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Sam Brinton Warrant Issued—Biden Official Accused of Stealing Luggage Again
So
I think it's safe to sayI believe that that Tweet thread that accused him of having a continually escalating fetish was right. IIRC there was some criticism of the Tweeter's objectivity and credentials, but I guess even a broken clock..I suppose my reaction could be called bigoted but I'm not surprised by this, nor was I surprised by the initial charges or even the claims that he was playing out a sexual fetish. In fact, I found it highly more plausible than the alternative given his bizarre behavior and reported lies when confronted.
Taken as a whole, I am more likely to distrust someone who shows such suspect behavior while also apparently being hellbent on signaling deviancy. Not a good combination.
EDIT: Strong language edit.
As far as I’m aware this is one of only two high ranking government officials with a trans identity (it could be more but these are the only two I think that are visible). And already one has been outed for sexual deviancy. Not a great base rate, and very bad optics if you’re seeking greater trans acceptance
That isn't what "base rate" means, base rate would be "rate in a larger population", not "rate among people who I've heard of in the news". Most obviously, taking 'two trans in government' as true, there are other high status positions with only few trans people - powerful executives (such as martine rothblatt ), celebrities, transgender state legislators. Each category increases the overall sample size, making 'one in two' much less obvious.
Also, they aren't transgender - "Brinton is bisexual.[9] Brinton, the first openly gender-fluid individual in federal government leadership, uses they and them pronouns.[1][5][6]". Transgender is sometimes used to include 'nonbinary/genderfluid' descriptively, but more in the 'everyone is queer uwu' sense than a literal one.
In terms of base rates, of the dozens of productive and competent transwoman software engineers I know of (whose economic value outweighs occasional purse theft) ... a decent few are 'sexual deviants', but almost none of them have committed crimes related to it.
Also, this isn't "outing" brinton as a sexual deviant, they were publicly a kink activist and did drag beforehand.
That you know of.
I don't think 'committing crimes [i.e. things like 'stealing luggage' not 'ordering unlicensed HRT'] related to sexual deviancy' is something >1 in 10 trans people do? do you disagree?
I really don't have any reasonable basis to either agree or disagree. My uninformed prior is that weirdo sex perverts (not generically LGBT, mind) probably commit roughly equivalent crimes or worse at around that rate.
Why would being into kink (one class of "weirdo sex perverts") indicate a high rate of committing crimes? It's mostly just a niche interest.
As a tangent - one example I happened to come across - aphyr, the jepsen guy, is quite kinky (obviously nsfw). Jepsen is an incredibly useful project for measuring and improving distributed systems - a good read here. So this is a serious, smart, and useful person. Yet - he isn't just kinky, he directly links from his programming blog to his mastodon account, where he RTs naked bound dudes and posts nsfw pics of himself along with posting about databases. And this with the words - "I've got a Mastodon account for snarky jokes, databases, and leather" - most won't intuit what "leather" means before they click and see a 250lb guy's ass. I've actually been to aphyr.com for programming stuff a dozen times - the technical interview series is based as shit, without noticing that. Most kinky people I either know personally, or know of, are just ... smart people who are kinky.
Tangent tangent - This is a great example of my opinion on "the LGBTs are awful deviants who are undermining civilization" - even if aphyr's homosexuality took a hundred prime age men out of the breeding pool, jepsen's utility to a networked society greatly outweighs it, and this guy's contribution to society is much more than a hundred 100iq people who have children. Being gay is a misuse or twisting of sexuality towards unnatural and meaningless ends, but ... it is so in a way that coexists with the infinitely complex interconnection of physical causation, and said physical causation is not bringing down society, while complex technical achievements are making society even more capable!
Smart computer guy with no kids versus ordinary people who have kids - where do you think "society" comes from? If nobody is having children but they are all software whizzes, then after their generation there won't be anyone there to use this wonderful project they created.
I don't know what Jepsen is, I don't know what distributed systems are, but at the end of the day, things are made for people, not people for things. The eventual effect is that all this Smart People Stuff is on the backs of Average Normies who buy, use, consume and need things that they have no idea are dependent at several removes on the Smart People Stuff, but at the same time, without the mass of Average Normies driving the economy because they use, buy, consume and need things, the work the Smart People do would be meaningless.
To be clear, that was a rebuttal to "the LGBTs are actively destroying society". I'd obviously prefer if jepsen was straight and had children.
Which people, though? People can only have purpose to the extent they experience, act, or relate - and more intelligent, capable, and complex people do all of those more, and with more depth, than less so. Which is more or less the same as being more 'productive', whether technically or artistically or intellectually or politically, or even in some other inscrutable personal sense.
Marginal contribution isn't "importance if entire class vanished". The US needs janitors and farmworkers a lot more in lower-tech eras than it does now.
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Particularly in the case where it is flouted at the rest of society, it is a form of aggressive norm-deviation that intuitively makes other norm deviations such as criminal activity more plausible.
So? Not only is there no dispute that plenty of serious, smart, and useful LGBT people, it doesn't preclude the possibility that this particular person doesn't have more transgressive proclivities that you either don't know about or haven't manifested yet. The subject of this thread is (according to some) a serious, smart, and useful nuclear scientist.
That seems dubious, but even so, you could say the same thing about, e.g., Hans Reiser. It proves nothing in itself.
How much more plausible? 1.05x? 1.5x? 10x? The numbers aren't even the point, it's just that "makes more plausible" is a very vauge statement that covers for a lack of detailed understanding.
Also, 'being a fabulous faggot" isn't nearly as much of a 'deviation' in 2020 as it is was in 1960, to say nothing about 1860! Much of society thinks that's just great, and otherwise we wouldn't have seen the biden admin appointment.
@ rest: yeah, it was a tangent, but the general point is that if there's something wrong with being a weirdo sex pervert, there has to actually be some effect of it, even if it's complicated or indirect or suppressed knowledge, that makes it bad. Using "drag queen kink is norm deviation" + "norm deviation is correlated with norm deviation" + "this kinky drag queen did a bad norm deviation" is absurd, it's a simulacra, circular, you've entirely dodged whether there's something wrong with it!
It was somewhat rhetorical, but the idea is that the causal impact of a person existing vs not existing on society is quite complicated, and people who do complex, requiring-intelligence work, especially work that improves the quality of infrastructure used by many in a scalable way, and especially work that might not have happened if they weren't there, have a counterfactual effect much larger than someone who does work that's easy, already plentiful, doesn't. have impact that scales. What, precisely, is the impact on society when an extra 100iq person exists? They do some extra accounting, watch some youtube, purchase some extra food, vibe?
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Oh shit, this is the guy who made me incredibly curious about Haskell!
It may not have been quite what he implied, but was still really valuable for my programming mindset.
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