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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   30408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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In a "what the fuck even is this timeline" update: Anderson lee Aldrich, the Q Club shooter, is apparently non-binary and uses they/them pronouns, and already had an Encyclopedia Dramatica article detailing his career as a 15 year old "professional hacker", calling him a pedophile, and describing his absent father as an MMA fighter and porn star.

I'm feeling very vindicated in my impulse to hold off conclusions... but I would think that, given my biases, wouldn't it? The real test would be a tragedy that looks at first glance to fit my biases perfectly and allows me to cathartically Boo Outgroup. I suspect that differences in media ecosystems have that less likely... but I would think that too, wouldn't I?

Plus obvious, audacious narrative updates in real time.

And our first echo shooting, as usually happens in the immediate wake of a highly publicized mass shooting. No apparent political/CW element, disgruntled employee.

Kind of low effort for this forum, but I watched a news clip on twitter where CNN interviews Natalee Bingham, a friend of one of the victims, commenting on the suspect claiming to be nonbinary, saying: “That's really really offen[sive] especially being a transgender woman myself, that a male, which it was obvious with the mugshot, that's a man, that's not a nonbinary person, because in no way, shape or form could they appear as a woman the next day, it's really offensive to even hear that, that they're playing that role."

I was just blown away by the hypocrisy. According to standard leftist rhetoric, a person's gender self-identification is sacrosanct, denying someone's chosen gender identity is transphobic, and the the idea that someone might identify as transgender or nonbinary for personal gain is rightwing fearmongering and something that never happens. Never mind the fact that Bingham based her judgment solely on how the suspect looks in his mugshots (while Bingham herself looks and sounds “transgender” at best); I thought making people's gender recognition dependent on well they “pass” was another faux pas to the LGTBQ+ community.

I want to avoid making this all “boo outgroup”; I know that Bingham doesn't speak for the entire LGBTQ+ community, and maybe others disagree with her views. Still, it's baffling to hear her say so casually the same things that would get a cishet male or radfem woman cancelled. I can somewhat respect the leftist view that self-identification is always valid, even if I personally disagree with it, but if the real rule is more along the lines of “we can question other people's gender identity but you can't”, then I have even less respect for the people pushing this ideology.

Transgender people are not, as a rule, exempt from being "canceled" for saying the wrong thing about other trans people. (See Contrapoints' video on her own experiences of being canceled.) I would hope for some mercy in this specific instance, not because the identity questioning is justified but because she's talking about someone who quite literally just killed her dear friend; expecting her to be perfectly charitable isn't really fair. I would not, however, generalize from this case in determining leftist norms in general.

There is a discussion that often comes up around alcohol and inhibitions. Does being drunk make you act like a different person? Or does it reveal who you truly are behind the mask?

The glaring issue with this example is that "charitable" is even a frame to come up. It's that, in a vulnerable moment where the mask is off, this person clearly does not genuinely believe in the doctrine of self-identification.

Maybe she will suffer social consequences for it. It would be tactically sound, if nothing else. Because opponents of gender ideology are going to be linking to that clip for a decade.

Tactics or no, I hope people don't harass this bereaved person. I'm sure opponents of gender ideology would find plenty of ammunition anyway, from somewhere or other.

Many transgender people don't believe in the doctrine of self-identification. Quite a lot of them have strong feelings about precisely what it is that defines their own gender, and would like the rest of society to adopt their specific theory even if that means excluding people who don't fit in with that definition. Self-ID wins that internal battle because, amongst the available options, it's the one that can unite the most people within the community. Every other definition is forced to turn away potential allies by its very nature.

And yes, ultimately, self-ID is a matter of charity. I think most of the people who subscribe to it as a notion would privately concede that a person can, in theory, falsely claim to be transgender. For example, if an evil genie told me I'd have to go and tell people I was a man or they'd kill a hundred babies, and I went out and told people I was a man, that would not, in itself, make me a man. But, if people didn't know about the evil genie and thought I really meant it, then "self-ID," as a norm, says that trusting me on that would still be the right thing to do in most situations.

We might ask, what is it that distinguishes a false claim to be trans from a true one? Many activists wouldn't ask this, of course, because they'd rather not start a massive internal fight. But I suspect that the closest thing the "self-ID" camp would have to an answer to this question -- provided they felt safe enough to consider it in the first place -- would be something along the lines of, you're really transgender if (a) you want a different gender identity and (b) that want is intrinsic rather than instrumental. I'm reaching, on that second one, because I have never actually seen it articulated that way, but I think it fits. Wanting to be female because then you can get scholarships reserved for women would not make you trans; wanting to be female because there is no same-sex marriage and you want to marry a man would not make you trans; wanting to be female (or male/neither/a mixture) because you just want it is the thing that counts.

Unfortunately, "because I just want it" can be very hard to describe, let alone prove. Thus: charity.

I wonder where that places Iranian trans women. Infamously, Iran has a very high rate of transwomen, because it's the legal alternative to homosexuality. However, this is clearly an instrumental motivation, even if it often coincides with significant efforts to present and live as women.

It's also an interesting definition, because much of what is driving opposition to the rise of gender ideology is the belief that social pressure, contagion, and misdiagnosed mental illness are the primary drivers trans-identification right now, and these are seen as extrinsic motivations that are often misunderstood as intrinsic by those who temporarily self-identify as trans. If the activists truly believe as you say, but then they pretend otherwise for politically strategic reasons, then they are fundamentally untrustworthy on the very important factual question of what is actually driving increasing rates of trans-identification.

You bring up some interesting issues. I think it's worth clarifying that my use of the word "intrinsic" doesn't preclude social influence on desire. So, if someone sees a trans person, and they never had a desire to be trans before that and never would have without having seen it and known it was possible, but they do still want to change their gender now that they know that they can, just as a want-in-itself, then that would still count as an "intrinsic" desire, in the sense in which I am using the word. The cause of the intrinsic want is not relevant, provided that the desire for a particular gender is a desire for that gender rather than wanting the gender as a tool on the way to something else.

So, for example, if some of those Iranian trans women would never have wanted to be trans if they could have simply been homosexual, but, over time, they've adopted their female identity and now it feels like their own and they've come to like that identity in and of itself, then that would count as a socially-mediated intrinsic desire, by my definition. Whereas, an Iranian who is living as a trans woman but who would transition back to male in a heartbeat if they could just be homosexual does not have that intrinsic desire, and indeed I think many people who generally support self-ID as a measure would still concede that such a person is not "really trans" -- because they don't really want to be, not for itself.

social pressure, contagion,

If you want to be trans solely in order to make your friends accept you, then that's not an intrinsic desire for a gender. But are there really people who would transition solely for that reason? It seems far-fetched. On the other hand, people can sometimes manufacture genuine desires, in order to fit in. Kind of like the difference between wearing jeans because that is the socially acceptable costume and you don't want to be questioned, on the one hand, and wearing jeans because you have absorbed that you feel socially comfortable in them and now they just feel "comfortable" in themselves, even when no-one is watching. The former is not an intrinsic desire; the latter could be.

misdiagnosed mental illness

Yeah, this is an interesting one. If you think that transitioning will improve your mental health, but you don't actually want to be the other gender as a thing in itself ... yeah, could happen, some mental illnesses make people latch onto solutions indiscriminately.

I think some people would want to say that a person like this is still close enough to "really trans" if the transitioning does actually help. I'm not sure that I would, though. Honestly, the more I explore these edges, the more I find myself feeling like "intrinsic desire" actually does describe something important about what it means to be trans. Mind you, I am not, myself, transgender in any way, and I hesitate to present myself as an authority on a subject that hinges so closely on the personal experiences of others.

In and of itself, none of this addresses the question of whether we should attempt to reduce the prevalence of an intrinsic desire to be another gender, of course. Whether or when to police the existence of such intrinsic desire is also a separate question; proponents of self-ID would say "don't ever," but some might be willing to move to a different standard if they still believed that intrinsic desire itself would be respected under that standard.

More seriously than my last comment, and especially because this is an incident where the political valence has thrashed around wildly and this latest reveal has it seeming to favor “my side,” I want to take this moment to decry the state of our politics, where the best thing that can happen to a side is some random lunatic wearing the enemy's colors committing some telegenic atrocity.

Yes, I've said before, it could be worse! We could be cheering on “our side's” lunatics when they take enemy lives as trophies, and so dive headlong into Hobbesian brutality. But that doesn't mean that the reverse is healthy, either.

It does not seem right to me that we should be handing over the direction of our culture to homicidal maniacs. Of course, it doesn't seem right to ignore them, either, but there's a proper response and it's not how we're looking at these incidents: we're looking for some excuse to rise up and say “I told you Those People couldn't be trusted! Come on, let's get 'em!”

And if such excuses are pivotal in deciding the course of history, (happening the right amount of time before an election, for example,) I can't help but wonder how many for-want-of-a-nail alternate timelines we're generating, where some bystander looked this way instead of that and did/didn't so prevent some well-avenged atrocity from being committed.

It further has me wondering exactly how many of our own deepest values are themselves entrenched emotional backlashes to random but viscerally-felt effects, rather than – as all but the most stalwart of reactionaries would like to hope, at least in some cases, at least a little – the result of genuine moral improvement.

I feel like looking down that path too far leads to madness, so I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader.

This is happening because incentives. We now have established that "hate speech" is an exception to free speech everywhere but the upper courts and The Motte (for now). Only one side can effectively wield this hate speech exception, so when an event like this happens we get each side trying to blame the other. While the left might lose a smidge of credibility when the facts turn against their narrative, the right will be subject to ever encroaching bans and censorship. The right, therefore, will collectively sigh with relief when it turns out the latest murdering lunatic didn't watch Tucker Carlson. However, this ratchet only goes in one direction (Elon Musk notwithstanding), because the hate speech exception almost exclusively applies to right wing values and beliefs only. The activists, whether by Machiavellian cunning or just authoritarian instinct, see an indirect (but obvious) causal link between the utterences of their ideological opponents and these types of mass shootings, and they see an opportunity to cast a wider net for the hate speech exception. This strategy been working quite well for them, and the right doesn't really have a counter.

It's really bad news when one of these shootings really does turn out to be some gun-toting Trump cultist, and I am relieved when it is not. Because when it is, the ratchet will move again, with more institutions enacting incremental bans and censorship of ever more ordinary right wing views and opinions, because their words are literally killing people. It doesn't happen everywhere all at once, but is rather just a slow grinding down of free speech. Once these rules were established, the game to disown violent radicals on your own side, particularly if your on the right, and to try and pin it on the other side, is the correct and only sensible move

The desparation of groups to see a mass-murderer wind up belonging to the other tribe inspired me to dream up a mobile app that you could use whenever such an event was occuring live. It would allow you to bet on the identity and motivation of the perpetrators of mass murder events while they are breaking news. The odds would be based on collating data from every media headline atrocity that has occurred in the past 20 years. Imagine the odds on this guy.

Some might call it crude, but I would argue that this is no worse than the wink nudging that occurs on reddit or twitter whenever such an attack occurs.

Years ago I had an idea for a goofy story concerning two characters independently plotting mass shootings in the US. The first character is a misogynistic incel who wants revenge against the Stacies and roasties who've rejected him all his life in favour of Chads. The second character is an Islamic fundamentalist who believes the West is fundamentally, irreparably rotten and degenerate, and the only thing that can save it is the immediate imposition of an Islamic theocracy.

All the logistics and planning for the two mass shootings are ironed out. There's just one problem. The first protagonist is of Arab descent and is named Muhammad Assan: he's savvy enough to realise that, even if he publishes a manifesto long enough to rival Elliot Rodger's, the motivation for his mass shooting will be attributed to Islamism (even though he himself is an atheist) purely on the strength of his name and ethnic background. The second protagonist, meanwhile, is of Chechen descent, is named Adam Abubakarov, only became a zealous Islamic convert in college, and is ambiguously Slavic enough to scan as "white": even if he screams "Allahu akbar!" before commencing his rampage, he realises that his name and skin colour means that his rampage will be assumed to have been motivated by far-right extremism, hatred of women, James Holmes-esque psychosis or similar; his religious beliefs will be a footnote at best. So both would-be murderers are stymied by how to ensure that the underlying messages for their respective rampages are interpreted as intended.

The solution? It's 70 years old and no less effective for it: they'll swap rampages. Adam will publish Muhammad's manifesto under his own name immediately before shooting up a sorority house, and Muhammad will blow up a synagogue immediately after distributing pamphlets containing passages from the Qur'an.

TBH I'd read it.

“We did it, reddit!”

Great idea, but if you think "suspect was known to the FBI" is bad, wait till you see the insider trading schemes for MurderBets.io.

It's a good thing that the Prediction Market Act of 2036 mandated that 10% of the bet volume goes towards life insurance of the target, and that he gets the full volume in the event he kills the assassin.

However the CCTV companies seem to be the happiest with the outcome, as they win no matter who loses.

I was thinking recently about assassination markets, and how the state would try to curtail those.

Couldn't they outlaw making bets and trades that pay off when "someone dies"? The idea is that allowing those markets sets perverse incentives -- namely, to kill the individual in question. Or maybe this legislation couldn't work because of a loophole that would let assassin markets run under the guise of life insurance?

It seems to me regular markets already have that incentive structure, at least for the set of people whose sudden unexpected death would have a predictable effect on the market. Assassination markets are kind of a distilled version of buying leveraged stock in an industry and murdering a politician who is angling to regulate it. Which ties into the old idea that having wealthy enemies is dangerous.

Wouldn't an assassination market be censorship resistant as a matter of course?

Couldn't they outlaw making bets and trades that pay off when "someone dies"?

Outlawing the entire life insurance industry?

An exception can be made for betting own your own death (and naming the people who benefit). Since you can't personally benefit from the payout after you're dead, and can choose who you trust enough not to murder you for money, this is a reasonable exception as the main issue doesn't apply.

Easier just to jail anyone who suggests it too stridently

Combining prediction markets and trial by combat? A man after my own heart...

Problem is adjudicating afterwards.

Q Club

(I will admit that, for the past few days, I've been hearing people say "Club Q" and until today thinking it was probably some term for Qanon believers.)

deleted

The playbook has gained a few pages but man it's been the same overall strategy to respond to mass shooting events as long as I can remember:

If the shooter's political motivations make outgroup look bad, hammer on those.

If shooter had no clear political affiliation but their identity (white and male, usually) is useful, hammer that.

If their identity is bad for the narrative but the victims are particularly sympathetic (children, women, LGBT, immigrants, etc.) hammer the hell out of that. I would bet most people don't remember that the Pulse Nightclub Shooter was an Islamist. And the 'new' page is blame outgroup for 'hateful rhetoric' causing the shooting anyway.

If literally all else fails, then just hammer the lack of gun control (even if it happened in a 'gun free zone' in a state with strict gun laws). Usually the pivots aren't as visible, but you see them regularly.

The Kyle Rittenhouse situation was interesting because they tried, very poorly, mind you, to use every one of these approaches, despite it never really being a good fit on any count. There's still people who claim he was a White Supremacist who crossed state lines with an illegally owned rifle with the intention of killing minorities. This, after an acquittal at trial and copious video evidence he was attacked and chased and everyone he shot was white, anyway.

Incidentally, I do believe this is why the Waukesha Christmas Parade Attack got relatively little coverage and has not led to any particular political movement. 6 Deaths, 62 injured.

No political motivations, attacker was minority, and the victims were middle class and white and probably Republican, and there wasn't even a gun involved.

And I'm not saying there should have been a political movement! I think treating it as a semi-random tragedy is the right approach and overreacting by, say, banning parades or something would be stupid.

But the fact that journalists and media don't take this tact with every mass killing gives away the game.

We regard car crimes as an acceptable cost for a lifestyle enabled by cars, so few people clamor to ban cars in the wake of car attacks. Guns are regarded by the left as chiefly a nuisance and not a critical tool that enables our way of life. Cars don't need a second amendment to protect them; the benefits are obvious.

We could take obvious common sense steps like limiting the maximum speed a car can go, and also limit the size of gas tanks so they can't run from police for very long and banning racing stripes because nobody needs to make their car look cool.

That's about how gun control advocates sound when attempting to articulate "reasonable" compromises on firearms.

Those are only obviously onerous because most Americans rely on cars though.

How many people have to exercise a given right for it to be onerous to impose upon it?

Regardless of if it's actually onerous, observe that because many people drive the limitations would be obviously onerous. There's less of an explanatory hurdle.

No political motivations

Darrell Brooks had publicly posted about his desire to assault out old white people. He also believed Hitler was right to attack Jewish people. It wasn't brought up in the trial, but there was clear evidence of hateful motivations in his online posting history.

He also represented himself at trial and used sovereign citizen arguments and basically was an incoherent mess in terms of his 'ideological' beliefs.

He's not exactly the central example of a politically motivated killer like, say, the guy who shot up the Republican baseball game all those years ago.

Yeah, I almost put something in about pre entertaining the world with his sovereign citizen beliefs.

Surreal, yes. (You skipped the part where’s he’s apparently a weeb.) Strong evidence...not yet.

I’m sticking to my prior for at least a week.

When the media said his grandfather was a Republican, I knew they were deceptive. If he was a Republican, they would have said it, because they don't like Republicans, so "his grandfather is a Republican" means that was the closest association they could find and he's not one. It was also suspicious that media reported that someone stopped him. How exactly? That information was absent from most news reports, so it was probably unflattering to the side the media likes.

i thought the newsworthy part was supposed to be that his grandfather was a member of the California state assembly, not just that he was a republican.

I think it’s more a matter of public record. His party affiliation is unlikely to be known; someone who actually ran as a Republican, on the other hand...

absent from most news reports

Really? The ones I saw both named the guy who tackled him and interviewed the one who beat him with his own handgun.

They probably didn't and maybe still don't know(at the time of this writing) his party affiliation.

They knew the affiliation of his Grandfather because he is a literal politician.

Why then, would they mention it? Is the political persuasion of the killer's grandfather the most important topic here?

Because there is a high correlation between people's political affiliation and their families political affiliation.

Maybe for parents and kids, but grandparent is a bit of a stretch

Seems like it's because whomever in the media brought it up believes that "Republican == bad person". Therefore, saying his grandfather is/was a Republican would be tantamount to saying "his grandfather is a notorious scoundrel". At least, I struggle to think of any alternative explanation.

It seems to me that his identity is more aligned with a progressive identity than a conservative one. He is the product of a progressive lax culture, not a conservative one. He’s the child of a drug addicted porn star father and a felon mother. His father was addicted to meth, a commonly abused drug in the gay nightclub scene. His parents’ lifestyle was the opposite of conservative.

The fact that he was previously charged for threatening to blow up his mother’s house strongly suggests that he targeted the sexually promiscuous nightclub because of its similarity to his father (in his mind). Clearly he had an interest in violence against his parents before.

If you want less of these kinds of attacks, what is the best course of action?

  • Well, there’s absolutely no association between anti-gay belief and attacks on gays. Many millions of Americans are heavily invested in being anti-LGBT, but they don’t attack gays. Muslims and Orthodox Jews hardly have any interest in attacking gays, despite being anti-LGBT.
  • There’s a stronger relationship between shooters and broken families / traumatic childhoods, in particular absent fathers.

To best prevent future cases of this sort of violence, producing even more lgbt propaganda will accomplish nothing (it’s already omnipresent after all), but fixing society and keening families together would probably help. It would be more advantageous to actually extol the value of a stable mother-father marriage, versus continually talking about gays

The interview with the father complicates this.

Guy was more concerned with the possibility of whether his son might be gay than whether or not he murdered a bunch of people.

If he was gay, it could make sense that he internalized some of the hatred coming from a meth addicted/extremely homophobic dad.

Will be interesting to see what comes out of it.

Although, fuck, we need a new national sport. The ‘guess the motivations of this week’s mass murderer’ game is getting pretty dark.

If he was gay, it could make sense that he internalized some of the hatred coming from a meth addicted/extremely homophobic dad.

I haven't seen the interview. My impression from what I had read this morning was of a father who didn't have much involvement in his life.

You’ll probably come across it. It’s… pretty bad

Well, there’s absolutely no association between anti-gay belief and attacks on gays. Many millions of Americans are heavily invested in being anti-LGBT, but they don’t attack gays. Muslims and Orthodox Jews hardly have any interest in attacking gays, despite being anti-LGBT.

I'm not sure this is a valid argument. Just because anti-gay belief usually doesn't lead to attacks on gays, that doesn't imply that attacks on gays aren't caused in part by anti-gay sentiment. This ties into your second point. Definitely, shooters are going to mostly be people with other psychological issues, brought on in some cases by a traumatic upbringing, but that doesn't mean anti-gay sentiment didn't contribute.

Which is to say, it takes a confluence of factors to produce a shooter. The importance of upbringing does not imply that anti-gay sentiment cannot have contributed.

fixing society

Not a terribly useful contribution. 'Fix society'. How? Or how would you try to reduce rates of single motherhood?

anti gay beliefs almost never leading to attacks on gays does imply that attacks on gays aren't caused in part by anti-gay beliefs

if you look at any two variables and find near zero correlation, it implies they are not connected or "caused" by each other

Rockets almost never launch humans into space. Does that imply that humans being launched into space isn't caused by rockets?

sure

now what?

no part of a something "implying," i.e., suggesting, something else means it must be the case or not be the case

Or most people don't act at the extremes of their beliefs, but some do. Most Christians do not attack abortion doctors, but the belief system is a vector. Most people who believe climate change is an existential crisis are not killing oil billionaires but again the belief system is a vector.

That doesn't mean the belief system is wrong or should be stopped, bad actors will attach themselves to every belief system. But there is a connection.

Claiming the thinking is a "vector" is muddying the waters to attempt to bridge the substantive evidence gap between the two. It feels intuitive, but "I understand why someone who believes X would do Y" doesn't mean X causes Y. It doesn't mean it partly causes it. There needs to be more and yet there isn't.

When attempting to find correlations between these beliefs it cannot be distinguished from zero. In that circumstance, that is exactly what the word "implies" means.

if you look at any two variables and find near zero correlation, it implies they are not connected or "caused" by each other

Aside from this formulation just being entirely wrong, you definitely can have causation without correlation (https://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/causation-without-correlation-is-possible/), if anti-gay sentiment only causes attacks in people with rare mental issues, then we would surely expect little correlation.

before you attempt to correct anyone, you should first attempt a definition at the word "imply" which is generally agreed upon

that isn't what "imply" means

it doesn't matter if it's possible for something to happen

something can be possible and yet it is not "implied" by it or the vis-a-versa

"imply" isn't a word for possible/impossible, it's a word which means suggests to varying degrees

you are simply misusing the word

I don't think I was misusing it. With respect to questions of logic, imply generally means, as the Free Dictionary has it, to 'involve by logical necessity'. X implies Y means that Y is always a logical consequence of X.

well, I think we spotted our disagreement

In mathematics, "implies" is how we pronounce "⇒". Your statement was mathematically false, which was a useful thing for him to point out.

If you were trying to speak a language other than mathematics, like English, in which there are more and fuzzier definitions, either use a less fuzzy word like "suggests" or "hints", or make your context clearer by avoiding other words with both math and English meanings like "variables" and "correlation".

yes, I will

In hindsight mathematicians should have swiped jargon from a dead language, like the doctors and lawyers mostly did, or at least used more proper names instead of generic words.

I might not even have remembered that "implies" was one of the important words repurposed with a significant confusing distinction in meaning, if I'd been making a list from scratch. There's "or", "in general", just about every word in topology, ... and "significant", ironically.

Teaching the virtues in school with stories and examples, teaching young women how to pick mates in teen years, teaching women to be homemakers which reduces total societal stress, banning degenerative media, publicly executing drug dealers. There’s a lot you can do to reduce the terrible behavior that leads to a kid being born from a felon mom and meth addicted pornstar father. After he’s born, better male role models would also help quite a lot.

If the rate of anti-gay believers who become violent against gays is 1 in 60 million per year, or 1 in 6 million, I do not feel comfortable calling this anything but statistical noise. I do not believe his anti-gay beliefs (if they exist) are causal whatsoever.

Franco’s Spain might have been capable of doing these things with any amount of success. Biden’s(or Trump’s or Desantis’) America is not- either capable of doing these things or capable of being successful in them.

I mean, part of the reason Franco's Spain fell apart the second he died is it turned out there was a whole generation of younger people, including the King who actually didn't agree with Franco all that much.

teaching young women how to pick mates in teen years

don’t they already know how to do that? or are they picking the wrong ones

teaching young women how to pick mates in teen years, teaching women to be homemakers which reduces total societal stress, banning degenerative media,

Can you show me a single instance of such reforms leading to a decrease in single motherhood? Aside from the merits of these goals, you are swimming against an irrepressible social and economic tide here.

publicly executing drug dealers

Well now you're just being silly. The overall body of research on capital punishment, though inconclusive, tends to lean in the direction that there is no deterrent effect. Moreover, considering how many drug dealers there are, the number of innocent people who would die under such as system would be rather large.

If the rate of anti-gay believers who become violent against gays is 1 in 60 million per year, or 1 in 6 million, I do not feel comfortable calling this anything but statistical noise. I do not believe his anti-gay beliefs (if they exist) are causal whatsoever.

Under this argument, you can't ascribe ideological influences to any terrorist act ever. Most fundamentalist Muslim aren't terrorists, so religious motives could not have been causal in Islamic terrorism? What a ridiculous argument.

Such reforms have never been studied, as they haven’t been implemented since modern social science; if and when they are studied, it would take a very good metastudy to determine what’s true from what’s false.

There is no research indicating that public executions are ineffectual in deterrence. There may be some research indicating that imprisoning individuals for twenty years before executing them in private is ineffectual in deterrence. This is different than a speedy public execution in the neighborhood of their peers, which I promise would have a deterrence effect.

You are making a ridiculous, silly, ignorant category error by confusing conservative Islam with the potent terroristic ideology that causes young Muslim men to commit terrorism. It’s really not fundamentalist Muslims as a category who commit terrorism, but a small subset who subscribe to radical terroristic ideology promoted by a small few. At least in the West. That’s much more than 1 in 6 million. It’s probably more than 1 in 100,000. Of the adherents to ISIS ideology, or Al qaeda ideology, I’d say 1 in 20,000 probably commit terrorism. No, there is no study on this either.

That’s much more than 1 in 6 million. It’s probably more than 1 in 100,000.

Well this is my point. 1 in 100,000 is still vanishingly small. Where would you draw the line for saying we can just chalk something up to statistical noise. 1 in 5 million? 1 million? 200,000?

This is different than a speedy public execution in the neighborhood of their peers, which I promise would have a deterrence effect.

Well, aside from what is asserted without evidence being able to be dismissed without evidence, the wrongful conviction rate would be to most people intolerably high. Executions are slow for a reason; the appeals process is there for a reason. John Grisham estimates the wrongful conviction rate to be between 2% and 10% - now, he isn't necessarily unbiased considering he works with the Innocence Project. So let's go with the lowest end of his estimate, 2%. In 2019, over 240,000 people were sentenced to prison for drug-related crimes, the most serious offence of whom was possession in only 3.7% of cases. But let's say your policies reduce drug crime by half - which is very unlikely - and then half the number again to be generous so we get 60,000. These are the ballparkiest of ballpark figures, but I think if anything I've surely got an underestimate, and that still leaves us with over a thousand wrongful drug executions per year, for apparent benefits in defence of which you can't even cite a single piece of evidence.

We are already completely fine with wrongful convictions, which is why we throw people away for life despite a chance of wrongful conviction. The difference between being killed, and being thrown away in a tiny cell for your whole life, is vanishingly small, It is the bulk majority of the moral harm done already. You cannot reasonably be against killing people, despite the chance of wrongful conviction, and yet be perfectly fine completely ruining their life in every way short of killing them, despite the chance of wrongful conviction. (As, the number of people eventually freed from wrongful conviction of murder is much lower than not.) Chance is a fact of life that we all deal with every day. Sometimes we just die. The small chance of being executed wrongfully for a murder we didn’t commit does not somehow make executions not worth it, any more than dying when a bridge collapses makes building a bridge not with it.

The evidence for deterrence is that we are promptly executing the drug dealers in front of their community. If you can’t even attempt to reason from first principles why this might deter future criminals, I have no idea what to tell you. Nations that execute drug dealers (and have high catch rates) do shockingly well in deterring drug use. You can look up interviews on YouTube of international drug traffickers talking about how none of them would ever traffic into Singapore. Because they would be executed. I promise you that if you, at the age of 12, saw your uncle executed for drug dealing in front of you, your chance of subsequently dealing drugs will plummet.

Also, we’re obviously talking about dealers of hard drugs, not “drug related” offenses.

The evidence for deterrence is that we are promptly executing the drug dealers in front of their community. If you can’t even attempt to reason from first principles why this might deter future criminals, I have no idea what to tell you.

You can't reason your way to a conclusion on a topic so impossibly complicated as deterrent effects of certain punishments. After all, it's surely intuitive that the existence of the death penalty for murder would deter murder, but it doesn't seem to. These are essentially unfalsifiable arguments, and therefore entirely worthless and unproductive.

have high catch rates

I agree with this part because it is well-evidenced that the single most important factor in deterring crime is the chance of getting caught.

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The difference between being killed, and being thrown away in a tiny cell for your whole life, is vanishingly small

yeah but if you’ve been wrongfully convicted that difference starts to feel pretty big. exoneration doesn’t do me much good if i’m already dead. personally i don’t think the death penalty is really “worth it” regardless. summary execution is a different story, that’s a pretty good deterrent imo. not really how i think the state should be operating though, it’s unbecoming. leave that sort of thing to the street gangs

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Muslims and Orthodox Jews hardly have any interest in attacking gays, despite being anti-LGBT.

The Pulse nightclub shooting was committed by a Muslim.

I thought it was determined his motive was shooting up any nightclub

absolutely no association between anti-gay beliefs and attacks on gays

Uh...wanna bet? The statistic of interest is P(anti-gay | attacked gays), not the other way around. P(attacked gays) is low regardless of the condition, seeing as this is stochastic terrorism. Compare various other types of crime.

The people responding to you either don’t know or don’t care what “association” means.

But, I suspect that most attacks on gay people are by other lgbt people for the same reason most attacks on black people are by black people: that’s who they spend their time with.

So, it’s not obvious to me that P(anti-gay | attacked gays) is actually greater than P(anti-gay)

I would hazard a guess that most attacks on gays are by underclass males who may not like gays very much, but not because they’re strongly committed to traditional ideas of marriage.

That’s not really a fixable issue.

Uh...wanna bet?

Yes. I am not aware of any context in which ideologically-motivated assaults by strangers are the majority, or even a statistically-significant minority, of assaults committed against any sub-population.

The vast majority of crimes against the person (with a semi-exception for crimes like rape and armed robbery where absconding with some benefit undetected are major considerations, and even there only 40-45% are committed by strangers) are committed by people known to the victim. Crimes which result in physical assault with a weapon are some of the least likely to be committed against strangers (as ideologically-motivated attacks would be most likely to be).

Fair point. Overall crimes against LGBT are very unlikely to be ideological.

I read the OP as specifically talking about stochastic terrorism like this mass shooting. Of mass killings targeting LGBT, I would still bet that most were ideological. Given the rarity of targets, random or workplace sprees are unlikely to target LGBT. Though Pulse was apparently an exception!

You keep calling this shooting "stochastic terrorism." Based on (a) my understanding of both the currently-known facts about this shooting, and (b) my understanding of the meaning of "stochastic terrorism", this seems to be a completely unjustified classification.

"Stochastic terrorism" is defined as "the public demonization of an individual or group leading to violence against the demonized individual or group." Even assuming that "groomer discourse" actually represents "demonization" (which I would dispute), you have completely failed to demonstrate any link between it and this shooting other than your own prior. I haven't seen any indication linking "groomer" discourse to the shooter at all. There's no manifesto floating around, no Brendan Tarrant-style Go-Pro propaganda footage, nor even any alleged anti-gay, anti-trans, or anti-groomer statements by the shooter at any time.

So no, until there's some evidence of it, this shooting isn't "stochastic terrorism." Your labelling it as such, under these conditions, is at best an exercise in blinkered question-begging and at worst bad-faith fake-news consensus-building.

Nightclubs, concert venues, and other celebrations get shot up all the time, for completely non-ideological reasons. Example. Example 2. Example 3. Example 4. Example 6. And, most famously, Example 5. Even random vigils/wakes get shot up. Example 7. Lots of things happen all the time, for reasons unrelated to the grand-narratives that currently have everyone's attention. Just because the culture war sucks up all of our attention doesn't mean it dominates the real world in the same way.

Ah, hell. You’re right.

I focused in on the “stochastic” part without fully considering the requirements for “terrorism...” specifically an ideological campaign. You are correct that such a motive hasn’t been proven, and as such, calling it stochastic terrorism is assuming the conclusion.

I want to emphasize the arbitrary, uncoordinated aspect. Do you think “random acts of violence” would be more accurate?

nor even any alleged anti-gay, anti-trans, or anti-groomer statements by the shooter at any time.

There is actually at least one neighbor who made incredibly vague claims the shooter has a history of some incredibly vague homophobic slurs. OTOH, the same article I read also said the shooter had been the victim of homophobic slurs in high school, and his fairly well documented internet lolcow history doesn’t seem to include any hate speech.

Thank you for this information. The neighbor's testimony makes me update slightly in favor of purposeful targeting of LGBT individuals, though the history of violence against his own family still leads me to believe that this was a generally violent individual whose choice of target was a secondary consideration, rather than being an ordinarily-peaceful individual moved particularly to violence by the strength of rhetoric or belief about a single issue.

18% of Americans believe that it should be illegal for adults to engage in lgbt sex. That’s 60 million Americans. The rare attack we get from this group is statistical noise, and while the attack itself is proof of the attacker being anti-lgbt, there’s no correlation between “strength of being anti lgbt” and the attack. Eg, in this attack the person has no strong history of engagement in anti lgbt activism.

I’m not convinced that there’s much correlation between the 18% and anti-gay hate crimes- anti-gay hate crimes are probably mostly beatings delivered by underclass men who suspect ‘little fags’ of hitting on them, and may not like gays very much but don’t think it should be illegal.

the attack itself is proof of the attacker being anti-lgbt

No, it's not. It's proof that the attacker was homicidal. That attacker could be anti-LGBT, but that is not proven just by the location of the shooting.

he targeted the sexually promiscuous nightclub

Gay bars seem to be a popular scene for shootings like this, but I'm somewhat curious as someone who mostly stays home after dark what fraction of nightclubs qualify as "LGBTQ spaces".

I'm also peripherally aware that shootings happen at regular bars/clubs fairly regularly but usually don't make the national news because they match personal or gang feuds rather than assumed-to-be-political violence.

I kind of wondered the same thing.

In the case of Pulse, it was supposedly “all the Disney locations down the street could afford visible security.”

Reading the Encyclopedia Dramatica entry, all you can really come away from it with is that he was an extremely online young person from a broken home who's brain was thoroughly scrambled by the internet. I could honestly believe he went down weird leftwing or rightwing radicalization routes, or that, despite outward appearances that this must have been politically motivated, this was completely random. Just the first/best soft target he happened upon. Or that his motives are some schizophrenic mish-mash of all three possibilities. Crazy people gonna crazy.

There's a lot of people going "look at all these people proven wrong by not holding off conclusions" who aren't... holding off conclusions, such as the conclusion that this non-binary identification shuts out the possibility that the shooter might be anti-gay far-righter. One might quickly imagine why such a shooter might announce they-them profiles to be written in official documents: to own the libs. ("Lol! They have to call me by this shit now!") Of course, I don't know if that's the case - that's what holding off conclusions indicates.

There's a lot of people going "look at all these people proven wrong by not holding off conclusions" who aren't... holding off conclusions

Yeah, seconding this. Finding that the initial story is wrong or missing information doesn't necessarily make the second shallow story complete.

One might quickly imagine why such a shooter might announce they-them profiles to be written in official documents.

The shooter doesn't appear to be filing pro se, so at the very least they managed to talk a lawyer into risking sanctions for it. Which still isn't that high a bar.

You might as well consider the possibility it was 42D Chess move by a far-left radical, who wanted to make the right look bad, by attacking a gay club...

Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me...

He could also, as seems likely, be just crazy.

That would be good argument, but Stefferi doesn't seem to like it.

I'm not arguing against the thesis that they're crazy, I'm arguing against the idea that having unconventional ideas and lifestyles (especially if they're some years past) means they're not a right-winger.

FTSOA, a nonbinary they/them shooting up a gay nightclub is extremely noncentral to the grouping of "right-wingers". It sounds like a desperate bid for everything to be the fault of a political side rather than a disturbed and violent individual.

Nobody can even define what "right-wing" is, but we're all pretty sure that everything bad that has happened since man first descended from the caves is their fault.

Does a 66-year-old white heterosexual male smalltown small businessman gun owner sound central to the group of "left-wingers", let alone far-leftists? Because that would be the description of James Hodgkinson, the Congress baseball shooter, aka the incident that tends to be brought up at this forum in regular intervals when discussing right-wing terrorism - I hardly imagine an argument dismissing Hodgkinson as a counterexample of left-wing violence on grounds of identity-based "noncentrality" would get very far.

Sounds pretty central to me. White people are a majority not just of the country, but of the Democratic Party as well. Older people are more likely than younger people to be involved with politics.

"Nonbinary" is a political term with no basis in reality. Swapping pronouns is likewise a purely political thing.

You're looking at demographics. I'm pointing out that one person personally identifying with the shibboleths of one political party is a lot more indicative of loyalty than conforming to the media's hysterical stereotype of giant tranches of the population.

I mean, there’s right wingers into some weird shit, but this particular kind of weirdness is pretty exclusively a left wing phenomenon and doesn’t appear to be completely in the past.

That's not the argument though. The point is that if you're crazy, you might do crazy shit regardless of your beliefs, so you shouldn't blame the beliefs on his actions, but the craziness.

Even when otherwise healthy radical Muslims were committing terrorist attacks, progressives were saying you shouldn't blame the religion for it. I think that argument should apply even more, if we were discussing a radical Muslim who had a long history of mental illness.

It's not like "crazy" is an on/off switch. There are examples of people where you clearly can blame insanity and not any particular ideologies (ie. James Holmes), but it's also perfectly possible to do an attack due to ideological motives while having some sort of a mental illness. Of course we don't know what's the case here, since we don't really know all that much at all about this case still.

How are we supposed to know if he's genuinely using the pronouns or not? Unless he admits to trolling, the rules are we have to take him at his word.

Being somewhat facetious here, but I don't think many of the rightists blowing up the non-binary thing suddenly think that this stuff is legit. Myself I think it's possible, but makes sense that it could be an easy way to avoid a hate crime charge (how could I hate them, I am them!), or could also just be true. But it is very...i don't know the adjective, something, that the rules established by the progressive class are now suffocating them. They cannot say that he's faking it without destroying a central tenet of many of these people which is that Self Id Is God.

I'm not saying all progressives believe this, Jesse Singal for one was very good at pointing out the insanity with Jessica Yaniv, but enough do that many of us watched the coverage of this thing evaporate instantly among some previously engaged people.

but makes sense that it could be an easy way to avoid a hate crime charge

First, I don't think it will be easy, since his nonbinary identification will surely be challenged in court. But even if it succeeds, and let's say it gets him out of a hate crime charge, what would be the point? The quintuple homicide alone is likely sufficient to put him away for life (Colorado doesn't have the death penalty).

So I don't really see it as a calculated move to get a lighter sentence. Trolling, maybe. Insanity, maybe. Genuine claim, maybe.

Definitely seems possible that it's a lie to troll or dodge hate crime charges. But it is interesting seeing people squirm in the hot seat on this question. If mere identification is sufficient, then how can you question this person? If you've previously held a standard that there was no legitimate gatekeeping, and that anything short of enthusiastic affirmation was transphobic bigotry, do you bite that bullet or flip-flop? If you flip, your enemies will use it against you forever. And if you bite the bullet, they'll use that against you forever too!

Very much a situation that highlights the contradictions.

I don't think this question is as squirm-inducing as you think. How would you respond to this?:

Obviously you're trying to catch me in a trap, you're not really asking me to be consistent here, you're just trying to score points against me!

"What is a woman?" is exactly the kind of thing that ought to make people squirm, and maybe it makes normies / clueless / true believers squirm, but I see a ton of, "that's just a political gotcha question, you're obviously a right wing troll to ask it!"

The response to the trap is "no, it's your opinions that let me score points, I'm just trying to expose them."

The response probably won't work since anyone who merits the response probably isn't logical. But it's the correct answer. Showing that someone's opinions lead to one of two things, both bad, isn't a "gotcha", it's reasoning.

That's still squirming. It's the crying soyjack with the smug mask on. It's like someone went "what are you, some sort of commie?" if you asked them what time it is.

Definitely seems possible that it's a lie to troll or dodge hate crime charges.

When facing 5 premeditated murder charges how much worse does it get with a hate crime charge?

Much worse to spend that sentence in a men's prison than in a women's prison, I assume.

But he's not claiming to be full-on trans.

Yet

i still think mere identification is sufficient. it’s more of a subjective disposition than anything, so if he says he’s nonbinary i’ll take him at his word. not like i have any way of corroborating it beyond that.

I've never known these people to actually think that way. Because there is no thinking occurring. So there is no contradiction to be noticed. You are not supposed to question how people identify when it's to their advantage to not have it questioned. And then it's "obvious" evil right wingers are faking it when it's to their advantage to believe that. You will see no one of any consequence or influence modify their perspective on the supremacy of self identification what so ever. They're already letting men into all you can rape buffets women's prison if they "self identify". To say nothing of all the lesser ways they've marginalized and disenfranchised women for the sake of the trans identity. Why would some trollish behavior from a mass shooter change any minds in how our society is being dismantled?

TBH I suspect there's even a simpler solution: his lawyers told him to do it in an effort to avoid hate-crime charges.

Lawyers don’t generally advise their clients to lie.

The phrase "If you were to identify as non-binary, you'd be less likely to get hate-crime charges." is not legal advice. It's a statement about the legal system that is likely true (and might be useful for an accused person to know).

What someone else takes from that is not necessarily the lawyer's business.

"A statement that would be useful to know" is advice. And it's coming from a lawyer, so legal.

Advice is specific direction on how to proceed. That statement does not qualify.

I'm not sure it could be considered a lie, even in principle. If you inform the court that you'd like to use nonbinary pronouns, then you are literally and factually identifying as nonbinary.

In principle it could be a lie if he is snickering to himself and his stream of consciousness contains the symbols "owning the libs."

A truthful self identification wouldn't look like that at all

That's how they identify themself to the court, which the court can verify because that is how they identified themself to them. Is the idea that they have a different "true" pronoun identity? In the absence of a brain-scanning machine that can determine one's "true" pronouns, I don't know how that could be demonstrated. Is the idea that they identify differently to their friends and family? Well, there's no rule that you have to identify with the same pronouns to everyone.

I dunno, I think a lawyer would not be doing anything wrong to basically cue up the decision. "With what pronouns would you like to identify yourself to the court? We could use he/him, she/her or they/them. It's your choice how to identify, although the prosecutors will likely have a slightly more difficult time establishing the elements of a hate crime charge if you use she/her or they/them. Let me know what you decide." I don't think there's a lie there, no matter how you squint.

I don't think the way you identify to court can be a lie in principle, so on that we agree.

But, I think Lauren Southern was lying here. She was kind of laughing at all this as a joke. I suppose, similar to the courts, you can say she identified to the government as a man, and you can't lie about that in principle.

What the left gets right is that a right-wing troll could lie about their identity. (Like Lauren was doing). The gunman could be, or could not be. You would get a good feel for if he is lying or not based on hearsay of private conversations he's had with friends. Or you could try guessing if you knew what his reddit posts looked like or whatever.

What the left gets right is that a right-wing troll could lie about their identity. (Like Lauren was doing). The gunman could be, or could not be.

Yeah that's true. It still opens a can of worms for the trans movement, though. Once you can construe falseness in someone's purported gender identity by ascribing an ulterior motive and looking to ulterior behavior, each being inconsistent with someone who is "actually" a woman or whatever, then you kind of open the door to (e.g.) discrediting a trans woman as pursuing an ulterior motive of indulging a sexual fetish (autogynephilia), if you can in principle substantiate it by looking to ulterior behavior (does his browser history contain some type of porn that suggests he is getting off on pretending to be a woman).

This of course raises the question, what if it's all a troll job? The entire non-binary thing, or even the entirety of Queer Theory. Given it's internal contradictions it would hardly be surprising. Maybe it's all a giant joke that got out of hand. It could be, or could not be.

Seems like it should be hard enough to prove that it's false, but maybe I'm wrong.

is that even a legally sound defense strategy? seems more like something he came up with himself

No idea; it could be the reverse.

I'm not remotely surprised. I don't know what the exact "law" has been named, but whenever details about the shooter are scant and/or the incident doesn't quite garner the attention you'd think the media atmosphere would shower on it, you know it goes against the narrative.

I didn't know if the shooting was going to turn out to be gang related, or Islam related, or a disgruntled employee, or what. But the lack of any detailed confirmation that it was a right-wing inspired anti-LGBT shooting basically screamed out to me that it wasn't. Because if the evidence had been there to support it, even if it required a lot of squinting, you know the MSM would have crammed it down our throats and made sure everyone and their uncle knew Republicans were to blame. Not that a few didn't run with that narrative in the absence of evidence anyways.

The lack of mugshots suspiciously violated Coulter's law. And the deaths to wounded ratio definitely broke Sailer's law, so this one messed with all the reliable metrics.

TBH the deaths to wounded ratio, considering it seems to be a generally red tribe area, is admittedly rather weak evidence that the they/them thing isn’t made up- red tribers usually hit what they’re aiming at.

Not that a few didn't run with that narrative in the absence of evidence anyways.

The one that inspired “stop Asian hate” comes to mind. They had zero evidence it was hate motivated but that did nothing to stop the fake media outrage

the non-binary part doesn’t seem that weird to me. Lots of kids that age identify that way these days, and it’s not like it really entails much beyond claiming the label. any links to the dad’s porn?

Yup all the conservative teens i know go by they/them, very common

One article I read claimed he played Electro in a 2011 Spider-man porn parody. He went by the name "Dick Delaware"

almost makes me feel sympathy for the kid. it’s not easy to grow up in the shadow of such a distinguished father

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