site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 27, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Recently the US city of New York, decided that BLM protestors that felt victimized by the police preventing from running amok, deserve 21500 USD (28267877.5 KRW) each.

Such a payout somewhat changes the calculus of participating in protests, peaceful or otherwise. Previously by joining a protest one showed willingness to sacrifice time and risk being temporarily detained.

But now the what the Hot Coffee Incident was in common perception notable for, harm suffered being greatly outweighed by compensation, has come true. Thus making protesting a net-gain, unless one views publicly supporting BLM to be so immoral, as there existing no sum high enough for which one would do it.

In related olds, DisruptJ6 protestors, despite alleging molestation going on for a longer period of time, and interfering with bodily autonomy in much more invasive ways, have yet to be given money.

So, when Group A files a lawsuit and reaches a settlement, some other group which has not filed a lawsuit has somehow been treated unjustly? Perhaps you should wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens, before you get all outraged.

Unjustly? Outraged?

That sure sounds like what the OP was going for, yeah.

I don't see it. I'm not sure how the facts stated in the OP could have been expressed in a more dry and less outraged manner without outright sounding like (the old-school scifi stereotype of) an AI.

From OP:

In related olds, DisruptJ6 protestors, despite alleging molestation going on for a longer period of time, and interfering with bodily autonomy in much more invasive ways, have yet to be given money.

What it says in the article they linked:

The detainees list several issues. The conditions allegedly include no religious services or visitations, "black mold" and "worms" on the jail's walls and in food, abuse by guards, and vaccine requirements for visits and other services. They also say their clothing sent to laundry is returned covered in "brown stains, pubic hair and or reeking of ripe urine." And they say they've lost eyesight and hair because of "malnourishment.

So...prison? You can't expect me to believe that in a forum where people routinely express a desire to murder carjackers and other petty thieves that someone being outraged about moldy food and dirty clothes without pushback is evidence of anything other than blatant tribalism*. Not to mention the use of the word 'molestation' without providing any evidence that they were sexually assaulted in prison - which, for all I know, exists, but they don't link to it and (lest I be accused of not doing my homework again) some basic google searches of 'january 6th protestors prison rape' or 'january 6th protestors sexual assault' only turns up a few cases of the protestors themselves raping children or assaulting women. Or perhaps you'll claim that they used the word 'molested' per the dated 'Alice and Bob arrived at their destination unmolested,' but now the level of mental gymnastics you're expecting from me to imagine that the OP is being fair or charitable exceeds my modest IQ.

From OP:

Recently the US city of New York, decided that BLM protestors that felt victimized by the police preventing from running amok, deserve 21500 USD (28267877.5 KRW) each.

From the article they linked:

They were restrained with tight plastic handcuffs also known as zip ties by officers who were not masked as the pandemic raged. Officers wielding batons swung at protesters and hit them with pepper spray, according to the lawsuit.

You can also follow a link to videos of the protestors being beaten. Why would you frame them as 'feeling' like they were victimized when they were beaten with batons and pepper sprayed?

From OP:

But now the what the Hot Coffee Incident was in common perception notable for, harm suffered being greatly outweighed by compensation, has come true. Thus making protesting a net-gain, unless one views publicly supporting BLM to be so immoral, as there existing no sum high enough for which one would do it.

Between 15 and 30 million people protested that summer. Three hundred are eligible for a payout. Based on the estimates in the NYT article, 180-230 will collect and some other undefined number have already settled. From the evidence provided, OP's argument is that some minute fraction of BLM protestors being paid out makes protesting liberal causes anywhere in the United States a net positive, which is frankly idiotic and ignores all the jail time that BLM protestors did receive:

The AP found that more than 120 defendants across the United States have pleaded guilty or were convicted at trial of federal crimes including rioting, arson and conspiracy. More than 70 defendants who’ve been sentenced so far have gotten an average of about 27 months behind bars. At least 10 received prison terms of five years or more.

Do you think OP's inflammatory claims brought a reasonable amount of evidence?

We could have an actual conversation about events - the ping-ponging hypocrisy of conservatives swinging from prison inmates FAFO'd to moral outrage at the in-group suffer, and liberals salivating over the possibility of January 6th rioters being prison-raped. From conservatives being hostile or apathetic towards women's sports to suddenly being outraged that the purity of women's sports might be compromised by trans athletes, and liberals who went from supporting cis-women's leagues to dogpiling women who dare to suggest that trans athletes might have an unfair biological advantage. We could have, and have had, more nuanced discussions about both the January 6th and BLM riots - although I admit that I was disheartened by them at the time, at least they were better than this.

This is what the community has come to - low effort, inflammatory posts bashing left wing topics du jour with minimal evidence receiving virtually no pushback or rebuttals. And frankly, most posts along these lines aren't even worth engaging with.

*For the record - prison rape and poor prison conditions are bad, and neither the J6 or BLM rioters should be raped, starved or otherwise abused.

... yeah. Selective outrage of prison mistreating Jan 6 protestors just sets you up to get owned by "... Yeah, that's what prison is like, coercive authority is inherently oppressive, we on the left support better prison conditions for everyone (e.g. this), while you only support it for your team". “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.", specifically. Sure, that quote is, when examined, a contentless dunk (most reactionaries are conservatives are ok with harsh treatment of white or rich gangsters too), basically just "conservatives are mean therefore they hate minorities" ... but it doesn't help anyone to believe dumb things and it fuel!

Prison is supposed to suck. What we all gain from coercing people to not steal, commit fraud, or undertake any one of the tens of thousands of harmful activities proscribed by law is a thousand time the harm done to those imprisoned, however you account for it. And the harm done by being in prison, being unable to work and play, is a hundred times worse than any extra harm done by moldy food or occasional health problems. So "the food is moldy", "it smells like piss", "medical care is a few decades behind the state of the art" - maybe they should be fixed, but it's just not that bad, whether for j6 protestors or random criminals. Things like this are used to stoke passion by any political team for those 'mistreated in prison' - but even if prisoners were kept in pristine conditions with spotless white walls to stare at, that's still equally terrible for anyone innocent and equally necessary for the guilty.

Prison is supposed to suck.

  1. This isn't a prison. It is a jail, where people, in particular the people in question, are being held pending trial. Such persons, who have not been convicted of anything, should not be subjected to conditions which "suck" more than is inherent in being imprisoned.

  2. Even in prison, people have the right to a minimum level of decent treatment.

Bottom line: If the claims are true, the conditions should be ameliorated and those who have been subjected to them should be compensated.

I’m curious what that standard should be (not as a matter of law but policy)

More comments

A clue! "Thou callst me dog" and all that. When you're "disheartened" by even the nuanced discussions, it doesn't really seem like you want to have those, either.

More nuanced is a relative term, not a full-throated endorsement of the discourse. There's plenty of dogs to go 'round, and failing to clear even that bar is impressive.

If you think so, you know the drill- be the change.

I used to try harder, particularly when I was temporarily stuck in an easy job that was a waste of my time. These days, too many pokers in the fire, too many buns in the oven and a general questioning of whether arguing on the internet (even in a place like this) is the most prosocial thing I could be doing at the moment.

Yes, I remember the "conversations" on reddit, because they were a lesson in effective gaslighting and manipulation. Month after month of tactical arguments msde in bad faith by accounts that went back to their home subs and gloated about how good they were at propaganda.

Those tricks don't work here, thank god.

But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

Less pithily, if you want to suggest that the OP was framing things in a misleading way, likely in a naked attempt to fit things into a false narrative he prefers, that seems perfectly cromulent and also likely correct, and I didn't need you to help me figure that out. That's still a very very far cry from stoking outrage.

You asked how it could be less edgy. CPAR quoted the actual text, which was less inflammatory, no? Not seeing the problem here.

was less inflammatory, no?

No.

From the post you replied to:

So, when Group A files a lawsuit and reaches a settlement, some other group which has not filed a lawsuit has somehow been treated unjustly? Perhaps you should wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens, before you get all outraged.

From your first post:

I don't see it. I'm not sure how the facts stated in the OP could have been expressed in a more dry and less outraged manner without outright sounding like (the old-school scifi stereotype of) an AI.

From your most recent post:

That's still a very very far cry from stoking outrage.

So, what's your argument? Is it that Gdanning is unfairly accusing the OP of being outraged/claiming that the J6 protestors are being abused? Is it that OP didn't use inflammatory language in their post? Or is it that OP isn't stoking outrage?

My reply illustrated how the facts could have been expressed in a more neutral and less outraged manner. I pointed out specific words that misrepresented the facts in an inflammatory way, and gross overinterpretation of facts to 'stoke outrage' (see section on argument about protesting being a net-positive activity). I conclude with ways we could have had a more nuanced conversation rather than angry, low-effort posts.

By my lights, you're conflating less neutral with more outrage. You illustrated how it could have been more neutral, less biased, more accurate, all those things. I disagree that this means that somehow it's less stoking outrage than the existing overwhelmingly milquetoast OP.

They were restrained with tight plastic handcuffs also known as zip ties by officers who were not masked as the pandemic raged. Officers wielding batons swung at protesters and hit them with pepper spray, according to the lawsuit.

Oh my goodness. They weren’t masked? The humanity! Imagine not using a device that had about zero chance of doing anything especially when outside! Clown world.

Yeah, I chuckled at that line too. It seems a bit late in the game to be clutching pearls about unmasked police officers.

This is what the community has come to

Please spare us the sneering that you found insufficient push back on a top level post you disliked in, checks watch, 4 hours in the middle of the week during American working hours.

Have you considered that

low effort, inflammatory posts bashing left wing topics du jour with minimal evidence receiving virtually no pushback or rebuttals.

and

And frankly, most posts along these lines aren't even worth engaging with.

are related? Consider that rather than us all being frothing culture warriors that many people just didn't have much productive to say about this topic or interest in details and collapsed the post. Criticize what is said for sure, I find value in your posts when you do so, but do you not see the failure mode of chastising this place for not pre-emptively steel manning every possible argument? Should we take your lack of comment on some hot topic as tacit approval of some terrible argument?

Have you considered that and are related?

Yes. I had written a long rebuttal, but maybe we'll let another comment wither on the vine and for today and I'll knock off complaining about the community for another 6 months or so until I lose my temper again.

Carjackers are not petty thieves by any standards.

I apologize, I meant it in the colloquial sense. I was unaware there was a strict legal definition.

I can either edit my post or you can take this as an admission of error. @desolation

which is frankly idiotic and ignores all the jail time that BLM protestors did receive:

You know, those numbers for jailed BLM protestors are also really, really, small.

If we observe disparate outcomes between two social groupings, it's possible that these disparities arise from different behavior on the part of the groups' members. Alternatively, if we also observe that one of the groups enjoys a position of power over the other, and demonstrates strong antipathy for the other, we might consider the hypothesis that the disparities arise from some form of discrimination and oppression.

With a system as complicated as modern society, outcomes are the yardstick by which processes are judged. Failure to design, maintain, and enforce these systems results in people losing confidence in them. Once lost, such confidence is difficult to regain. Priors are established, and shape perception moving forward.

we might consider the hypothesis that the disparities arise from some form of discrimination and oppression.

Yes, but only if the two groups are similarly positioned. If Group A gets $X from the settlement of a lawsuit while Group B gets $Y, the difference might have arisen from some form of discrimination and oppression. But if Group B has not yet filed a lawsuit, the hypothesis is nonsensical, because it is premature. That’s why I said OP "should wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens, before you get all outraged"

Filing a lawsuit is done when the people doing it have a reasonable expectation of winning. I would not have expected to win a lawsuit like the one described in the OP. If right-wing protestors file similar lawsuits, I certainly do not expect them to win. Then too, there is the problem that every situation is perfectly unique. To truly make a claim of equivalence, we need right-wing protestors in the same city, protesting in exactly the same way, at the same time, responded to by the same cops, with the same lawyers arguing the case before the same judge.

Alternatively, people can note that they cannot imagine right-wing protestors being treated in this fashion, and support that argument by looking at the ways right-wing protestors are actually, observably treated, relative to their methods of protesting.

You are appealing to the processes of the system, but people do not trust the system or its processes.

Filing a lawsuit is done when the people doing it have a reasonable expectation of winning. . . .

The problem with this is that it is premised on the conclusion being true. More importantly, that was not OP's claim. And even more importantly, see here. And even MORE importantly, a lawsuit has indeed been filed

I would not have expected to win a lawsuit like the one described in the OP.

Well, it was a settlement, not a win, and the amount settled for was quite small, as these things go. The City of Columbus agreed to pay $179,000 each to 32 protestors. Excessive force lawsuits are successfully litigated every day. That's why there are many lawyers who make a living pursuing them.

You are appealing to the processes of the system

That is not at all true. As I said, we should wait to see the outcome of their lawsuit. I was criticizing the logic of OP's claim, which is las bad as that of a leftish feloow I knew, who claimed that the courts are biased against his group, because the US Sup Ct rejected an argument that a red state's gerrymandering was unconstitutional, but courts held that New York's map was an illegitimate gerrymander. Never mind that NY's constitution explicitly forbids partisan gerrymandering. Stupidity crosses team lines, apparently.

The problem with this is that it is premised on the conclusion being true. More importantly, that was not OP's claim. And even more importantly, see here. And even MORE importantly, a lawsuit has indeed been filed.

I understand the argument you're trying to make, but these seem incredibly bad examples.

Worrell's case is available here. Not everything is public, but the available documents and especially the contrast between the the official submitted timeline and this DoC e-mail exchange don't look particularly good for the DoC. The contempt order was transmitted to the Attorney General for the United States, which received the update... and as far as I can tell, has done nothing specific to this case since.

That could even be reasonable: the government has been making various claims portraying him as a the jailhouse equivalent of a vexatious litigant, though I don't know how much the judge believes that. And given the behavior of the DoC, and conditions involving other people at these jails, it's hard to come to a separate conclusion:

I think, on the first day, he also advised me of an inmate who was a federal prisoner who had sought access to the sick call system for weeks who was not allowed to go on sick call because he failed to complete the form requesting sick call. He wasn't able to complete the form because his fingers were so hurt that he couldn't move his fingers; and two of his fingers had turned black, and he was unable to write to complete the form. So the marshals actually took him up to sick call because he could not complete the form, and that's why he had not been taken on to sick call.

In another instance the Marshal told me -- I think this is only the first or the second day -- that, in retaliation for prisoners' actions, the D.C. staff had cut off the water to the entire pod of the cell block...

And for the first time in the history of our particular Marshal here, our Acting Marshal, they were ordered to leave the jail, and they were barred entry. In his entire career, he has never seen any local jail that ever barred the Marshal from entering the jail, but they were barred entry to the jail. They did not get into a shootout, but they did not enter the jail on Sunday.

Now, that's not Worrell with fingers turning black, or even in the same block as had to be completely pulled of all prisoners. And I hope that the DC Jail victims get some compensation (and some jail officials get some prison time), though from my understanding this can be a bit of a shitshow. But the best he's gotten so far from this was bond and GPS monitoring. Which isn't a small deal! But it does not look like a particularly unusual or severe allowance, either; there's no shortage of cases with far worse than pepper spray getting immediate release on recognizance across the United States, without having to spend multiple months in jail in the meantime.

Quaglin's suit simply didn't survive the motion to dismiss phase, many months ago, and was then mooted by transfers for other cause while he was trying a motion to alter judgement. None of the prayers for relief in the initial complaint (cw: probably a nutjob) involved monetary compensation. I'm having a hard time tracking down the exact status of his case, but it looks like he's lumped under this and his trial may have been delayed by picking a nut of a defense lawyer.

I'm not going to overstate this: these people could be (and probably are) morons on the actual merits. But these are very awkward fits to the sphere of "wait until Group B files a lawsuit and we see what happens".

And the connection to the J6 Defendant Letter seems incorrect. That letter or series of letters was recognized by the courts in September 2022 (see Document 168 Attachment 3, again cw: nutjobs); the Worrell Contempt order was Oct 13, 2021.

Worrell's case is available here. Not everything is public, but the available documents and especially the contrast between the the official submitted timeline and this DoC e-mail exchange don't look particularly good for the DoC. The contempt order was transmitted to the Attorney General for the United States, which received the update... and as far as I can tell, has done nothing specific to this case since.

Well, the claim was that the about the judicial system's response to complaints about mistreatment, so I think that the judge's response is more germane. After all, NYC didn't agree to do anything, either, until after substantial litigation

And the connection to the J6 Defendant Letter seems incorrect. That letter or series of letters was recognized by the courts in September 2022 (see Document 168 Attachment 3, again cw: nutjobs); the Worrell Contempt order was Oct 13, 2021.

Yes, thanks, I misread the date.

It’s also possible that they don’t file a lawsuit because they know how skewed the system is. In a situation where the groups are already obviously treated differently, it makes little sense to go to the expense of hiring a lawyer. A black guy denied entrance to an elite university because he lives in South Africa under apartheid isn’t going to sue the school for it.

The police in NYC were pointedly less interested in stopping rioting and looting than in attacking anti-police protestors. Their handling of Floyd protests was textbook anarcho-tyranny, deliberately allowing the spread of lawlessness while concentrating their efforts on the law abiding in order to deter criticism.

The failing here is that the systems of accountability are so anemic that police can continue to routinely violate civil and human rights while obliging taxpayers to foot the bill.

In related olds, DisruptJ6 protestors, despite alleging molestation going on for a longer period of time, and interfering with bodily autonomy in much more invasive ways, have yet to be given money

As I noted the last time this was brought up, these are normal conditions. If you have a problem with how Jan 6 rioters have been treated in detention, you have a general problem with how the detention of accused criminals is handled in the US.

As I noted the last time this was brought up, these are normal conditions. If you have a problem with how Jan 6 rioters have been treated in detention, you have a general problem with how the detention of accused criminals is handled in the US.

This presumes that the Jan 6 protesters are in fact criminals. If they are not, and are being treated like criminals anyway, that is objectionable.

No, it presumes that they have been accused of being criminals. The current process is the process (according to Skibboleth) by which we treat those whose guilt we are still in technical doubt about.

And a week after the Jan 6 defendants sent their letter, this happened: EDIT: I misread the date; this was re an earlier complaint making the same claims.

In a case involving a Jan. 6 Capitol riot defendant, a federal judge held the District of Columbia's corrections director and jail warden in contempt of court Wednesday and asked the Justice Department to investigate whether inmates' civil rights are being abused.

.............

"It's clear to me the civil rights of the defendant were violated by the D.C. Department of Corrections," Lamberth said. "I don't know if it's because he's a January 6 defendant or not."

And shockingly, the Biden Justice Department found that the conditions their political opponents were being held in were perfectly fine.

... even as a long-term skeptic of journalism, I'm amazed how bad even the Associated Press is, given that this is all public info.

AFAICT, Worrell didn't have a broken wrist but a fifth metacarpal fracture according to the (iffy) doctor's notes or a "broken hand" by his lawyer's claims. Which is kinda a trivial thing, but come on. (and the bigger concern was about what this might predict for the minimally-treated cancer the same defendant was dealing with.)

More seriously, the US Marshall's inspection summary is here. It did not "found the building where 30 Jan. 6 defendants are being held to be sufficient". Indeed, the building's quality itself was very, very far from the top concerns that the Marshall's inspection brought at either the CTF (housing J6 defendants) or the CDF (which held more and more varied defendants. At the CDF: it found poor food quality and limits to food being used punitively, punitive disabling of water for entire blocks for days leading to standing sewage, injuries without corresponding medical or incident reports, and concerted effort by guards to threaten 'snitches'. The DC Deputy Mayor for Public Safety tried to maneuver this as about the CDF building's construction, but he also denied that water had been shut off for days.

This eventually lead to a (toothless) MOU.

Similarly, none of the concerns for the CTF (which housed the J6 defendants) focus on the building's quality, and instead the report just found that "The U.S. Marshal's inspection of CTF did not identify conditions that would necessitate the transfer of inmates from that facility at this time." And the judge's summary makes that distinction pretty clear:

It is beyond belief some of the reports of the Marshal here to the Court yesterday. We had an executive session of the full court yesterday. And he said the conditions at the D.C. Jail were deplorable; the conditions in CTF were not as deplorable. And the immediate action taken by the Department of Justice was to move all federal inmates out of the D.C. Jail; that does not mean that the conditions in CTF were meeting any standards. According to him, they were not as deplorable as the conditions in the D.C. Jail.

((And that's despite the jail barring entry to the Marshalls during a later day in the inspection, wtf.))

I’m aligned with you politically and share your basic perception of riots and the disparities in the way they’re handled based on political valence. That being said, this is a low-effort and uncharitable post, lacking in argumentative rigor, which does not develop its thesis sufficiently to merit a top-level post.

Hot Coffee Incident

the irony of the hot coffee incident is that liebeck was totally in the right and the mainstream consciousness was that mcdonalds was so unfairly punished

I have stated in a number of conversations that I believe that powerful people on the left wanted the residents of cities to suffer from riots and looting during the summer of 2020 and I consider this further evidence of that belief. Riot control forces are capable of preventing most of these riots from getting out of control, but they are often prevented from doing so either by direct orders, deliberate understaffing, or disincentives to action. For example, recall the Kenosha riots, which started after Wisconsin governor Tony Evers egged on unrest, stating that, "what we know for certain is that he is not the first Black man or person to have been shot or injured or mercilessly killed at the hands of individuals in law enforcement in our state or our country. Following that:

Day 1: August 23

By 2:30 a.m., a truck in a used car dealership along Sheridan Road was lit on fire. The fire spread to most of the 100 other cars on the lot, damaging an entrance sign for the nearby Bradford Community Church (it did not spread to the church building itself).[25][26] The buildings surrounding Civic Center Park, along with many downtown businesses, including the post office, Reuther High School, the Kenosha County Administration Building, and the Dinosaur Discovery Museum all sustained damage to their front windows and entrance foyers.[27]

Day 2: August 24

Mostly peaceful demonstrations were held during the day.[30]

Arsonists targeted a Wisconsin Department of Corrections community probation and parole office[39] and the city's Danish Brotherhood Lodge.[40] Other buildings set on fire included a furniture store, residential apartments and several homes.[41][30][42] Firefighters worked into the morning of August 25.[43]

Day 3: August 25

The Kenosha County Board sent a letter to Governor Evers requesting the deployment of an additional 2,000 national guardsmen.[45] Kenosha County Sheriff David Beth asserted that most of the damage was from individuals with no intent to protest and who were not from Kenosha County. Governor Evers declared a state of emergency for the region, sending in 250 troops from the Wisconsin National Guard to the city.[46]

At around 11:45 pm, 17-year-old Illinois resident Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed two people and injured a third.[50]

So just enough was done to say, "boy golly, gee whiz, I sent the Guard when they asked", but only after encouraging riots and spending days treating the burning as basically deserved, and even then they were wildly understaffed. Only when a few of the rioters were shot was anything done to stop this.

It's actually something of a credit to DeBlasio that he apparently didn't want his city to be burned and looted, but it turns out that there are plenty of people on his side that are more than happy to provide some further disincentives for officers that attempt to stop rioters.

Part of a seeming trend of the left benefiting from participating in their protests. Had a girlfriend who got intentionally arrested at a Bay Area protest years ago, maybe for Trayvon Martin, I don't recall. Not only did it not hinder her career to have that on her record, it bolstered her credentials.

Woe be unto thee who is discovered to have been at January 6th or Charlottesville however. I recall news of a guy who worked at a hot dog shop in Berkeley who lost his job after it was discovered he attended the latter.

seeming

I’ve no doubt that getting arrested is an occasionally valuable social signal. I hear MLK was a criminal, too. Is your only complaint that white supremacists can’t figure out how to leverage it?

Here’s the source for your Berkeley anecdote. Nominative determinism claimed another victim; maybe he was just confused, and thought “It’s okay to be White” meant him in particular?

Not only did it not hinder her career to have that on her record, it bolstered her credentials.

Details are needed here, where and how does she detail this incident to bolster her credentials? On her résumé? In what industry?

Nonprofit and tech adjacent Bay Area stuff. Lean In Foundation.

I think it’s the institutional power differential. People with power like the branding of most blue tribe protests, so they can and often do protect those who protest for the right causes in ways the disempowered right cannot really do. It kinda makes for an interesting tell of which groups and ideologies are ascendant. If people are not harmed socially for participation in a protest, the protest is for a cause the elites agree with. If people get punished socially for protesting, they’re actually fighting the entrenched powers.

Why give a conversion to won, of all things? Do we even have regular posters/readers residing in South Korea?

and at least throw some commas in there for legibility!

Might be bait to get more replies, which makes no sense in a sequentially sorted forum but neither does anything else I can think of.

Specifying that NY is a city in the US is also kind of odd. Im wondering if a certain language model wrote this comment.

From the linked NYT article

According to the lawsuit, the protesters arrested in the Bronx were surrounded by police officers before an 8 p.m. curfew and prevented from leaving

It does seem like the sort of technicality that could win you a lawsuit if you were arrested for failing to comply with a curfew you were prevented from complying with. That said I haven't carefully read the lawsuit and don't know how accurate the NYT's summary is.

On February 9th, Bari Weiss published (in her capacity as publisher - not the author of the article) an article in The Free Press purporting to be an accounting of misdeeds from a whistleblower, Jamie Reed, who worked at a transgender healthcare clinic for teens. Jonathan Chait, on February 17th, cited this in his own article, as well as the Affadavit the whistleblower filed with the Missouri Attorney General.

The afffadavit should be sufficient to dismiss Reed as a troll or a crank. Choice quotes, paragraphs 15 & 59:

15. One patient came to the Center identifying as a “communist, attack helicopter, human, female, maybe non binary.” The child was in very poor mental health and early on reported that they had no idea their gender identity. Rather than treat the child for their serious mental health problems, the Center put the child on cross-sex hormones and ignored the child’s obvious mental health problems. The child subsequently reported that their mental health actually was worsening once they started the cross-sex hormones.

[...]

59. Children come into the clinic using pronouns of inanimate objects like “mushroom,” “rock,” or “helicopter.” Children come into the clinic saying they want hormones because they do not want to be gay. Children come in changing their identities on a day-to-day basis. Children come in under clear pressure by a parent to identify in a way inconsistent with the child’s actual identity. In all these cases, the doctors decide to issue puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

Many journalists as well as state officials took seriously the allegations that children Sexually Identify As An Attack Helicopter, in a breathtaking display of credulity. Calls for investigating Reed's allegations to Save The Children From The Evil Clinic have come.

Chait, for his part, engaged in several twitter spats regarding the article. Notably this exchange, in which he demands that trans activists pre-register whether it is bad, if true.

On Wednesday, the Missouri Independent published their own investigation wherein they spoke to parents of those who used the clinic's services. A few choices quotes:

“I feel like I could go line by line to her affidavit,” Jones said, “and debunk it all.”

[...]

Several of those interviewed by The Independent also recounted their experiences with Reed — both good and bad.

“There were parents of trans kids who also raised some red flags around Jamie. So I really wish the center had listened to trans people,” Jones said. “We said: ‘This is a person who isn’t safe for us.’”

[...]

Reed’s affidavit to Attorney General Andrew Bailey alleges the Transgender Center quickly gave children hormones. The center “gave children puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones after just two one-hour visits (one with a therapist and one with a doctor at the Center),” she wrote in the affidavit.

Parents and former patients told The Independent it took months and multiple appointments before their transgender children received a puberty blocker or hormone treatment.

[...]

Lisa is the mother of a trans child who asked that her last name be withheld. She waited longer than the Freels family for her pre-teen son to receive a puberty blocker.

Her son had his first appointment at the Transgender Center in August 2019 but was too young for a puberty blocker. He had to wait three years.

He has had 21 visits with a psychologist and nine visits with an endocrinologist since the summer of 2019.

Joey, who also asked that his last name be withheld, started taking testosterone days before his seventeenth birthday and after nearly a year of therapy.

[...]

Parents said they felt like they had the Transgender Center’s doctors’ full attention to ask questions and review possible side effects of treatments. When they left, they had multiple handouts — some provided to The Independent that had been emailed from Reed herself.

[...]

Divorced parents told The Independent the center contacted both parents prior to proceeding with treatment, including meeting via video chat for an out-of-state ex-husband.

“They made it very clear that until, until the other parent was in full agreement, they could not move forward if and when one of the parents wanted to move forward,” Lisa said.

The St.Louis Post Dispatch also published an investigation, wherein they spoke to 30 people, with similar results as the Missouri Independent.

Chait is now contorting himself about whether Bayesianism is good.

Singal is on Twitter arguing it's entirely plausible that a Tumblr addled teen said something silly around a case worker. I agree that seems possible, but the bigger issue seems to be that they said that psychological services were rarely provided in and never in an ongoing manner while those parents say that their children had twenty appointments. It doesn't seem like Reed provided a good characterization of the services the clinic offered.

It would be nice to have good statistics on this stuff but medical privacy laws make it unlikely. I also would be nervous about building a database of trans teens when Texas and now possibly Florida are trying to make gender affirming care grounds for losing custody.

Do we have a good way of knowing about what happens inside medical clinics besides testimony from staff/patients?

I had a lengthy analogy about the catholic church's sex abuse scandals (the right in trans debate: are the people who say "WTF PEDO CATHOLIC CHILDRAPE EVIL!!!!! EVERY PRIEST A PEDO!!!", the left in trans debate: catholics who say everything is fine and the anti-catholics (the real pedos) are motivated by hating truth and beauty), but i forgout about it, then accidentally closed the tab. so, shorter:

Reed makes many claims of the form - nearly all children had serious mental health issues, the center often gave out hormones the same week. That 'nearly all' (80%? 90%?) was facially implausible in a way that 50% wasn't. If you interact with randomly-selected underage trans people, even in hyper-selected-for-weirdness internet communities - at least half just don't have, or claim to have, diagnosed mental health issues! The affidavit makes much stronger claims than the FP piece, jumping between broad claims about most patients and specific claims of misconduct in specific tail-of-distribution cases. And its claims are correspondingly more obviously flawed. Even without the local news accounts, she's clearly significantly exaggerating the problems. And the local news accounts confirm the expected - many patients wait a while for hormones, get multiple consultations, don't have diagnosed mental health issues, are told of side effects, etc.

But ... this doesn't, and can't dispute the specific claims of misconduct in the extreme cases. And if we assume Reed wasn't fabricating specific stories whole-cloth (so the specific examples they gave at least sort-of happened) - but just exaggerating particularly noteworthy experiences she had (as many do), it could still be bad. If 85% of trans kids are mentally healthy and get treatment on a reasonable and conservative schedule (in a relative sense), and 10% of trans kids declare they're trans because they want to be cool on tumblr and being trans is uwu, and some of the latter are 'mentally ill' ... is that really implausible? And it explains her writeup better than a "Stephen Glass-type fabrication" does, and is compatible with the local news investigations. (lol @ original article mentioning her keeping a document with all the bad cases, but not mentioning the number of bad cases in the document, or the ratio between that and all patients)

"Treegender" and co aren't fake, quite a few dumb kinds on tumblr and tiktok really do that. The "attack helicopter" thing was probably a joke, but maybe it was someone being dumb and making absurd claims, involving a common internet meme.

That all would contradict both the "leo sapir" types' desired claims (they like to imply that kids either shouldn't transition generally, or that at least half of current trans kids aren't really trans in some sense) and the "michael hobbes" types' desired claims (kids aren't really transitioning for stupid reasons, the entire issue is just a right-wing selection bias hatemachine).

So I don't think the debunking penetrates the right-wing motte, though it demolishes the bailey.

Not sure why OP got so few comments. Compare to a nearby right-wing debunking, which got 49 updoots and quite a few.

Who is Reed?

The whistleblower/affadavit filer. Post edited for clarity.

update: Jessie Signal gets detailed account from Jamie, including uploads of her notes. This includes a google doc, with last edit on Jan 5, that includes attack helicopter incident.

The afffadavit should be sufficient to dismiss Reed as a troll

So.. what was this ?

It looks like a dirty trick of the sort Karl Rove used - e.g. he knowingly leaked a forged memo the media would seize, and then revealed it was forged to discredit them.

Who fucked up their due dilligence here ? Or was the affidavit published after the article ?

Looking at urls, the affidavit seems to have been published earlier. Did the author of the article not read it?

Well played. Goes to show always double check when someone's telling you exactly what you want to hear.

Doesn't do much to move my priors, though. Too many cases of underage mastectomies for me to buy that everything is fine in transgender care.

I've been seeing media reports (1) about ISPs asking for companies (especially companies that use a lot of bandwidth like Netflix) to pay for network infrastructure. A quick google led me to a number of articles (2,3,{1}) that read something like:

"Large corporate bandwidth user resists efforts by ISPs or governments to make them pay for bandwidth use" (this is a little bit flippant, but isn't all that far from the truth).

My intuitive response is that users of bandwidth should pay for it, including large companies. This seems fairly straightforward, right?

Another article (4) mentioned that "net neutrality" is the idea that prevents ISPs from charging their customers. How is this defensible?

Another quick google leads me to this article (5) which mentions that one advantage of net neutrality is freedom of speech (which the modal mottizen might be inclined to support), but this goes against the straightforward argument that customers (e.g., Netflix) of a service (network infra providers) should pay for it. What gives?

Sources:

  1. This week (mar-2023): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/netflix-fights-attempt-to-make-streaming-firms-pay-for-isp-network-upgrades/

  2. More than a year ago (sep-2022): https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/09/google-fights-latest-attempt-to-have-big-tech-pay-for-isps-network-upgrades/

  3. More than 10 years ago (feb-2011): https://www.osnews.com/story/24357/internet-infrastructure-who-should-pay/

  4. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/who-pays-internet-infrastructure-simon-dillsworth/

  5. https://www.itpro.com/strategy/28115/the-pros-and-cons-of-net-neutrality

I hadn't heard about this argument in a while and the comments on your first link reminded me why: Comcast won in the US and got Netflix to pay them money because the US regulators failed to do anything about it. In addition to the double-dipping argument mentioned by another reply, it's important to highlight all of these costs are entirely artificial. Everyone could save a lot of money by the ISPs not refusing to rent space in their datacenters to Netflix, since Netflix's service actually requires almost zero Internet bandwidth due to nearly all of their bandwidth being them sending the exact same data to multiple customers, so more local caches improve their efficiency a lot. Comcast (and other ISPs with their own TV/video interests) is artificially greatly increasing the amount of Internet bandwidth Netflix needs because their parent company owns competitors to Netflix.

In addition to the double-dipping argument mentioned by another reply, it's important to highlight all of these costs are entirely artificial.

The economics of internet infrastructure are weird. Companies at the core (Tier 1) don't pay for connectivity to each other at all. They get paid by Tier 2 and 3 networks that can't summon the requisite connections and data flow to qualify.

Honestly, the fact that a decentralized Internet with global connectivity to almost everyone works is quite the technical and political feat.

But yes the fact that Comcast, part owner of competitor Hulu and cable TV operator, can do this is probably a tad disappointing.

The economics of internet infrastructure are weird.

Yeah, which is why I'm not entirely sure if Netflix or Comcast is right on the "double-dipping" claim.

Presumably, large companies have a contract with their ISP to obtain access to a certain amount of network bandwidth. If an ISP wants to renegotiation that contract when it expires, that's perfectly reasonable. Otherwise, how are they justified in attempting to charge the company more than the contract requires?

I believe the anti-ISP side here is that the ISPs are overselling bandwidth, and then when a customer actually uses all of the bandwidth they bought, the ISP is in trouble. They need to upgrade the infrastructure to actually accommodate the bandwidth usage, and they are attempting to pass this cost on to a customer without re-negotiation of contracts.

Now, I'm a bit anti-ISP by habit, so can someone give the pro-ISP argument here?

Peters said. "Broadband customers, who drive this increased usage, already pay for the development of the network through their subscription fees. Requiring entertainment companies—both streamers and broadcasters—to pay more on top would mean ISPs effectively charging twice for the same infrastructure."

It seems natural to me that customers pay for the product that comes to them. If I get something trucked to me, I assume the cost of road tax (for upkeep of the road that the truck uses) will be included in whatever I pay the trucking company.

Or another example, when people talk about large companies 'emitting CO2' to imply it's their fault rather than ordinary people's, they do so to provide services we demand. The aluminium they smelt, chemicals they produce all go to an end-user eventually. It's not as though they're emitting CO2 for fun. Ultimate responsibility lies with the demand, not the supplier. If we charged the producers as well as the consumers for emitting CO2, we'd effectively just be charging consumers twice since producers can only push the cost onwards or reduce production.

If we discovered that Netflix was doing something ridiculously silly like using inefficient file-compression and increasing the amount of bandwidth used, then there would be some basis to complain. Or if energy companies were using extremely inefficient, expensive, unreliable sources of energy that necessitated costly construction of new power line infrastructure and the closure of power-intensive industries like aluminium plants, then there would be reason to impose punitive action against them.

If we discovered that Netflix was doing something ridiculously silly like using inefficient file-compression and increasing the amount of bandwidth used, then there would be some basis to complain.

A post above yours says that they basically are.

That post says the opposite of your claim.

That post says that Comcast refused to let Netflix reduce its bandwidth usage unless Comcast gets paid.

Actually, it's worse than that. Comcast refused to let Netflix reduce its bandwidth usage at any cost. And then managed to get Netflix to pay them extra for that bandwidth usage.

I think you've misread it.

Netflix wanted to rent space in local datacenters to reduce the necessary bandwidth. Comcast shut them down.

It seems natural to me that customers pay for the product that comes to them. If I get something trucked to me, I assume the cost of road tax (for upkeep of the road that the truck uses) will be included in whatever I pay the trucking company.

I pay both Comcast for the pipes and Netflix for the content that comes over the pipes. If Comcast starts charging Netflix for delivering what I already them pay for, that might be shrewd business on Comcast's part, but I'm not going to like a Netflix fee hike to cover what I'm already paying for.

Isn't this double billing? Which is a terrible idea and entirely unnecessary.

Someone has to pay for the internet infrastructure. And it makes sense that payment should be roughly proportional to usage. A system in which all users of the internet pay their ISPs for access to the internet, proportional to the amount they use, while companies and other web hosters pay nothing for this, is stable and sane, and what we have now.

An alternate system where companies and other web hosters pay proportional to the amount people use their site would also handle this. I think it's inferior to what we have now, because it strongly discourages the usage of free content (or cheap content paid for by ads), and would require websites to charge microtransactions to casual viewers to compensate for their access, so costs would just pass on to the same people they are now but with more friction.

But this? Trying to make companies pay for bandwidth use that customers are already paying for? That's pure greed, it makes no sense. ISPs are already getting paid for Netflix use, because Netflix users have to pay the ISP directly for however much bandwidth they use, which then compensates the ISP for the costs of building the network infrastructure. Netflix is not the customer of the ISP, the actual customers are. They're already being paid (and more than they deserve anyway given their natural monopoly).

One-sided billing went out when uni-directional communication went out

Let's start our story with the physical precursor to all this digital stuff - mail. Party A pays a company to transport Item X to Party B. (Or, at least the agreement is to transport it to a location believed to be Party B.) The exchange of money agreed upon between Party A and the company may have depended on how large Item X was or the distance it needed to travel. Bulk/bundled pricing could be possible. In any event, for this story, Party B does not pay the company anything. If the company turned around and said to Party B, "Actually, I got yo' shit; pay me more if you want it," that would be double billing and without checking, probably illegal (unless, of course, in certain scenarios where Party A's agreement specified that Party B would be providing some compensation; COD does exist).

One might mistakenly view one's relationship with a package service as, "I pay you for your service, and the charges apparently include the amount that I send out as well as unlimited reception of goods." Perhaps this misunderstanding could be amplified by having a bulk/bundled billing, say, you pay an $Y "service fee" that includes being able to send out up to Z letters per month or something. "I pay you plenty and don't always send out the maximal amount I'm allowed; clearly, the extra must cover things like how much it costs for me to receive stuff." But this is clearly misleading and wrong.

Sears used to sell a ton of stuff via mail-order. This sort of thinking could result in folks concluding, "Yo, we the people already pay the mail service, like $Y/month! That clearly compensates them for both sending and receiving! The companies shouldn't have to pay them more! That would be double billing!" And while the companies shouldn't have to pay more to receive the letters that contain your orders, they sure as hell are going to have to pay them more to mail you back a fridge.

Intermediate conclusion: if the only things that ever traversed the internet were UDP packets, perhaps a sensible pricing scheme could be devised that only charged one of the sender/receiver. (I kind of kid, because you could still plausibly charge each side for just the packets they send for other types of connections.)

Enter telephones. Telephones are inherently a two-way communication medium. Suppose I want to talk to Bob down the street. I could go run my own telephone line directly connecting us, then use it for free, but I'm probably going to instead pay a company to hook me up to their centralized telephone service, so that I can talk to lots of different people. Bob is also likely to do the same. Now, when I call Bob, is it "double billing", because we both paid for such service? Probably not. There are special cases here, of course. Say, what if it's an especially expensive call to make (long distance/international)? It could get complicated, because there might be multiple companies involved, and they might be trying different pricing schemes. Maybe the telecom company in my country lets me receive international calls for free, but charges to initate them; maybe the telecom company in Bob's country charges either way. I remember exactly these sorts of things happening in the early days of cell phones and just having to plan out, "Hey, you should call me instead," or like, "We were talking on a call that you started, but now that it's 7pm, we should hang up and I should call you, because it'll be cheaper."

In any event, in a telephone network, you might have nodes which primarily receive or primarily send, and these things might affect how much it costs to build the infrastructure/run the network. You should expect that companies will try out different pricing schemes. With telephony, Sears can now take orders via telephone. "Customers" would pay Sears for products. "Customers" would pay the phone company for phone service. Would it have been a stable system for Sears to go to the phone company and say, "Yeah, dude, the 'customers' pay you for phone service. Set us up a connection with 1,000 lines for free, otherwise it's 'double billing'." Then the next year, Sears' sales go up, and they come back, "Make it 10,000. Free. Don't care how much trouble you have to go to. Actually, ya know what? Christmas time is busy; make it 50,000, just in case. Make sure it's free or we'll sic the press on you."

"Company" and "customer" are not categories that attach to packets on the internet.

So, I'm calling Bob down the street. What about? Who knows. The telephone company can't listen in without a wiretap warrant; they don't know. Maybe Bob set up a little business, and I'm buying something from him. Maybe the thing I'm buying is actually being sent to me via the telephone conversation we're having (I give him a credit card number over the phone, and he like, tells me his stock picks or something). At what point does Bob get to go to the telephone company and say, "Yo! This here a 'company', not a 'customer'! The 'customers' pay you so that we can talk. FREE!" (Nevermind that Bob is an asshole that is actually just a customer of Jane's Stock Tips that he repackages and sells for more money. The telephone company can't know this either, because again, no wiretap warrant.)

Bob makes enough money off his shitty stock picking business that he decides to buy a ranch in the middle of nowhere, like he's always dreamed of. He contacts the telephone company, "Yeah, hi! I'm gonna need you to go ahead and run like fifteen telephone lines a few hundred miles out to my little compound. Business is booming, and I have the whole family answering calls and giving stock tips. I have a big family. So, if you could just go ahead and do that on Saturday, that'd be great. Thanks! ....oh, and remember... FREE!"

Would this system be stable and sane? I think already it appears not quite sane. How about stable? In this system, there appears to be a hell of a great incentive to gain the 'company' label. I might look like a customer at first glance, but I'm going to start up just enough of a business, host just enough content in my house (send just enough stock tips of my own out on the phone). I'm a "business" now. Can I go to the ISP/phone company and say, "Yo dawg, I'm not a businessman, I'm a business, maaaaan. FREE." What is the minimal level of business/hosting that I need to do to qualify? Can everyone on the block attain this minimal level? We'll all do it, and we'll all stop paying. Who pays now?

The internet is just a bunch of endpoints

A variety of big companies help connect up those endpoints, forming a massive morass in the middle of everything. Endpoints get charged by the company that helps them get into that morass. (Companies which set up that morass negotiate with each other to price traffic between their respective networks when they traffic to each other.) Endpoints get charged according to how much traffic they want to get in to and out of said morass. Large, heavily-used endpoints probably pay a lot. Small, slightly-used endpoints probably pay a little.

While packets don't come with a "company" or "customer" label, in reality, telephone companies and ISPs do have "business class" service. It costs more, not less. It recognizes that there may be differences in service needs. Individuals might be happy with cheaper service that doesn't come with the fifteen lines that Bob needs or better guarantees like that at least ten of them need to be functional 100% of the time. The usage demands of individuals can often be rounded off to "within some small bucket", and bulk/bundled prices can be easier for everyone than metering out every call/packet. Bob's business needs more than this small bucket, and he's going to pay more. Sears needs even more, and they're probably going to pay even more. Neither of them can be like, "Yo, the 'customers' already pay you; FREE."

This general story makes sense, and lots of academic ink has been spilled on "two-sided markets" with different features along these lines. In some cases, there may be benefits to providers; in some cases, there are some things we can do to reduce concerns. In the basic story, things mostly work out okay given some measure of competition. Of course, the basic story doesn't preclude the possibility that anti-competitive behavior could arise or that such behavior should be dealt with. Below, people describe Comcast as vertically-integrating their own streaming service and behaving anti-competitively toward Netflix; that particular anti-competitive behavior can and should be dealt with, but the solution is not some weird distinction between 'customers' and 'companies', where 'companies' can magically demand FREE no matter what their demands are.

Okay, you make some good points and I'm largely convinced away from my previous viewpoint.

But then, assuming we treat companies as indistinguishable endpoint users, why do ISPs need to demand that they specifically pay for infrastructure costs? Shouldn't that be baked into their business class service? Isn't the entire point of paying ISPs that they use the money for infrastructure? Is it just that there's an abnormally large amount of demand from a small number of servers that the regular infrastructure can't handle all at once? Does the increased usage from these companies not make their regular endpoint user costs abnormally high to compensate for this without special negotiations?

I think it's just a blend of the two things. Think again about telephone service circa 19XX, with some low value for XX. Telecoms have some reasonable expectation for the needs of most businesses, maybe tens to low hundreds of numbers. Then, some company like Sears changes the way they do business, shoots to the moon, and suddenly needs thousands of lines. You could imagine that the telecoms previously had written their regular endpoint user costs without even having the possibility of this use case in mind.

I can't find it now, but I recall seeing a picture of outdoor telephone lines in what I think was a European city back in the day, at like a central location. It was the most gawd-awful mess of just absolute spaghetti, worse than any "bad cable management in a server room" pic you've ever seen. But that was just, like, how they did things at that time. But now imagine Sears shows up and says, "We want to locate a call center in this city, and we need like thousands of lines, yo." The telecom might phrase it in terms of, "Yeahhhhh, we're going to need a new 'tier' in our list of regular endpoint user costs," or they might phrase it in terms of, "Dude, we simply need to completely redo our core infrastructure, because we can't scale to what you want with the way we've been doing things." It's probably some blend of the two, and they pretty much need to just negotiate it out. Hopefully, there's competition between possible providers and the telecom company isn't running their own business to compete against Sears, so that the result can plausibly be just a regular competitive negotiation. What I have less patience for is a company like Sears running to the newspapers and screaming about how horribly unfair it is that the telecom company won't just go to millions/billions of dollars of effort for free to accommodate their massive need.

Given the response to my post below about culturally bound illnesses I figured it would make sense to write out a top level post specifically discussing gender dysphoria, since I expressed a desire to avoid that topic initially. I was inspired by Scott Alexander's recent post on culturally bound illnesses.

The basic idea of my previous post is that some illnesses which seem quite common in our society, things like anorexia, depression, chronic pain, and gender dysphoria, seem likely to be highly culturally mediated - i.e. they would not exist if the cultural norms we are inoculated in didn't account for them. This goes against the standard narrative for LGBTQ+ people, who often put forth the idea that before a minority gets social approval, there are a ton of 'closeted' individuals who simply live in suffering. Under this model, the social approval actually creates the urge to, for instace, sleep with the same sex or transition gender. (I'm less confident about homosexuality being highly cultural.)

I'm sure someone here could give a better history of rough numbers of trans individuals/gender dysphoria cases over time, but the gist seems to be that numbers have exploded recently. A quick search shows laughable results such as:

The percentage and number of adults who identify as transgender in the U.S. has remained steady over time.

And then on the exact same website:

Our estimate of the number of youth who identify as transgender has doubled from our previous estimate.

This is some of the most clear double think I've ever seen, and I tend to be much less invested in the trans debate than many here. Other studies are more honest explaining that:

The population size of transgender individuals in the United States is not well-known, in part because official records, including the US Census, do not include data on gender identity. Population surveys today more often collect transgender-inclusive gender-identity data, and secular trends in culture and the media have created a somewhat more favorable environment for transgender people.


I think this whole topic presents a clear problem, but I'm less sure about the actual solution. I'm sure many would jump at the chance to say we should just tell people who have gender dysphoria to suck it up and keep it to themselves, but I doubt the feasibility of that given how easy it is to create subcultures on the internet. Also, if you try to apply that frame to other problems like say anorexia, or depression, the failure modes become extremely clear.

Then again we can't just let these culturally created illnesses run rampant through our culture, and I predict they will only become increasingly problematic as our communication infrastructure and leisure time scales up. Ideally we want to replace these unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones, but we run into a chicken and egg problem.

So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?

The percentage and number of adults who identify as transgender in the U.S. has remained steady over time.

And then on the exact same website:

Our estimate of the number of youth who identify as transgender has doubled from our previous estimate.

Why do you think this is double think? Youths and adults are different groups and if you read down to where they explain this headline:

"Overall, based on our estimates from 2016-2017 and the current report, we find that the percentage and number of adults who identify as transgender has remained steady over time. The availability of the YRBS data has given us a more direct look into youth gender identity and provides better data than was previously available to us for estimating the size and characteristics of the youth population. Youth ages 13 to 17 comprise a larger share of the transgender-identified population than we previously estimated, currently comprising about 18% of the transgender-identified population in the U.S., up from 10% previously."

This they say is a result of new data from the fact that: "Additionally, in 2017, the YRBS, a national survey of high school students, began asking respondents if they are transgender."

The YRBS (Youth Risk behavior Survey) data was only available after they made their last estimates in 2017. So the explanation could be that there is more in depth data than before so their previous estimate was low, or it could be that the numbers of youths identifying as trans has gone up in the past 6 years while the number of adults so identifying has remained the same. Or some mix of the two. But I am not sure why doublethink is involved at all.

As to the last question, do we need to do anything different at all? At a societal level the number of people identifying as trans is still very very low, and the data from this report might suggest that the increase in youth trans does not translate to adulthood in any case. You could probably surgically transition all 300,000 youths and it really will not have much impact at a social level (not saying you should, just that you could without too many wider impacts). If their parents and doctors agree they need treatment, then treat them, if they don't and the kid wants it anyway then there are already established legal processes for emancipation and the like.

Back to percentage and number can't both be steady: if the youth percentage has doubled but the overall total is "steady," what's going on there? Are there a lot of adult detransitioners? Again, lazy lack of sourcing, but prevailing opinion among pro-trans people seems to be that detransition is extremely rare. Or is the implication that it's no longer steady, something else is occuring right now that's caused a "wave" of youths who will eventually be adults?

Indeed, their explanation is that they have better information as the question is now directly asked to youths on the survey post 2017 when it wasn't before, hence why their estimate of the prevalence in youth doubled. But if the measurements are correct then de-transitioning or a recent youth wave would seem to be the most plausible explanations, I would agree.

I have no writings aside from TheMotte, and all I can really offer is that society isn't for anything in particular, it's the emergent behaviors at scale by all the people that make it up. A blind hydra rather than a blind watchmaker perhaps. It will adapt, grow new heads and change as people change and individuals are largely unable to impact it, and governments only marginally more so.

Youths and adults are different groups

Only at the time of measurement. Youths grow into adults, and unless there's some proposed mechanism intervening, one would expect trans youth to grow up into trans adults, and trans adult to have been, at one point, trans youth. Thus today's trans adults are yesterday's trans youth, and today's trans youth are tomorrow's trans adults. Absent some other influence, a doubling in the number of current trans youth over past baselines would indicate that when those youth grow up, there will have been a significant discontinuity in the number of trans adults from the last generation to this one.

Something else has to be going on for both of the hilighted statements to be true.

Something else has to be going on for both of the hilighted statements to be true.

They point out the youth figures from the new estimate are now derived from a direct question added to the survey post-2017, where before they were estimating by other means. So that would be the baseline something that could enable both statements to be true.

They say their estimate has increased, not that the true (the actual amount we would see if measured by some omniscient entity) numbers have. Now it is certainly possible their original methodology was actually just as accurate as the direct question method and so the increase is a real one, rather than one driven by the methodology change. That might indicate a recent wave of youth identification. In the reverse if the previous numbers were wrong and the doubled numbers were also correct historically then that might indicate some level of de-transitioning before adulthood.

But because the methodology changed we don't know if either is true.

They point out the youth figures from the new estimate are now derived from a direct question added to the survey post-2017, where before they were estimating by other means. So that would be the baseline something that could enable both statements to be true.

But that elides the question of what happens between the estimate of the trans youth population, and the survey of trans adults, right?

In what way? There are 300,000 youth trans people and 1.3 million adults (according to their figures) now (or as of 2020 really).

Previously their estimate was 1.6 million in total, 160,000 of which were youths back in 2016.

Presumably all of the youths in the 2016 estimate (using data from 2014-15) aged out of the category and either became adult trans, detransitioned or died. And some number of the adults remained trans, some number detransitioned and some number died. But we don't have those numbers.

There are 391,000 Trans people between 18-24 in their 2020 charts. So some of these would have been from the youth cohort from 2016. We don't know how many were "new" and how many were from the 2016 youth cohort however. It could be there really only were 160,000 back in 2016 and all became adults and trans. Or some number detransitioned and were replaced by new adult trans people.

Is that what you were trying to figure out?

Expand the Universe of Acceptable/Respectable Ways to be a Man or to be a Woman

I want to be clear on what I think "trans-ness" is: there may be some hard-core of people with a physical brain-illness/defect that causes them to feel born in the wrong body, but the majority of people tempted by transition are pathologizing the natural feeling present in most people of not living up to the Masculine/Feminine ideal. Most people who transition either dislike or feel incapable of living up to their gendered ideal, and flee it rather than fail at it. I've also spoken about how Ricky Bobby morality has poisoned our youth: the idea that you can do whatever you want as long as you're the best at it means that most people are inevitably failures, and that they respond to failure by seeking out extremely obscure games and metrics to regain self-esteem (looks nervously at rock climbing wall).

I suspect that a big part of what causes men to consider transition is an over-intense idealization of what a man is. When transwomen talk about how they weren't men, how they felt that masculinity didn't fit them, they often aren't describing actual men I know, they are describing a cross between early-season Don Draper and peak-80s Stallone/Ah-nold, they're describing a being of infinite assertiveness and Nietzschean-Ubermensch privilege over the world. In these poor minds, there but for the grace of God after all, a man is Ron Jeremy in the bedroom and Gordon Gekko in the boardroom and Audie Murphy in a fight. That's a cool ideal, one I might strive towards at times, but it is one that no one meets.

If one considers that to be a man one must meet that standard, the only conclusion one can reach is that one is not a man, can never be a man, the project of being a man will always fail. What is trangenderism then? It is an alternative project for those who fail at the project of their birth gender. If being a man means if you ain't first you're last, means the world telling you that you are never good enough until you're a 10% bodyfat crossfit competitor who runs his own corporation; being trans means the supportive section of the world telling you that you are doing a great job, it's a project you can't fail at. It's a hobby that 100% of people who try are affirmed in how great they are at it, even in the early stages, and that hobby/project grows to consume the lives of those who feel they can't succeed at anything else.*

A man can earn 100k and squat 400lbs for reps; he'll be surrounded by people telling him he needs to work harder until he's Elon Musk and that 400lbs isn't bad for a noob but what's the record and anyway maybe you could drop a weightclass and keep the lifts up. When a man puts on a little bit of eyeliner and posts on a trans subreddit, he's surrounded by people telling him he is super valid and totally passing gorgeous.

So that's a lot of words on the problem, what do I think is the solution? We need to expand the universe of how you can be a man. Not just in terms of masculine/feminine interests, though I don't really buy into gendering most things anyway (I love a fruity cocktail on a Saturday night and a sweet iced coffee to chase the hangover away Sunday morning), but in terms of what success looks like. When the masculine ideal was having a steady job, getting married, raising kids as a good father, and maybe owning a home, a lot of men could feel like they fulfilled that ideal. How do we modernize that ideal for a world where women have entered the workforce and often in pair-matched cases out-earn men? Where violence is so proscribed that too many men die without any scars? Where delivering security to your family is impossible, even being secure that you have a family can be impossible?

I'm not sure how we do that, but rebuilding a complete masculinity that men can aspire to is how we solve gender issues, both the kind that end in surgery and the kind that end on incel forums. Hell, I consider the best project that feminism can undertake to help professional women achieve their ambitions to be building a better Himbo, in the Joe Rogan mold, who can support his brilliant lawyer/executive/politician wife without feeling less-than because he draws his self-worth from other sources. Everything else is downstream from there.**

*I don't believe this has much correlation with objective measures of success/failure/masculinity, rather with self-perception of success/failure/masculinity, which is only marginally related.

**I think most of this could be flipped to the feminine with more or less the same effect, but obviously I am somewhat less familiar with what it feels like to be a woman.

In a society which exalts women, and values their opinion as much as todays western does, men alone cannot redefine what a man is.

Greater acceptance of short and passive men among men, wouldn't alter how the they are perceived by women.

A man can earn 100k and squat 400lbs for reps; he'll be surrounded by people telling him he needs to work harder until he's Elon Musk and that 400lbs isn't bad for a noob but what's the record and anyway maybe you could drop a weightclass and keep the lifts up.

There is a contradiction here in how you cite only examples of men. The disparity between how intrasexual relations are between men, who encourage other men to try harder, to put in more for effort, to achieve greater things, versus how they are between women, where exaltation of self-improvement in the field of femininity isn't common, of praising the most womanly woman, who is great at all things associated with the fairer sex.

One could blame contemporary feminism, which in its vulgar form is interpretted as women being deserving of high status by their mere existence, while men have earn their worth; and the absense of parallel movement as influential which would tell men they are Kings no matter their lack of achievements.

Thus one would expect the sex which, you claim, gatekeeps membership in it would less commonly transitioned into, than the one which places less value on what makes its sex special. Yet as "What is a woman?" is due to feminism each year given a greater variety of answers, trans men are growing faster than trans women.

Greater acceptance of short and passive men among men, wouldn't alter how the they are perceived by women.

I agree, which is why I label it as the most important job for Feminism to help promote the careers of professional women.

There is a contradiction here in how you cite only examples of men.

I cited only examples of men because I am a man, I experience life as a man, so it's easier to write, and the post was long enough without getting into women. But I think women suffer from an equally destructive set of societal expectations in today's world. A pretty girl used to be pretty enough if she was top ten in a high school class of one hundred, now she has to be prettier than thousands, pretty on a scalable level. But also a young professional girlboss, but not too successful then men won't like you; smart but not too smart. A 40 year old middle class housewife 100 years ago had pride, easy and carefree, secure in her home in her husband in her children in her place in the community. Today we expect women to be all things at all times, and we never give them security. We expect a 40 year old woman to fuck like Samantha from Sex and the City, to Lean In like Sheryl Sandberg, to mother like a Mormon mommy blogger, or maybe to Tiger Mom like Amy Chua, to craft and decorate like an Insta influencer, to never get old but never be young and naive either. She is to raise her kids to be independent and leave her and maybe call her once a month after, she is to love her husband who at any time might leave her alone having wasted her first fruits in sacrifice to a false promise of forever.*

Transmen equally view being male as an accomplishment, as a project to create meaning in their lives. Transmen are satisfied with being male, they don't have to strive to be ubermensch when mensch is good enough.

*Very, vanishingly few women benefit from divorce. It is mostly a negative sum transaction. It is popular for men to view themselves as the victims, and therefore women as the putative victors; in reality as in Roadhouse nobody even won a fight.

The relentless positivity of the trans community isn't a positive - it's a negative. It's a defense against the immensely shitty situation of potato-shaped Norwood 3s getting memed into thinking they can become cute anime girls. It's fleeing to the sanctuary of a Legally Protected Class.

Personally, as a gay man who suffers from pretty awful insecurity about himself (particularly my disgusting body), I've found that one thing that has helped me feel like more of a man has been doing a physical labor occupation.

Absolutely. It's terrifying to think that without a very physical job and a few active hobbies I might have turned into one of those poor nerdy guys getting literally brainwashed by anime.

Thanks for teaching me the term for my family's balding pattern...

I think you’re on to something and it does kinda dovetail with something I’m noticing on the other end of the spectrum— what they think a woman is, or what it feels like to be an “internally female being”. The thing I’m seeing is a conflation of the trappings of femininity— dresses, domestic activities, an femininity in the aesthetic choices of media and decorative art. Now, there are women like that, and women who aren’t. Most natal women don’t do that stuff, and certainly don’t do it all the time. And for that matter, a lot of women like and even play sports, like masculine-coded media, wear t-shirts and jeans and skip the makeup.

What I think we’ve done to gender is made gender into a completely binary choice, and said that if you don’t do them or don’t do them “right” it’s obviously because you aren’t that gender. And it’s really weird because we don’t do this with any other identifying choices. I can be a Christian in lots of ways without my identity being questioned too much. I can be my race no matter how much or how little of the cultural aspect I identify with (I can even identify with the cultural aspects of other ethnic groups and still keep my racial identity— nobody has ever questioned whether an Americanized Japanese descended person was still Asian, or whether an Otaku was White). Gender somehow is a uniquely binary situation where you either identify 100% with all the trappings of culture and aesthetics or you surrender the man or woman card.

But then I think a lot of how modernity has commodified identity bears some blame here. Identity in the West, outside of race is largely a set of choices to be made, which isn’t how identity worked for most of human history. For most of history, you were given almost everything in your identity, then you lived up to that. You didn’t save the princess because you wanted to be a knight. You were born into that warrior caste and thus behaved like a knight. And even if you didn’t, you were still a knight, just a bad one. But if you have to be a good knight, perfectly chivalrous and brace and awesome with a sword to be a knight, then what do you do with a bad knight? And if being a knight is a choice, might a bad knight simply go be something else?

What I think we’ve done to gender is made gender into a completely binary choice, and said that if you don’t do them or don’t do them “right” it’s obviously because you aren’t that gender.

FWIW this is basically the exact rift between people who are "trans" and people who are "gender nonbinary" (or queer or otherwise gender nonconforming) in the LGBT world. I remember back on tumblr around 2010 a lot of gay/queer people were quietly shading transgenderism because being trans basically reinforces the gender binary whereas being queer/NB is something outside the binary. You don't hear about it much these days because trans is such a mainstream issue and people who aren't fully on the trans positive bandwagon are labeled TERFs or whatever, but the issue isn't really fully resolved.

I can be a Christian in lots of ways without my identity being questioned too much. I can be my race no matter how much or how little of the cultural aspect I identify with

One thing that applies to those who transition into gender or into Christianity is that the convert must demonstrate zeal, while those born into a religion can be lax. I'm going to use Islam because it is more racialized in America. There is nothing in the Quran about race, my blonde hair and blue eyes qualify me for Islam as easily as my Pakistani friend. But our behavior will be judged differently. If we both move through the same mosque community, I obviously a convert and he obviously born into the faith, I will be held to a higher standard before being taken seriously. If he drinks a little, eats some bacon occasionally, misses prayers sometimes, people might say he is a bad Muslim but they will not doubt that he is a Muslim. If I convert, and then I keep drinking and eating pork, most people would say I never converted at all, that it's all a farce, a put on.

This is a great response, I absolutely agree and think I’ve been flailing towards something like it myself. There definitely needs to be a shift in modern masculinity away from physical violence and ore towards social fluency, emotional stability, and overall intelligence. At least that’s where I’ve been able to carve a niche for myself.

Unfortunately it seems like family is a hardwired instinct for a lot of men, and I think a big problem is a lack of male role models. With the rise is divorce rates it’s not uncommon for men to grow up not seeing a single well adjusted, relaxed, competent man. Especially not one in a happy marriage. In fact I’m over thirty and can’t think of a single one in my life, including myself - though I do aspire to be there.

While I do know men who are married and accomplished, they’re all so damn neurotic I can’t seem to respect them or truly look up to them. The media doesn’t help either, with the bumbling dad tropes. I’d be curious if people could name one good father figure in modern media. (Bandit in Bluey is great but he’s a dog.)

Anyway, older men have largely failed to adapt masculinity so I suppose it’s up to the coming generation to salvage what we can.

they’re all so damn neurotic I can’t seem to respect them or truly look up to them

Basically they are extremely driven workaholics or highly passionate about something, but they're also constantly anxious and can't seem to relax. They don't have a confident, relaxed air is another way to put it. Hard to put into words I suppose.

While I do know men who are married and accomplished, they’re all so damn neurotic I can’t seem to respect them or truly look up to them.

I think that all men are neurotic and insecure. I have traveled and dated all over the world and every man you can imagine thinks they're a piece of crap at the end of the day. Every man in my family that I've known my entire life is like this. I think it's intrinsic to being a man. I have met men who are insanely hot with huge muscles and are, to me, the perfect example of masculinity and even they are extremely insecure. I am a thousand percent less neurotic and insecure than I was ten years ago but even today I'm just a snide comment away from spiraling again into self doubt. I think it's downstream of sexual selection, men are so driven to procreate and have sex that we lead ourselves into madness when we aren't actively fornicating. It sounds bad at first but taking this perspective has made me more empathetic to fellow men I meet. We're all self doubting. Dating as a gay man can be so dire because we often tear at each others' insecurities. It makes me have more respect for women who seem to be able to lend sanity to the male psyche in a way other men can't.

Also expanding this as a quick reply to @fivehourmarathon's post above, which I agree with strongly: He proposes that we need a new kind of masculinity we can perform or grow into. (I think that's a fair assessment of the point, correct me if I'm wrong.) I think it's a good proposal, however I think an easier fix would be to encourage people on an individual level to actually support and urge on masculine qualities in men. I can remember times people in my life have told me I have certain manly or masculine traits and it is a huge confidence boost for me to remember those times. I think we dislike making these comments as a culture because we don't prize masculinity as a trait.

I think it's downstream of sexual selection, men are so driven to procreate and have sex that we lead ourselves into madness when we aren't actively fornicating.

Wouldn't it be the other way? Sex is far easier to get on demand for gay men than straight men. Straight women don't enable the sexual excesses of men, they check them.

I can remember times people in my life have told me I have certain manly or masculine traits and it is a huge confidence boost for me to remember those times.

I get this too. My workplace is entirely men and it's nice to 'blend in' and feel accepted.

Yes, I was saying straight men and gay men alike are driven to madness when we're not getting laid. When I think about how much harder it is for straight men to get laid than gay men I feel surprised that straight men are able to keep it together as well as they do. I wouldn't want to jump through the hoops that you guys have to jump through to have sex and don't envy the runaround at all.

Taking this to its dramatic extreme, the older I get the less I care about the trappings of society and can't help but feel like all the niceties and luxuries of life are a sort of masculine "nesting" instinct to attract female mates. Since I don't have to lift a finger to get laid as a gay man and this is becoming more and more clear to me, the allure of luxury goods is less and less appealing- and indeed, at a certain point simply highlight my insecurity rather than enhance my masculinity itself. When it comes to attracting men as a man, you want to display security, and nothing looks less secure than some insane piece of fashion or a botox'd face or a piece of jewelry or a fugly haircut or basically anything other than the body you were born into. Women may demand these luxuries to feel safe, or as a signal that the man is flawed/able to be tamed/sensitive, but men find them as cringe markers of insecurity (which is much easier to notice in someone else than in yourself, by the way.)

I'm not 'you guys', I'm gay as well though I'm not a very typical gay man. But it's my observation that the hoop jumping that straights engage in has value. Men should want to be tested and challenged.

Taking this to its dramatic extreme, the older I get the less I care about the trappings of society and can't help but feel like all the niceties and luxuries of life are a sort of masculine "nesting" instinct to attract female mates. Since I don't have to lift a finger to get laid as a gay man and this is becoming more and more clear to me, the allure of luxury goods is less and less appealing- and indeed, at a certain point simply highlight my insecurity rather than enhance my masculinity itself. When it comes to attracting men as a man, you want to display security, and nothing looks less secure than some insane piece of fashion or a botox'd face or a piece of jewelry or a fugly haircut or basically anything other than the body you were born into. Women may demand these luxuries to feel safe, or as a signal that the man is flawed/able to be tamed/sensitive, but men find them as cringe markers of insecurity (which is much easier to notice in someone else than in yourself, by the way.)

I am not so sure about this. A lot of male indulgences (luxury watches, expensive liqueur, expensive technical or mechanical toys) are at best tolerated by women, not actively sought out. My internal model is that I have to spent weirdness points to indulge in them. Part of that may also be that my social class actively discourages overt displays of wealth (you're supposed to be more subtle, like talking about that time you spent a sabbatical in Tibet).

Culturally bound as you say, but male adornment as status symbol dates back to before the Greeks. The Great Male renunciation is the anomaly not the historical norm.

I agree that the things you've outlined (everything is a tournament profession; success at being a man is measured in terms of impossible ideals; the previous masculine success parameters are less attainable than they used to me) are real problems. Probably solving them would mitigate the kind of gender issues that "end on incel forums" (or in suicide, another thing that's been trending up).

But I'm not sure I buy that these are root causes of a substantial fraction of MtF transitions. Are the majority of transitioners really people who have decided they should become a woman because they think they will fail (or have failed) at being a man? I'm curious as to what evidence makes you think that is the case. If you're right, that makes the problem much easier than I think it is, which is a really good thing!

Are the majority of transitioners really people who have decided they should become a woman because they think they will fail (or have failed) at being a man?

I have no idea, and we aren't really asking that question to transitioners. Detransitioners often talk about things like that, but they are a particular subset of people, and if nothing else subject to the same biases that eg Ex-Mormon or Ex-Muslim forums are subject to.

I'm curious as to what evidence makes you think that is the case.

I can go dig through forums to find evidence, but this isn't an issue I think about a lot so this is more the gestalt from the Myers-Young Associated Statistical Survey, acronym for short.

I can recall, though not cite offhand, numerous examples of trans people in writing and in real life telling me what feeling like "not a man" and "not a woman" felt like. And it always involved some kind of assumption that because I am a man I strongly feel a constant sense of being a masculine stereotype. When my experience of being a man is constantly falling short of that stereotype, from 13 to 31, and probably onward to the grave. I'll try to find the Slate(?) article in particular that I'm remembering, but it was a piece by a transwoman contra-TERFS arguing that transwomen never had male privilege because before transition they "weren't the men who were hitting on their secretaries, the guys making dirty jokes in the locker room after the football game, the frat boys having competitions in objectifying women." Right away you have the apex fallacy, equating "men" to executives, athletes, popular fraternity brothers; and not to autistic nerds, janitors, or obese unemployed. The idea that if you aren't a really great man then you aren't a man at all.

If you're right, that makes the problem much easier than I think it is, which is a really good thing!

I think this problem is much bigger and harder to deal with than a "medical illness" answer; this is a society wide phenomenon experienced by most people, transitioners are just those at the bottom of the fragility/mental stability totem poll who slide off into the strange.

I have no idea, and we aren't really asking that question to transitioners. Detransitioners often talk about things like that, but they are a particular subset of people, and if nothing else subject to the same biases that eg Ex-Mormon or Ex-Muslim forums are subject to.

Not only are we not asking, the question is so politically fraught we probably couldn't get good answers anyway.

I can recall, though not cite offhand, numerous examples of trans people in writing and in real life telling me what feeling like "not a man" and "not a woman" felt like. And it always involved some kind of assumption that because I am a man I strongly feel a constant sense of being a masculine stereotype.

I wonder if that assumption is more likely to be a cause or an effect. By which I mean, you've observed a certain misconception in your trans acquaintances about what it's like to be a normal man; how do we tell the difference between the chain (have this misconception) -> (think they fail at being a man) -> (want to be a woman) -> (trans), vs the chain (want to be a woman) -> (trans) + (reinterpret ordinary experiences as evidence for transness) -> (implicit misconception)? Not saying you're wrong, just the second seems more intuitively plausible to me and I'm not sure how one would tell.

I think this problem is much bigger and harder to deal with than a "medical illness" answer; this is a society wide phenomenon experienced by most people, transitioners are just those at the bottom of the fragility/mental stability totem poll who slide off into the strange.

Ah, I see what you mean. It's an easier problem only for the narrow question of "how hard is it to deal with trans ideation once you are intervening in someone's life", but a broad social problem is much harder to fix than a few people with mental illness.

So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?

In a word, gatekeeping. Assuming gender dysphoria is at least partially a culturally-independent phenomenon, attempt to separate such cases from the far more common culturally-dependent ones. And do not consider any "treatment" aimed at anything but relieving the ideation in the latter cases.

But how do you gatekeep when the only gauge is based on feelings? This is my biggest frustration talking to people about trans - it always boils down to "that's how I feel" and there's no real way to get around that since it's not a logical proposition.

If someone actually skilled at such things, perhaps a psychologist or a therapist of some sort (or maybe a trial lawyer), cannot with high reliability tease out the difference between someone with a culturally-dependent ideation (a "transtrender", to use the pejorative) and someone with something more deep-seated than that, then the entire profession of mental health is bogus. This is possible, but in that case there is indeed no solution better than telling all to "suck it up". I wouldn't expect to be able to reliably figure it out from casual conversation, although those close to the person with such feelings might be able to.

Make it costly. It is very nearly costless to articulate a feeling. However, people feeling severe distress are far more likely to engage in costly activities to try and relieve it. Gatekeep transition therapies behind assessments that a patient is likely to (or has) attempt or engage in behaviors that are harmful to themself or others in order to relieve it. If someone is willing to self-mutilate out of extreme dysphoria and will do so regardless of what anyone else does, it's probably better that the same operation be performed by a trained surgeon less likely to make quite as much of a horrifying botch of it. Anything else, the focus should be on reintegration of self-perception and physical self.

it's probably better that the same operation be performed by a trained surgeon less likely to make quite as much of a horrifying botch of it.

Depends on the surgeons, seemingly there are some who do make horrible botches. Or the money-grubbers, who will push their services to young people like this wonderful specimen of my nation who is now infesting yours:

An Irish plastic surgeon based in Florida who has a huge social media following has been reported to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for alleged false promotion of services to under-18s.

Five organisations led by Genspect — an international alliance founded by Irish psychotherapist Stella O’Malley that has concerns about gender-affirmative treatment of young people — filed its complaint against Dr Sidhbh Gallagher in February.

...She has described herself as “Dr Teetus Deletus” online, in reference to her surgical removal of breast tissue for women transitioning to men. In her TikTok videos she regularly describes the procedure as “yeet the teets”. “Yeet” is slang for forcefully throwing something away.

Dr Gallagher has said she does up to 500 gender-affirmation surgeries a year. One a month involves a person under the age of 18.

So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?

Being cruelly blunt? Treat it like mental illness. Nobody thinks anorexia is an identity and it is treated as an illness. Even if it is to an extent culturally-bound (and I wonder about that; there is certainly the element of social contagion, but excessive fasting and problems with food intake have been around for a long time even if not described as a tidy syndrome called 'anorexia'), we don't just nod along helplessly that of course, we must give them their very own flag and add them in to a month of celebration.

Same with transgender issues. Go back to so-called medical gatekeeping; if you really are suffering from dysphoria so severe you would try to cut off your breasts or your penis, then this is a mental issue that needs treatment the same way as if you tried chopping off a hand. Maybe the treatment is helping you find ways to live in your body (and fuck off with the notion of 'conversion therapy'), maybe the treatment is surgery and drugs when you're adult enough and this is long-standing enough that it's not changing any other way. And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts (oh sorry, I mean whatever today's term for alternate sexualities is).

On the other hand, if someone who looks like this insists they are too a real woman and should therefore have access to female-only spaces, that's mental illness. Maybe the best you can do is go along with their delusions, but that does not give them the right to be treated as if they really have changed sex, not alone gender. Transgender competitors in sports? That can go several ways, but mostly that there should be a separate league or division or whatever where all trans athletes can compete against each other. If you changed genders five years ago and have been beating out cis women ever since, I think we can all recognise that something is going on due to natal biology.

I'm doctrinaire enough I'd even row back on changing birth certs because fuck it, those are identity documents. If I can legally have mine changed to pretend my parents had a son not a daughter, why can't I legally have it changed that I was born in the US and so am an American citizen? Or that I was born five years later so I'm younger? Or that I'm a different race because you know, I've always identified deeply with Tibetan culture? Either it's a legal document or it can be switched around to include/exclude elements at whim, in which case it should be as binding as Monopoly money for use in any kind of official context.

That being said, treating it like mental illness should also mean de-stigmatising it like mental illness. No, it's not normal, but it's a condition people suffer from. If we don't blame people for suffering from schizophrenia or depression, we don't blame them from suffering from delusions that they're a different sex. We treat it, we help and support them, we don't mock them - but we don't invent a flag and a celebration month, any more than we have a "Happy Global Bipolar Disorder Day! Hurrah for you, you perfectly ordinary normal person!"

And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts

Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts? I encourage you to read my essay downthread; I believe the thing you are referring to is more common, and more complicated, than you think -- but that aside, surely having disordered desires should be treated as a mental illness, in much the same vein as the other things you describe?

Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts?

Not if they're going to be officially deputized by the State to (mission-)kill anyone who offends them.

I don't actually think people are generally unwilling to accept people like this- after all, there was no pushback on deputizing them partially for this reason- but I don't trust cops, least of which those that are in uniform, even less if they're Thin Blue Liners. If I had to talk to one of them, I wouldn't even admit to jaywalking lest they take that as an excuse to bust out their inner Eric Cartman. The ride is indistinguishable from the rap these days.

There was a comment upthread about how people are afraid to denounce Islam and functionally treat its adherents as wearing suicide bomb vests because they threaten violence to those who say those things. This is the same thing, except top-down rather than bottom-up.

And yes, it makes things objectively worse for any member of the violence-advantaged class (for example, men adopting the Pence rule makes the life of the honest woman more complicated). But that class, on a population level, does not generally care enough to change this- it is useful when the economic game is zero-sum.

I confess that I am confused by this response. Who is being officially deputized by whom to kill whom? And how does any of this make sense in the context of @FarNearEverywhere's parent comment, which already posits a massive change in how the official parts of society deal with trans stuff?

Trans people are being deputized by the state to wreck the lives of normal people. They've been granted official "victim" status, which gives them a frankly absurd level of protection from normal criticism, which they then routinely abuse in a variety of novel ways. When normal people who haven't kept abreast of our mercurial social reality object, they get hammered, often as not via state or pseudostate enforcement mechanisms.

You're saying that it would be better for people to be kinder to Trans individuals. But only a vanishing minority of the objections to Trans individuals have to do with their Transness, as such. People are objecting to the active "recruitment" of children by agents of the state, the vociferous defense of actual perverts, the extension of charity to sexual criminals, the weaponization of serious state power to enforce fringe ideology, and to the damage done to ordinary people who attempt to exercise their purported civil rights in response. Trans people, as such, wield immense, absurd, and almost entirely unaccountable power under our current system, a highly visible fraction of them are quite gleefully abusing that power in highly visible ways, and the rest are refusing to restrain this fraction, refusing to criticize or hold them accountable, and vociferously attaching anyone else who tries to do so.

You are right that they need help, but they need to be stopped more, because they are cooperating with efforts to do serious damage to our society.

I guess I don't see how this has much to do with what I'm saying. The post I was originally responding to suggested:

And somebody have the backbone to stand up to those for whom it is a sexual fetish, identify it as such, and tell them they're not transgender, they're perverts

as a way to dissuade these people from transitioning. In other words, tell people with autogynephilia that they are disgusting and should go away, which seems both cruel and unlikely to work. I'm proposing compassion instead, because I don't want these people to end up deciding they are trans, I want them to get help.

For whatever it's worth I have little love for the trans lobby and am pretty incensed at all the propagandizing and abuse of state power to enforce their ideology. I just happen to think that many, probably most, trans individuals are also victims here, in much the same way that lonely people who get targeted by lovebombing and join a cult are.

Perhaps I can prevail upon you to be kind to perverts?

If you want to call it a paraphilia, go ahead, I'm not fussed either way. I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.

I also think there is a difference between someone so distressed at their biological sex that they want to cut off the distinguishing characteristics, and the types who complain about the cotton ceiling and how it's transphobia if cis gay women don't want to have sex involving a dick.

I think in the rush to be accepting and supportive, a lot of sketchy stuff got past and now the allies and activists are kind of stuck - they've nailed their colours to the mast, they feel that if they row back on anything then it's giving in to the demands of, well, the likes of me and denying the reality of trans people.

But the more the crazier stuff gets out into the mainstream, the worse the backlash will be, and the genuine trans people who only want quiet lives will suffer. The trenders, the attention seekers, the sexual assault crowd and the lunatics will be okay, the ordinary person who isn't Rachel Levine or Sam Brinton will get the worst of it.

I think it's a small proportion but I also think that unfortunately they are the loudest and most visible and most online.

It seems we differ in our estimates here. Maybe it would help to draw a distinction between, let's say, people with disordered sexual desires (in which group I would include any autogynephilia in natal males), and people who are "visible perverts" (you know about them because they do perverted things in public or are publicly loud about their proclivities). I agree that the latter group is rare and unrepresentative of trans people, and it's crazy that the trans lobby doesn't want to get rid of them (probably this is downstream of "pride" stuff). I think, though, that the former group includes probably the majority of MtF trans individuals as well as a decent percentage of men who don't transition. This is probably not usually acknowledged because it's perceived as unflattering to trans people, and to be fair the people loudly crowing about how "it's just a fetish" are being cruel and are not helping the matter.

I think we ought to have some charity even for the "visible perverts" crowd; they need it even if they don't deserve it -- but what I'm really referring to here is the other group. Right now all they are hearing is either total silence, "Eww, you pervert", or "That means you're really a woman deep down! You must be trans!" I think there is a need for counseling, along the lines of "So, you know how you really really want to be female? And how you find that idea sexually arousing, too? Yeah, that's a thing; it's something a bit wrong with you, but it doesn't mean either that you are disgusting or that you are 'really' a woman or should try to become one. Let's try to help you figure out how to deal with your feelings."

It's difficult to work in the interests of a group who is doing obvious, immediate and lasting damage to everything they touch, who do not actually want the help you advocate offering, and who will make their best effort to harm anyone who tries.

It's a big ask, is what I'm saying.

Are you referring to trans activists, the "visible perverts", or to the "disordered desires" group? Granted there is overlap, of course, but I think it's the first two groups who are doing the damage. A lot of the third group doesn't (or doesn't yet) even consider themselves trans! If you want them to not get eaten by the trans meme, you've got to provide some kind of compassionate support. Because when the options are suffer in solitude, get shamed and ridiculed, or listen to the seductive whispers telling them that they can satisfy their desires and join a group that will continually affirm them, it takes a pretty strong will to not pick the third option.

Nobody thinks anorexia is an identity

People absolutely do, particularly on social media. It's a well-known problem.

Yeah, but that's part of the mental illness aspect. There aren't (I hope) people rushing to proclaim themselves "allies" and that this is something to be celebrated, not treated.

The day we get to "starve yourself to death day" as a national celebration, then we can throw in the towel.

So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?

Find susceptible people before they get eaten by the toxic memes, and give them genuine sympathy and counseling, I guess. Tell better stories and offer better philosophies so that they don't latch on to the destructive ones. The cat's out of the bag, which is why this is an issue to begin with, so pure shame or pointed silence is off the table -- they'll just go find groups that tickle their ears. The teenage girl who is uncomfortable with her body needs personal care before she gets convinced that being anorexic would make her special or that she'd be happier as a boy.

I guess this solution is just "Replace the unhealthy cultural memes with healthier ones," but there's really not any other possible solution anyway. This is a cultural problem and you can't just Do Something to solve cultural problems.

Well, there is a first step to replacing the unhealthy memes with healthier ones that doesn't require winning the whole culture, and that's making sure the healthy ones are at least on offer and available to the people who need them. Be the change you want to see in the world?

So - what are your recommended solutions to the issue of transgender ideation and other culturally bound issues?

I'm not trans, but I do have a lot of personal experience with transgender ideation. When I was younger, I seriously considered transitioning many times - it came to the point where I had resolved to confess it to my parents, and ask them about actually getting treatment. I ended up chickening out at the last second though, and never went through with it.

What really got me off the idea for good - what made me stop viewing transition as a live option - was discovering radfem (TERF) blogs online. They were completely unabashed in saying, this is ridiculous, you are not a woman, we will never view you as a woman, what you're doing is harmful to actual women, and you really should just stop. And I ended up concluding, you know what? You're right. This is silly, and I should stop.

So, I'll reiterate what I said earlier and what others have said as well. The solution is to encourage a culture of open and honest discussion where no meme is above criticism. Some people will still choose to go through with medical transition anyway, or develop an eating disorder, or what have you. But it will certainly be less people, if the broader culture encourages them to be exposed to alternative viewpoints.

The solution is to encourage a culture of open and honest discussion where no meme is above criticism.

Sounds like the solution is banning TERF rhetoric which is repressing trans youth.

No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites

1] From the moment of birth, Chinese-American infants show extreme acceptance to conditions that horrify European ones.

-Cover a European 40 hour old infants nose, either directly or by lying them face flat on the bed; and they'll struggle to uncover it. Chinese infants will breath through their mouth, otherwise remaining entirely motionless. Where European infants will become more aggressively distressed the longer you do this to them, Chinese infants will remain calm.

Study by Dan Freeman and his Chinese-American wife in Nature:

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0

2] Dramatic differences remain at four months:

REACTIVITY BATTERY RESPONSES: Exposed to a battery of tests designed to elicit reactions; moving, crying, fretting, vocalizing and smiling; Chinese infants are undeniably different.

For example, the most mobile Chinese infants are less than a third as mobile as the most mobile American ones and half as mobile as the Irish sample. In each area except for smilling, American and Irish reactivity can be expressed as multiples of the Chinese ones; with a degree of difference that would be shocking in a gender study! This is even after 32% of the Boston sample, but none of the Chinese sample, was excluded due to infant non-cooperation.

See the chart on page three. It's really, really dispositive.

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1037/0012-1649.30.3.342

CRYING IN RESPONSE TO INNOCULATION: Other studies involve observing differences in rates of crying upon childhood innoculations, and compare American infants to Japanese ones. Here, you get shocking differences like, 4 out of 26 Japanese infants crying in response to a shot where every single American infant did so. This, at least partially results from considerable differences in levels of cortisol production, both prior to and immediately after innoculation.

https://sci-hub.ru/10.2307/1131465

General Note: I tried to find East Asian American studies for the four month behaviour section, but couldn't. Readers of the papers will find that they appear to be well controlled as these things can be, with the Chinese sample being from the infants of students at China's top university.

3] Dramatic differences obviously remain in adulthood:

3.1 THE BAMBOO CEILING: There is asian overrepresentation in every field involving intelligence and a bamboo ceiling in every subfield requiring a personality. To give one example from reuters:

"Asian Americans comprise 13% of associates at major law firms, but just 4% of equity partners — the lowest ratio among minority groups, the report notes. Only one of the current 93 Senate-confirmed U.S. Attorneys is Asian American, and their representation among law clerks has been stagnant for the past 25 years."

The difference between associates, and partners/US Attorneys is of course, that the latter might occasionally try a case or engage in unmediated interactions with people who are not like them and need to build up a rappor.

3.2 MASKS PEOPLE, MASKS! Explain to me why, until perhaps the last two months, your average East-Asian American was more likely to be masked than blue-anon types. Isn't the parsimonious answer simply that infants who won't fight to uncover their nose, become adults that are indifferent to showing their face?

Do we realy have to litigate this one?

3.3 MUSIC: Asian parents sure as hell get their kids to play piano, and early, often similarly strict musical upbringings are common among music stars generally. Where then, are the distinguished East Asian-American popular musicians?

3.4 NOVELS: Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?

@sword-of-empire: I can be reached at lepidusian@protonmail.com

  • -25

What was the point of this fever dream rant? Did some Chinese guy steal your girl?

Good lord this got me. Thanks for the laugh.

Let's assume that your poorly-developed, unsourced arguments are all 100% true. They're not, and throwing music and novels in there is almost absurd enough to suggest parody, but I don't want to deal with your Gish gallop, so I'm going to use my imagination.

Why should I care?

If, as you seem to think, Asians are unfeeling automata who may neither comprehend art nor build genuine rapport...I'm not seeing the problem. Explain to me why the existence of such people is a bad thing.

Calling a series of factual statements a “gish gallop” is basically telling on yourself. There’s no argument here, but you’re admitting the conclusion you would draw is uncomfortable ergo assuming bad intentions.

Not at all.

I think he’s wrong on the merits, such as with his inability to name Asian (-American?) authors or musicians. He’s also not making only factual statements. Part of what makes it a Gish gallop is mixing in assertions, like the claim that the gap between law associates and law partners implies Asians lack “personality.” He is throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

It is interesting to try to compare the reaction of this site to this poster to the common reflexively hostile one most reddit subs have to HBD in general (which this site doesn't share and/or looks down upon)

There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though. Maybe.

There seems to be some history I'm missing with the user that might explain it though.

His post a week ago started with "Our struggle with China is racial", focused on the supposed inherent cruelty of Chinese people rather than something more supported like East Asians being higher conformity/conscientiousness, and was poorly argued and focused on anecdotal evidence. So there's some carryover, where people take this post as a continuation of the same argument rather than just being the (quite plausible) assertion that East Asians have personality differences separate from the higher intelligence. Obviously "this race is so incompatible that we're destined for racial conflict" is a much more dubious claim, especially when the argument isn't even about the resentment that flows from differing capability or from violent crime but vague personality differences. And as I pointed out in response to his original post, he's focusing on Chinese people but they don't have that much genetic separation from other East Asians, most of which do not have China's reputation for low empathy or its political antagonism with the U.S.

Regarding this post specifically, my largely uninformed impression of the infant studies is that they're small and potentially questionable for the usual replication crisis reasons, but unfortunately it's probably difficult to do an improved version of them for political reasons. (It's also harder to know what implications they have for adults.) It would make sense, but a lot of replication crisis stuff makes sense, that's why people were investigating the hypothesis in the first place. It's not comparable to intelligence research on population differences, where the state of the evidence is much firmer and more extensive.

Some people seem to think that you need to have a "personality" in order to have a right to live.

Some of the arguments are sourced, some are not. I think, as poorly argued as the position is, there are undeniable expressed differences between divergent population groups. I don't know on what basis anyone can deny this considering the widely divergent cultural norms and expressions. Let alone physical and psychological differences. I also, like you, don't know exactly what the person is arguing towards. It reads similar to anti-China CIA threads on /pol/, without the industrial accident webm's.

If, as you seem to think, Asians are unfeeling automata who may neither comprehend art nor build genuine rapport...I'm not seeing the problem. Explain to me why the existence of such people is a bad thing.

I think there is an undeniably obvious problem to develop between two people, one an unfeeling automata and another who deeply feels and sympathizes with everything around him. Now neither the Chinese nor European live up to those descriptors, but I think the principle holds firm regardless. That there is a clash of 'values' there.

I think a lot of the world has been playing by western rules for a while now. And I see no reason to assume that any country anywhere in the world would continue to do so if the west fades as a power. I don't see it as a ridiculous deduction to say that this potential loss of power, coupled with different values of a rising power, represent a threat to the people who value all the things the 'west' has stood for internationally.

I don't think you necessarily need to demonize the Chinese to make this argument, but there does seem to be a numbness to the western population when a threat is proposed that is anything other than the media flavor of the month. A sort of automatic assumption that, no matter what, the status quo established by White expansion and global dominance throughout the recent ages is a universal that was always the case and that it will hold no matter who is 'in charge'. I think that assumption is obviously faulty. But, again, I don't think you make those arguments literally, like is being tried here. I think you just show a Chinese person boiling a dog alive and let the 'visceral logic' do the speaking for you.

You were warned the last time you engaged in literal Chinese cardiology that you are allowed to develop weird theses, but it can't just be cherry-picked examples of why your target group is bad.

Do we realy have to litigate this one?

Yes, if you are going to offer anecdotal observations as "evidence" that the Chinese are lizard people, you have to actually justify your just-so stories.

This kind of manifesto-posting is not desirable. Lots of people come here with very particular ideas about certain racial and ethnic groups, and as you are no doubt aware, we don't prohibit that, but you actually have to make a well-founded argument, not just "Look at how obviously alien and inhuman these people are." We have rules against weakmanning, and rules about writing like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

Just to take an obvious example, we have several posters with very obvious antipathy for Jews. Yet when they go off on their favorite topic, they usually manage to post in such a way that there is at least something to engage with, it's not just "Jews bad." Complaining about Holocaust memorials or the amount of dollars that go into funding Jewish NGOs might be a veneer over their real agenda, but it's a veneer that allows even Jewish posters to argue at the object level.

What you offer a hypothetical Chinese poster to engage with is "true or false, you are an alien bugman of a hostile alien species."

Since you were already explicitly warned to stop posting like this, banned for three days. If you want to come back and keep riding this hobby horse, you will need to seriously up your game.

Thanks. I could've sworn that this exact nonsense about Chinese babies was seen before on here, but I wasn't about to hunt down proof. I didn't engage either time because I'm not even sure what the point to all this is.

He doesn't seem to participate otherwise so it was just a profile check to see.

I'd like to make a meta-comment here; I got this thread in the daily volunteer janitorial duties. Without context, I see consensus building, cherry-picked (though not insufficient) evidence to support his claims -- No Chinese-Americans are not just high IQ whites seems to be the one real claim of the entire post, which the subsequent evidence feels so disconnected from I almost forgot about it --, vague weakmanning.

That said, on a quick read, and without seeing his name, it wasn't even clear to me whether he was pro or anti East Asian. The first two sections seem to suggest that the babies are a lot tougher/more stoic than Europeans, not a priori a negative trait. The last section, without context, could read as evidence of East-West cultural incompatibility or discrimination. Initially, when reading the title, I thought he was going for Chinese don't just have higher IQs, they are more resilient/industrious in general. This falls apart in the third section, where he's hammering the trope of East Asians = seen by Westerners as emotionless/cold/disconnected, which I think vaguely passes muster? There's considerable asymmetry in general cultural exports between East Asia and the US after WW2/Korea.

He's begging the question with Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?, but taking a step back, my main exposition to Japanese/Chinese culture has been self-sought (barring reading Sun Tzu when I was a young teenager, who's become a ubiquitous prototype of eternal Eastern wisdom) and entirely autochtonous. I've briefly perused top 25 best books in Asian-American literature and don't recognize a single title (except for a Murakami book, whose inclusion I find borderline offensive).

I believe I rated this as Bad, maybe an extremely charitable Neutral, but I feel this showcases a shortcoming of the hyperlocal view the volunteer system offers: not only am I unable to immediately view his previous posts (which in my opinion are significantly easier to classify without context) -- they are two clicks away, context then profile --, but am also not necessarily aware that this is a toned-down/more indirect version of the usual manifesto, for which he was already warned.

I feel obligated to point out that Haruki Murakami is not Asian-American, he's just Asian (Japanese).

As for the meta-comment, @ZorbaTHut can comment further if he wishes, but I think it's by design that volunteers only judge posts in isolation, since it's just meant as a sort of triage system. I don't think the volunteer janny system is ever meant to replace moderators, because the mods see user histories and take that into account.

Adding to the meta comment: it would be nice when jannying to be able to go and see the context of a post, and then be able to give an opinion.

At least for me (on my telephone), if I leave the janny page for any reason, I forfeit the volunteering for 24h.

Tap the three dots below the post, hold the "Context" option which appears in the pop up and tap "Open link in new tab". At least that is how I do it on firefox on android.

Thanks! (I'm feeling rather embarrassed for not having found out myself)

I feel obligated to point out that Haruki Murakami is not Asian-American, he's just Asian (Japanese).

"whose inclusion I find borderline offensive" I wasn't offended at the quality of his writing :P

This kind of manifesto-posting is not desirable

It's not even a manifesto. The last time it was more well-formed but also fell short of our classical manifestoposters. It's «here are some reasons I find compelling to think that the Chinese are, essentially, yucky emotionally stunted robots. Amirite?» He suggested some racial struggle, but what's the struggle? Chinese babies are significantly more chill than other babies; Chinese adults tend to wear masks, excel at technical competence and fail at entering the PMC; a hundred years ago, Mainland Chinese elite women had their feet bound. Okay, I personally buy all this and much more.

Where's the thesis and its development? What is supposed to be or not be litigated, exactly? That a sovereign Chinese state is inherently a threat to Western values or something? This doesn't follow from the provided evidence, such as there is, and isn't even articulated.

Maybe I just lack the context of the Yellow Menace discourse and it's assumed to be self-evident the moment Chinese differences are established. I can certainly see how an intuitive antipathy for a racial Other can inform policies. But this is supposed to be a place for rational-ish discussion. You need to spell this stuff out.

I wish there was a Yellow menace. If I was to choose between the current woke pmc and ccp leadership I wouldn't blink before choosing them.

Are you really that bullish on the CCP after 2 years of zero-covid and rolling lockdowns? A consistent pattern over the last 3 years seems to be, America is retarded, but they consistently get outdone by the rest of The World. Russia started a full-scale war, China did zero-covid, Australia/NZ tried zero-covid, Canada went full authoritarian, Germany phased out nuclear... to go back to coal! The UK's economy stagnated. So many other countries got on the lockdown train. And the Third World, they are going to need a lot of IMF loans soon.

Yes. CCP Don't want to export their values unlike Brussels or Washington and them being the hegemon will allow to solve the two biggest problems facing EU - mass migration and inability of current migrants to culturally assimilate. Which requires some mild application of the stick not only the carrot.

CCP Don't want to export their values unlike Brussels or Washington

Are we sure about that? Sure, China may not necessarily be interested in International Communism, but they seem to like asking their business partners (NBA, Disney, etc.) to make the right noises and not make the wrong noises. China's investments in African nations is also likely for a similar reason, to shore up international PR and UN support for the PRC.

Maybe it's just that being the hegemon requires or results in values spread--maybe material power is not enough without memetic power.

I suppose Dase could repost that Russian "proverb" about the two chairs here...

Something something two chairs but one ass? Now sure how that applies here.

While I cannot know for certain, I think @HalloweenSnarry references the classical Prison Riddle, i.e. a shit test used as part of a «registration» rite for a new cell mate, popularized on Russian imageboards (this stuff was recently brought to the attention of Westerners by Galeev).

The riddle in question is a near-perfectly polished psychological attack against a relatively powerless newcomer in a honor culture setting; it's really pretty crude, but lazily googled translations are lacking, so here goes. «There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.

Supposedly, default passwords are:

  1. «I'll take the sharpened pikes, cut down the jerked cocks, will sit myself and sit my mother».

  2. «I'll sit on the pikes and sit my mother on my knees».

In principle, the universal counter «For what reason do you inquire?» (literally), or some blah like «We're fine with standing, thank you very much» are also valid, though I haven't had the opportunity to try it out.

There is a whole family of those riddles, sadly their charm is untranslatable. The most reductionist one is «Offer your ass vs. sell your mom?»

I like the trolley problem one:

You're on a train, chained to levers that can turn either left or right. There's a fork in the road ahead - your mother is tied to a pole on the right and your buds, ten of them, are on the left. Which way do you turn, who do you hit?

Answer: today's buds [could be] tomorrow's cops.

Russian (and broader Russophone) culture pays a lot of attention to the problem of choosing between terrible options and false dichotomies, captured in the saying «horse-radish ain't sweeter than radish». E.g. the Escobar Axiom of Choice (Escobar is a Ukrainian black metal character):

In any choice between only two mutually exclusive and opposite entities, both alternatives will be exceptional fucking shit.

Or in the original form:

«this [one] is fucking shit, and that one is fucking shit. Both fucking shits are such that I just fuck her mom's mouth».

Pelevin has developed this idea into a faux-dialectical method, e.g. in «Batman Apollo»:

– The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.

And earlier, in «P5: farewell songs of the political pygmies of pindostan»:

Ludwig Wittgenstein had claimed in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that he had discovered a general form for describing the sentences of any language. In his view, this universal formula accommodates all possible signifier constructions – just as the infinite space of the universe accommodates all possible cosmic objects.

"That there is a general form of sentence," writes Wittgenstein, "is proven by the fact that there can be no sentence whose form cannot be foreseen (i.e., constructed). The general form of the sentence is: "The issue is so und so" ("Es verhält sich so und so").

However, philologist Alexander Sirind, an associate professor at the Irkutsk Pedagogical Institute, recently managed to disprove the famous formula, by giving an example of a sentence that goes beyond the all-encompassing paradigm outlined by the Austrian philosopher. It goes like this: "Fuck you, Wittgenstein".


But as for the CCP vs the Globohomo, I think another piece of imageboard fancy is more relevant – the 4chan «freedom is best, and hard choices» or maybe the Ben Garrison remake «the march of tyranny». If you don't have negotiating power except in the form of defecting in protest, and your defection threshold is only reached after both tyrants have curtailed freedoms of their subjects, just to a different extent (and that's still a better case than what we have here) – eventually both tyrants converge to absolute dominance and all subjects are maximally debased.

The Chinese Taoists, – he said, – had a similar notion, I will retell it in my own words. Struggling for hearts and minds, discourse workers constantly demand that people answer 'yes' or 'no'. All human thinking must flow, like an electric current, between these two poles. But in reality there are always three possible answers: "yes", "no" and "fuck you". When too many people begin to understand this, it means there is some wiggle in the skulls. In our culture, it has reached a critical point. It needs to be reduced drastically.

This reminds me of older discourse around powertalk(?), wherein enough people "leave" the game of producing to extort producers, that society begins to collapse. (I only briefly leafed through a decade ago and current perusal leaves me uncertain whether that was the source.)

More comments

Yeah, that first one was what I was thinking of.

Your ending paragraph puts things a lot better, though.

There are two chairs. On one, sharpened pikes. On the other, jerked [erect] cocks. On which one do you sit, on which do you put your mother?» As is common with riddles, it rhymes.

Password template seems to be any solution where you don't sit on the cocks and your mother is absolutely unharmed/uncocked. I did figure that out as much, but thought of retarded shit like placing the chairs sideways and both of us sitting on the side edge or something. I might just be too "neurodivergent" for Russian prison. That fails the "fuck you" criterion though.

Exactly, I’d rather continue to take mandatory DEI trainings than be under the CCP.

Why? I feel the exact opposite way.

You’d rather take mandatory trainings on the party? Wear a loyalty pin?

For me zero COVID alone would be a nightmare. Hong Kong just dropped their mask mandate last week!

The sense of unity though, of everyone of any religion, ethnicity and political persuasion coming together - from all over the world - to fight Winnie the pooh and friends, it would be such a relief.

Just think - no wondering if that person I just met at work is a monster obsessed with killing black/white people - not having to wonder about anyone who isn't Chinese at all at the start (not to mention how much easier it would be to score a cute Chinese girlfriend when everyone is terrified of them - sure you can spy on me sweetie, I know less than nothing). It sounds like bliss.

Note that I read the scenario here as things are exactly the same as they are now but the ccp are in charge, and people aren't saying they wish the last 20 years were rewritten so that the ccp steamrolled the world and everywhere now looks like China, because I can't imagine either IGI-111 or Lizzardspawn going for that based on previous conversations, and because that would require a lot more set up to engage with hypothetically.

I suppose if I have to be ruled by tyrants, I'd much rather have the ones that don't change the rules constantly and look to permanent revolution.

At least with the CCP, you know what you're getting.

Yeah I don't think anyone saying they would love to be under the ccp lived in a place that "took covid seriously", my country dropped their mask mandates mid-2022, by god I was going insane, if I was in China where they have stricter covid rules and lockdowns, I would have probably jumped out of the window by now.

US Red State residents have no idea how good they had it the last two years.

‘Lies about how awesome Mao is’ are not a significant improvement on ‘lies about how awesome black supremacists from the 70’s are’.

It's not "the lies" that are the issue.

Pretending to think that declaring war on sparrows and killing 100 million people was a stroke of genius doesn't seem like a notable improvement on pretending to believe that black women have some kind of unique insight.

More comments

My favorite part was where he implied that 3-chord overproduced popular music is better than classical music.

Better or worse is purely subjective in art. I won't call pop music the pinnacle of music, but I personally would rather listen to pop than to classical music.

Yeah popular music is trash. East Asians contribute (or at least K-pop and J-pop do), but it's just more slop.

There is asian overrepresentation in every field involving intelligence and a bamboo ceiling in every subfield requiring a personality

Do you suppose high-caste Indians and Jews have incredible personalities to go along with their intelligence, in the sense that there's «more» of a person there, or a better person? Might this word be deserving of some… scrutiny? This autistic Chinese American guy has an opinion to share:

You, the reader, have probably noticed that up to now, we’ve focused mostly on brains and technical ability. Yes, they are essential, but personality characteristics (both individual and collective) and “soft skills” also matter, especially if one wants to rise to a leadership position. From my personal observation, Indians are, in general, very good at projecting confidence and assertiveness from the way the talk and present themselves, much better than Chinese are, at least in the American cultural context, even when you discount the language barrier Chinese face relative to Indians. I’m talking not only about how one says things in terms of word choice, but the vocal tone and body language behind it. Sure, you can disdain this as superficial, but it matters. Perception matters as much, and in some cases, more, than substance. There is also that Indians seem to have a stronger network and help each out more in the career world. Collective intelligence or ethnic nepotism, you be the judge.

I have stories to tell on this. First of all, I remember vividly how when I interned at the same place as an Indian schoolmate, he was the only one who scheduled, successfully in a few cases, coffee meetings with executives, as an intern (!!!!!), when it never would have occurred to me, or probably almost everyone else except him, to even try. One can sort of link this to collective intelligence, in that it is an indicator of discernment with regard to who matters (the executives) and who doesn’t (the engineer worker bees) within the political organization. And needless to say, you rise up in the organization by aligning yourself with the people who matter. Yes, my telling a full-time engineer this was met largely with a response in the likes of, “He knows who matters and who doesn’t. And even if he completely fucks up, he has nothing to lose, he’s only a 2nd year college intern. In any case, he gets good practice interacting with people who matter.” There is also that multiple people I know have complained about blatant Indian favoritism in interviews in the likes of what is described in this Quora answer. Yes, others have told me that when Indians interview other Indians, the bar is much lower. It’s not just in interviews. Another guy told me about how he once worked for a company that turned into ruins after Indian managers protected some Indian fuckups from getting fired. Personally, I have seen a case of Indians getting promoted way faster than those of other ethnic groups on a big team with an Indian director. So sometimes, I ask myself the verboten. Could it be that Indians really are far higher ranked in tech companies than their ability and contribution, because they are much more self-promoting and collectively nepotistic than those of other groups? Moreover, could it be that many people secretly think and resent this but are too afraid to say out of fear of being publicly vilified for “being racist” and having their careers ruined from alienating a national group increasingly powerful in corporate America? And that gradually, other groups, as they awake to the rigging of the game and get past, reluctantly, their moral objections, will quietly do the same, transforming tech companies and the American workplace at large into literal prison gangs contend, destroying whatever is left of the ideal of meritocracy and fair play in this country, ever more mired in identity politics?

I remember Lynn (probably) writing that black people, too, tend to have «winner personalities», just of a slightly more combative mold, which makes teachers intuitively assume that black students must be smarter than what those ignorant, culturally biased formal tests might indicate: always speaking up in class, not ashamed to ask questions, proud, undeterred by criticism or low-class background… basically model grinning Americans from cartoons and stock photos, who don't even need no Tony Robbins to coach them into success. The other side of that is surprising lack of real success, and probably stuff like this too. The Chinese are more known for videos of this kind. As you say, your struggle with China is racial. So, which way, Western man?

Aside from suggesting that the Chinese aren't full-fledged human beings because something something not emotionally reactive enough, do you have an idea of a perfect American? Less like the Chinese, more like Indians, Jews, Blacks? Or do you suppose that Whites are the only group that's properly balanced? I've criticized them the last time and could go on with mockery, but would you mind making a positive case?

because they are much more self-promoting and collectively nepotistic than those of other groups?

Yes. I have anecdotal evidence generated by my lying eyes, but Indians tend to be prolific nepotists in my part of the world (Dubai). And given 35% of the population is Indian, I think I have a decent enough sample size to base this assertion on.

Anecdotes of an Indian from a specific village/township in India entering the management of a company and the company suddenly becoming a foreign outpost of that village is a dime and a dozen. In the West, Indians are probably less granular in their nepotism in that a manager might favor South/North/X Caste/{whatever tribalism you can conjure up} Indians over other Indians, or even other Desi's (Not Pakistanis) if they are proportionally not large enough yet, but the pattern will eventually lead towards the guy's village if not his extended family as they grow in numbers. The KPMG offices here had to purge their upper management and CEO a few years back because the Indian managers were doing what they do best. Unfortunately for KPMG they hired an Arab!! who did the exact same thing before half the company revolted against him and got him to step down.

Otoh, I can't speak for the entire world, but no one comes second in nepotism to the Lebanese. The "Lebanese Mafia" as they are called here have taken over just about entire industries to the point that people joke you are better off having gone to "AUB" than Harvard if you want to work in Media/Consulting here.

Yes. I have anecdotal evidence generated by my lying eyes, but Indians tend to be prolific nepotists in my part of the world (Dubai). And given 35% of the population is Indian, I think I have a decent enough sample size to base this assertion on.

This is true for most immigrant ethnic groups, though. It's no secret that up until the 60's and 70's policing, municipal waste management, and teaching were all ethnic patronage jobs in most major American cities, with the specifics of which group got what depending on the particular ethnic mix of the region (e.g. Polish ethnic interests mattered in Chicago, but not NYC.) Germans also were famously ethnocentric in the midwest up until about WWI (when it became very politically touchy to speak in German or be overly-sympathetic to the Kaiserreich) however, the fact that they were largely in farming and small communities limited their reach.

I don't think this is really comparable to the «Indian Cordyceps» so aptly described by Moldbugman.

Related take from Razib.

I'd rather have people with hard skills in my country than 'soft-skills' people. Better to have rule by high-INT than high-CHA. Nobody's ever denied that East Asians are clever, they make contributions in technology. If they've all joined the Democratic/leftist mainstream media ideological consensus, then that's really more our fault for founding it in the first place.

So what if they're a bit less creative and more disciplined? It's not a highly significant effect, there's plenty of start-ups and development in China. They lead in many sectors of technology: https://twitter.com/scienceisstrat1/status/1557866377486245889 How is this possible if they're not significantly creative?

Discipline can also be good in certain circumstances, if you've got a soldier who'll fight to their last breath, that can be useful. The conditions China fought under in Korea were horrendously bad, they had no air cover, negligible artillery/armour and their logistics were minimal. They could only move at night lest they get found and pummeled by the US air force. The mountains of Korea are immensely cold and tens of thousands of them died of frostbite. But they fought the UN forces to a standstill with skillful infiltration tactics and night fighting, using infantry alone. In terms of generalship and valor, they outclassed us as much as we outclassed them in firepower and materiel. Surely such feats deserve respect!

I really liked the Three Body Problem series, it was thought provoking. I also liked Reverend Insanity, which is very unlike other books and webnovels in various ways. Both are from mainland China. And there are considerable political problems in the mainstream publishing industry in the US, there is a tendency to market various politically-correct literature, from authors of favored ethnicities.

Anyway, of all the ethnic groups in the US, you're finding problems with the East Asians? The ones with the lowest crime rates and highest incomes? The ones who are getting lumped with whites in terms of anti-meritocratic discrimination?

If they've all joined the Democratic/leftist mainstream media ideological consensus, then that's really more our fault for founding it in the first place

Have they? Every Asian-American I meet is grounded in traditional responsibilities of the nuclear family & boomer era conservative society.

Natalists:
  • Have children....and live for your children

  • Take care of your old parents.... and they will do the childcare while you work

  • Pay for your child's education...which comes with the implicit expectation of getting grandchildren.

Merit & work ethic based values
  • Pull yourself up by your bootstraps --> go to school & get a job

  • Excuses like 'I do not have privilege' are never tolerated

  • Anti illegal-immigration --> pro skills based immigration

Emphasis on their culture's preservation
  • Take pride in being the race & culture they hail from

  • Kids are expected to come home for special events celebrated in a historically faithful manner

  • Defer to elders continues to be the norm.

  • Jadedness around blank-slatist neo-ideologies. The great leap forward and the general failure of neo-systems across Asia has made them quite resistant to 'brand new ideas that will fix everything'. There is a 'you have no idea how good things in the 1st world are, do not fuck this up' belief that pervades the culture. (I'd say this applies to 1st and 2nd gen immigrant culture at large)


There are 2 reasons that Indians and Chinese aren't solidly red-coded.

First is because of the Republican's insistence on 'Whiteness & Christianity' being core to the platform. If it gets reframed as 'protestant values & religiosity', then people-of-color would be more likely to associate with the group. Trump and more concretely: DeSantis, has already started this process by capturing Cubans & religious Hispanics. The model clearly works.

The second is the tricky one. Both Indians and Chinese diaspora really value social acclaim through institutional success. So as long as the institutions are coded left, they will continue to pretend, and eventually believe themselves to be coded left. It is a very Scott-Aaronson-ian approach to the world. Unless Republicans can tie themselves to being high status, they will never be able to pull Indians/Chinese towards them.

But going by values, Asian-diaspora embodies more of the boomer-era values that Republicans claim to stand for than Republicans themselves.

This may be true of the immigrants themselves, but I'm not so sure it still obtains among the second- and third-generations; particularly those growing up under contemporary socio-cultural conditions.

In my experience, second-generation Asian Americans are divided between a vocally woke minority of mostly women and a quiet majority of mostly men who don't care about politics and just want to earn a living and be left alone.

First is because of the Republican's insistence on 'Whiteness & Christianity' being core to the platform.

This is simply false and has been false for decades. Here's what George W. Bush said about the topic on Sept 17, 2001 for example:

The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war."

Leftists insist that Republicans are racist, and push this meme by misleading media stories. A Bush II example of this was James Byrd (black guy) getting murdered by racists in Texas while Bush was governor. Leftists who oppose the death penalty wanted a hate crime law, Bush said such a law was unnecessary because Texas has strict laws against murder. Texas eventually executed the killers based on those laws.

A Trump example of this is creatively editing a statement to imply Trump described white supremacists as "fine people" when he explicitly said he wasn't referring to them. (Full quotes here: https://www.politifact.com/article/2019/apr/26/context-trumps-very-fine-people-both-sides-remarks/ )

Now I fully believe that Indians and Chinese believe this to be true - but their belief has nothing to do with any actual mainstream Republican views. Your second reason explains quite well why Indian and Chinese Americans believe this, regardless of how true it is.

Sounds pretty great for the people around them.

yeah. quiet neighbors, quiet well-behaved kids

Where then, are the distinguished East Asian-American popular musicians

K-pop, or well-integrated into the U.S. music scene. E.g., Mike Shinoda, Steve Aioki, Far East Movement of "Like a G-6" fame, Dream Theater's bassist John Myung, Lawrence's guitarist Jonny Koh (okay, that's from my personal playlist and not from general prominence), the Disney/musical theater singer Lea Salonga, does Yo-Yo Ma count? It's not exactly popular music per se, but he's one of the greatest popularizers of classical music of the last 50 years...

And that's just off the top of my head. I'm sure there's other obvious ones I'm missing, as well as an at-least representative sample of backing musicians, producers, studio engineers, etc.

James Iha from Smashing Pumpkins etc. Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs (half Korean). Even the Van Halen brothers (part Indonesian) might count here.

I for one would like to welcome our new stoic Asian overlords.

i guess clarification is needed given "-american." i thought it was apparent. OP is talking genetics, HBD. "-american" is in this context meaningless, it is only present to avoid the obvious absurdity of wondering why 1.5 billion east asians aren't producing great english novels. but it is even more absurd to use this framing as the gotcha for "where are their great novels--they aren't particularly creative--they aren't particularly intelligent" when east asian storytelling in the west has success ranging from merely incredible in video games to total domination of the market in comics and animation.


3.4 NOVELS: Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?

yukio mishima

yasunari kawabata

kazuo ishiguro

haruki murakami

that's poetry and prose. beyond that, japanese creatives apropos manga and anime are the most successful and among the most interesting storytellers in the world. i consider pure prose as incomparably above illustrated stories, so the great mangaka do not compare with the great authors of the last 150 years, but below the likes of hemingway, mccarthy, faulkner, rushdie, coetzee, updike and of course mishima/kawabata/ishiguro/murakami, and above almost all other living english language authors, are katsuhiro otomo, akira toriyama, hiromu arakawa, masamune shirow, kentaro miura, and also sunrise/"hajime yatate".

3.3 MUSIC

ref. above. when adapted, many of those iconic japanese series have iconic scores by japanese composers.

one of the greatest living producers is the filipino chad hugo. the biggest japanese artist in pop right now might be rina sawayama, i don't know, i don't listen to much. steve aoki is successful, mike shinoda extremely so. the popular lofi owes much to the various -waves, especially vaporwave, which itself pulls heavily on work like tatsuro yamashita/japanese citypop. but these aren't straight causal lines, music is collaborative, between partners like hugo and williams and between generations like yamashita to macintosh plus, and that's ignoring everything else vektroid worked off. i'd sooner criticize pop anyway for lagging behind, all the brilliant producers work in hip hop and electronic. what's popular on the radio today uses techniques kanye worked out 20 years ago.

great artists often have troubled childhoods where their creative expressions go from psychological escape to literal escape. i think this is why the US black community produces so many singers and musicians, and this could explain why the asian community of the US, half as a whole (which it certainly is not) as large as the black community and far more economically successful, seemingly produces fewer great musicians. forcing a kid to play piano or violin for 13 years isn't going to turn them into a superstar, they have it or they don't, they'll be exposed and fall in love or they won't. how many white kids play instruments in school but never do anything beyond orchestra or band?

and again to close . . .

Where are the great East Asian-American novelists?

many, varied, and incredibly easy to find. the concluding point of your short essay was to discredit yourself with profound cultural illiteracy. you should consider this an opportunity to reexamine how you think about the world, as you are wrong.

Ishiguro is British, not American.

OP argues from genetics, legal nationality is immaterial. pointing out the immense success of east asian creatives answers the substance of his essay.

beyond that, japanese creatives apropos manga and anime are the most successful and among the most interesting storytellers in the world

Don't forget video games; the stories contained within their media are probably even more popular than their works of written and televised art.

Music

Nearly everyone on the face of the Earth has heard the compositions of Koji Kondo in some form or another. Sure, you can argue that the reason for that is circumstantial, yet I don't believe any other composer has the same distinction.

i thought about editing my comment or posting a reply mentioning video games but figured someone else would. sure enough.

it is especially laughable to asperse creativity when the juggernaut of manga/anime still strides inside the footfalls of the behemoth called NINTENDO

This seems like a good sell for Asian-Americans as the best possible integration case with the traditionally white United States of America. What we get:

  • High economic productivity

  • High compliance with local rules and social standards

  • Replication of our historic cultural traditions in music and literature

These are pretty strong benefits, and we don't even have to deal with the kind of sociopathic climbers that become partners in law firms! I have a hard time imagining a group of people that I'll tend to have more affinity for than those with the intellectual capacity to do high-level law and finance that choose tech and science at disproportionate rates instead.

I agree with the thesis that Asian-Americans are not just smart whites, but disagree with the implication that the outcome of that is negative. Instead, I think the Asian-American population synergizes with legacy Americans and is one of the few examples I can think of where diversity is our strength is more than a slogan.

Study by Dan Freeman and his Chinese-American wife in Nature:

https://sci-hub.ru/10.1038/2241227a0

The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract…has a total of 48 infants. And the primary criteria is quite subjective—besides blink rate, it was all unquantified “oh the baby struggled more quickly”. (And even the blink rate isn’t actually display in a table anywhere.)

And, it’s the least blinded study I could imagine. The authors quite obviously knew they were looking at white or Asian babies, so there’s a huge potential for bias…up to and including pushing some of the babies harder.

The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract…has a total of 48 infants.

And with this small sample, they nevertheless got massively significant p-value of 0.0001. Small sample size makes it harder for p-values to reach significance.

And the primary criteria is quite subjective—besides blink rate, it was all unquantified “oh the baby struggled more quickly”.

That's why the discuss the reliability:

Four arbitrarily selected infants formed reliability sample, and of the 160 items involved, the authors were over 1 point apart in only three instances; all scales reported below yielded reliability coefficients of 0.912 or better, with an average reliability of 0.969.

So, they are quite subjective, but the authors subjective judgements were in very high agreement.

And with this small sample, they nevertheless got massively significant p-value of 0.0001.

I have no idea whether this study if correct or not, but why are you cherry picking the very lowest p-value of the several reported?

It's sufficient to dispose of the argument that the study should be discounted because of its low sample size (which is an innumerate argument that gets thrown around far too often on the internet). P-values are, in part, a function of sample size. They're the answer to the question "what is the likelihood of seeing a pattern at least this strong in a sample of this size under the null hypothesis?". Having a small sample size isn't some sneaky hack to get more statistically significant results - as wlxd points out, a smaller sample size makes it harder to find significant results (i.e. you need a stronger effect size).

A lot of people have this vague idea that a study needs thousands or tens of thousands of observations to get persuasive results about some statistical pattern, and it's just not true. As an intuition pump, imagine flipping a coin 48 times and getting 42 heads and 6 tails. Is that not enough to convince you that the coin (or flipping process) is rigged?

Oh please that was the lowest…but barely.

I suppose it’s a bit cherry-picking to point out the lowest p-value, but all of the subjective observations were in that teeny tiny range.

Well, no, not barely. It was the lowest by a lot. The other p-values were small, but nowhere near that small (they were from .005 to .06). Besides, if they were all about the same, then why not cite the highest? That's what people do when they argue in good faith.

Because they have a conclusion they need to support. This isn't complicated.

That poster has made top level posts mentioning these unresponsive Chinese babies twice now. Those claims were based on this study? That's how far they strained themselves in searching for sources?

The study…is that really the fully study, or just the abstract

I looked around for copies in other aggregators and it seems to me that is actually the entire study. It's less than 1 page! Being a researcher in the 60's must've been fun.

I don't think I've seen anyone make the claim that Chinese-Americans are just high IQ whites. Usually if someone has gone far enough down the HBD rabbit-hole to have this conversation they will bring up in the next breath the personality differences between East Asians and Europeans as an explanation for their underrepresentation at the highest levels of achievement.

Clearly there are differences, just as Indian Brahmins or unassimilated Ashkenazi Jews are not the same as White Americans, even if they all qualify for the high IQ 'club.' What we should conclude from this fact is unclear, but given intermarriage rates of 20% or more per generation and imminent catastrophic population decline in China cutting off the supply of new immigrants, I don't think you have anything to worry about unless you think that having a future white population with 5-10% Asian ancestry is some sort of disaster.

I think there are enough 'IQ nationalists', especially in the 'fringe rationalist world' to warrant some expressed reservations regarding the alleged supremacy of IQ.

Where are any great novelists of the past 30 years?

Dunno, but ‘where are the great Asian-American novels’ is particularly dumb because Asian Americans A) haven’t been here as long as whites B) language barrier and C) don’t exactly have an industry dedicated to promoting them per their group(which is a partial explanatory factor to the over representation of blacks among the American literary canon) while also being a fairly small portion of the population.

I agree with all those points!

I believe the point was that there haven’t been great novelists of any stripe or race in the last 30 years, so the problem is not solely a Chinese one.

Whether that is true I‘m not really sure.

3.1 THE BAMBOO CEILING: There is asian overrepresentation in every field involving intelligence and a bamboo ceiling in every subfield requiring a personality. To give one example from reuters:

Isn't this subject to the college admissions counterpoint: i.e. that, just like colleges use "soft skills" to discriminate against otherwise intellectually overachieving Asians - and Jews before them- to serve other ends , so do businesses (or businesses downstream of this tendency pick it up as a result)?

Thus Asians may funnel themselves more into fields with more objective criteria to avoid this issue? (or the downsides of not having social connections)

Yes, it could be. Depends on your priors on the prevalence of bigotry. Is Harvard is just saying Asians have no personality to justify excluding them or is Harvard is excluding them because they have no personalities? That's why I selected Law as a comparative example, where to the extent that soft metrics are being used for evaluation, those doing so are personally acquainted with those they are judging. If an admissons officer says, this kid has no personality, maybe he's meeting a quota. If your boss that's seen you grind for six years before partnership consideration time says, he's cool and all but God I'm not gonna put him in front of clients or juries - this is far more dispositive.

More likely, the bamboo ceiling just reflects generational effects. East Asians flooded elite law schools only in recent years, it's basically a decade to make partner at most big firms and then you stay for life, so what you're seeing isn't really underrepresentation (though Asian associates will claim it is hoping to get some help) it's just the difference a decade makes.