge component of it.

How /d/are you >_>

In seriousness, one major problem is actually having to talk about the subject knowing people are going to reply "ok, let's see your open tabs Kurt Eichenwald."

That's the angle I find the least interesting. Even if true, it doesn't say much about where we should take the discourse on trans issues.

What I find absolutely fascinating is the entryism aspect, or laundering ideology through respectable-looking institutions, and our system being either unable or unwilling to do anything about it.

Certainly knowing the etiology of a phenomenon is an important step towards developing a holistic understanding of it.

I'm not saying that all cases of transgenderism can be reduced to a fetish, but, it's still something to keep in mind.

Yeah, that's the thing. Ordinary trans people have been used as the stalking horse for the fetishists and the grifters taking advantage of "hey, if I say I'm a woman, I can get sent to women's prison not men's prison".

Few years back, when I was discussing the trans rights stuff with other people on another site, I and those who were dubious about the whole thing like I was were being assured that "What you fear will never happen; no man or boy is going to go to all the trouble of saying they are trans simply in order for some peeping tom opportunities". A little later, after the first offences by individuals claiming to be trans, the line was "they're not really trans, they're ordinary perverts/criminals" (this, despite the simultaneous line that "you're trans if you say you're trans, no gatekeeping").

I think people have nailed their political colours to the mast and invested too much time and effort, often for personal reasons, into trans rights activism so they feel any backing off or accepting the cases where conservatives were right are going to mean giving up everything, so they grit their teeth and ignore this stuff and if they have to, they come out and support it. Because otherwise, the right-wingers were right about the things they said would happen if trans activism got its way about social normalisation, and that undermines everything they've fought for.

I and those who were dubious about the whole thing like I was were being assured that "What you fear will never happen; no man or boy is going to go to all the trouble of saying they are trans simply in order for some peeping tom opportunities".

I feel like there's an interaction with the binary oppressor/oppressed model here. I've seen similar contentions, where the premise is that nobody would ever claim a marginalized identity falsely or lightly, because the experience of the Oppressed is categorically worse than the experience of the Oppressor. There is nothing that could possibly be worth the agonies of the soul one would be taking on to claim an Oppressed identity, save the pure truth of the matter itself.

The binary model cannot permit any recognition that it is ever, under any circumstances, in any way, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor; the binary all-or-nothing thinking would make such an admission tantamount to claiming that it is always, under all circumstances, in all ways, better to be a member of the Oppressed group than the Oppressor, in which case you're claiming that their real statuses are reversed, and are attacking the moral justification of the Oppressed group. Attempts at nuance or complexity or using one's head instead of one's gut will feel, on that gut-level, like nothing more than a direct enemy attack.

Does this really happen or am I just making this up? Well: have you ever heard someone say "[so you're saying that Xs are] the real oppressors" or "...really oppressed", when the matter of a potential advantage to belonging to an oppressed group is discussed?

I have.

You can't call it a fetish, because if it's a fetish, then I get to say "keep that shit away from me, don't involve me in your fetish."

There's currently a Request for Comment on the talk page for the Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People regarding this issue.

Thank you, it's an incredible read.

It looks like the No's are going to win using all the usual tactics.

No, because British newspapers in general are less reliable on trans issues.

PinkNews simply does not engage in the kind of politically motivated campaigning for trans rights that The Times and The Telegraph conduct against trans rights. They just don't, and if they did one would expect that some high-quality or academic sources would have picked up on it by now the way they have picked up on the campaigning by the mainstream anti-trans broadsheets. --Newimpartial

The Times, Telegraph, and Economist are not reliable sources on the topic of trans issues. While we can use biased sources to a degree on Wikipedia, we should not let their editorial decisions determine ours—just like we don't cram articles on American Democratic politicians full of every supposed scandal Fox News has implicated them in --Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe)

I say manufactured controversy within the press, because no-one here has provided any sources that substantiate there being an academic dispute within the eunuch chapter of the 8th edition standards of care

It's really very simple. If one source takes a stance that bigotry against trans people is a good thing, and a different source takes a stance that bigotry against trans people is a bad thing, while it is true that they have opposite biases, that doesn't mean we give equal weight merely because they hold opposing positions. The position that is opposed to bigotry, or in your words, "grossly biased" against bigotry, is the one we're supposed to favor. The neutral position is not "pro-bigotry" and "anti-bigotry" are equivalent, so we give them equal weight. The neutral position is bigotry is bad, and we don't pretend that pro-bigotry perspectives are worth giving weight to... You believe what you want to believe, I don't give a shit about you. --Jayron32 (an admin)

I'll make it simpler. You are wrong. And persisting to argue here about whether LBC is a reliable source is wasting everyone's time, because it doesn't help your case. And selecting hateful sources and demanding Wikipedia repeats their hate, is not earning you any brownie points. -- Colin

Clouds of ink, browbeating, veiled and open threats, constantly changing the definition of terms and moving goalposts, demands for impossible evidence, hordes of supporting partisans rushing in to gang up on people. It's amazing to see the party struggle session perfected and enacted so casually at the slightest hint of Wrong Opinions.

And all the same things being done here. Is there any explanation for the reflexive denial other than blatant support for the pedo-castration fetishists?

Remind me again how the old sweet song goes: "there is no such thing as the slippery slope, that's a fallacy".

So now transgender activists of a certain stripe have moved on from "all we want is to be able to use the bathroom we feel comfortable using" to "eunuch identity is totally an orientation that should be recognised under the LGBT umbrella".

Among these experts are people like Thomas W. Johnson, Richard Wassersug, and Krister H. Willette, who attended several WPATH conferences, and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively) that were active for over 20 years. Johnson and Wassersug have even published research based on a survey of EA's users, and the stories posted there.

Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic, or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot? You allege that they themselves are fetishists:

As for their work in WPATH, I'm sure they are proffesional and wouldn't dream of letting their fetish affect their work.

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case. This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration. The article you linked describes it as (bolding mine):

Reduxx reached out to the Anthropology Department at CSUC for comment on Johnson’s association with a forum hosting child sexual abuse fantasies

which again makes it sound like those usernames weren't actively posting erotica. I assume if they were, the news article would be pasting that front and center. I'm not personally going to make an account on that website myself to investigate (look at what happens to people who 'associate' with such websites 20 years later) but I'm curious to see the results if someone else does.

Did you read the post? The article with the reader's digest punchline is noted as written by Jesus, the purported username of one of the doctors.

I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?

What's the rest of the story? Also, what about the other two accounts?

The "2017" was part of the story posted in 2002 about castration being normalized in (then) future year.

The reader's digest 2017 citation was the punchline within the story, the joke being (on EA in 2002) that by 2017 becoming a eunuch will be a normie, reader's digest type activity.

See, what happened there is that this was a story, a work of fiction, set in the future. So, while the story itself was published in 2002, the internal elements included things like "this is a Readers' Digest article from 2017". You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?

I agree, it's very odd to think Readers' Digest would still be a thing in 2017, maybe that is what confused you?

You know the way George Orwell published a novel in 1948 that was set in the year 1984?

Wait, but how did he know what would happen in 1984 if (as you claim) he was writing the book in 1948? How did he avoid getting in trouble for misinformation by, like, the 1948 version of facebook mods?

Shocking, I know, but they didn't even have mods back in 1948! Can you imagine?

It's official, Hitler happened because they didn't have mods.

Fortunately though we got mods in the fifties, eventually culminating in the greatest mod of all time, Mick Jagger.

More comments

I was confused by that. He said it was written in 2002, but it's cited as Reader's digest 2017. Is that like...The reader's digest? Or is it some kind of internal Eunuch Archive reader's digest? That excerpt wasn't from the other article he mentioned, so is he citing it directly using his own account on the site?

It is fictional story set in utopian (for the author) far future, I think it was clear from the context.

The shining future predicted by the author indeed came true, we are all wearing mirror shades and we love it.

Was it a conspiracy, or just people working together to achieve their dreams?

Many cases of fiction influencing real life - just remember all the science fiction fans who worked on real space program and helped to make their vision a reality.

Were those accounts on the Eunuch Archive used to post erotic fanfic

From the original post:

For example the user "Jesus" wrote a story "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?",

...

and all have accounts on the Eunuch Archive ("Jesus", "Eunuchunique", and "Kristoff" respectively)

.

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence

Can you link the post where I say anything like that?

or were they used to study the content/users and post surveys and whatnot?

All 3 had active forum accounts for over 20 years. Johnson was apparently a founding member of the site. That's a looot of research.

If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.

This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration.

Did the Freakonomics guys go on to recommend policy that goes easy on drug dealers, or something?

If you want I can dig deeper and dig out the spicier posts, but I want you to put skin in the game - if I find it you admit you were wrong, and no more asserting I must be wrong because I didn't give you black-on-white "I'm a fetishist" posts.

I said I'd be curious to see the results if someone else tracks down the rest of his stories. Compared to how inflammatory your OP was, my response was fairly measured and I'm trying to engage with you in good faith.

Here's a list of potential evidence you could provide, and how it would influence my thinking. I think you might find it disappointing though:

  1. Spicy, blatant erotica around orchiectomy from Johnson -> Dude's fantasizing about cutting his balls off and maybe has a bit of a...conflict of interest when it comes to providing guidelines for trans teens.

  2. Blatant pedophilic content from Johnson -> Dude's probably a pedophile. No bueno. I assume he'll get canned if you or others circulate those stories.

  3. All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.

  4. Survey (or other data) of WPATH members or other academics involved in treating trans teens that X% of them are fetishists along these lines -> X% of these people are fetishists and if X is > than...I don't know, maybe 1-5% depending on how bad the fetish is, I'd probably find that disquieting?

I assume we're never going to get (4) short of some really impressive investigative journalism, so I think it'd be an interesting conversation what kinds of evidence could stand in for it. If you want to convince me that some significant fraction of people involved in the trans debate are fetishists, I need some kind of evidence that a bunch of them are fetishists. Maybe really widespread reports of children who say they are not trans who were being pressured into it? Some kind of internal slack channels being leaked? The FBI busting some kind of pedophile ring implicating a bunch of these people? Maybe something like your post implicating just a few people, but it happens again and again for months on end?

Republican politician or Catholic priest

I don't think "republican politicians" are experts on anything other than their own beliefs, nor do I present them as disinterested authority figures.

But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.

But trans-activists cite consensus of experts such those caught posting castration fantaties that, no really, welfare of children is improved by giving them access to PBs and HRT.

Well, I've been asked to detail the evidence that would support a change in my beliefs. You (I assume, perhaps incorrectly) think that some significant fraction of academics have conflicts of interest based on their sexual preferences. What evidence would convince you that a robust majority (say >95%) of these experts are, in fact, coming from a place of wanting to do what's best for the youth rather than pursuing their own sexual fantasies?

I wouldn't go so far as to say 'disinterested' as the criticism that these academics believe in a broader trans rights agenda independent of their research or data almost certainly is true for a majority, and it's not clear to me at least that the data warrant some of the claims that are made.

Not Syo, but I would assume the majority, likely significant majority, of academics choose a field of research based on personal interests, whatever that may be.

Depends on the field and generation. At least in the life sciences/medicine, there seem to be an even mix of altruists and ego monsters, but no conflict of interests in the same way that I could see in the humanities. I expect it's similar in the harder sciences. Maybe you're right for the humanities, although it would be interesting to see, for example, the breakdown of cis vs. trans academics in WPATH.

In a highly unscientific poll, I picked 8 profiles at random from WPATH and of the 6 I could track down 2 were transgender. So you're probably right that a significant fraction are trans. As (I think) you gesture at, they may well punch above their weight in terms of influence.

I'd venture that the evidence that would convince a skeptic to not be so concerned is roughly parallel, and equally impossible, to the evidence that would convince you that the skeptic's level of concern is remotely justified.

So, what's to be done? Are we just going to be partisans poking each other in the eye for eternity? When we reach an impasse without the data to get an answer, do we just shrug and lower our guns for the time being and move onto other things?

Sidhbh Gallagher is a heck of a creep

Well, at the risk of people complaining I'm not doing my homework again, why do you think she's a creep? Because of the way she advertises to minors on tiktok, or glamorizes plastic surgery? Ah, I see your edit. So you think she gets off on removing body parts from healthy people?

Surgeons have been doing radical mastectomies for breast cancer for decades, and it was quite controversial for a while. If I remember the section from Emperor of all Maladies correctly, common practice in the early days was to take all of both breasts regardless of the stage or size of the cancer. Do you think cannibals and fetishists were/are overrepresented among surgeons as well? Or do you think she's specifically into the pedophilic aspect of it?

the particular costs and lack of (visible?) critique from "within the movement" says something concerning. That WPATH seems to be removing guidelines (removing age recommendations for most procedures) when most of the world is adding more says something, too; we can disagree about exactly what that means, but I would be hard pressed to accept that it says anything good. How bad does the failure mode need to be, and how lacking the internal pushback?

To clarify, you want pushback against the three individuals from OP and Dr. Gallagher from within WPATH?

All three accounts post spicy takes along (1) or (2) -> Three out of 4,134 members of WPATH are fetishists or pedophiles. Slight update towards the broader point you're making similar to reading a news article about a Republican politician or Catholic priest doing similar things.

Generally when the Republican Politicians and Catholic Priests are caught doing unspeakable things, they've made some effort to hide the behavior. These guys were pretty open about their unspeakableness, and nobody at WPATH seems to have had a problem with them. Elsewhere in the thread, people are linking to claims that Wikipedia's staff likewise doesn't seem to have a problem with them. I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?

If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?

...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities. Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?

To be fair, all of the papers I can access skip over the question of how Johnson/Wassersug developed a relationship with the eunuch forums, in favor of summarizing how the survey specifically was performed. Johnson didn't do a great job of obfuscating his identity, but it's both plausible and likely that it's only obvious in retrospect or if you were already following the community extremely closely.

The academic papers and citations aren't great, but on their own they're not clearly malicious rather than just weirdly amoral.

I think your 1 and 2 are reasonable expectations, but what do we conclude if WPATH actually was presented with 1 and 2 and just shrugged it off?

I confess, I'd never heard of WPATH or those three academics until yesterday. I don't pay much attention to the academic side of things. Most of my exposure to the trans community is just real life friends that I have; we don't spend a whole lot of time haggling over DSM-5 definitions or whether they're mentally ill or fetishists. We're just friends who play sports together, or video games, or go out dancing. I don't misgender them or discriminate and it doesn't come up aside from some snark about nasty conservatives now and then, but my trans friends are hardly unique or outliers in that regard.

My (our?) generation sidestepped this issue as all of these people transitioned as adults.

So, say OP is right and the medical field is run by a freewheeling cabal of pedophiles and/or castration and/or autogynephilic fetishists who get off on, as I think naraburns put it, mutilating children. Then, uh, probably WPATH or whatever the other relevant orgs are delenda est. Say the first bailey to that motte is correct, and some higher-than-background level of pedo-castro-autogynes are members of WPATH, what do we do? I don't know. If it's 40% and they're swinging votes, probably delenda est. If it's 5% and the majority of the decisions made are still coming from a place of medical opinion rather than fetishism, it's a bit of a tough call. If it's background level (on par with Republicans or Catholic priests) should we do anything at all besides fire the people who get found out?

If a Republican is dallying with gay prostitutes and gets caught, that's one thing. If a Republican gives a speech on the house floor about how a given bill is a good idea, and his experiences with gay prostitutes proves it, and the other republicans nod and clap and then pass the measure, I think probably your eyebrows would be going up a bit, no?

The better analogy would be the Republican himself is the gay prostitute, no? But then, everyone does this. If a Republican gun-owner gives a speech on the floor about gun rights and decries non-gun-owners who don't know an AR-whatsit from a bump-stock-shotgun writing gun control legislation, do your eyebrows go up? Or the wealthy Republican business-owner pitching lower business tax rates, or union busting, or axing parental leave?

The steelman is that gun-owners understand guns better than liberals, Black people understand the struggle of the inner city better, trans people understand trans youth better. The critique is that all of those people have potential conflicts of interest.

Someone with a castration fetish writing guidelines for trans youth is probably a bridge too far for the majority of people though, no?

...you mention that he'll probably be canned if we or others circulate these stories enough. I think that's probably true. Should he be canned? Is there actually agreement that what he and his comrades have done is actually objectionable? From where I'm sitting, it sure doesn't look like the people in question think they've done anything wrong, and they don't seem to have made much effort to conceal their activities.

Having read the actual writing thanks to Gattsuru, it seems pretty likely that the eugenics is enough to give him the boot, although he's already emeritus. The optics alone are probably enough for the University to cut ties. The fact that a medical professional is fantasizing about castrating people certainly seems to present a conflict of interest around treating trans (or eunuch?) identifying children. I'm sure elements on the left will say 'blah blah personal life doesn't affect medical opinion' but I don't think your average suburb-dwelling normie will be buying it.

Their communities, both academic and therapeutic, seem to have acted as though this was all fine. Is it worth talking about what this says about community norms in high-status blue circles?

The fact that he was so bad at opsec is what made me assume he was doing it purely from an academic lens. Yes, it's worth discussing, although I'd hesitate to call the gender studies department at the University of Chico high-status.

It's hard to find information for the more recent stories, but this seems to cover up to 2008. Of the three named accounts, only "Jesus" has pieces listed. Of those two, "Orchiectomy: Is It Right for You?" could be arguably just academic and medical discussion, if somewhat overly optimistic about its frameworks, but "Making of the Modern World" is the sort of 'world-building' that makes the gay stories with 'and all the women went on a vacation/died of irrelevance' seem like high art. And it does include some material focused on young people :

"During the transition to the new system, while all boys from eight to fourteen were being reexamined for suitability for genetic reproduction, all boys were required to report to their neighborhood clinic on their fourteenth birthdays. School records and existing health reports were used to select ninety percent of these boys for immediate sterilization. Of course all boys who had been selected to become drones at their eighth birthday examination were castrated, but so were a majority of those boys who had thought that they were to become breeders."

The piece starts with a foreward openly inviting other authors to write about:

"Erik and I would both like to encourage readers to create additional stories for the Archive set in this future world. Erik would like first person accounts of boys becoming drones--what happened to YOU on and around your fourteenth birthday (or to your brother for women writers). I would appreciate gentler stories of the domestic life of drones, wives, and their children, church services, classroom discussions, etc. "

This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories. On the other hand, I do think it dramatically reduces my confidence that this paper is meaningfully useful: there are people who can describe a fetish community from the inside, but there's remarkably few who can do so in a sphere with policy ramifications hitting their interests without putting a thumb on the scales. Worse, having the same persons also involved immediately with the SoC8 draft allows and encourages a lot of citation massaging: that paper is summarized at one point to "As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care."

"Eunuchunique" and "Kristoff" do not seem to have published stories under those names, at least as of copies of the story archive I can find, and the forums a) seem to have been nuked a few times and b) don't seem to be publicly available, so it's a little hard to talk on that side.

Thanks! That was a wild ride.

This is not porn in the poles-and-holes sense, and I don't think it's the sort of thing that should get someone fired, but I've seen less fetishistic vore stories.

It's hard to say, no? The eugenics angle from the second story alone is probably enough in today's climate if he weren't already emeritus. The passage about castrating children certainly seems like some kind of disquieting fantasy, to @arjin_ferman 's point. I think it might be different if it were more personal in nature, but these weird, bigger-picture fantasies about redesigning society that don't seem particularly sexual in nature? It's all utterly bizarre. Mr. Johnson certainly seems to have some kind of castration fetish, and I'm skeptical of his opinions on the treatment of trans children.

As an aside, many moons ago, a group of my friends discovered and passed around the pain olympics for shock value. Funny how these things come around. At least (to my knowledge) none of the youth of Athens were sufficiently corrupted to castrate themselves.

Sorry to single you out, but this is exactly the sort of response mindset I was addressing with they "well, I suppose ... Hey guys!" rhetorical flourish that bothered @SSCReader so much.

My claim was simple: castration fetishists managed to get positions of influence in a fairy impactful organization, and are using them to push their fetish into the standards of care for transgender people. To prove my claim I:

  • Pointed to a forum where castration fetishists gather.

  • Showed that some of it's most veteran members of the WPATH, who were invited to several conferences where the standards of care are debated.

  • Quoted an excerpt from that standards of care that is directly to the fetish.

  • Pointed out that the chapter cites the very forum these members regularly post at, and have been active for over 20 years.

If my post was limited to the first 3 points, I could understand dismissing it as a run of the mill conspiracy theory. I'd disagree, but I could understand it, as this is how the conspiracy discourse has gone on for the past several decades. I'm not going to call the fourth point the final nail in the coffin, but we are getting to the point where it's going to be quite a bit of work to reopen it again.... I was expecting pretty much everyone to agree, that at the very least this raises several red flags.

What I got in response was:

This sounds more like the Freakonomics story of the professor inserting himself into the Chicago drug-dealing scene or the anthro professors visiting tribes of Pacific Islanders than a trio of academics spearheading a conspiracy to depopulate the plebs with fantasies of castration.

"Move along, nothing to see here...". Then I was asked:

  • whether the academics attending the WPATH conferences actually wrote any stories (addressed in the OP)

  • whether they were fetishists, or just academics studying them (addressed in the article I linked, and was quoted to argue against me)

  • to provide examples of more "blatant" and/or "pedophilic" content, because evidence that at least one of them wrote stories there suddenly wasn't enough (and if I managed to do that it would "slightly" updated towards my original claim, and all it would conclusively prove is that 3 out of over 4000 WPATH members are eunuch fetishists, which is not relevant to my claim at all).

  • to provide survey data about the fetishes of all WPATH members?! Which... how am I suppose to that to begin with, and what does it have to do with my original claim?

This is just reflexive denialism, and exactly what my rhetorical flourishes were poking fun at. I'll plead guilty to not staying with the spirit of the forum, but I hope it's clear now that it wasn't a broad attack on the blue tribe, but at a certain epistemology.

I tried to engage you politely and in good faith, but since you disagree, I apologize for the offense and I'll leave you to your more productive conversations with other folks.

They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.

An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit. It's like if, for example, someone criticized the National Organization for Women for giving Mattress Girl their Woman of Courage award even after the text messages came out discrediting her rape accusation. And then you responded with "Sure it looks like she falsely accused him in retaliation for him breaking up with her and/or for the personal benefits, but NOW has 500,000 members, can you prove the majority of them share her motive?" Clearly they don't need to, the relevant members of their organization hold to a "Believe Women"/"Believe Survivors" ideology and so a single liar with sufficient skill at invoking the ideology was all it took. But instead of just being a response to a single incident, it's WPATH establishing a medical standard. And instead of being an openly non-neutral activist organization, it's the most prominent independent organization setting standards for trans healthcare, one that countless medical institutions listen to.

This then provides valuable insight into the validity of WPATH's decision-making processes, like knowing a medical/scientific organization wrote the conclusion of an argument first. And as I said in my other post, it also gives us valuable information about the processes of institutions that continue to take their recommendations seriously or "that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect". For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to. However, many other authorities like the American Medical Association have not. If a lot of institutions are making decisions on the subject are heavily influenced by social justice ideology, that is valuable information in judging this split. And yes, I already knew that so it's not going to shift my opinion very much, there's already been varying levels of other evidence like the mass-resignations complaining about ideological pressure a few years ago at the NHS's only gender clinic for children (since shut down as of a few months ago). But a lot of people think things like the shift to maximally "gender-affirming care" are just about following the evidence rather than ideological pressure and so this provides a valuable test case.

They got a nonexistent inborn-gender-identity as an entire chapter in the WPATH guidelines, which now recommends "gender-affirming-care" for it, based explicitly on the studies they did surveying their fellow posters on the forum! If your reaction is "this is unimportant because they are 3 people out of 4000", then this very event should show why that reasoning doesn't make sense.

Based on your other post, I'm curious how you account for people desperate to castrate themselves if not some odd innate quirk, but we can set that to the side for the moment.

That's a fair point on the influence of those three, although it also depends on the broader argument you're trying to push. Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation? Because that was the sense I got from OP, and I still largely don't believe that (although I'm open to more evidence). Moreover, only Johnson is listed as an author for the WPATH guidelines, not the other two (only cited). I'd wonder whether other people worked on it as well, editorial oversight, etc.

But your point that I was too dismissive of their influence is well taken.

An ideological milieu that only tolerates one side of an argument is fundamentally gullible to anyone who can invoke the automatically-winning side. Indeed, it will frequently come to the wrong conclusions whether this susceptibility is deliberately exploited or not, exploitation just increases the rate. It's the same dynamic at play whether the people determining WPATH policy come from eunuch.org or from Tumblr, whether they originally got into the idea for "want to feel special" reasons or "fetish" reasons or "social justice subculture" reasons, whether they consciously lie or believe their own bullshit.

I'll grant this too. I don't mean this as a gotcha, but what would you prefer instead? It seems unlikely to me that trans-skeptic (? not sure of the term) people will do gender studies for 6 years of a PhD in order to represent their side in professional organizations, and moreover, that conservative spaces are just as hostile an ideological milieu to any evidence that would purport to find benefits to accepting trans folk as their chosen gender (which I've seen cited numerous times; whether they actually hold water, I've never tried to figure out). I find it hard to believe that in some fantastical world where some unbiased body did publish such a study that conservatives would read it, shrug their shoulders, and the issue would die.

You might argue that I'm comparing apples to oranges by juxtaposing a body of PhDs and MDs with 'Cletus from Alabama' (as other people have said when making this criticism). But with the legislatures getting involved, Cletus be flexing his muscles whatever the eggheads at WPATH say and his opinion is making decisions in this arena.

For instance, in the past few months medical authorities in Sweden, Finland, and the UK have issued recommendations against the use of puberty blockers for supposedly trans children, and to my amateur eye they have good reasons to.

Thanks for the links, and taking the time to lay out your argument. Appreciate it.

Is it that a significant fraction of WPATH and people pushing advocating for trans folks are pedophilic groomers who get off on child mutilation?

This is Kiwi Farms line, that is now official conservative line on which the "groomer" campaign is based.

https://kiwifarms.net/threads/eunuch-community.13954/page-4

It's truly fucking insane. This small fetish community started during the infancy of the internet, was completely blatant in pursuing their fucked up ideals, and now its leaders are influencing academia, the media, health, and governments into playing along with their bullshit. A tiny amount of coom-brained lunatics who get off to castrating children, and the whole fucking planet, are somehow forcing the entire forsaken world into bowing to their sick fantasies. And they just get away with it.

Is this really all what is it all about? Is small group of people dedicated to one bizarre fetish really the greatest secret manipulators and masterminds in history?

David Cole from Takimag (someone known as Jewish Holocaust denier is not someone expected to be too woke) strongly disagrees.

https://www.takimag.com/article/doom-and-groomer/

The key point here is that the indoctrinators are spreading a belief system. They’re mentally scrambling kids on gender. But the goal is not to physically rape them. To reduce this complex dynamic down to “sexual grooming” is misleading, because what’s going on has way more in common with the Khmer Rouge than it does with Albert Fish.

...

Last week I described the educators who labor quietly and single-mindedly to further the tranny agenda as “worker bees.” They’re successful because like all worker bees, they’re banal. Yes, we all love to mock those “libs of TikTok” videos of freakish tattooed teachers with pierced septums. But they’re the minority. Think of every pro-CRT, pro-tranny school-board member you’ve seen. They’re ordinary people you wouldn’t notice at the grocery store.

They’re invisible, doing their work out-of-sight. They’re predominantly women, and they’re not trying to have sex with kids. They’re working with quiet, fanatical dedication to remake how children see gender and themselves, in service of an ideology, not their own personal sexual desires.

Of course, they are talking about different people, leaders and common soldiers.

Still, why this particular fetish was normalized?

Follow the money. There is no profit out there. Look, for example, at furry fandom - even the most dedicated fans could not spend more than low four figures on fursuit, and exit is easy - just put your fursuit in wardrobe and let it here.

Transgenderism is for life, and it is unprecedented money maker for big pharma and big medicine.

If people were rationally following their interest, we would see them support T cause, and we do.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/billionaire-family-pushing-synthetic-sex-identities-ssi-pritzkers

https://archive.ph/XH5v5

These are the three sources of movement that changed the world.

Transgenderism is for life, and it is unprecedented money maker for big pharma and big medicine.

This is a little hard to believe, because the "for life" parts (i.e., hormones) are generic medications and they're dirt cheap.

Rather than asking questions you don't want answered, how about you do a little background reading?

One of the Eunuch Archives’ most prominent participants is an unidentified site administrator who uses the moniker ‘Jesus.’

‘Jesus’ claims to have been involved in editing the most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), issued by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and WPATH’s newest Standards of Care draft.

One of those three people is administrator of the fetish website. If you want to claim that the persona administrating the website itself is doing so merely out of academic curiosity, then go ahead and make that claim, but the far likelier claim is that the guy who administrates, and participates, in the fetish website is himself a fetishist.

For nearly two decades, the Eunuch Archive has hosted an annual “Meeting of Members.” The event is held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Willette’s area of residence, and is co-hosted by Willette and the pseudonymous Jesus.

https://reduxx.info/top-trans-medical-association-collaborated-with-castration-child-abuse-fetishists/

https://reduxx.info/top-academic-behind-fetish-site-hosting-child-sexual-abuse-fantasy-push-to-revise-wpath-guidelines/

Rather than asking questions you don't want answered, how about you do a little background reading?

Unkind. The background reading doesn't really answer the question to my satisfaction. This is a case where the words written down are projecting an image to the reader that they don't actually, specifically support. I happen to be fairly confident that the image projected is, in fact, quite accurate, but these sorts of ambiguities drive a lot of our worst conversations here.

Unkind.

Not very, and absolutely warranted. Asking questions that were answered in the OP, or in the article he quoted, is not an indication of someone wanting to find the answer.

but these sorts of ambiguities drive a lot of our worst conversations here.

Sure. Since there seems to be a lot meta-talk about form in this thread, I'd also like to ask: do you think it would kill him to say something like "Wow, that's pretty wild! But do you think you could clarify these questions for me..."?

and elsewhere complain about people being unwilling to engage with the evidence, but as far as I can tell, you haven't provided any that this is the case.

I'd agree that the evidence in this post is lacking, and this is a perfect example of the exact sort of question the OP should have concluded with. The articles I heard of this from very clearly portrayed Johnson, Wassersug and Willette as enthusiastic participants in the castration fetish scene, along with evidence that seemed to back their assertions reasonably well, but I likewise did not check primary sources, and the source I found it from was fairly partisan. I did google the names and found the papers they'd written drawing on the fiction archive as a research resource, but that doesn't answer the question.

I'd readily agree that dispassionate researchers engaging in some niche anthropology is very different from extreme-fetish enjoyers smuggling their thing into academia, and then into actual policy. If the former is the case, I'm pretty sure I still have some pointed objections, but would agree that this instance isn't directly relevant to the larger issues. The same would go if it could be argued that these guys weren't actually relevant to the WPATH drafting, or that WPATH isn't actually influential to policy. That chain is the actual story the above is hinting at, and the fact that it's hinting rather than laying it out is my objection to the post as a whole.

Well, I̵ ̴s̷u̸p̴p̸o̴s̶e̷ t̴̮͒ĥ̷͙a̴̦̒t̶̥́ ̴̞̓I̵̟̍ ̷̢͝c̷͜͠a̶̱͗n̷̫̽'̷͖̇ẗ̸̪.̷̢̫̂̍.̷͔̱̏̈.̴̦̳͐ ̸̡̥̪̄o̸̝̅̋́h̸̛̖̗̰̓͗ ̷̤͔̲͑͗G̵̼͒̎͝o̶̯͇͓̓ḋ̵͈̻͈͛̈́, ṋ̴̞̹͉̊̐̀ͅở̴̱̀̎̂͛!̴̖͓̟̬̊̇̓̾ P̴͕̗͚͙̘̏̿̀l̸̥͚͕̺̤̺̙͇̉̉͆̈́͗̃͘̚ë̸̟̘̟́̑̾a̸͈̗̦̟̘̱͓͊̇͋ș̷̱͚͔̤̀̇́͑͜e̶̘̿́͂̋ ̶̬̈́̒m̷͇̓͗͐̔̿̿̚͝ắ̶̲̫͖̪̺́̈͒̂́͜͠k̸͍͔̙̣̰̖̻̩͆e̴̱̤̤͎̟̐̀ ̴̹̪͇͈͚̉̾̈̚i̷̡̖̹͇̤̝͛̽̎̍t̴̻̓̾͠ ̵̭̿ş̶̧͔͖̹̣̃̂̈́͐̚̕ṱ̴̡̜̀͋̉̃̉̃͜o̶̬̹̒͌p̷͍͖̼͔̓̌͜͝!̷̛͉̎́͐̕͘̚

This is obnoxious, don't do this.

You've managed to garner a pretty impressive array of reports (nine so far) including AAQC nominations and "boo outgroup" complaints. The tone of your presentation is... excessively smarmy, I guess I want to say. It doesn't invite discussion. And yes, some portion of that may be the natural result of you Noticing things you're not, on some views, allowed to Notice. But this is not a space where you get modded for Noticing, this is a space where you get modded for not speaking plainly. Don't connect a few dots and then dangle implications, here. Make an argument. Tell us what you think the evidence on offer tells you.

I get modded every time I outright say "These people want to mutilate and sterilize children." Now he's getting modded for provided reams of evidence for any reasonable person to come to that conclusion themselves, cheekily hinting at it. Possibly because he saw me modded for saying it directly, who's to know.

You say you won't get modded for noticing, so people don't need to play coy. I don't believe you.

I get modded every time I outright say "These people want to mutilate and sterilize children."

You were most recently moderated here. Let's take a look at what Zorba said about it:

...right now you're drawing a direct line from your opinion of the outcome to what you believe is the activists' intention, and that direct line implies cartoon-supervillain evil.

And is probably wrong.

So either bring evidence or knock it off with that kind of rhetoric.

This does not quite fit your interpretation of why you were moderated. In your case, you stated your view without bringing evidence. This post did the opposite--brought evidence, of a kind, while failing to state a view. The best way to avoid moderation on high-heat issues is to carefully bring both evidence and argument, along with a heap of charity for the outgroup.

I'll plead guilty to not keeping with the rules or their spirit, but I think @drmanhattan16 above explained the issue much better:

Write for clarity, not amusement, and all that.

I do like a good horror story, and I think I got carried away writing this post.

I guess this also means I never get to make fun of wannabe writers, who pour out their frustrations onto news articles ever again.

For what it's worth, as a horror story it's pretty good - it does a great job selling the mounting sense of dread as new information is presented.

Just that's not what The Motte is for.

Maybe we need a The Motte Horror Story Hour thread, where we can post purely facts-based horror stories.

Tell us what you think the evidence on offer tells you.

People with specific sexual fetishes centring on castration of minors are now being accepted as experts when it comes to setting policy dealing with minors engaging in decisions about medical treatment including hormones and surgery?

That seems to be the OP's argument, but it's just made in an obtuse and somewhat annoying way. It could have been shorter and more direct. Write for clarity, not amusement, and all that.

You really read through all of that to find the one thing you don't like?

They were trying to express frustration... And did it effectively.

As a reader of the site, please don't do this.

I was familiar with the EA and the mentioned posters back when they enforced the rules about not supporting this stuff on minors. Honestly, I participated in some of Jesus's research threads (never knew he posted in the stories section. The others don't surprise me.) Seeing them going from careful and professional to doing cartwheels down the slippery slope is ... disappointing, to put it mildly. I remember when people got modded for seeming too enthusiastic about the new policy recommendations. Heck, mods there provided plenty of information in agreement with the prevalence of both desisting after puberty and fettish-driven fixation on castration. And that's just what I got from the handful of boards I bothered reading (Eunuch Central, the general health board, and occasionally the surgical/chemical castration boards. I once poked my head into the stories section, read the titles, and noped the f out of there.)

Wow, thanks for talking about it. Didn't expect we'd have any firsthand experience here. Do you have insights into the board culture you think would help explain the whole thing to people, if you're comfortable talking about it?

Think I kinda recognize some things by analogy to niche groups I've been in. Is there like this undercurrent of equivocation between an official community slogan of "haha imagine not being able to tell the difference between fiction and reality", and very active community leaders obviously taking it uncomfortably seriously?

I'm not sure I was ever involved deeply enough to give a meaningful response, but to the best of my recollection...

I was most active around 2008-2012. At the time, there was a very sharp divide between the different sections of the forums (and there were quite a lot of sections, organized into categories). It seemed like most of the active participants in the sections I visited were middle-aged men/eunuchs, with a smattering of 18-50s filling things out. User motivations ranged from fettishistic and body modification (I recall a frequent poster whose username was "splitdick"), to gender identity and BIID, to medical issues requiring castration (prostate/testicular cancer or injury, etc), to autistic or religious people citing a desire to remove the distraction/temptation of sexuality to focus on what they really cared about. There were lots of personal anecdotes, and Jesus et al (but mostly Jesus) provided academic references when appropriate.

The general pattern was to always, always discourage rushing into castration, even though there was frequent lamenting the lack of support from the medical community. One young, fit christian poster kinda scared most of the active members by confidently skipping the recommended preparation and getting surgically castrated very quickly after opening discussion. On the other hand, there was a middle-aged autist who spent many years trying to convince doctors to help, and wound up bringing an elastrator to an appointment to demonstrate the ability to castrate himself if no surgeon would do it in a safer way (this was apparently when the doctor in question was utterly terrified of anyone discovering that he gave in to the threat).

There were threads about castration of minors, and the mods seemed to watch those closely and take action if anyone seemed too supportive of castrating minors IRL. I think there were also serious concerns about doxxing (one poster apparently had direct experience with at least one-three teenagers who were castrated in the Netherlands for non-trans medical reasons, and had a habit of revealing more detail than was necessary, and got modded for it). One of the admins not mentioned here (Palo, IIRC) had plenty of stories about boys expressing interest in castration prior to puberty, then changing their minds almost immediately afterward.

And as I recall, there were lots and lots of origin stories involving boys observing the castration of livestock.

Now that I'm trying to remember everything I can, I do recall a discussion that got uncomfortably positive toward sexual experiences for boys, particularly between 10 and 14. I recall someone (I forget who) posting large chunks of an article about various men's experiences when they were underaged, to which some posters replied with fond recollections of being 10-14 and getting molested by older teenagers.

Ultimately, what I got out of it was a lot of medical information, and a confusing mix of support for wanting to escape sexuality and also so much explicit sexuality, that I really couldn't say much about what was really going on. In the bits of the forums I read, Jesus generally posted in a very dry, academic manner, and Kristof came across as a grumpy old vet who was getting too old for this shit and really just wanted to be a nun. I kinda got the impression that some accounts, like Kristof and Palo, were often held by older people in the community, and might have changed hands when the original user died, but I never confirmed that. Palo came across as both the top mod and the one who took moderating for safety most seriously (though, there are mods I don't remember so well, so take that with some salt).

Oh, and the pushing for a male-to-eunuch identity thing was always there. Jesus was pretty open about trying to publish research to encourage medical recognition of such an identity. I'm more surprised that the others got involved in the publications and such, since they always struck me as more oriented toward the community than being involved as researchers directly.

I feel like I have not answered the question. :(

Now come on, you know it's only a few odd people on Twitter, or a few kids on college campuses, and it never ever happens in reality, and if it does it's only very, very rare and it's conservatives blowing up a few incidents into a big conspiracy...

... and if it does happen, then they deserved it/it's good and normal

I know it's being made fun of often, but what exactly is per se inconsistent about a combination of views that amounts to "you are pretending (your positions) to be losing when you are actually winning, and I actually wish you were in fact losing"? In a culture basically hardwired to support underdogs (ceteris paribus), the most reliable way to drive home a win is to maintain the narrative of loss, thus overcoming the bias towards balance that starts working against you once you cross the fifty-fifty mark. If you are a right-winger, you would do well to feel exactly the same about the left's response to any minuscule win that you consider to be yours (a bunch of people coming out to protest for a nativist party, Elon Musk taking over Twitter, Trump and allies actually implementing a "Trumpian" policy for once...).

Well yeah, we know it's rational to use that tactic, and we know you know it's rational. That's why we read that message into e.g. smirking denials that child mutilation fetishists are writing their pedo fiction into public policy. You can't read it any other way once the tactic is common knowledge.

That's why I've been begging any of you for the love of God to oppose it instead of just denying it, to no success.

I don't think the duplicity you are implying is actually part of it, though, at least consciously. In my estimation, the typical left-wing activist really does believe that the forces of society are arrayed against them and attacks on some sexual-politics NGO like this one are an instance of the way in which the overwhelming forces of society assert themselves the moment they attain the smallest victory.

Contribute something more than snark, please.

I saw this stuff probably a month ago, briefly thought about writing it up, and then let it lie because there didn't seem to be a way to do the subject justice without tripping the "low charity" alarm. I think you probably did better than I would have, but I think it could use a better ending. Ditch the partisan voice, sum up the factual content dispassionately, and then lay out why this is worth talking about.

Here's my take on a few productive questions:

  • Is WPATH influential?

  • Are these guys influential within WPATH?

  • Is their behavior objectionable, and if so why?

  • If it is objectionable, has the system produced a reasonable response?

  • If the system has not produced a reasonable response, what's the appropriate way to talk about this here?

  • ...I think a lot of Reds are going to think this is a pretty big deal. I think a lot of Blues are going to think it's not that big a deal, for a variety of reasons. So what size of deal should this be?

...I appreciate that from a tribal perspective, the fact that these questions would even be asked is itself something of a problem. But this is not a tribal space, and battle-cries do not contribute to the conversation. Such questions do need to be asked here, because the evidence indicates that we, collectively, are not on the same page on this. So what's the scope and scale of the disagreement, and where do the borders lie?

[EDIT] - looking at the conversation below... Does this look productive to you?

Most of the red responses are sardonic call-backs to memes. Those memes arose from a lot of previous arguments, but most of those arguments, by volume, didn't happen here, and most of the people who made them aren't here now, and the memes themselves are not in fact an argument. Why should the people who are here now engage with an attack on statements they haven't actually made? This whole mode of communication is just passive-aggressive as hell.

The blue responses mostly are about this problem. I'll note that some of them are actually moving beyond that to engage with the content! That's commendable! ...And then reds are low-effort snarking at them for it.

This all would go a whole lot better without the implying implications, and just a bare statement of facts and arguments to sum up what seems to me to be a relevant and readable post.

This all would go a whole lot better without the implying implications, and just a bare statement of facts and arguments to sum up what seems to me to be a relevant and readable post.

What, do you want us to die of boredom?

I for one appreciate the post the way it is: there's a hook, an explanation, and a got'cha. It's Shakespeare.

nara did a bit of redhat killjoying, but in the proper way that I enjoy about this place. Also, I see one meme reply so far, not a bunch.

Thank you, it made my day to hear someone enjoyed it! I'm not much of a writer, but I'd lie if I said there wasn't some amount of artistic expression going into this.

Is WPATH influential?

To a moderate extent, yes. They're not binding, and some jurisdictions actually prohibit some of their policies, but a lot of US-sphere medical practices will take it as the starting point, and the extent it exists as an organization with standards makes matters more billable. Some of that's probably the dog being wagged by its tail -- pre-2010-era trans stuff did reflect a lot of contradictory and not very well-considered rules (eg, requiring three months life experience before cross-hormone therapy basically required a lot of really bad attempts at passing in public) -- but it's hard to distinguish.

Are these guys influential within WPATH?

Hard to tell. Simply being a member of WPATH isn't that constrained; there's something like 4k members in the US, it's 225 USD/year (with discounts for low-income countries) and open to a wide variety of 'professionals' for voting membership, so that doesn't really much. On the other hand, Johnson is cited as an author in the draft SoCv8 (though, AFAICT not past SoCs), and Johnson, Wassersug both have research cited in the SoC.

((Willette isn't listed on the current membership directory or obviously cited on the research lists; the big connection here to WPATH seems to be a link to older research or public talks, but this could be the multiple author problem.))

It could be that they've played a longer-term role behind the scenes, or it could be that WPATH decision-makers already had the answer they wanted and just pointed to the first extant member who'd published anything adjacent to their target. I think part of the Red Tribe objection assumes at least in part the former (ie, that the casual treatment of therapies for trans-women are motivated in part by liking the side effects), but I don't think the latter would a high point even by the low standards of social science.

Is their behavior objectionable, and if so why?

I dunno. The fetish content is creepy, but 'people with a kink fantasize about legal acceptance of the kink' going into fantasies about a mandate isn't exactly unusual; if anything, it's bog-standard among free use and exhibitionists, and not unheard of elsewhere. On its own, I don't think it's terribly strong evidence favoring actually implementing such things, so much as it's something that the authors both desire and want to avoid the mental hoops of taking responsibility for desiring. Hypnosis kink and (among women) 'abduction' kink plays a pretty similar role, and there's even some pretty bog-standard gay furries who use a variant because they've got hangups about 'choosing' to be gay.

((That said, there's only a handful of furries that take to eunich/nullo/neutrois levels, and afaik none of them as trans-adjacent. Maybe Chris Goodwin?))

But it does raise serious questions about the strength of their research, especially given the relative lack of other researchers going after the same community (and... not exactly paranoid concerns that they've played a role in what other research that does exist). Weirdly fetishistic Q/A stories don't necessarily invalidate the same author doing conventional research, but I think there are serious data science problems with running one of these forums and using it as a data source, and that's if the author did actually disclose it.

If it is objectionable, has the system produced a reasonable response?

I don't think so, and perhaps worse, I'm not sure it can. I think the minimum for Red Tribe trust would involve some sort of moderately skeptical analysis of this stuff being taken seriously in public spaces, but there's not really a way for that to exist right now; academic research isn't going to publish (and probably shouldn't publish!) a 'hey, these guys are creepy weirdos with bad understandings of physical side effects to their interests', but more broadly no one sane's going to spend twenty years of their life on the matter on the off-chance that it becomes higher-profile.

((and I include myself as 'not sane' here))

But on the other hand, I'm not sure that the Red Tribe interest is in a reasonable response. WhiningCoil's self-described framework for this post below is that "These people want to mutilate and sterilize children." That's true in the strictest sense, but it's also The Worst Argument In the World, where expanded it becomes "These people (three of a dozen experts, plus the thousands of unaffiliated and unassociated doctors and shrinks doing the work) want to mutilate and sterilize (voluntarily) children (14-18-year-olds, which we do a variety of other not-exactly-great surgeries on)", in the same way that advocates for these policies are committing the same non-central fallacy when they compare the surgeries here to orchi or prostate removal for cancer treatment.

I'd expect that both WhiningCoil and the authors here would take similarly distinct positions on the availability of endometrial ablation as an option for sixteen-year-old women with extremely severe periods and no interest in reproduction (and actually doctors do!), even though the matter is clearly separate from trans stuff and from the sexual interests here, or even any externally visible modification.

On the gripping hand, there's a fun philosophical question about whether 20%+ of the voting population can be taxiomatically unreasonably on both the right and left, but the pragmatic side you kinda need a solution.

If the system has not produced a reasonable response, what's the appropriate way to talk about this here?

Dunno. I'd expect it would be helpful to focus more on the object level by WhiningCoil rather than repeating the vaguries, and to actually do some of his own homework for ChrisPratt, but that's kinda on the margins. I think ChrisPratt's pretty outright focused on the literal and central examples of sexual abuse of children, while WhiningCoil's concerns are far broader.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

On its own, I don't think it's terribly strong evidence favoring actually implementing such things, so much as it's something that the authors both desire and want to avoid the mental hoops of taking responsibility for desiring.

this... this is insightful. It connects to a whole lot of patterns I see in a lot of much more conventional lowbrow material; fanfic, pulp stories, web fiction and so on. Sort of a desire to offload moral responsibility to one's circumstances and surroundings. Most interesting.

I think part of the Red Tribe objection assumes at least in part the former (ie, that the casual treatment of therapies for trans-women are motivated in part by liking the side effects), but I don't think the latter would a high point even by the low standards of social science.

I think there's a bit more to it.

Reds think that a significant percentage of Trans people are actually engaging in a sexual fetish, not a mental state or some sort of deeply rooted gender identity. Certainly a lot of highly noticeable behavior by specific trans people seems difficult to explain in any other way. This is vehemently denied by Blues, whose counter-arguments start with Chinese cardiologists.

Reds think that Blues are in denial about the fetish aspect of the trans movement, along with a lot of other, similar aspects (tactical transness and pedophilia, to name two); the Red model says that Blues understand on some level that such behavior looks absolutely horrible to Normies, and they also understand that policing such behavior would mean conceding 90% of what Reds are fighting for on the issue. At a minimum, it would mean gatekeeping and skepticism about claims of transness, and the conflict between the two results in concealing the issue and attacking anyone who brings it up.

This is an example of people in the movement being pretty clearly in it for the fetish, in a way that should definately have resulted in some sort of social safeguards being activated. The absence of such social safeguards is evidence for the general Red argument: Blues cannot be trusted to think critically or act responsibly where this issue is concerned, because their social biases overrule what should be basic, axiomatic values. Their social immune system doesn't work, in short, and so social contagion runs rampant, necessitating quarantine.

Blues have a different view, of course, but as you say, we kinda need a solution.

Plastic surgery (and other controversial elective surgeries like liposuction or bariatric surgery) exist, but they're controversial enough that they're not really good examples even if social conservatives don't really go after them with the same strength that they do (directly) sexual/sexuality stuff. Non-trans hysterectomy and endometrial ablation are similarly politically complicated, though in ways that don't break down into simple Red Tribe/Blue Tribe splits. And there are other 'cosmetic' plastic surgeries that are still pretty well-established for young patients that I wouldn't put into this category, like cleft lip repair.

But for a really outside-the-box example that isn't controversial because everyone accepts it, the current standard of care for all non-Becker's birthmarks over 20 cm, and for most other 'hairy' non-Becker's birthmarks over 2 cm, includes surgical removal or laser 'surgery' (basically high-power light therapy). This had a historic cause, since there's a small subclass of that may have an elevated chance of cancer, and historically for any birthmark in this class it was practical to remove, a meaningful biopsy was almost as invasive as the full surgery to remove it and nearby tissue.

We could now evaluate these in higher levels of fidelity without having to cut out large portions of tissue, so we could reduce the number of total surgeries being performed on minors. But the birthmarks do genuinely look pretty ugly, and they're very common targets for stigma and self-image problems, and surgery performed at younger ages tends to have better recovery and less obvious scarring than surgeries on older people (or, in the case of haemangiomas, can have less visually obvious scarring than what occurs as the haemangiomas naturally shrink and fade with age).

There seems a somewhat similar class of matters for some dental surgeries, where the results are aesthetically pleasing and have some ease-of-care benefits, but have complicated tradeoffs for health directly. I know less about that field, though.

I think you probably did better than I would have, but I think it could use a better ending. Ditch the partisan voice, sum up the factual content dispassionately, and then lay out why this is worth talking about.

I see how it could be improved, but I swear it wasn't partisanship! I was expecting the story to have the same status as Jeffrey Epstein - so out there, both sides can unite on being shocked at the whole thing. In hindsight, it was naive, given how sensitive the trans issues are but I thought we could make a separation between that, and WPATH in particular.

looking at the conversation below... Does this look productive to you?

Not exactly what I was looking for, no. I mentioned in another comment, I find the conspiracism vs "nothing to see here, move along" angle a lot more interesting.

I'll note that some of them are actually moving beyond that to engage with the content! That's commendable!

No. If the goal is to build respect between the two sides, we can't have one side treat the other like they were babies. It's not commendable, it's expected. Imagine writing something like that in response to one of ymeshkout's posts about election fraud.

Here's my take on a few productive questions:

I think the thread is dying down a bit, so I don't know if I can have much impact on the conversation, but I can still answer these if you want.

As with other gender diverse individuals, eunuchs may also seek castration to better align their bodies with their gender identity. As such, eunuch individuals are gender nonconforming individuals who have needs requiring medically necessary gender-affirming care (Brett et al., 2007; Johnson et al., 2007; Roberts et al., 2008).

I think the biggest takeaway here is exactly how little evidence is required for WPATH to declare something a "gender identity" requiring "medically necessary gender-affirming care". I've read academic papers from forum posters talking about their forum buddies before, but I've certainly never seen a case where the resulting paper was considered notable, let alone sufficient basis to create a medical standard of care. I previously wrote a post about otherkin/transracialism/plurals as a control-group for gender-identity, in the same way that parapsychology can serve as a control group for science. This serves a similar function, but on the medical institution side of things.

Also, take a moment and consider exactly how big the gap is between the quality of evidence and the boldness of the claim. Presumably the author thinks gender identities are fixed/inborn:

Like other gender diverse individuals, eunuch individuals may be aware of their identity in childhood or adolescence. Due to the lack of research into the treatment of children who may identify as eunuchs, we refrain from making specific suggestions.

So apparently for all of human history some people have been born with a eunuch gender identity (separate from actual eunuchs who generally had no choice), and we're only now finding out thanks to the guys writing the WPATH standard of care happening to post on a related fetish forum. And that's just it as a scientific claim, but this isn't even about whether a hypothesis has a 51% chance of being true, it's about medical care. Medical care carrying severe and permanent side-effects demands use of the precautionary principle and very strong evidence that it will benefit the patient. But it goes beyond even that because of course this isn't him treating a specific patient he has met, it's him establishing a medical standard of care. His internet surveys of his forum buddies are sufficient for WPATH to declare that patients diagnosed as having a eunuch gender identity (which is presumably any patient who claims to identify as a eunuch, which I suspect would go up orders of magnitude if psychiatrists started telling patients about the idea or the it got any cultural traction) will benefit from "gender-affirming care".

This tells us very little about eunuchs, but it tells us a lot about WPATH's decision-making processes. It also tells us important information about the institutions that continue to reference other WPATH recommendations as if they're significantly more meaningful than a sheet of paper with "Yes X is a gender-identity, prescribe gender-affirming care." printed on it. Or for that matter institutions that would openly criticize something like a standard for prescribing chemotherapy if it was based on such dubious evidence, but stay silent when it's a standard for prescribing castration because of the political aspect.

Well, I suppose it's better that people get their rocks off on some seedy website. After all it's just fantasy, and the people running the site make it clear they don't condone anyone actually trying to do this sort of stuff.

This reminded me of... this story. But here, author does make it clear that she'd really like it to happen. (especially in the comment section)

"There was a virus. It was an artificial virus, and it infected the entire world. It was called PNY-1, for Polytranscriptase Nuclear Y-chromatin, and the one was because it was the first, and hopefully only, virus of its kind."

"There was a fan of the show, or maybe a small group - that part is not known for sure - that had a lot of smarts. He, or they, understood biochemistry and genetic recombination. Whoever it was called themselves 'The Conversion Bureau'. They were kind of like computer hackers, only they hacked biology instead. A lot of people in the early decades of the century had laboratories in their garages, and played around with home genetic engineering, hacking DNA. The 'Conversion Bureau' made the virus because of that show."

"Why? Why did they do it? And what does any of that have to do with..." Dylan dropped his eyes "...With boys having to wear bras?"


"[Humans are] A lot gentler. A lot kinder. A lot more concerned with the feelings of others. The Pony virus changed a lot of things, Dylan. It increased the amount of oxytocin all bodies make. That's a hormone that helps make us care and be nurturing. When mothers care for their children, their bodies are flooded with the stuff. But men used to have very little of it."

"Were men mean, before the Pony virus?"

"Well... I guess they were. There were hundreds of wars, all over the planet, all the time. Every single day, there was about one hundred wars going on. Now we don't have any. There aren't any armies anymore. Nobody sees the point of having an army, because all of the money to make weapons and train soldiers is used to feed people, and clothe them, and make sure everyone has a place to live." The world was pretty scary before the Pony virus, Richard had to admit.

"Oxytocin was only part of it. The virus changed the part of the genes that controlled territoriality and aggression too, and it also... cut the level of testosterone by two thirds. Testosterone is the male hormone. It makes men hairy... or it used to anyway... but it also made them extra aggressive, and extra territorial, and... well... horny all the time. So men were pretty frustrated, and they also were... I guess... a little more mean and prone to anger and violence." Richard decided to leave out the old statistics that showed that 98% of all violence was committed by males alone. Testosterone was probably a very big factor. Maybe the creators of the Pony virus had intended everything after all.

"So... the virus basically made men... less like men." Dylan was a smart kid. He'd pretty much hit the nail on the head.

"Um... yeah. Pretty much. Having breasts is just incidental. The real point was to make males act more like females, to make them more caring, more concerned with feelings, less violent, and less aggressive. That's why there are no more violent contact sports, no more wars, and no more hunger. No man can stand to let another man die in a ditch anymore." Richard watched the boys playing jump-rope. A smaller child wanted to play. They had welcomed him in, and took the time to gently teach him how to play. He couldn't imagine boys doing that when he had been growing up. "But the virus also affected women too, son. It made them even more nurturing than they ever were before as well. Both men and women were made less violent, aggressive, and more caring overall. And it only took eight weeks to spread to every human on earth."


From "Author's note":

Every single thing in The Friendship Virus is based on fact. More, these facts are acknowledged by all the educated, professional men of the world. Not a bit of any of this is the least bit in dispute. I know these things because not only do I study and research, had a parent involved in enforcement, but... I can use Google.

As you can. Everything above is just the first of ten thousand pages verifying everything I wrote.

I have received a lot of crap about this one, single story among my more than one million words of storytelling, and every bit of it comes from one thing: boys who don't like hearing the truth - a truth understood and recognized by all real men in positions of power, authority and enforcement of law and order.

And it's not just this story.

Within FimFiction, she has her own section in the CB universe called “The Chatoyaverse”. JDR authored an enormous number of stories herself, some as part of a series, others as one-offs. However, they generally share the same elements: The magical barrier is expanding and will not only kill all humans, but destroy their civilization too, erasing mankind’s entire culture from existence. In the original story, the exact nature of the barrier was left vague, other than it extends from Equestria, would “heal the Earth”, is harmful to Humans, and humanity is already dying out. But in JDR’s stories, Celestia deliberately created the barrier to wipe out humans.

Humans are harmed by the magical barrier because they have no magic, which is because they have no souls, which is also why they’re pure evil. Technology is also pure evil, which is why the barrier destroys it too. Men are especially evil, in which JDR claims they’re responsible for 98% of all the world’s violence and rape, and the only way to cure them is to make them more feminine. Failing that, castration works too.

Celestia is an immortal goddess doing this for their own good, as are the other ponies. Not only does the potion turn all evil humans into perfect ponies, but the potion is explicitly said to completely alter the user’s mind by removing any negative thoughts from their brain. It also makes the ponies unwaveringly loyal to Celestia, even if before they were the most hardcore pro-human rebels. Also, they are reprogrammed to be pansexual. Critics have likened this to mind control and brainwashing, making the prospect of being turned into a pony even more disturbing. But it doesn’t stop there; in one particular story, the natural-born ponies are the product of centuries long eugenics program to breed out undesirable traits; ponies are superior because she deliberately made them so.

Her justification for Celestia’s questionable actions is: “In my stories superior beings - truly superior beings - can do things that if a lesser being, like a human, were to do, it would indeed be evil."