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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   10233 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 19, 2026

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If we're doing electoral politics culture war, how about the news out of Ohio?

For those not paying too much attention there's a fairly competitive race going on for Ohio governor between Democrat Amy Acton and Republican Vivek Ramaswamy. On Twitter yesterday Walter Curt, whose biography describes him as the State Director of the Conservative Caucus of Ohio, posted this video. The video features one Donna Arthur, Amy Acton's mother, who says the following:

My name is Donna Arthur and I'm Amy Acton's mother. I worked at the children and Family Service Association building one of the first two sexual abuse programs in America. I love my daughter but when I saw her lying about her opponent, it's not easy for a mother to say this, but Amy has a serious problem. She is a liar. She lies about her past. She says she grew up living in a tent. None of that is true. She's lied her entire life. My daughter needs help and she can't help you if she needs help herself. People can change but first they have to tell the truth and my daughter still isn't doing that. Don't vote for people who lie. Don't let her become your governor. If you think she'll make your life better you're fooling yourself. It will only get worse.

That's a pretty powerful ad! Getting a candidate's mother to come out against them like that. Acton's campaign had their own response prepared, of course.

Today, Dr. Amy Acton's brother, Philip Stearns, released the following statement condemning Vivek Ramaswamy's attempt to platform their estranged and abusive mother:

"It's not surprising that Vivek Ramaswamy has stooped to such a despicable low as to attempt to turn the sexual abuse Amy endured at twelve years old from our birth mother's husband into a political talking point," said Philip Stearns, Dr. Acton's brother. "After he was arrested and Amy and I were removed from their custody, our birth mother stayed married to Amy's rapist until he died. This desperate, disgusting attack reveals exactly who Vivek Ramaswamy is at his core - a pathetic excuse for a man who is willing to hurt anyone as long as it gets him what he wants."

Those are some pretty explosive allegations! Perhaps Acton's mother's opinions are not very reliable if Acton was removed from her custody at age 12 and Donna chose her rapist husband over her daughter. As best I can tell, the allegations are true. National Review alleges to have reviewed documents showing one Cledith Arthur was charged with having sexual contact with Acton while married to Donna. Donna has her own criminal history as well, with a conviction for theft by deception and accusations of animal abuse. Interestingly the Huffington Post dug up another 2020 interview with Donna from Operation Rescue. According to that interview:

Finally, when Amy was 12, she accused Donna’s husband, Bud of raping her. Apparently, Bud had a daughter from a previous marriage that had earlier made similar unfounded claims. It is possible that this and suggestions made by her father gave Amy the idea for making that particular accusation.

There was a grand jury investigation and Amy was called to testify. Donna had gone to court that day to support her husband. She was never personally accused or charged with any crime.

...

Donna borrowed $10,000 from her father and hired an attorney who recommended that she and Bud move away for awhile until things could calm down and charges could be dropped.

It seems to be Donna's own testimony that her husband was arrested for sexual abuse of Action and Donna and her husband skipped town while on bond to avoid any kind of trial.

Journalists naturally reached out to Ramaswamy's campaign for comment, and they said:

We don’t know what happened between Amy and her mother, who first spoke out about Amy in 2020, but we know that Amy Acton is a serial fabulist who has some serious problems with the truth that the public needs to be aware of before deciding who to entrust as governor.”

On the one hand, it's hard for me to see how one goes forward with the ad above knowing the full story. If the question is to be one of credibility I am not sure I trust Acton's mother, whom she has not spoken with for almost 50 years and who chose her rapist husband over Acton, above Acton herself. Especially if she has her own criminal convictions for specifically fraud-adjacent behavior.

On the other hand, how did you not know this information? As best I can tell it took the National Review and Huffington Post less than a day to get their hands on the primary legal documents detailing the dispute. The campaign's own statement references the 2020 interview, in which Donna admits the sexual abuse allegations and discusses their leaving town ahead of a trial. I guess the hope is voters see the ad but don't dig any further into the situation or context?

Oh boy, Vance is throwing his weight behind this. Guess he's trying to get a head start on losing 2028.

I can’t wait for the 2028 ads accusing Tammy Duckworth of failing to protect places of worship, featuring a heartfelt plea from the insurgent who blew her legs off.

Nooo, JD (I know you are reading this)! Tell your wife to shut up, and that you don't need to defend every single coethnic losing Izzat!

Ramaswamy is both a terrible human being and a terrible candidate, as always. Just... wow. He's going to lose hard.

The Ohio boomer Republican may be more likely to side with the mom in this scenario

The cynic in me now believes he will win.

No chance in hell. He is on Kamala Harris levels of anti charisma. He will lose against a pet rock.

Or a feral one

My contempt for Ramaswamy following this debacle is normally reserved for the other side at its worst; it and the Jay Jones incident from last year are the most FUBAR I have seen our October-surprise-type politics get, and he should lose in a landslide to mitigate the damage to the social fabric. Unfortunately Jones didn't, but I don't mean to change the subject. At least Ramaswamy is polling poorly. May he poll ever worse.

It's also stupid evil, which seems like a Ramaswamy trademark. Forget the question of people looking into the full backstory; if that were a problem, ProPublica wouldn't have business. But literally now, half of the target audience is going to dismiss this as AI-generated, and the other half are Midwesterners. That's a landmine, not a golden opportunity.

I don't particularly like Acton on her own measures, but I could honestly see Vivek losing by double-digits even if the headwinds were more neutral. The annoying bit is that it's going to get drawn up as anti-Indian racism, rather than principles or just disliking the smarmy git.

I've thought that Vivek's political instincts were questionable ever since he made his infamous tweet about work culture.

When an Indian billionaire posts online the day after Christmas and tells Americans that they should adopt the stereotypical Asian childraising style if they want to be economically competitive, I might give it credit for audacity, but good politics it is not.

In general I'm all for the "we should wait until trial finds someone guilty" argument, but they literally fled the state while out on bail and hid until his death. Even if he was actually innocent of the rape, he's a literal fugitive that the mother helped and supported! Those details are to be settled in court, not by whether or not she personally believes them (and that's assuming she doesn't believe the allegations instead of just not caring/supporting it).

In any other world that should be a disqualifying reason to prop up the mom by itself.

But as always now the GOP ratchet is to simply double down. Support a child predator on accident? The 12 year old must have had it coming.

Support a child predator on accident? The 12 year old must have had it coming.

Yes, your personal political enemies are all cartoon villains, as always.

What, particularly, is the steelman of Vivek's stance here? Is it "Acton was a child who made up everything, including the accusation of her father raping her" or is it "Acton is lying about living in a tent, but I respect and would never question her testimony about being raped by her father"?

I'm pretty sure the steelman, such as it is, if we're going to stoop to calling it that, is "We got the attack in first, playing defense about specific facts and credibility is a suckers game."

See, for reference, the Cornell rape case.

A reminder of the quote I'm replying to:

The 12 year old must have had it coming.

Yes https://apnews.com/article/election-2026-ohio-governor-ramaswamy-acton-mother-93ab182c3e0a95d25ddb409ec0628231

... and where, exactly, does he say "The 12 year old must have had it coming", or words to that effect?

What else am I supposed to call choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim?

That is evil and normal voters seem to agree considering how Ramyswamy's chances have plummeted. There is no need for Vance to defend this, but he does so anyway the same way there's supposedly no reason to cover up the Epstein files and yet..

What else am I supposed to call choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim?

Contemptable? Detestable? There are certainly a large range of words to convey judgement, without making a false accusation.

Especially since a false accusation doesn't call 'choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim' anything. It's a change of subject, not an adjective.

What else am I supposed to call choosing to side with a child rapist fugitive and his enabler over a victim?

What it actually is by all appearances: a belief that the 12-year-old girl made it up and the husband was a tragic victim of a justice system too quick to take a disturbed child's inventions as gospel. You might call this a dangerous heuristic, even a culpably reckless one, but I think it's clear that a person who believes that is not cartoonishly evil in the same way as one who believes that the rape did occur but was no big deal.

I've not followed this race at all, but my initial reaction was: Ramaswamy must have been doing really badly in the polls to do this kind of wild, Hail Mary ad. And indeed he was down by high single digits.

There's something to be said for losing with dignity. Now he's the child rapist sympathizer. "Oops I didn't know better" doesn't absolve him.

MAGA was pillaged from 2 sides in 2024 - the technocrats and the neocons; The technocrats, were a mix of recently politically homeless 'elites', with a sense of social liberalism, and economic conservatism (to a point), and mostly anti-woke (some of course, had been instrumental in enabling woke). They cozied up to Trump and Trumpism in a variety of ways, but in reality are a mix of opportunistic and somewhat aligned politically. Basically all were Obama liberals, and would have been quite to the left of Clinton.

Vivek is the worst and most transparently slimy of this crowd, and boy isn't it great to see his grift collapse. Here's a guy who's presidentail campaign was a super strained argument that he was an even bigger Trump ally than Trump himself, and relied on word games like "God is real" as a major campaign plank, to appeal to Christians, while simultaneously asking them to agree with it in a form that was transparently a unitarian platitude. Point being, tortured epistomological games worded in ways meant to trick the dumb voters is neither new, nor successful trick of Vivek's.

His Governorship run is just a leftover plate spinning from when early in Trump II it looked like the technocrats had won. Elon had DOGE, Vance came from Thiel, SV had trump's ear... The neocons had attached themselves to DeSantis (who, was an otherwise viable actually America First, populist conservative successor), and helped sink in by attaching their stink to him, while he went up totally unprepared to skip Trump in line.

But alas, DOGE was a failure, Vance turned out to be more MAGA than SV (yay), and the neocons won the current administartion in the end with Iran; Vivek is a dying gasp of the silicon plot.

But alas, DOGE was a failure

At some point I think this is worthy of a larger conversation. I'm of the contrarian opinion (I know it's contrarian) that DOGE succeeded. Massive federal layoffs, ongoing deregulation. The gutting of USAID was significant. The actual DOGE employees all got assimilated into other departments or projects and have mostly all become more powerful. DOGE's successor program Tech Force is quietly achieving a lot of the same goals without attracting almost any attention.

My supposition is that most of the "DOGE failed" narrative is pushed by a liberal media and Republican MAGA critics who want it to have failed, while the actual people involved are fairly satisfied with the work they were able to do and very satisfied to continue doing the same work under other names with almost no scrutiny because "DOGE failed".

At some point I think this is worthy of a larger conversation. I'm of the contrarian opinion (I know it's contrarian) that DOGE succeeded. Massive federal layoffs, ongoing deregulation. The gutting of USAID was significant. The actual DOGE employees all got assimilated into other departments or projects and have mostly all become more powerful. DOGE's successor program Tech Force is quietly achieving a lot of the same goals without attracting almost any attention.

More than this, DOGE was the Trump 2.0 administration's opening move to tame the bureaucracy that had been one of the cornerstones of the Trump 1.0 'Resistance.' It wasn't just the downsizing of large parts of the bureaucracy, but who took the buyouts, and why.

The USAID takedown was a not-subtle shot across the bow of the largely non-legislatively-defined executive branch what had existed more by convention/inertia than as a statutory-defined structure. The instigating incident where USAID leaders tried to physically stop USAID from accessing facilities and classified information was practically tailor made for the most Trump-favorable legal resolution on established American national security law- that the US President is the ultimate authority of executive branch (classified) information, and that no one beneath the president could overrule the president on accessing the president's information. (The exception to this- US nuclear secrets- are not the president's information, but rather covered by acts of congress.)

The USAID takedown demonstrated that the administration could, and would, take physical custody of US federal government information systems, and that there was no real legal recourse against it. Various inside-the-fed resistance activities from the Trump 1.0 period, such as the national-security channel coordination used in the Russiagate abuses, or the 'fortify the election' meetings that were bragged about after post-Trump-1, or the Pentagon subverting directives to withdraw from Syria, were not going to stay hidden inside federal servers. Similarly, the DOGE requirement that employees justify what they did that week- even taken over by the Departments at DOGE's expense- had a similar effect of demonstrating that federal employees could be required to provide information on their activities.

There was more to the downsizing than just that, of course. The whole DOGE campaign read like a pressure campaign leading up to the downsizing like out of a business 'how to make organizational change' text. But the people most likely to take the buyouts included the people most able to see the writing on the wall about executive branch compliance efforts, and could see the risk to themselves for past or potentially current opposition.

In this framing, the success of DOGE has little to do with DOGE as an organization, or even counter-corruption. It has more to do with changing how, and whether, the executive branch follows presidential directive. In Trump 1.0, it wasn't exactly uncommon for the framing to be that 'the adults in the room' would limit what Trump would do. That wasn't just a matter of secretary-level appointments. It also is far less a factor in Trump 2.0.

It's fine and fair to not like that. It is harder to argue that more bureaucratic insurgency in your favor is a more efficient government organization.

I had a family member take the buyout because they started looking for a different job (since the security and flexibility that is the draw of a federap job is gone), and they scored a way higher-paying job. Like many buyouts, it would have been the case with DOGE that many takers were the capable employees you don't want to lose.

That depends significantly on the 'you' and what 'you' prioritize. For a non-trivial part of the DOGE-coalition, cutting down the employee count is a benefit in its own right, even if all the employees were high performers. Cases like your family members would be a 'win'- after all, that person is making more in the private sector, which 'you' could value/prioritize more than the government sector.

More than this, DOGE was the Trump 2.0 administration's opening move to tame the bureaucracy that had been one of the cornerstones of the Trump 1.0 'Resistance.' It wasn't just the downsizing of large parts of the bureaucracy, but who took the buyouts, and why.

This is an important part. Everyone is interpreting DOGE as if it was this one-off endeavor that can be judged on its own terms. As far as the admin is concerned it was just phase one. There were some big successes and some big failures and a lot of lessons learned. Now they're on phase two (or three, or whatever). There are a lot of internal debates about how to proceed. There are a lot of insiders who would even agree with my analysis and who openly talk of DOGE "failing". But on the whole I don't think the DOGE mission really finished. History will see the entirety of Trump's term and judge everything as one continuous effort.

For example, there's the question of fraud. Elon made some big gobsmacking headline-grabbing allegations of fraud that everyone eventually discredited as hyperbole. He made different statements at different times so it's hard to judge what exactly to even discuss. At one point, he claimed that there were $50 Billion in fraudulent payments made annually by the federal government. At another point he estimated $233B-$521B, which is apparently based on a GAO figure he might have misinterpreted. I believe at one point he claimed the entire federal deficit could be solved by prosecuting fraud and abuse, which would be somewhere on the order of $2T. Everybody agreed that all of this was preposterous and that Elon's vast exaggerations poisoned the well on enthusiasm for DOGE.

But if I go to the White House fraud report page (www.whitehouse.gov/fraud), they are currently claiming to have stopped $260 Billion in Fraud and $72 Billion annually. Not bad? Maybe someone can do the math and determine that the White House is lying or exaggerating. But I don't see any news outlets noting that the official position from the White House is that, essentially, Elon was right. And I thought DOGE was a failure.

This stuff compounds in all sorts of non-obvious ways. For example I guess that the new Anduril Arsenal-2 navy shipyards contract in Baltimore would not have happened without this kind of post-DOGE restructuring. Military contracts seem like the kinds of things that were always happening on autopilot, wouldn't it have happened anyways, maybe my guess is wrong. But in reality government contracting rules are deeply inscrutable and it takes a significant amount of work for politicals to exercise any authority over them. So I strongly suspect that the next generation of war spending is all going to be downstream of DOGE in ways that are hard for outsiders to see.

For example I guess that the new Anduril Arsenal-2 navy shipyards contract in Baltimore would not have happened without this kind of post-DOGE restructuring.

I'm not so sure about that. The USN is... well, not desperate, but they're having to scale up construction massively for tbe AUKUS program, and I feel like they'd have thrown money at anyone with a decent plan and a lobbyist or two in DC.

AUKUS is a symptom, not the cause. The root of the ship-building spinup is China. AUKUS is more of a bet/trade on short-medium term constraints for medium-longer term capacity gains.

maybe failed is too strong. but the context I'm saying this, is in the general ambitions of Musk from a government influence perspective. DOGE's accomplishments were not met with enthusiastic co-momentum from Congress. A lot of opportunity was squandered or actively ignored. DOGE lives on most, IMO, in spirit through the focus Vance has given to uncovering fraud - but again, this isn't really driven by the technocratic influence on the government from outside 'business efficiency' energy.

I don't know to what extent the fraud taskforce descends from DOGE. Ostensibly it was all downstream of that viral Nick Shirley video. (There's another topic worth revisiting at some point, I think a lot of arguments we had on this site are provably wrong in hindsight.) Practically, I do think that part of the strategy of DOGE was to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, and fraud stuck. But I don't know if this particular version of the fraud taskforce would have happened without DOGE, or if it quietly borrowed a lot.

I do know that the Tech Force initiatives are direct descendants of DOGE. They are diffuse, different in every department, and deliberately not that exciting to talk about. But a lot of stuff is happening beneath the surface. It's hard to judge it from the outside.

That's why I said 'in spirit'.

Here's a guy who's presidentail campaign was a super strained argument that he was an even bigger Trump ally than Trump himself

I don't think Vivek was running with a plan to beat Trump. Candidates had to declare in 2023 when it wasn't clear if Trump would be on the primary ballot or if he would have a disqualifying medical or legal issue, and I think Vivek was always running in the "only if Trump turns out not to be available" lane.

No you're correct he wasn't trying to beat Trump while courting his voter base - that was a mistake DeSantis made. He was specifically running a self-marketing campaign to bootstrap himself into Trump's orbit. I do think being a spoiler to distract anti-Trump sentiment were and being 'insurance candidate' in case Trump disappeared from eligibility, were real secondary aims.

Yeah, it's clear that Vivek's bet was that MAGA was ascendent and that instead of running against Trump he should run with Trump. It worked. Vivek went from anonymous to prominent. He was the only major 2024 Primary contestant to be elevated by Trump's victory. (Technically, Doug Burgum won biggest prize of all by being appointed to the cabinet to run a major government department, but Burgum dropped out of the primary before a single vote was cast.)

It's not clear what happened that Vivek went from DOGE to Ohio. The story I've heard is that he and Elon simply disagreed about strategy, although that is the perfect cover story for deeper drama if there was any. But after campaigning hard for Trump he had the right to ask for whatever position he wanted and the governorship of Ohio was perfectly reasonable. I don't think anybody expected him to cock it up this badly.

In a normal year a stray dog with an R after its name would win an Ohio governors race. Unfortunately, Vivek is less charismatic than a stray dog and this is a very blue year.

Acton in a landslide, I'm calling it.

Ramasawmy just cannot help himself. He's shown time and time again that he's willing to poke the bear in ways that most politicians have the savvy to avoid. Controversy aside, I did not find this ad convincing. My reaction wasn't "Acton must be a real slimeball for her own mother to speak against her!" Instead, it was immediately apparent to me that this was a perennial family conflict that had been weaponized for the sake of the election, and it looks desperate. I'm not one of those "respectability politics" people, but this is a conspicuously low blow.

It doesn't help that Acton's mother doesn't mention what Acton is a liar about. I don't think it would be a very effective ad to say, "My daughter is a liar - she said she was raped when she was twelve, but she wasn't!" It seems Ramaswamy's camp forgot about the Streisand effect: in trying to avoid addressing the allegations they've just made Acton look more sympathetic and strong, especially to her increasingly mobilized Democratic base.

What I have read, though cannot prove, is that the campaign cut the ad but some staffer was aware of the foot-gun potential and prevented them from releasing it as an actual campaign ad. However, someone else in the campaign (potentially Ramaswamy himself) disagreed and leaked it to conservative influencers to post instead. The campaign has now doubled down on it and is allegedly spending some $4 million to promote it ahead of election day.

It doesn't help that Acton's mother doesn't mention what Acton is a liar about. I don't think it would be a very effective ad to say, "My daughter is a liar - she said she was raped when she was twelve, but she wasn't!" It seems Ramaswamy's camp forgot about the Streisand effect: in trying to avoid addressing the allegations they've just made Acton look more sympathetic and strong, especially to her increasingly mobilized Democratic base.

I think it's intended to refer to Acton's claim to have lived in a tent one winter while in her mother's custody but still not great with the additional context.

This is consistent with my theory, which is that an increasingly large number of young MAGA conservatives (including potential Ramaswamy campaign staffers) think that almost all rape allegations are false, and therefore the relevant decision-maker assumed that Acton's rape allegations were false without checking to see how plausible they were.

To be fair, the situation is genuinely weird if you look at it. Somebody fleeing the state post-indictment and the arrest warrants never getting enforced is unfortunately plausible, even if it's not how the system is 'supposed' to work, and even more plausible before these records were both computerized and widely accessible.

Except Arthur didn't just hide 'until things blew over'. He fled the state permanently, and was arrested in another state two decades later; he didn't die until 2004, well after automated fingerprint scans were pretty normalized. The most plausible explanation is that the paperwork got lost and the prosecutor didn't push that hard, and in the late-1970s that's more plausible than you'd want it to be, but there's a lot of different steps that had to be missed.

That said, I'd expect the staffer (and Vivek) position was just that they could get away with it, and the truth didn't matter. Cfe the question of whether Trump raped Carol for a high-profile example. A lot of MAGA people believe that more completely than anything statistical about rape allegations applying to one specific person... but it doesn't work that way, here.

This is an even dumber stuck prior to have than assuming they're almost all true.

I think it's intended to refer to Acton's claim to have lived in a tent one winter while in her mother's custody but still not great with the additional context.

The issue with the ad is that the "I lived in a tent" claim is dominated by the "my father raped me repeatedly and fled the state" claim. Presumably the mother thinks both are lies; Vivek presumably wants to cleanly separate them and only focus on the tent claim. But if he's basing everything on the mother's credibility, then he also inherently is bringing in the father rape claim, and no one cares about the tent claim in comparison to the father rape claim.

It's asinine to even suggest that they can be separated. Why, pray tell, was Acton living in a tent? Ah, I see.

Wow, I didn't realize they doubled down that hard. I can't think of a worse ad to dump millions of dollars into.

Challenge accepted.

Let's not forget Dudes for Harris.

Let's have another one about AI, this time about deepfakes. A picture of a somalian politician speaking in front of an upside down American flag was circulating on Twitter. Fortunately, we had a helpful journalist investigate, and debunk the image as a deepfake. The politician's staff helpfully provided the real image.

Only one problem. The original image circulating on Twitter was real. And the image provided by the politician herself was the fake.

On Monday, Oct. 19, the Oregon Journalism Project published a story questioning the video’s authenticity, describing it as a deepfake — a manipulated video potentially crafted using artificial intelligence — and reporting that the flag had actually been displayed right side up at the event.

...

But by Tuesday afternoon, Oct. 20, the Oregon Journalism Project had retracted its story, acknowledging that newly obtained images confirmed the flag was, in fact, upside down.

...

The image credited to Fai shows apparent inconsistencies: a section of the flag in the lower-left corner appears misaligned with the rest of it, just below the graphic displaying her name, and a corner of a star appears to be missing near the top of the flag.

As of right now, the politician's own Twitter is still linking to the now-retracted article, which used the deepfake that she herself provided.

I think the most shocking thing here is that a "journalist" had both the real and fake images in front of her, didn't even take the smallest steps to verify the authenticity of either image. Did she just assume that a politician wouldn't just ... lie ... and simply felt like the authority was enough to come to a conclusion? I think this forum already knows, but journalistic integrity has fallen so far that this laughably bad deepfake is just passed off as true because someone said so. Once deepfakes get more convincing (I had the latest nano banana try generating a similar deepfake and it was basically flawless), we're going to have to stop trusting the papers and our lying eyes too.

The other thing is that this is some seriously insane level of chutzpah here. Who is going to see a real image circulating around, then call the real image a deepfake, then provide their own deepfake as the supposed "real" image as "proof"? It's so farfetched that I'm surprised anyone would think this harebrained plot would work. Yet somehow it did and was regurgitated in other outlets including our favourite Axios.

This also shows that a politician can just pants on fire lie now with zero consequences. Not like trump level off the cuff stupid lies, but lie about what literally just happened at an event that dozens of people attended, with a multitude of official and unofficial videos and photos posted on multiple social media platforms, including the politician's own Facebook page. To point to a completely authentic image and just lie and call it fake. The gaslighting is off the charts. She can post "This never happened here's "proof"", while the video evidence is RIGHT THERE, posted on literally the same Facebook page, and people will eat it up.

In the comments sections and Twitter (stupid places I know) they are somehow still arguing that the evil nazis are somehow still the bad guys in this situation.

Anyways I suspect that once activists figure out on a wide scale what they can get away with on deepfakes with zero consequences, and how bad people are at noticing them, things are going to get really messy really fast.

(I don't want this to be about a left/right thing, I want to talk about ai and fact checking and whatever please)

The flag I don't care about, but the fact that they apparently chose to immediately lie at the drop of a hat and produce a deepfake as their response, is a pretty serious and telling flaw.

The flag I don't care about, but the fact that they apparently chose to immediately lie at the drop of a hat and produce a deepfake as their response, is a pretty serious and telling flaw.

The most charitable interpretation I can think of was that some idiotic and incompetent staffer handled the situation. A more realistic (in my opinion) guess is that this is a kind of Jason Arday situation. That this woman is not that bright and used to just saying whatever is convenient without getting challenged on it or called out.

I agree, though I think this is just the beginning. They got caught this time. Now the strategy is out in the open. I suspect that eventually the volume of deepfakes will get so large that it will eventually overwhelm our capacity to filter and verify information. A gish-gallop of slop.

I'm inclined to make a stupid analogy: the Tush Push. This is a play in football pioneered by Nick Sirianni when he was coaching the Indianapolis Colts. In it, the quarterback is physically shoved forward by one or two large linemen, in hopes of overpowering players in front of them. It's been criticized as stupid, brutish, and anti-football. It had been long-theorized but never executed successfully. Early attempts on the Colts had limited utility, ultimately failing to make much of an impact. Despite these failures, the failed attempts caught league attention, and everyone stood by waiting to see if this strategy became viable.

Then come the Philadelphia Eagles. With the team's specific player composition, body sizes, and overall acumen for the play, it became incredibly powerful. Success rates climbed over 90%, and suddenly the NFL had a completely new play-style on its hands. The Tush Push became the talk of the 2022 season. More notably, everyone tried copying it. They wanted a slice of the pie. To be specific, they waited for it to be successful before they co-opted it.

I think we're going to see something similar with AI in politics. We're in the early days, and politicians are still testing the waters. What will people trust? What can they get away with? I think Trump's incessant use of AI memes on Truth Social is a loud manifestation of this limit-testing, and this Somalli politician is another. At this point, most use of AI in politics has been a failure or at least an object of mockery. The models have only recently become competent enough to make convincing fakes for the non-boomer population. However, once limited success is seen I suspect that like with the adoption of the Tush Push, we're going to see an explosion of AI use.

Who is going to see a real image circulating around, then call the real image a deepfake, then provide their own deepfake as the supposed "real" image as "proof"? It's so farfetched that I'm surprised anyone would think this harebrained plot would work.

I am certainly cynical enough to believe someone would do this. I understand that most people aren't, but any serious journalist should be.

(I don't want this to be about a left/right thing, I want to talk about ai and fact checking and whatever please)

You might not want this to be a left/right thing, but considering the political slant of most "fact checking" orgs, it will be.

“Fact checking” organizations are a lazy substitute for the lack of critical thinking in this country. Taking the rose tinted glasses off the eyes is incredibly difficult for most people. And this is especially evident when you ask someone to articulate the viewpoint of someone they are criticizing in a way they would find no fault with. The overwhelming majority of people can’t do it, but can only sneer, or satirize or caricature their opponent’s views. Tells you all you really need to know when forming a judgment about whether you’re wasting your time with someone or not.

I'd argue that such organizations fulfill a role in current society that is at least not insignificant for the powers that be.

Any ruling regime that has hegemonic control over public discourse has an evident interest in controlling and limiting the public dissemination of information because their control over society and its consensus depends on it. Its opponents and dissidents, on the other hand, are evidently interested in the opposite, and the simple social reality is that spreading and disseminating subversive and heretical information is always easier than suppressing and eradicating it. Hence the emergence of the centrist liberal narrative about the grave danger posed by 'fake news' and the corresponding need to enact 'fact-checking'. It also makes sense for the simple reason that mainstream liberal media has nothing to fear from 'fact-checkers' even if those were dissidents and heretics; after all, this media does not function by spreading lies and fabrications but by simply not reporting uncomfortable facts and by spinning information that is factually true according to their hegemonic ideology. In other words, there are no facts to check there.

The ultimate aim of 'fact-checking' is of course to eventually justify the cancellation, censorship and suppression of platforms accused of spreading 'fake news'.

Either you’re in the business of fact checking or you’re pushing a partisan bias when it comes to fact checking your political opponents. If the former is your goal, you’d have to shutdown practically all news outlets out there, as you’d be holding them to a information standard that’s as rigorous as censoring and penalizing people who make false medicinal claims about their quack new elixir that “they” don’t want you to know about; and spend the rest of your days reading only peer reviewed journals for the rest of your life. Not always the most objective either; but it’s among the best we’ve got.

Even “fact” driven people are often impelled by motivated reasoning. In most debates and political disagreements I’ve had with people, it’s become very clear to me that most of their counterpoints to you involve rhetorical jabs that take the form of asking you a particular question, solely for the purpose of thinking you aren’t able to answer it (e.g. they’re not seeking understanding or truth; but of course they expect you to take their POV seriously; always). Which is somewhat standard debate tactic: don’t ask a question you don’t already know the answer to. What I intensely hate are people who don’t directly laser in and address what it is you’ve said so what they’ll do is they’ll replace your argument with an argument you didn’t make; and they’ll attack that instead. And so you either have to interrupt them or let them burn the next 45 minutes answering a question they’ve asked themselves and then ask them the same question again while they can’t understand why you’re having to repeat yourself.

Occasionally I’ll get sent a video from a friend or relative of that Patrick Bet David dude from Valuetainment (who always struck me as a fraud and if you look into his background, he actually was quite the snake oil salesman) and one thing I’ve seen him occasionally pitch to people is he’ll ask them, “Are you a numbers guy?,” and then he’ll expect them to defend their views with evidence on that front he’s setup. That rhetorically worked pretty well for him until the day he had an economist on his show. And when said economist started rattling off numbers and concepts homie clearly couldn’t follow, he tried silently backing away from it and diverted to telling some personal anecdote “story,” in this soft, genteel tone and his head nodded somewhat down. One of those physical gestures that surely screams, “Oh shit… this guy knows what he’s talking about…” (Folds). A standard behavior of bullshitters and con artists. Needless to say, I too, often come prepared and am waiting for them when they come asking. The one redeeming trait I’ll give them is they don’t claim to be objective, they just happen to think the facts support their ideology. They’re no different than I am in that regard, at least to some degree.

I think the most shocking thing here is that a "journalist"...didn't even take the smallest steps to verify the authenticity...

Maybe it shocked you, but I'm not surprised. Confirmation bias is the least of the sins I attribute to them, and it doesn't feel like deliberate deception on their part (especially since they retracted it).

If you throw in a couple sets of quotation marks and some attribution, then the retracted article even would've passed the "very rarely lies" test because everything past the third word in the article ("A deepfake video of Washington County chair candidate Nafisa Fai...") is correct.

I don't want this to be about a left/right thing,

Well I think it is in the sense that it threatens to help polarize the United States even more than the present. If the leaders from each side are able to present credible evidence/argument to their supporters that (1) the other side is full of bad people who want to do them serious harm; and (2) any evidence contradicting the narrative is fake, it really has the potential to cause a lot of trouble.

Personally, as a conservative, if a photo came out showing Trump or some other Republican doing something very embarrassing I would be automatically skeptical of it and predisposed to believe evidence that the photo was faked, even if that evidence came from the politician at issue. That sort of bias is just heavily ingrained in human psychology.

That’s pretty much what happened here. The real image showed a Somali politician with the flag upside down, showing at best ignorance and at worst disrespect for the flag. Journalists who don’t want the immigrant community to be seen in either of those ways is strongly biased towards any way to “debunk” that idea.

And this is why deep fakes will work most of the time. They don’t have to even be good, they just have to conform to what people want to be true.

The real image showed a Somali politician with the flag upside down, showing at best ignorance and at worst disrespect for the flag.

The most charitable interpretation was that the person simply wasn't paying attention. As a Trump supporter, if Trump appeared in front of an upside down flag, I would assume that he is old, distracted, and probably focused more on any attractive women in the area.

I think part of the issue here is that Somali-Americans are perceived by many as being completely hostile and disloyal to the United States, and appearing in front of an upside down flag confirms that perception on an emotional level.

Journalists who don’t want the immigrant community to be seen in either of those ways is strongly biased towards any way to “debunk” that idea.

I agree completely, and I would add that your typical journalist in the US probably has a very negative opinion about the sort of person who would spread these kind of images. Probably the journalist thinks such people are racist, stupid, etc. "Deplorable" is the right word. So yeah, it would be very easy to convince your typical journalist that the Deplorables are trading fake images to foment their own racism.

And this is why deep fakes will work most of the time. They don’t have to even be good, they just have to conform to what people want to be true.

Combine that with (1) convenient mechanisms, e.g. Twitter, for distributing such things; and (2) the lack of a credible authority as to what is fake and what is real, then yeah I think your prediction is probably accurate.

In fact, I would guess it won't be long before it's easy to create AI-generated "reenactments" of culture-war sensitive events. For example the sexual encounter at issue in the recent Cornell fiasco. It seems that if it fits their tribal allegiance, people will even accept "fake but accurate" materials.

These things are extremely hard to predict, but I would guess that AI generated materials will lead to significantly more polarization in the United States, even more than we have now.

In fact, I would guess it won't be long before it's easy to create AI-generated "reenactments" of culture-war sensitive events.

Somewhat relevant would be the Gabriel Paul Horcasitas case, where an AI video of the victim (Pelkey) was used.

I initially thought the video was in favor of lenience for Horcasitas, since it mentions forgiveness and the article talks about the sentence being tossed, but when I checked as I was making this post I realized I got it backwards: the video was created by Pelkey's family, who were pushing for the maximum possible punishment. The judge mentioned being moved by the video, and gave the maximum sentence. This was sufficient for the sentencing to be tossed on appeal, as the appeals court was not happy with AI influence. So not a problem in this particular case, since presumably resentencing will be uninfluenced by AI.

I'm curious if that position persists across time and situations: if a sympathetic-to-the-assailant family had made a video of the victim forgiving him and saying he shouldn't get a significant sentence and that somehow made it through the courtroom, would the sentence get overturned?

I would guess it won't be long before it's easy to create AI-generated "reenactments" of culture-war sensitive events.

I've seen two examples tweeted within the last week. I can't find one, but here's the other, when it came up on Reddit several months ago. The post photo is reportedly AI, though based on the real (probably? hopefully?) video linked by some of the commenters.

For example the sexual encounter at issue in the recent Cornell fiasco.

Neither example was of a drugged-up orgy, thankfully.

It seems that if it fits their tribal allegiance, people will even accept "fake but accurate" materials.

The Reddit comment to this effect, "its not misinformation, it happened - the "photo" is ai, the story is not.", is only slightly net upvoted, but IIRC it was even worse on Twitter.

I'm confused by the whole thing. Is the flag upside down to signal some kind of danger from Trump? If yes, it seems weird to not own up to it.

Was it just incompetence on someone's part of how to fly a flag? Ok, I get wanting to hide that.

Was it sabotage from someone at the venue, and no one realized it was a problem in the moment?

From the description I thought she was standing in front of a completely spread open obviously upside down flag, which would have been quite the statement. This, I didn't even notice it was upside down since it's curled up? I see it now that I'm looking for it.

It seems much easier to believe everyone's just retarded with the hanging it wrong and then trying to cover it with a deepfake and then being too embarrassed to admit it.

An upside down flag was originally an emergency symbol; hanging it is basically ye olde equivalent of dialing 911. From that it acquired meaning as a protest symbol, meaning that the country is in dire distress.

I mean, not noticing what direction a furled flag is in seems understandable.

The American flag, at least, is prominently blue on top with white stars when hung on a vertical pole like this. Flipping it would make the top section red-and-white striped, and look IMO completely wrong.

Depends how it’s furled- thé blue could easily be completely hidden.

Unless you attach the outer end to the pole, or use some unusually stiff cloth, it will partially unwrap like you see in the example here. But not impossible, I suppose.

The odd thing is, it's not an outdoor flag thats attached daily to a permanently mounted pole; it's a ceremonal flag thats normally stored mounted to its pole amd brought to the ceremony where its placed in a pedastal stand. Flags on that type of pole are normally semi permanently attached to the flagpole. It's baffling to me how it ended up upside down in the first place short of someone wanting to send a message.

If deliberate, disrespect to what many consider an important symbol of the country (and cause to doubt her loyalty). If accidental, a lack of attention to detail, knowledge, and/or care about what many consider an important symbol of the country (and cause to doubt her loyalty).

I'm inclined to think it has neither of the two above implications/interpretations, and was just a standard mistake by someone and not a big deal (how many FAITHFUL AND LOYAL politicians would have paid attention and noticed?). The fact that her campaign responded to the allegations by making a deepfake, however... well, it could have been a panic response, but it does shift my beliefs closer to "deliberate, showing a lack of respect/loyalty".

Possibly a case of dual messaging?

My Florida Ballot

Early voting starts in my state. Mid-terms have arrived. Here is what I'm voting for, and why:

Governor - Byron Donalds: I largely agree with most positions more than I disagree. I support police, and cracking down on criminality, I oppose most gun control. To keep a long story short, im about 60/40 as far as agreeing with Republicans/Democrats respectively. And will vote R if I must choose. This will be the same for the other smaller representees.

-Edit- Senate - Ashley Moody: Same reasons as Byron

Supreme Court - Carlos G. Muñiz: Keeping him.

CFO - Blaise Ingoglia: I did a little digging, he seems more effective at managing spending for the state. So I'm going with him.

Commissioner of Agriculture - Wilton Simpson: Unfortunately, I dont know the first thing about argiculture. But just looking at the perspective candidates websites. Wilton claims to have done some nice things, like providing for those in need via a Farming Feed initiative, and preventing medicine from getting water systems. Assuming this is true. He has my vote. I also went and checked what stuff he has voted for on Ballotpedia, most of it seems pretty good. He voted for things related to childrens welfare and having standards for education systems. I trust him. His oppononent, Joey, doesnt even have anything he has done on his website.

Attorney General - James Uthmeier: He was under DeSantis, and as an Attorney General he basically will over see the state legal system and such. I trust him to enforce the laws we have on the book and help police crack down on bad behavior.

Amendment 1 : I'm largely for increasing funding for emergencies, Florida tends to have a lot of natural disasters, so I dont see the argument against this just off intuition. So I'll vote yes.

Amendment 2 : Again, I unfortunately don't know much about agriculture, but it basically says that certain equipment wont get taxed. Im going to go with yes for this as well. But if anyone know a lot about agriculture, I'd like an argument as to why. Farming tends to be an expensive endeavor from just doing brief research, so I'm gonna vote to save the farmers a few dollars.

Amendment 3: I don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I kinda understand the fundamental argument for Taxes: someone needs to pay for government services. And from what I can tell, this bill will tax people the more expensive their houses become. It essentially reads as a progressive tax but for property. I tend to sympathize with progressive tax systems in general, so I don't have a problem with this. But it does seem unfair to those who bought their house for $100,000, but now pay more tax because that house is worth $300,000 they didn't exactly choose that, on the other hand for many this might have been a desired outcome. There are also those who would plan on just living in the house forever without selling so for those accruing a higher price on the house isn't very relevant. There is also the problem of landlords passing the tax on the current renters. I dunno, I'm still thinking on this, opinions are welcome.

There are also those who would plan on just living in the house forever without selling so for those accruing a higher price on the house isn't very relevant. There is also the problem of landlords passing the tax on the current renters. I dunno, I'm still thinking on this, opinions are welcome.

Think of this factor, which I only occasionally see mentioned:

Property taxes are how municipalities raise most of their money. The state gets most of its funding from sales taxes.

Any action that cuts into the ability of local governments to raise money weakens them, relative to the state. And in Florida, they're already quite weak.

This may be good or bad in your view. It does lead to a situation where the state now has greater ability to punish/control the actions of given municipalities. They can dangle funding over their heads in exchange for compliance with various goals, and/or withdraw funding if they try and rebel from the state's edicts or even for mere political disagreements.

The usual property tax rate (varies by county) hovers at or below 1%.

The state sales tax is 6%.

If someone saves $1000/year on their property tax, and then spends all of those 'savings' on taxable goods and services in Florida, the State collects about 60 bucks. But that money will circulate so its more precise to say that the state gets a 6% cut of every purchase that is attributable to that additional spending.

You can roughly expect that the Florida GDP will increase by some % (people spending the tax savings) and the Florida State Budget will grow by some % of that total increase.

But in the short term municipal revenues will plummet, and they have limited tools for addressing that.

I am not entirely sure how they're planning to square that ultimate circle.

I own a home, so I am pretty self-interested in reducing my tax burden.

I also think my County doesn't do a great job spending its money and spends way too much in general, even given how much it takes in. I presently trust the State Government to be less Profligate in spending than the County, so I expect it will rein in some excesses, although it might also cause quality of services to take a hit. But I don't know that I can ALWAYS trust the state to be good with money.

And I dislike creating a more centralized 'point of failure' where bad actors need only take over the State government to gain full control of the budget. This will increase the incentive to do so.

I am a localist at heart when it comes to political participation, so I slightly prefer having budget and taxing levers controlled at a level that is closer to and more legible to me

So I'm probably going to vote against Prop 3, even though I fully expect it to pass anyway.

I don't know how to feel about this. On the one hand, I kinda understand the fundamental argument for Taxes: someone needs to pay for government services.

This is literally the issue, money must come from somewhere. Every dollar of tax that a retired boomer getting 3k a month off social security with a paid off house now worth 10x they bought it for fifty years ago they get to stop paying, is another dollar charged to someone else someway else.

Just look at the mess of California's property tax to see this in action, the old pay basically nothing so the young pay basically everything. Your money already goes to a 75 year old couple spending it all on cruises and casinos, and they get free services from the city on top.

I just voted straight R.

Yes, I know, Ken Paxton. Politicians are corrupt, news at 11. I’m concerned that my rep in the federal house isn’t pro-data-center enough but that was my only real reservation.

I could tell that the early voting line tilted democrat.

Honestly I have no idea why anyone would vote Dem at the city/state level other than being part of the local machine. I can understand being Dem/Gop at the national level but at the local level GOP seems to have much higher performance last decade.

If property prices go up uniformly in a taxing district then your property taxes do not go up. This is true basically everywhere.

Your property tax is calculated by

Government Decides Budget = your property value/total taxing districts property value * mileage rate. The last one is just a fudge factor and is the variable solved for.

If property prices go up uniformly in a taxing district then your property taxes do not go up. This is true basically everywhere.

Except California, which is where a lot of the discourse centers. And it seems a lot of people -- even non-CA property owners -- don't realize that California is weird in that respect, and was before proposition 13 (among other things there's a constitutionally provided 1% property tax). And you'll note the people who insist that prop 13 must be repealed NEVER talk about going to a conventional property tax system at the same time.

Florida has a Prop 13-like system, though somewhat less crazy. Homestead assessment increases are capped at the lower of inflation or 3%, and the instant ballot proposition would lower the cap on non-homestead assessment increases from 10% to 5%. Given that land values tend to rise roughly in line with nominal GDP and improvement values tend to rise roughly in line with replacement costs, and construction inflation is somewhat faster than general inflation (because Baumol), the homestead cap is going to bind and the 5% general cap is likely to bind.

Amendment 3 sounds like an absolute nightmare policy. Land Value Tax is the 2nd best tax (after pigouvian texes, but those can't scale) and this seems like the exact opposite.

Empirically and in the US context, I would say the performance of Texas and California state governments is the best case for high property taxes (and correspondingly low income and sales taxes - the difference in tax mix between states is bigger than the difference in overall levels of taxation).

Again empirically, low property taxes encourage smart people to take up real estate investment (or land speculation, as Georgists call it - you are investing in location, location and location) at the expense of relatively more productive activities, and voters and the local politicians they elect to focus on increasing house prices rather than improving opportunities in the real economy.

LVT isn’t universally considered the 2nd best tax. It has this weird popularity with fairly high IQ people but far less popularity in Econ or real estate finance academia (can accuse this group of bias).

Its big issue to me is it assumes LEGO like construction where you can upsize and downsize building as land values changes when construction in reality can’t be modified once built without very expensive tear downs.

LVT has a lot of problems, but the most basic one is property tax is generally supposed to pay for municipal expenses. And (Strongtown's claims notwithstanding) municipal expenses scale almost not at all with land value, and a bit more with property value (not so much among classes of property, but between them, because what they scale best with is population.)

True. I also think it’s dependent on Lego like construction. Downtown Miami has had soaring land values. But if you already build a 40-story condo building 10 years and now land values justify 100-stories you can’t just LEGO construct and add 60 stories to realize the value of higher land value.

It is done occasionally at smaller scales. Although the example that comes to mind is the NYC building that partially collapsed over the summer while they were trying to do so; obviously not all roses.

Let's break down Amendment 3. The average Florida home value is about $375,000, and the current exemption amount is $50,000. It's my understanding that the tax rate is approximately $750 for each $50,000 in value, so as it stands the average taxpayer would pay $4,875 per year on the average home. If the bill passes, full implementation would reduce this amount to $1,875. A 61% decrease in property taxes for the average homeowner does not seem fiscally responsible, especially since the bill also caps annual increases on non-homestead property at 5%, down from 10%. I honestly don't see how local governments can handle that kind of decrease, and there's no mechanism in place to replace the funding.

There is also the problem of landlords passing the tax on the current renters.

Landlords can't claim a homestead exemption, so this wouldn't affect renters at all.

Florida seems to collect those property taxes and then disburse them back to the local governments. The state itself seems to be doing very well, fiscally. $3.8bn budget surplus, paying off debt ahead of schedule, well funded Rainy Day Fund. They also seem to get most property tax revenue from rental properties and second homes, which don't get the homestead exemption.

Might be they actually can just eat the loss in revenue to reward the people who actually live there. Perks of a competent government.

property tax revenue from rental properties and second homes, which don't get the homestead exemption.

For long-term rentals, this presumably does get passed on as increased rent. It could be acceptable policy, I suppose, but I would describe that as "actually live there" too. Perhaps the incentive here to buy a home is fine, but worth considering directly.

Passing it on to Airbnbs sounds fine, though.

Econ 101 says that roughly 100% of property tax on improvements should be passed on in market rents, and roughly 0% of property tax on land. Econ 201 says that the actual pass-through is even less than that because the owners of houses built under a low-improvement-tax regime eat a loss.

My understanding of the empirical work on this question is that the theory is right for prices advertised to new tenants, but landlords and good long-term tenants generally renew leases with below-market rent increases, and that the size of the "loyalty discount" is lower when landlord costs (including property taxes) are rising. My personal experience as a market-rate tenant in my 20's is consistent with this.

I think Econ 101 would say that in the short term 0% of changing property taxes gets passed on to renters. You have X supply of houses and Y willingness to pay for housing by renters demand equation.

In the long-term new construction of rentals depends on a market required rate of return to develop new properties. Higher taxes reduces the profit on new construction so you get less new construction.

If Florida works like most states, taxing jurisdictions work out how much they want to raise, and then convert it into a millage rate. My gut feeling is that the null hypothesis should be that the total amount of property tax will stay the same and the millage rate will increase to compensate for the reduced base - not that millage rates will stay constant and spending be cut.

That would make the amendment a cleanish transfer from businesses, landlords and owners of expensive homes to owners of cheap homes - which you would expect to be popular. That said, supporters and opponents of the amendment seem to be campaigning as if it is a tax cut.

My gut feeling is that the null hypothesis should be that the total amount of property tax will stay the same and the millage rate will increase to compensate for the reduced base - not that millage rates will stay constant and spending be cut.

I misread the bill and thought that would be blocked: It's assessment increases that are capped at 5% per year, but that capped value can be taxed at any rate. That seems quite plausible.

Linked under a discussion about Scott’s AI messaging: Politics is not interior design. Don’t feel bad about skimming the first half, which can be summed up as

Most people vastly overestimate their ability to predict second- and third-order effects of anything, including strategic speech.

The part I wanted to share comes near the end, when he asks why this keeps happening. Selection bias, sure, but also:

It is gratifying to see yourself as a subtle navigator of opinion dynamics, and less gratifying to admit that you are mostly guessing. "This would be counterproductive" is often the most prestigious available way to avoid saying something costly.

Our society really likes countersignaling. Fashion, politics, Internet debate clubs. Historical conspiracy theories. I think a lot of contrarian, edgy statements can be discounted because of this dynamic. Especially when it comes to social media.

"This would be counterproductive" is often the most prestigious available way to avoid saying something costly.

What about "that would be an ecumenical matter"?

I’m pretty convinced of this, at least without really good levels of subject matter knowledge. I would expect an economist to accurately predict second order effects of a tax hike or tariff increase on prices because he’s studied that system deeply. I would expect a geologist to be able to tell me whether or not fracking would destabilize geologic plates and cause more earthquakes. Or expect an expert on neurology to predict the effects of early screen use on the development of the human brain.

Take away the expertise, and it is effectively impossible because you don’t have enough background information to know the difference between things that are impossible, things that are rare, and things that are common. If I know for example, that tariffs lower imports, then it’s possible to say raised tariffs will raise prices on basic supply and demand. If not, I can’t really do that.

The contrarian approach mostly looks smart because it signals that you aren’t beholden to expert opinions and are supposedly looking for yourself. Which signals that you’re smart enough to do it and that you’re confident in your ability to do that. Smarts and confidence are seen as positive.

That’s part and parcel of the difficulty of peering behind the veil of emergent properties more generally.

Most people vastly overestimate their ability to predict second- and third-order effects of anything, including strategic speech.

This ties into AI and investing. A second order consequence of the AI semiconductor boom in 2022-2024 was a "memory shortage" in mid-late 2025-2026 which saw stocks such as Micron , Western Digital, and SanDisk increase by 10x in a 1-year period, exceeding even NVDA itself, yet based on my own research, only 2 people total predicted the memory shortage second-order effect. All the attention in 2022-2024 was on Nvidia but no one cared about memory . None of the popular bloggers, podcasters or anyone else in involved in AI foresaw the shortage or recommended those three stocks. It just suddenly happened--boom--memory shortage (there is even a Wiki about it). My guess is, the rise of coding agents in early to mid 2025 saw sudden demand for memory, because this requires having to store large projects.

My guess is, the rise of coding agents in early to mid 2025 saw sudden demand for memory, because this requires having to store large projects.

I was under the impression that the median memory chip is probably sitting on a fancy GPU in an AI data center. I do not think that people running vibecoded corporate-sized java codebases is enough to explain the shortage.

There are also higher order effects, though -- some FPGAs face a shortage not because AIs use them, but simply because producing AI chips is so massively profitable that it is very tempting for fabs to upgrade to the latest process generation instead of making peanuts by continuing to build boring 28nm chips.

I think he means the memory is for the coding agent workflow, not the apps generated. I.e. it is for the AI chips, but coding agents (and agents in general) generally require much more memory on the AI server doing inference then chats with users and have grown in usage a huge amount in the last year. The AI coding agents tend to operate with much longer context then your run of the mill chatbot talking with a user (even a chatbot that's doing some thinking). Memory requirements for the KV cache on AI inference server scale linearly with context length, a 500K used context agentic coding session (not hard to hit at all, context length limits for paid plans can reach up to 1m tokens, equivalent to a book 2500 pages long) is going to use about 50 times as much memory in the KV cache on the AI inference server then a chat conversation that maybe (if you're really chatty) reaches 5-10k tokens

None of the popular bloggers, podcasters or anyone else in involved in AI foresaw the shortage or recommended those three stocks

Possibly those who did see it kept it to themselves? I had a buddy who had recommended a few stocks including SanDisk using this sort of reasoning.

That being said, I agree it's interesting that the market as a whole didn't predict something which seems in hindsight like it would have been pretty obvious.

Quick note

Most people vastly overestimate their ability to predict second- and third-order effects of anything, including strategic speech.

I’ve concluded that “second-and-third order effects” are effectively unpredictable. There are the obvious-when-you-see them, then there are the plausible, which look convincing until you change some variables plausibly and reach the opposite conclusion. It’s like trying to predict the weather, except we’ve become good at that…like trying to predict the weather 1 week in the future? Unless you have inside (or obvious) information, you can only “mostly guess”.

So people’s politics include, if they’re smart common sense, and if they’re in a group currying favor…but otherwise, they come down to identity, because there’s no other coercion than within. Thus, I think politics is like art. People countersignal for the same reason they make unique art: because they want to stand out and be unique, so they see and express the unique parts of themselves. And I think, like unique art, countersignaling is very good, it satisfies curiosity and creates insight…except when people seriously adopt delusions or meanness, then they are hurting themselves and others, and also obviously wrong according to a reasonable, nice person.

An interesting "false flag" in the transgender culture war: a mystery group is impersonating a transgender group and sending texts and flyers to the wrong people:

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas-politics/texans-receive-texts-impersonating-transgender-advocacy-group/

This week, some Texans reported receiving texts about “gender-affirming care in Texas” and a “complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” Those messages included links to the website of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT.

Questions about gender-affirming care in Texas? Start here. You can get the care you need: https://transtexas.org/resources

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/trans-student-mailers-hit-texas-210015782.html

This week, some Texans reported receiving texts about “gender-affirming care in Texas” and a “complete guide on bathrooms and beyond for trans kids at school.” Those messages included links to the website of the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT.

"This was sent to my home. Addressed to the 'students' of our family from the 'Texas Transgender Student Union.' It coaches minors on what to do if their parents are not supportive of their 'trans' identity and walks them through getting emancipated," Gonzales posted.

As far as I can tell, of course, the transgender groups in question have no disagreement with the contents in these messages, but they have been sent to the wrong people. They want this content to stay on the down low and for parents not to know about it. As on twitter poster put it "The trans people wouldn’t be stupid enough to send this out right before midterms unless they thought you were trans" (emphasis added). The pages on the websites that the pamphlets and texts linked to have been taken down, though archive links show they had content on them previously: https://web.archive.org/web/20261005063417/https://transtexas.org/trans-texas-takeover-tour/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260807023304/https://transtexas.org/resources/ which is a very interesting thing to do for a group that presumably wants people to attend their tour and have access to some resources.

This does reinforce the idea that the trans project is both unpopular and/or secretly transing kids without their parents knowing, as they reacting with horror that parents are being exposed to their message.

This hiding behavior is certainly not standard among all groups. Most groups would be thrilled to get free publicity pointed to their website, even if the messages are coming from an anonymous benefactor (assuming it doesn't get them on a spam shitlist or something). Nevertheless, it does seem like democrat ideology mandates that they support the maximalist trans movement, and their solution is to distance from it.

Hmm. I got a pamphlet from them mixed into a bunch of political mail that 100% knows I'm a republican(one a flyer for my republican house member, one a Greg Abbot flyer, one a handwritten-by-machine letter from Ken Paxton's daughter, and one a Talarico add by a 'lifelong republican' crossover voter. Being a high propensity voter in Tarrant county right now is a great way to be deluged with political spam through all media). Let me dig it out of the trash and open it...

Return address is a private house in Houston. It signs off with 'You don't need to have everything figured out. You don't have to know whether you're definitely trans. You don't have to decide about hormones or surgery right now. You don't have to convince your parents. Your job right now is to stay safe, find people who will listen to you, and give yourself time to figure out who you are. There are other kids in Texas going through this too- and there are adults whose actual job is to help you. Even if your family doesn't accept you as you are, groups like these are ready to become your found family.' The entire pamphlet is clearly addressed to minors becoming trans against their parent's knowledge or consent. It was addressed to 'students of the (my family name)household' and very clearly labeled as 'Texas trans and LGBTQ+ student resource guide'.

Uh, guys, I think this is a false flag sent out to rile up republican voters. And I say that as a Ken Paxton donor.

I'd... also add that from the other side, trans activists have an internal story about closeted kids being accidentally or 'accidentally' outed, then being beaten to death literally raped disowned and homeless sent to conversion camp stuffed into an oubliette constantly monitored 24/7. How well those stories existed to start with is debatable, as evidenced by highlights like Sam Brinton, but I can't imagine a Texas-based organization, even one that's little more than a webhost and a meet-and-greet, either avoiding exposure to those stories, or knowing of them and writing that text.

At the very least you’d expect them to use a nice unlabeled envelope instead of one with a trans pride flag on the front addressed specifically to my (in this case nonexistent)teenaged children.

Republicans have been doing this for a while. I used to get tons of text messages about Kamala Harris' purported sexual conquests with a "you go girl don't let the republicans keep you down" vibe.

If Dems don't like it they can fight back. Put out a flyer telling people to vote Ken Paxton so that he can help the president run for a third term and rename Texas Trumpsas.

To hit the Republicans where it hurts, it should probably either be pamphlets about the joy of toiling and dying for Israel, or something about tax breaks for the rich. The problem is that both would be wide open to comebacks about the underlying policies also having nontrivial support among Democrats.

I used to get tons of text messages about Kamala Harris' purported sexual conquests with a "you go girl don't let the republicans keep you down" vibe.

I'm glad I don't have to constantly hear about Willie Brown's willy anymore.

I hope I never have to hear about Kamala Harris again as long as I live.

Brother, have I ever got some news for you.

She just has name recognition, there’s no way she really gets nominated. I’m doubtful she’ll even make the attempt. Newsom is much more likely (cold comfort perhaps), or even AOC, but my gut says the eventual nominee will be someone nobody knows or cares about right now.

No, I doubt she'll actually secure the nomination (my money's on Newsom or Ossoff). But even if Harris puts her name forward, we certainly haven't heard the last of her yet.

I started to say "Come on even the Democrats can't be that stupid" but then I heard myself.

Part of me is going "Oh please please please run, I so badly want a follow-up volume to 107 Days" but I guess that's kind of mean.

Who would be her VP, though? Nominations here as I value your informed opinions so much. A second Tim Walz to appeal to the male vote or someone who could actually do the job?

Mark Kelly. He has impeccable credentials but he looks like a VP. He can play both the hero and the aggrieved victim persecuted with Trump. Democrats have a growing problem if Republicans "own" the image of space because of Elon, everyone is anti-AI, anti-nuclear, etc. Mark Kelly gives them a very easy self-image, a positive vision of the future. Plus Arizona is a swing state now.

If Kamala manages to get the nomination, it'll be a second Tim Walz type. She can't stand anyone who could obviously upstage her.

I don't think the Democrats are dumb enough to give her the nod, considering every Republican possibly in play except Vivek could beat her with their eyes closed (OK, Nikki Haley might need to keep one eye open), but if she does, it'll be another Democratic disaster.

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"How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?!"

What about you? Do you find it- wisible- when I say the name "Willie... Brown?"

It’s rather telling however that democrats get upset about republicans saying true things about them. If democrats made ads that said republicans want to cut spending and lower taxes, republicans would be thrilled even if they went to the wrong side.

Democrats are constantly running on "Republicans want to cut spending on [widely used government service or one that serves a sympathetic category] and pay for it by lowering taxes on the wealthy". That's like the single most common Democratic line besides "Trump is bad".

Democrats are constantly running on "Republicans want to cut spending on [widely used government service or one that serves a sympathetic category] and pay for it by lowering taxes on the wealthy".

Ok, and the analogous situation would be if there were some kind of conservative NGO with a website and literature promoting these sorts of tax and spending cuts; and some Democrat supporters started spreading their literature among people who would be offended by such proposals; and they concealed the fact that they were the ones spreading the literature.

I think that in that situation, a conservative Republican candidate might respond with something along the lines of "I support tax cuts for everyone and my priority would be to cut taxes for the middle class, not just the wealthy." Which might be a bald-faced lie, but I think @MaiqTheTrue 's point is plausible.

It seems that much more than the Republicans, the Democrats have positions which are very unpopular, very embarrassing, but which they still are reluctant to disavow. To be sure, I am a conservative so I am possibly biased on this issue, but if anyone can identity a few analogous issues on the Republican side of things I would be interested.

Data centers, abortion, and ICE- although Republican candidates tend to have considerably more leeway about sticking to strict ideological orthodoxy on the issues.

although Republican candidates tend to have considerably more leeway about sticking to strict ideological orthodoxy on the issues.

Well that's more or less the point.

It seems that much more than the Republicans, the Democrats have positions which are very unpopular, very embarrassing, but which they still are reluctant to disavow. To be sure, I am a conservative so I am possibly biased on this issue, but if anyone can identity a few analogous issues on the Republican side of things I would be interested.

I would suggest, speaking as a perpetually disappointed Republican, that Republican politicians do have a revealed preference for pursuing toxic, unpopular policies while in office. They simply lie about them if confronted with it in advance, and often continue to lie about it afterward.

Trump's war of choice with Iran is actually managing to be less popular than transgender kids. Pew polling shows 56% of Americans favor banning medical care for youth gender transition. While close to 2/3 of Americans polled disapprove of the handling of the Iran war. It should be noted that there has probably been an uptick in approval for a war with Iran after the war started, compared to approval for starting a war with Iran beforehand, though I couldn't find definitive polling on the topic.

But if in 2024 you put out a flyer saying "Don't elect Donald Trump, he'll start a war of choice without seeking public or congressional approval, raising gas prices;" Donald Trump would simply say that he won't start any wars while in office. Reminiscent of George W Bush running on reducing America's role as global policeman.

Democrats have a unique problem regarding issues like Trans rights and Reparations where they can't publicly disavow these policies, because the parts of their coalition that want these policies are insane spoiled children lobbying for status rather than for material or political success. Where the Zionist lobby or the oil companies are sophisticated enough to not care what you say about them in public as long as you deliver in private.

Trump's war of choice with Iran is actually managing to be less popular than transgender kids. Pew polling shows 56% of Americans favor banning medical care for youth gender transition. While close to 2/3 of Americans polled disapprove of the handling of the Iran war.

I'm not sure that this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Disapproval of how a war is being handled is not the same thing as categorical opposition to such a war.

But if in 2024 you put out a flyer saying "Don't elect Donald Trump, he'll start a war of choice without seeking public or congressional approval, raising gas prices;" Donald Trump would simply say that he won't start any wars while in office.

Assuming for the sake of argument that this is all true, why don't Democratic candidates such as Kamala Harris simply disavow the unpopular position, e.g. state that they oppose trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms; oppose "transitioning" for youth; and so on?

Democrats have a unique problem regarding issues like Trans rights and Reparations where they can't publicly disavow these policies, because the parts of their coalition that want these policies are insane spoiled children lobbying for status rather than for material or political success.

I wouldn't frame it quite this way, but I think that's a big part of the answer to the question.

Where the Zionist lobby or the oil companies are sophisticated enough to not care what you say about them in public as long as you deliver in private

That may be a factor, but also I am pretty confident that Israel and even oil companies are more popular among the general public of Republican voters than trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms are among the general public of Democratic voters. That being said, if it's really true that only 56% of people are in favor of banning medical care for "youth gender transition," I may be out of touch.

I'm not sure that this is an apples-to-apples comparison. Disapproval of how a war is being handled is not the same thing as categorical opposition to such a war.

All the numbers I've seen indicate that support for the war climbed slightly after it started compared to pre-war polling around questions like "Should the US launch strikes against Iran?" or "Should the US invade Iran?" but we can't get an apples-to-apples comparison because nobody polled the question "Should we launch a surprise decapitation strike against Iran in cooperation with Israel?" because that policy was never put on the table as something we might do. It was done completely as a choice by the executive branch, without any attempt to inform or sell the war or what it meant to the American public. Clearly the element of surprise had advantages in terms of the military's ability to launch decapitation strikes against Iranian leadership, but it also has costs.

Assuming for the sake of argument that this is all true, why don't Democratic candidates such as Kamala Harris simply disavow the unpopular position, e.g. state that they oppose trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms; oppose "transitioning" for youth; and so on?

So I'm not speaking about some hypothetical ideal here, just what Democrats were like in 2008. Barack Hussein Obama publicly opposed gay marriage, saying publicly that while he supported civil unions he thought that marriage was between a man and a woman because then "God is in the mix." Dan Savage told his readers at the time, vote for Obama, because he's lying about his support for the gays, and even if he isn't he's better than the alternative. Democrat freaks used to comfortable with accepting that their leaders would sometimes need to swerve in public, but trust them to take care of them when they came into power. Trump's super power is his supporter's belief that he's lying about all the things they don't like.

That may be a factor, but also I am pretty confident that Israel and even oil companies are more popular among the general public of Republican voters than trans-identifying-men in women's locker rooms are among the general public of Democratic voters. That being said, if it's really true that only 56% of people are in favor of banning medical care for "youth gender transition," I may be out of touch.

Coincidentally, the latest Pew Polls show Favorable/Unfavorable for Israel (the state) at 37% favorable and 60% unfavorable. Slightly higher for "the Israeli people" and much lower for "the Israeli Government." So Israel is slightly less popular than "transing kids." I would assume, though it's hard to find numbers on this as it's not exactly ethical polling practice, that transgender people are more popular than "transing kids."

I agree that it's tough to get an exact 1:1 between policies across different fields, and for the most part the median voter is foolish and incapable of thinking about tradeoffs so you're going to get overlapping impossible policies if you just go off public polling.

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True, but if I understand correctly, these are unedited flyers merely send to the wrong people. The group in question doesn't even claim that it disagrees with the content itself?

Anti-Rep ads on the other hand usually explicitly uses a Dem framing, like the planned medicare changes: Reps say they want to make access harder to make abuse more difficult, Dems say they just hate poor people (Btw, I'm against the medicare change).

That seems qualitatively different.

Yeah like Democrats had no problems with pushing a lot of 'Project 2025 is the secret plan of the Republican Establishments look how evil it is' when it's like one think-tank's opinions which have some overlap with Republican interests but are nowhere near 1-1. Reddit Libs were treating Project 2025 like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion for years.

The actual project 2025 was a nine hundred page pdf of boring policy and personnel recommendations, of which thé trump admin(or any Republican) would enact the majority.

The project 2025 in dem messaging was a hallucination that had nothing to do with it.

The best thing about Project 2025 was that absolutely no one read it, so you could just say it had anything in it and people would believe or reject on pure tribalism.

I think Jack Chick used that same philosophy as a comment about the Bible and the Catholic Church in his classic Death Cookie comic tract.

The flyers I get on the regular suggest that would probably earn more Republican votes.

Sure and these flyers appear to be sent mostly to Republicans as a turnout tool.

Send flyers to Hispanic and Democrat households from PATRIOTS AGAINST THE GREAT REPLACEMENT telling you that more than 80,000 American soldiers are married to illegal immigrants, and we need to DEPORT THESE WOMEN NOW, and urging you to vote Republican so that ICE can continue to do important work like literally exceed the Gestapo in venal lack of honor.

Address is correct according to this article (modulo a typo): https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/10/19/texas-families-lgbt-student-resource-guide-mailers/

TENT responded to the Daily Signal’s request for comment about the physical mailers.

At the end of the email received by the Daily Signal, TENT included its mailing address: “116111 W. Airport Blvd. #180, Meadows Place, Texas 77477.” That address is similar to the one listed on the pamphlet, but it appears no such address exists.

Getting the number slightly off is a very believable typo, and both addresses point to the same nonexistent place in the city. Either way, you can generally put whatever you want in that field, so whether it's right or wrong doesn't mean anything, and there's no reason a false flagger would intentionally make it close but not exact, so I think typo is almost certainly the case.

Edit: It appears there's a ups store at 11611 (thanks chat gpt), I bet it's likely that address, and both the fakers and real group made a typo on the number. It's very common advocacy groups and stuff to use po boxes, so that's not at all unusual.

As someone who owns one of these mailboxes, it's pretty clear to me that the real group made a typo and the fakers deliberately used a fake address. Not that the mailer includes a suite number but no box number. The plaza that the UPS store is in labels the units by letter, not suite number. So the address looks close to a real address but is actually unreturnable, since even if the post office was able to figure out the street address they wouldn't know what business to deliver it to. They have good reason as well; if some of the mail is undeliverable, they don't want the organization they're spoofing to get tipped off by a bunch of returns.

This does reinforce the idea that the trans project is both unpopular and/or secretly transing kids without their parents knowing

There is a longstanding mutual incomprehension on this question between activists and gender-criticals. Most activists would not deny that they are interested in helping children transition; they may downplay it during election season but it's not some great shameful secret, "Protect trans kids" is a widespread slogan. The reason "they're trying to trans your kids!" gets denounced as right-wing conspiracy-mongering is that active verb "transing". As the activists view it, they aren't transing anybody: they're trying to reach out to kids who are, in fact, already trans, and help them express their true selves. The implied accusation that they have some sort of program to brainwash cis kids into wanting to transition feels offensive and absurd - the only kids they're trying to reach out to really are trans, it's just that you can't tell who's in the closet, so obviously you have to shower everyone with "it's okay to come out, it'd be so brave, so life-changing" to ferret them out.

The problem is that to the typical trans activist, for a kid to "really be trans" basically means "this kid, if they knew transitioning was an option and faced no external pressure against doing so, would choose to transition" - anyone whose ideal self-actualized future self, given perfect information and absolute freedom, would transition, is ontologically trans. (Some theorists take this definition as-is, but the Blue Tribe activist on the street is more likely to hold some notion that if your idealized unconstrained future self would transition, this is evidence that you have in fact had the opposite gender written on your soul since birth.) So obviously, raising awareness of the possibility of transition will only serve to help kids who are, deep down, already trans - completely different from manipulatively "transing" cis kids. Whereas GCs, to the limited degree that they recognize the idea of kids "really being trans" - which wouldn't actually mean recognizing those kids' genders, of course, just acknowledging that they are of a kind with the population of "trans" adults in some deeper sense than parroting buzzwords they've been taught - would think that a "trans kid" must be a kid who already displays gender dysphoria and an active, persistent desire to be the opposite sex. So, of course, any intervention designed to raise awareness of transition among gender-conforming kids does literally constitute an effort to "make" them trans. And so the activists go on loudly and sincerely decrying accusations that they're transing kids while visibly and openly doing what their enemies mean by "transing kids".

On one hand, in the activists' defense, mainstream consensus has largely accepted that "encouraging closeted people to come out as gay" is not the same thing as "making them gay"; many Rowling-type moderate-left GCs would never endorse that conflation, yet take it absolutely for granted where trans is concerned. But on the other hand, in the GCs' defense, the trans activists' definition of "being trans" is obviously so confusing, radical, and esoteric that their continued misunderstanding of what their opponents mean by "transing kids" can only be some mixture of willful ignorance and unfathomable insularity, depending on individual levels of sincerity. Whoever you want to blame most, it's doing the state of the discourse no favors, and some people on both sides clearly like it that way.

(On the third hand, the right-wing discourse around "transing kids" is also riddled with motte-and-bailey rhetoric surrounding the spicier phrasing that trans activists are grooming kids - where, although it can always be claimed that they are simply using the word "grooming" to mean "manipulating impressionable youths" without connotations of literal pedophilia, this is often genuinely a cover for a veiled accusation that the activists are only telling kids to transition because they get some perverse sexual thrill from doing so, or even because they want to physically molest the kids they initiate. There, I think the anti-trans side are clearly at fault, and the activists are justified in rejecting the label even if the innocuous "motte" meaning of grooming is a defensible description of their behavior. I mention this because this reply turned into a bit of an effortpost, and an overview of the topic would not be complete otherwise; but I think the basic, less one-sided conflict outlined above would be with us with or without the "grooming" buzzword in the mix.)

Maybe I'm an ignoramus but I assumed 'transing' in this context means the concrete medical process of transing - getting the puberty blockers prescribed and taking them, doing the paperwork, the surgery itself etc.

Not just the medical process but the psychological process -- that is, getting the kids to believe they are trans and want all this stuff in the first place in the first place. And the social process (new name, pronouns, dress, makeup, etc)

That's the point: it's what gender-criticals use the word to mean, but not what trans activists understand by it when they deny the accusation. The two sides are, in a very crucial way, talking past each other.

The two sides are, in a very crucial way, talking past each other.

...on purpose, that is then.

this is often genuinely a cover for a veiled accusation that the activists are only telling kids to transition because they get some perverse sexual thrill from doing so, or even because they want to physically molest the kids they initiate.

Not necessarily sexual. Back when LibsofTikTok was just posting videos of libs talking to their own kind, there was a recurring archetype that I'll roughly sketch. Imagine a woman in her late 20's. She has a degree in education, a boring real life and a rich inner life. She posts videos talking about making her classroom a safe space, and a mild cynic could easily come to the conclusion that she really, really wants that experience of the "safe space" being necessary. That she believes that "school" is the setting for a drama anthology in which she is the main character, guiding and saving 22-26 desperate young people per year from repressive, intolerant, conservative parents.

The thing is, there just aren't that many gay kids. In a class of 20, she'll have maybe 2, and the odds of a terrible dramatic confrontation with the family where they have to seek help from their favorite English teacher that comes to a head in exactly that year is much, much smaller. How often can that really happen? Thrice in a career seems like a high estimate.

And yet a lot of teachers seem to be hyped as fuck at any hint that they get to do a big dramatic Very Special Episode type shit, just like the movies. That's why they got into teaching you know, and not because they're a lower-midwit who was afraid to leave a comfortable environment.

Objectively speaking, there are millions of teachers and only a few who post videos on TikTok giving the impression that if there aren't enough dramatically crying trans kids then they'll make them, but there are enough for a Twitter account to find a few every week for a year and make the meme well known.

Although it is as rare as you point out, "gay or otherwise non-gender-coforming teen with conservative Christian parents" is probably the most common case in today's America of someone being oppressed based on identity-group membership in a Narrative-compliant way. Anti-black racism still exists, but has been driven to the margins. Patriarchal subcultures which actually oppress women are on the way out. And the Smollett affair proved that the demand for violent homophobia targetting adults exceeds the supply.

If you are a shitlib schoolteacher in a suburban district in a deep red state, you still have the same 1-2 actually gay/lesbian kids per class that you always did, they are more likely than not to get a hostile response from their parents, and you can credibly expect that affected kids from other classes are going to come to you because they don't want to talk about this to a red-normie teacher.

I suspect the typical shitlib high school teacher in a red state does, in fact, meet several kids per career who have a catastrophic breakdown in their relationship with their parents over this issue. Back in the day, these kids would have stayed in the closet.

encouraging closeted people to come out as gay" is not the same thing as "making them gay

I think an insurmountable gap here is that it's easy to accept that gay people exist. Sodomy and homoeroticism has been documented since biblical times and even some animals do it. Meanwhile people wanting to chop off their own oragans and pump themselves full of hormones is a modern world.

Average people can also easily understand how it's possible to achieve sexual pleasure throug homosexual activity even if they do not personally want to participate. Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation. Therefore they can only conclude that it must be the result of either mental illness or brainwashing.

In the 70's conservative activists opposed laws banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in hiring because it would permit gay teachers in public school. The logic behind the "Save Our Children" campaign headlined by Anita Bryant was that gay people could not reproduce biologically so they must "recruit" children into being gay and therefore could not be trusted to be teachers. I don't think the average person who opposed gay teachers intuitively understood "gay people exist" I think they were concerned about "brainwashing" or "recruiting" the way people now are concerned about kids being "transed".

The broader framework of "we're concerned sexual minorities are recruiting children" vs. "there's no recruitment people are just born a certain way" isn't at all new. There are other features of the debate, like the consequences of medical treatment differing from sexual experimentation being different, that are new. But, I don't think it's all accurate to say that people in the past intuitively grasped that gay people existed and were not concerned about children being brainwashed.

Were they wrong?

With the rise of gay identifying it’s obvious people can be gayed. And then there are lavender marriages which produced children meaning most men can still get off to women. And honestly I think most gays are happier in lavender marriages where they get all the benefits of being a father and their children get a mother (plus not having to do childcare etc).

With the rise of gay identifying it’s obvious people can be gayed.

The rise in LGB self-identification is driven women who only date men identifying as bisexual. They haven't been gayed, they are claiming an oppressed identity for clout. The much smaller risk in gay male self-ID is entirely consistent with less closeting over time.

Citation needed? Last data I saw was that half of straight 18-34yo women in Britain were "unwilling" to date a bisexual man. Presumably some significant percentage of the remainder are at the "bisexuality is a negative, just not an utter disqualifier" level.

That "unwilling to date a bisexual" percentage is dropping fast from generation to generation, but I'd be very surprised if there was any age group for whom "unwilling to date a non-bisexual" exceeded it.

I don't think we disagree.

Last data I saw was that half of straight 18-34yo women in Britain were "unwilling" to date a bisexual man. Presumably some significant percentage of the remainder are at the "bisexuality is a negative, just not an utter disqualifier" level.

And that is part of why there has been minimal increase in bisexual identification among men who date women. I hope no citation is needed for the claim that men are much less squicked by female bisexuality than vice versa. The increase in bisexual identification I pointed to was among women who date men.

Ha! Egg on my face. I'm so sorry, I just utterly misparsed your sentence.

You intended "(women who only date men) identifying as bisexual"; somehow I read "women who only date (men identifying as bisexual)".

I figured maybe this was the latest stage of an anti-cis-hetero-men purity spiral somewhere but you were exaggerating it.

I hope no citation is needed for the claim that men are much less squicked by female bisexuality than vice versa.

True, but there's some squick! 20% of young men in that poll. I suspect that the demographic of women considering self-identifying as bisexual don't think they want to date any of those men either way, though.

Because in sexual intercourse, the woman is the fuckee, not the fucker. It’s a degradation to a woman’s self-concept as it is to a man feeling emasculated for a woman to admit to either herself or someone else that her husband took a nut to the face. I’d stake a grand on it that if you polled a line-up of pornstars about how they feel about what they do in the industry (save for the ones who engage in active drug use which is common to it) all of them or almost all of them will say they feel some variety of “empowered.” If you then ask them if they wanted their daughter (or hypothetical daughter) to be involved in the industry or what they do, all of them or almost all of them will say no. What gives? It’s because they’re lying to themselves, and they know it. Women often know that the observations men make about them are accurate, which is often why they will so strongly fight you and get upset and angry when you pull back the curtain on their attempts to conceal what they so frequently mislead people about.

Even the very strict gay/lesbian amount is double in Gen X than the Silent Generation. There is a lot more going on than people listing themselves Bi. The Bi thing explains only the last 10 years surge.

I haven't seen a good time series for men who have sex with men, but going back as far as Kinsey we know that the number of men who have had sex with another man is higher than the number of men who self-identify as gay or bi. There is a reason why early AIDS researchers used the term "men who have sex with men" and not "gay or bi men".

The people who tried to replicate Kinsey's work found that about 6% of men have had sex with another man. (Kinsey got a much higher number which is almost certainly bogus). A good modern meta-analysis gets about the same number.

but going back as far as Kinsey we know that the number of men who have had sex with another man is higher than the number of men who self-identify as gay or bi. There is a reason why early AIDS researchers used the term "men who have sex with men" and not "gay or bi men".

How much of this is just among ethnic groups who refuse to admit to being gay, though?

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That still sort of fits with can create gays. One thing I’ve found in dating is my taste of female body types seems to have some relationship to (1) earliest gf (2) who I currently have an emotional bond with.

I could see 1.8% of men being very gay and perhaps 1.8-6% having some fluidity. If you repress homosexuality then the extra 4% have less opportunity for gay sex so the gay sex attribute declines in them. They then develop relationships with females which develops emotional bonds and become more attracted to females.

Of course the LGBTQ people would say those people are gay. The bigots would say they can be straight.

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I'm not interested in doing "social contagion" vs. "inherent predisposition towards behavior previously repressed by social sanction" round 237 with someone who throws out wild speculation like "honestly I think most gays are happier in lavender marriages" without supporting evidence.

Regardless of whether you like my views. My main question “Were they right”

Is 100% yes. And it’s supported by the data

Silent Generation 1.8% gay. Gen Z 23.1% gay. And a key point here is it’s socially beneficial to be gay now and this is current data not how silent generation polled when they were kids. Silent Generation didn’t start being gay when it got cool. 3.4% of US adults are gay or lesbian (so completely excludes the huge rise in bi) so the Silent generation at 1.8% is still way below.

It's certainly unclear whether it was just activists making that claim versus it being widely accepted in the anti-gay community. I find it more likely that people hated the gays first (while understanding their existence) and came up with rationalizations second.

I think there's also a nuance in the understanding in that they can believe that someone can be brainwashed into actually being gay, and actually legitimately enjoying the feeling of guzzling cock. But anti-trans will believe that nobody can be trans. Their claim is that trans people literally cannot exist and trans identifying people are simply brainwashed into participating in self mutilation. That trans identifying people won't be happy about it, but won't be able to speak up while being imprisoned by ideology and a destroyed body.

I think the fact that Anti-Gay campaigns were titled things like "Save Our Children" suggests that at the very least, the leaders of the anti-gay community in the 1970's thought concerns about gays "recruiting" kids were widespread in the anti-gay community. While I am hardly effort posting, "anti-gay activists at the time acted like the public believed this" is some sort of evidence about the state of public concerns, whereas you are purely speculating based on your own intuitions.

Average people can also easily understand how it's possible to achieve sexual pleasure throug homosexual activity even if they do not personally want to participate. Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation. Therefore they can only conclude that it must be the result of either mental illness or brainwashing.

I agree that's probably a factor, but I think there's more to it than that. Humans are pretty good at guessing the sex of other people. A lot of the time when I meet a trans-identifying-man, my subconscious brain instantly says "man" even if the person is wearing lipstick, makeup, and a dress. So it feels like I am being asked to believe a lie. Of course it doesn't help that a lot of these trans-identifying-men seem to derive personal benefits from being treated as women such as an advantage in sports or easy access to women's changing facilities.

I think my reaction is pretty typical: "No, that's a dude pretending to be a chick" says my monkey brain. "This seems like a scam" says my frontal cortex. "Ewwww" says my lizard brain.

Meanwhile the average person cannot understand why soemone would gain satisfaction from severe genital and body mutilation.

I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.

If someone could wish for all these things, then why couldn’t they wish to be the opposite gender as well? Is it so much of a stretch?

And if you can accept the comprehensibility of that sort of wish, then I don’t think the comprehensibility of SRS is too much of a stretch, although I absolutely understand why many people would evaluate that the drawbacks are not worth the benefits, and that it might be considered odd or disconcerting for that reason.

It's not about attainability but relatability. Nearly everyone in the world would want 1 million dollars if you offered it to them. Moving to germany is a bit more situational but most people can acknowledge that germany has pretty good sausage, kraut, beer, and fast cars. But ask a random person what's in it for someone who wants to be a woman and he'd likely be at a loss.

And it's not just that they want to be a woman. They want it so bad they'll chop off their dicks and pump their bodies full of chemicals to make a poor imitation of this.

But ask a random person what's in it for someone who wants to be a woman and he'd likely be at a loss.

I mean, let me just ask: do you really think that there's so little to recommend in the lives of half of all humanity, approximately 4 billion people, that no rational actor, under a Rawlsian veil of ignorance, could ever want to be one of them?

If you do believe that to be the case, then the logical corollary is that you should become the most ardent of committed feminist activists. Alleviating their suffering would surely be the most pressing of political issues.

(I'm intentionally being a bit glib, but, what you said could be interpreted in that way.)

I'm sure there will be many people who can answer this. And they will probably be more sympathetic to the trans cause. But to the average person's point of view the trans person's pov is so alien as to be indistinguishable from insanity.

Well now I'm kinda curious. Do you think being a woman is that much worse than being a man? (I don't want to draw you into a long obnoxious argument, I just want to make sure I'm properly understanding you.)

I don't think it has anything to do with "better" vs. "worse". I just think the imaginative gap is so large that a lot of people struggle to even get their heads around the hypothetical.

The average person with a net worth of less than a million dollars does not struggle to imagine what it would be like to have a million dollars. The average person who does not live in Germany does not struggle to imagine what it would be like to live in Germany. (I'm not even saying their imaginary conceptions of these two counterfactuals are accurate: I'm just saying that most people don't struggle to imagine them, even if their imaginary conception thereof is wrong.) But waking up tomorrow morning as a member of the opposite sex is such a bizarre and alien concept that the average person struggles to get their head around it. I think the average person would have an easier time imagining what it would be like to be blind or paralysed than to imagine what it would be like to wake up as a member of the opposite sex.

I think you're making some good points and my argument is phrased quite poorly. I think it kind of conflates and the idea of wanting to become a woman and the idea of wanting to transition. I'm kind of too tired to put this coherently for now but you're definitely largely right.

They want it so bad they'll chop off their dicks

That is not the first time that bottom chirurgery has been characterised in such a way on this forum, and I would like to correct the record:

To the best of my knowledge, vaginoplasty (male-to-female) does not involve 'chopping off' anything. The male genitals in their entirety are rearranged into female genitals, with the penis becoming the clitoris and the scrotum becoming the labia; phalloplasty (female-to-male) is the same but in the other direction.

Also, the methods used are very similar to those used in within-sex reconstructive chirurgery in cisgender patients who have suffered genital injuries.

and pump their bodies full of chemicals

My brother in Christ, what do you think the endocrine system does?

to make a poor imitation of this.

It may have been a 'poor imitation' a century ago, but much progress has been made; the regret rate for transgender operations is less than that for knee replacements.

If it's feasible to fashion an entire penis from no-penis-at-all, why aren't dick enhancements as common as breast enhancements?

There's a clear strain of denialism and wishful thinking around physical gender transitioning, both surgical and endocrine, that sells it as being as good as the real thing. Meanwhile away from the transgender sphere people deal with all manner of complications around relatively simple and far more common procedures within those same realms of medicine, whether it's nose jobs, butt lifts, HRT or cosmetic dentistry.

The male genitals in their entirety are rearranged into female genitals

Rearranged yes, female no. This is three card monte rhetoric. I'll be charitable and grant that they are rearranged into feminine genitals. You raise objections to imprecise language and then use the same means to smuggle in your own favourable biases.

If it's feasible to fashion an entire penis from no-penis-at-all, why aren't dick enhancements as common as breast enhancements?

Because no man will admit he has a small penis. Why do you think condoms come in sizes of “large,” “extra large,” and “super extra large?” You can mostly tell which men have a small dick by how angry they are on average.

If having a small penis is something to be ashamed of that's more incentive to crack the problem of making a small penis bigger. 50% of men have a smaller than average penis. The potential market is, ahem, sizeable.

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Joking aside, penis enlargement procedures are a real thing.

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phalloplasty (female-to-male) is the same but in the other direction.

This is just flat wrong, and brings your supposed expertise about "gender-affirming care" into question.

You may have noticed that female people have no flesh in between their legs which can be used to fashion a crude imitation of a penis. To accomplish this, surgeons (or "chirurgeons" as you insist on calling them, apparently for no better reason than obfuscation and misdirection) must carve out a chunk of tissue from elsewhere on the patient's body, typically the forearm or thigh. It's similar to a skin graft, except that much more flesh is required, meaning the tiny minority of trans-identified females who undergo phalloplasties have telltale scars on their thighs or forearms for months or years afterwards. Wikipedia has some NSFW photos. So much for "correcting the record".

It may have been a 'poor imitation' a century ago, but much progress has been made; the regret rate for transgender operations is less than that for knee replacements.

Even if it was the case that the majority of trans people who undergo bottom surgery don't regret doing so, that doesn't tell us anything about how poor the imitation is. Even if 100% of people who get breast implants don't regret doing so, that wouldn't tell us anything about how realistic breast implants are. Satisfaction is not perfectly correlated with realism.

the regret rate for transgender operations is less than that for knee replacements.

I've heard so many trans activists independently recite this canard, and they never provide a source. Until one is provided, I'm taking this about as seriously as "trans panic laws have enabled people to literally get away with murder!!!1!"

"chirurgeons" as you insist on calling them, apparently for no better reason than obfuscation and misdirection

I've seen the word used interchangeably with vivisectionist in media that want to have an archaic flavor (like early MtG cards), so it's quite something to see a pro-trans-surgery person use the word for doctors performing those surgeries.

A Freudian slip?

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Isn’t this just the German word for surgeon?

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This is just flat wrong, and brings your supposed expertise about "gender-affirming care" into question.

I said that it was to the best of my knowledge. I am not an expert compared to professional chirurgeons, but compared to those who think a vagina is a lack of penis, and imagine the male-to-female operation to be something akin to the work of Lorena Bobbit, I think I'm doing fairly well, much in the same way as, while I do not claim be able to run the U. S. Defense Department better than James Mattis, I am fairly certain I could do a better job than Pete Hegseth.

You may have noticed that female people have no flesh in between their legs

This is a common misconception held by many men, leading to an epidemic of bed-time headaches among their wives.

which can be used to fashion a crude imitation of a penis. To accomplish this, surgeons (or "chirurgeons" as you insist on calling them,

'Chirurgeon' is from the Greek 'χείρ' (hand) + '-ουργός' (worker); 'surgeon' is an eroded form of the same.

apparently for no better reason than obfuscation and misdirection)

I am getting just a wee bit tired of the snide insults.

must carve out a chunk of tissue from elsewhere on the patient's body, typically the forearm or thigh. It's similar to a skin graft, except that much more flesh is required, meaning the tiny minority of trans-identified females who undergo phalloplasties have telltale scars on their thighs or forearms for months or years afterwards.

The same applies for cis-men, who were born biologically male in all respects, identify as men, and suffer injuries between their legs. Does this make such a man less male, or is this merely an appeal to disgust?

Even if 100% of people who get breast implants don't regret doing so, that wouldn't tell us anything about how realistic breast implants are.

Well, are we talking a woman whom you never suspected had implants because she went to a chirurgeon who made them look natural, or a woman who chose a doctor whose work was obvious at first sight so that everyone would know that she could afford them?

I've heard so many trans activists independently recite this canard, and they never provide a source.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/transgender-debate-gender-affirming-surgeries-have-a-regret-rate-of-one-per-cent-or-less-for-knee-replacements-its-17-per-cent-vic-valentine-4258947

I'm taking this about as seriously as "trans panic laws have enabled people to literally get away with murder!!!1!"

D. F. McLaughlin?

Paris Lee?

chirurgeon

So, for real, what’s the deal here? I don’t have a dog in this ongoing argument, I’m sincerely curious. I had never even seen this word before skimming through this thread, and a quick google only gives “archaic synonym for surgeon”. To my knowledge it’s not used by any surgeons or even seemingly medical historians. Where did you pick this up? Are you just a super-hellenophile classicist, or something?

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'Chirurgeon' is from the Greek 'χείρ' (hand) + '-ουργός' (worker); 'surgeon' is an eroded form of the same.

If you're trying to convince anyone here of anything (and not just shit-stirring), this cringeworthy attempt at verbal elitism is really not going to help. We know how to speak English very, very well around here. Feel free to join us.

I said that it was to the best of my knowledge. I am not an expert compared to professional chirurgeons, but compared to those who think a vagina is a lack of penis, and imagine the male-to-female operation to be something akin to the work of Lorena Bobbit, I think I'm doing fairly well, much in the same way as, while I do not claim be able to run the U. S. Defense Department better than James Mattis, I am fairly certain I could do a better job than Pete Hegseth.

And despite not being a professional "chirurgeon", I can do a better job than you. So you were obviously wrong to arrogate to yourself the responsibility of "correcting the record" on bottom surgery. (There's actually a specific Facebook group devoted to cataloguing this kind of behaviour.) If I ask someone if they can drive a car, I want to know if they can actually drive a car. Being able to drive a car better than an amputee who just drank a fifth of vodka is not a high bar to clear.

This is a common misconception held by many men, leading to an epidemic of bed-time headaches among their wives.

Har de har har. You knew perfectly well that I meant that female people have no flesh between their legs which could be used to fashion a crude facsimile of a penis. A clitoris (even a massively engorged clitoris) cannot be used to make a neopenis. We both know this. Why do you insist on wasting both our time with crude potty humour?

The same applies for cis-men, who were born biologically male in all respects, identify as men, and suffer injuries between their legs. Does this make such a man less male, or is this merely an appeal to disgust?

It's not an appeal to disgust: it's pointing out that you were mistaken. You described a phalloplasty as "the same [as a vaginoplasty] but in the other direction". You were wrong: there was a massive piece of the procedure that you were conspicuously omitting. The appropriate response to this being pointed out to you is to admit your error. The appropriate response is not to throw a strop, bring up a completely irrelevant "analogy" and say "oh whatever, stop trying to make gender-affirming care sound gross!"

I could just as easily make the same argument in the opposite direction: that by failing to accurately describe what a phalloplasty entails, you were either ignorant about what the procedure entails, or you were knowingly trying to make it sound less invasive than it really is. Neither is a great look.

I am getting just a wee bit tired of the snide insults.

I will happily desist, if you can provide me with a better explanation for why you insist on using antiquated terms that aren't even terms of art in the professions under discussion.

https://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/transgender-debate-gender-affirming-surgeries-have-a-regret-rate-of-one-per-cent-or-less-for-knee-replacements-its-17-per-cent-vic-valentine-4258947

I note that this is an opinion piece, and that Valentine doesn't actually show where they got their figures from:

Of nearly 3,500 trans people attending the UK’s largest clinic in London just 16 of them – 0.47 per cent – had any regrets. And an analysis of studies from around the world found a regret rate of one per cent for gender-affirming surgeries. It is hard to compare different interventions (as I say, we’re all different) but, as a yardstick, the regret rate for knee replacements is 17 per cent and for hip replacements five per cent.

This paragraph doesn't contain any hyperlinks. I asked you for a source for the claim that knee replacement surgery has a higher regret rate than gender-affirming care, and instead you provided me with an example of someone else making the exact same unevidenced claim as you.

D. F. McLaughlin?

From the source you provided: "The jury acquitted Patnode of second-degree murder and convicted him of second-degree manslaughter".

Paris Lee?

From the source you provided: "Ward was convicted of voluntary manslaughter in May 2025." I understand a retrial is pending, but Ward certainly hasn't "gotten away with murder" yet.

I suppose technically being convicted of manslaughter rather than murder is "getting away with murder", but I'm not aware of a single person who used the "trans panic" defense and then walked, which is the affirmative claim that dozens of trans activists have independently made to me. Show me an example of that, and we can talk.

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I think I'm doing fairly well, much in the same way as, while I do not claim be able to run the U. S. Defense Department better than James Mattis, I am fairly certain I could do a better job than Pete Hegseth.

No, I'm sorry, you're doing worse than Pete Hegseth. You don't need to know the fine details of the surgery to know what you're proposing could never work. It's basic anatomy.

This is a common misconception held by many men, leading to an epidemic of bed-time headaches among their wives.

If you really actually believe it can be fashioned into a penis, how do you explain doctors carving out huge chunks of forearms during phalloplasties?

I am getting just a wee bit tired of the snide insults.

Is he wrong though? What's the point of using a form of a word that no one uses when writing in English?

The same applies for cis-men, who were born biologically male in all respects, identify as men, and suffer injuries between their legs. Does this make such a man less male, or is this merely an appeal to disgust?

You claimed a vaginoplasty does not involve chopping anything off, and that a phalloplasty is the same process in reverse. He's pointing out how you're completely wrong on the facts, why are you trying to change the subject now?

http://www.scotsman.com/news/opinion/columnists/transgender-debate-gender-affirming-surgeries-have-a-regret-rate-of-one-per-cent-or-less-for-knee-replacements-its-17-per-cent-vic-valentine-4258947

Of nearly 3,500 trans people attending the UK’s largest clinic in London just 16 of them – 0.47 per cent – had any regrets. And an analysis of studies from around the world found a regret rate of one per cent for gender-affirming surgeries. It is hard to compare different interventions (as I say, we’re all different) but, as a yardstick, the regret rate for knee replacements is 17 per cent and for hip replacements five per cent.

The only link around these statistics is the word "London", it leads to the "London" tag of the newspaper you just linked to, not a study done in a London clinic.

It may have been a 'poor imitation' a century ago, but much progress has been made; the regret rate for transgender operations is less than that for knee replacements.

Sure, if you don't count people that stopped responding to your surveys, the responses you get will tend to say they're quite satisfied.

Also, if the results were so great, you'd think the overwhelming majority of trans males wouldn't be avoiding it like the plague.

It may have been a 'poor imitation' a century ago, but much progress has been made; the regret rate for transgender operations is less than that for knee replacements.

Suicide rate post gender reassignment still a lot higher than it is post knee replacement.

To the best of my knowledge, vaginoplasty (male-to-female) does not involve 'chopping off' anything. The...

To the average person, what you describe and "chopping off" are basically the same thing and repugnant for basically the same reasons. If it isn't literally "chopping off", that's a technicality, like "the burger doesn't taste like sewage, it tastes like excrement, so you're wrong when you say it tastes like sewage!".

I think most people can easily make sense of the idea that you might wish that certain aspects of your life were different. Someone might wish they were taller, or they had a million dollars, or they lived in Germany instead of America. These are all considered normal and comprehensible; most people don’t have trouble with the mere notion of a counterfactual.

You're gerrymandering because these are all harmless as desires. Consider another example: I understand why people might want another roll at the die of high school. This is normal, in the sense that people often have regrets.

It's not normal, nor does it make sense to me, to actually make this into a life project. In fact, it would be very alarming and I would not trust the person who sincerely attempts to redo their high school experience (at the cost of tens of thousands of dollars and medical procedures with non-trivial effects) to have a good view of what would fulfill them since they seem mentally imbalanced/lacking basic prudence and social insight to explain why this is a very bad thing to try to impose on people (the mental health comorbidities make it even harder with trans).

In any case, it would not suffice as a justification to let them pull a Steve Buscemi even if they could convince me they'd be happier. High school doesn't exist for the pleasure of adults.

You’re conflating two things that I never conflated. There are two separate questions:

  1. Whether the desire for SRS (or being trans in general) is coherent and understandable, outside of being a product of “mental illness or brainwashing”.

  2. Whether society should rearrange itself to accommodate the desires of trans people.

I was only addressing (1). Personally, I answer yes to (1) and no to (2).

I don’t believe that, at our current level of medical technology, men can become women. If you’re born a man then you’ll stay a man. And as a corollary, I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men) should be given access to women’s spaces, nor should they expect to be recognized as women by other people. But, in line with my general libertarian priors, I think that consenting adults should mostly be free to dress how they want and get whatever medical procedures they want, and I understand why some people would opt for SRS for psychological comfort, even though it can’t actually at the end of the day fully realize their desires.

I don’t believe that MTFs (i.e. men [by chromosomes and natal biology, women by identity]) should be given access to women’s spaces

I'm not sure that there ought to be separate men's and women's spaces, if their existence leads to things like a trans woman dying of cancer because she isn't allowed in the women's ward, and also isn't allowed in the men's ward.

The mother's version of events has not yet been established by a judiciary. I'm guessing there's a lot more to this case that hasn't come out yet.

Bro I'm gonna be deadass honest with you, there are a lot of freaks who are just gonna hang out in the bathroom and listen to women fart and piss if we don't have separate bathrooms. But if women are cool with that then sure, tear down those walls.

As a resident of a PNW city with a large trans population I'd say the way things are going is many newly constructed spaces have only a gender neutral single shared room with sinks and a mirror and then a series of stalls that have full floor to ceiling walls and wooden locking doors. This is certainly more expensive than "two rooms with plastic dividers around stalls" but it would be difficult to hear anyone fart or pee through the doors (which honestly I appreciate for entirely non gender issues reasons).

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If a person desires to have a limb amputated (which does happen) we accurately assess this to be mental illness.

If they desire to become the different gender, we say that is valid and give them the medical option to pursue it.

I really can't see a space morally between allowing a doctor to amputate someone's arm and allowing them to amputate someone's genitals. I can see why someone might want it. But I can't see why it should be allowed under our current system of medical ethics. Although, as a libertarian, perhaps you are okay with both surgeries, which would be a logically consistent position.

If a person desires to have a limb amputated (which does happen) we accurately assess this to be mental illness.

Not in Canada. Some medics actually were willing to bite the modus ponens (or the modus tollens, I forget which is which.)

Although, as a libertarian, perhaps you are okay with both surgeries

Yes.

I'm actually mostly ok with saying that transsexuality is a mental illness. On the one hand, from a certain perspective that's literally what it is: it's an abnormal neurological development that causes adverse health effects, most notably to the reproductive system. On the other hand, I want to stress that it's not merely a mental illness. An individual's reasons for wanting to transition, or wanting to be the opposite gender, can be very complex and multifaceted, and they can go beyond a simple "my body just doesn't feel right". The "wrong body map" theory is a convenient and digestible PR narrative that the trans community can use to explain the phenomenon to normies and make it more medically legitimate, but it only covers a small portion of people's actual experiences.

I do think that the neuroscience underlying transsexuality differs in crucial ways from the neuroscience underlying other types of body dysmorphia, but I don't know the current state of research in this area and I have no way of directly proving it, and at any rate it's a largely academic question.

Regarding the references to amputation, I feel compelled to note, contra Freud, that a vagina is not the mere absence of a penis; it is its own organ, it's just as much of a positive presence as a penis is. The ideal for MTFs is not to engage in a simple act of self-destruction, but to trade one functioning sexual organ for another (current surgical techniques, of course, cannot actually achieve this, but can only provide a facsimile of it).

I mean even if the neuroscience underlying transexuality differed in a crucial way from other things, is 'something being a naturally occurring pattern in the brain' enough to legitimize it as a way of life? If there was a particular brain configuration that made you attracted to infants, which occurred naturally and spontaneously, it doesn't really seem sensible for society to say 'oh that's natural get out of his way'

I just feel like the metaphor obviously doesn't work. If a trans woman gets SRS and has a functional neovagina that she can have sex and orgasm with then she still has genitals that do most of what people use genitals for. Whereas if someone gets their arm chopped off they don't have a different appendage that does most of what an arm does, they just don't have an arm anymore.

Also if you're for example, a trans woman, your penis is not often "usable" sexually either because of psychological issues with using it, or because of long term atrophy from hormones, or because you're straight and wouldn't be using it anyway. In such cases using the tissue to construct a neovagina allows for functionality where previously none existed.

If a trans woman gets SRS and has a functional neovagina that she can have sex and orgasm with then she still has genitals that do most of what people use genitals for.

The word "functional" is doing a lot of work, here.

Female genitals are reproductive organs. If they cannot be used for reproduction or any related ancillary functions (e.g. menstruation), we would not typically say they are healthy, functioning organs (prepubescent and menopausal women excepted). Indeed, if a female person is unable to get pregnant or suffers from amenorrhea, that constitutes a health problem. Imagine if a woman went to her GP and said that she'd missed her last three periods but didn't think she was pregnant, and he shrugged and said "but you can still fuck and come, right?" He'd likely be struck off the medical register, and rightfully so.

You can easily use contrived, tortured reasoning like this to "prove" that everyone has a vagina, in the form of their rectum. Your argument proves too much.

I just feel like the metaphor obviously doesn't work. If a trans woman gets SRS and has a functional neovagina that she can have sex and orgasm with then she still has genitals that do most of what people use genitals for.

Any hole is something a man can have sex with, that doesn't make it a functional vagina. The ability to orgasm post-surgery is also more of a distant possibility than a reliable result. There's a reason why most trans males never go ahead with surgery.

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Another nuance here is that wanting to be the opposite sex and viscerally yearning for SRS are different things. I think @Primaprimaprima was talking about e.g. sad young men who wish that they'd been born as women in a daydreamy, intellectual kind of way but don't have the dysphoric "ick, ick, ick, get that thing off of me" reaction to their penises that pattern-matches to the arm thing, and who, if they attempt a surgical transition, would only do so in an attempt to make the dream come true. I think it's true that that sort of trans desire is no more pathological, and no more difficult for normies to grok, than yearning to have been born to different life circumstances in some other way.

I think it still runs into the category issue under contest, namely, "what is gender", in ways that "Six-foot-five", "has a million dollars", and "lives in Germany" don't. What makes them normal and comprehensible is that the categories involved and adjudicating membership in them are agreed-upon.

The procedures to make someone 6'5", a millionaire, or a resident of Germany are similarly straightforwardly understood as to what they entail and what constitutes a successful intervention. Gender is different: under the GC definition of gender, no amount of intervention will ever be sufficient to move from membership in one category to another. Conversely, and somewhat confusingly, under the trans-activist definition of gender, no amount of intervention is ever required to move membership from one category to another. Many (most?) people seem to have a mushy concept of gender and see current SRS and hormonal interventions as insufficient to move membership from one category to another but are unsure about whether this will always be true and what a sufficient intervention would entail.

Exactly. If my process to 'make somebody a millionaire' was to surgically attach 1 million dollars worth of fake bills to them and then ask nicely at a societal level for everybody to 'treat them like a millionaire' whilst not actually giving them any spending money that's hardly making a millionaire.

To be clear, I personally believe that the criteria for membership in a gender category is relatively straightforward, and I believe that most other people believe this too, even if they claim not to. A man is an adult human male with XY chromosomes that produces sperm. A woman is an adult human female with XX chromosomes that produces eggs. A few edge cases don’t impugn the general validity of the definition. Everyone knows this, including trans activists, probably.

I don’t believe that SRS as it currently exists is capable of changing someone from one gender to the other. But, given that these matters are so deeply intertwined with matters of personal identity, I can understand why some people would opt for the “next best thing”, even if it’s not perfect.

Yeah, I suppose the last category I describe should be expanded to include those with a well-defined concept of gender category rules but who also see the currently-available suite of interventions as insufficient to pass across category boundaries. Perhaps the difference in understanding I was trying to articulate falls somewhere near someone seeing the interventions are insufficient and therefore don't see the motivation to undergo life-altering changes that don't achieve the end goal, similar to what Bingbong described here for the "millionaire" case. It's probably downstream of understanding the categories as discrete and mutually exclusive, and if your available states in the (M, F) category space are (1, 0) and (0, 1), any intervention that doesn't move someone from one bucket to another get evaluated as "0% successful" under that model since (0.2, 0.8) isn't a valid state.

connotations of literal pedophilia,

I don't think it outweighs the rest of the argument, but it seems relevant that certain parts of the mainstream center-right remain deeply uneasy about the comfort of the Pride folks with, for lack of a better term, age gap relationships within their communities. To their credit, they did largely kick out NAMBLA, but stories like Milo's are not exactly uncommon.

The reason "they're trying to trans your kids!" gets denounced as right-wing conspiracy-mongering is that active verb "transing". As the activists view it, they aren't transing anybody: they're trying to reach out to kids who are, in fact, already trans, and help them express their true selves. The implied accusation that they have some sort of program to brainwash cis kids into wanting to transition feels offensive and absurd - the only kids they're trying to reach out to really are trans, it's just that you can't tell who's in the closet, so obviously you have to shower everyone with "it's okay to come out, it'd be so brave, so life-changing" to ferret them out".

That would make a great deal of sense if, when these exact same kids detransition after a couple years, they didn't say "you were never really trans" when the share the sordid details of how exactly the "gender affirming care" was provided to them.

I see two additional issues here, which intertwine.

The first is that there is no objective way to tell if a person is "trans." It's purely self identification. Which is reason to be skeptical about gender ideology, but it also relates directly to the second issue, which is that in many circles, there is a lot of social status accorded to trans people. There are surely organizations which are very welcoming to trans people.

When you combine that with the facts that many young people are desperate for both social status and a feeling of being accepted, I think it's virtually certain that the desire for social status and acceptance will heavily inform the decisions of young people who are deciding whether or not to self-identify as trans.

So to me, it's completely reasonable to use the word "trans" as a transitive verb. In effect, offering acceptance and social status to a young person in exchange for an acknowledgment.

I don't see the objection; this seems precisely consistent with my claim that trans advocacy in schools is intended to target the "really trans". Those cis kids who give it a go but turn out not to like it in the long run are, indeed, told they were never really trans, and thus only collateral damage of a program which was intended to help those of their classmates who really were trans. You may shudder at the brute-force utilitarianism - I certainly do; it's why I'm opposed to children undergoing medical transition! - but I genuinely don't see where the internal contradiction is supposed to be.

The contradiction is that the program seems to be doing a spectacularly poor job at separating wheat from chaff, and that many of the purported signs and symptoms of "being trans" espoused by trans activists (including primary and secondary school teachers) are so broad and ill-defined that they could apply to literally anyone. A medical test which produces false positives at the same rate as true positives is useless. But when it's pointed out to trans activists that their program is producing false positives at an alarmingly high rate, their response is typically not "oh shit, we need to do better" but some variant on "that isn't happening, and it's good that it is".

Eventually people start wondering what the difference is between sufficiently advanced incompetence and malice. I don't agree that "the purpose of a system is what it does", but when trans activists are so resistant to switch up their system even when its shortcomings have been pointed out to them, it does inevitably make one wonder if their stated goal differs from their revealed one.

A medical test which produces false positives at the same rate as true positives is a useless medical test.

Not necessarily. If, for a cohort of 100, a test picks up 90 negatives, 5 real positives, and 5 false positives - and if the positive outcomes of giving the true positives the appropriate treatment outweigh the negative consequences of giving the false positives unnecessary treatment - the test, while not ideal, is far from useless. I think a lot of trans activists would endorse the idea that allowing a trans person to transition produces more utility than causing someone to waste a few years beginning and then reversing an unwanted transition wastes. Which seems sensible to me where adults are concerned, children are where I draw the line.

Which seems sensible to me where adults are concerned, children are where I draw the line.

So, in other words, you agree that these "awareness campaigns" targeting children in primary and secondary school are a bad idea?

Not quite; I think that medical transition for under-16s should be functionally banned in general, thus making awareness campaigns harmless because no irreversible physical damage to minors not yet old enough to weigh the risks responsibly would occur. If the availability of SRS for minors remains constant I concede that cutting back on the awareness campaigns would probably be justified, but that's clearly attacking the problem from the wrong angle IMO, and would be far less successful overall because secondary-school kids have tons of ways to learn about transition even if no word of it is breathed at school.

Chest binders are generally considered a subset of social transition, and yet can cause serious physical damage.

Even then, I'm sure you would agree that a male child who has been wearing female clothes and referred to by female pronouns from the age of 10 onwards is far more likely to seek medical transition than a male child who has not.

As far as I can understand it, we agree on the following:

  1. Trans awareness campaigns lack precision in their targeting, and produce a significant number of false positives i.e. they lead children who would not otherwise identify as trans to erroneously believe themselves to be trans
  2. Even in jurisdictions in which gender-affirming care for minors is banned, a child who has been socially "affirmed" for years prior to the age of majority is far more likely to seek medical transition as an adult than a child who has not.

I don't really see the difference between the above and the conservative framing of "they're trying to trans my child!" It just seems like a Russell conjugation.

Maybe what you object to is the ascription of intent: that trans activists aren't setting out to make non-trans children erroneously believe that they're trans, that that's just an unfortunate byproduct of a well-intended campaign. But given trans activists' reluctance to even acknowledge the false positives, this seems like a rather pedantic objection in the scheme of things.

If we're embracing "brute-force utilitarianism", we might as well shuck anything other than heteronormativity from school curricula anyway. Why should we care about the concerns of small minorities? The greater good is at stake!

We shouldn't do so, obviously.

I don't see the objection; this seems precisely consistent with my claim that trans advocacy in schools is intended to target the "really trans". Those cis kids who give it a go but turn out not to like it in the long run are, indeed, told they were never really trans, and thus only collateral damage of a program which was intended to help those of their classmates who really were trans.

If they were never really trans, but underwent hormone therapy and got surgeries, surely that means they got transed?

No; it just means that they were mistaken for trans, by themselves and others. You wouldn't say that someone who got spooked by a very forceful "are you sure there's nothing deeper to your occasional twinges of bowel pain" campaign, was given an erroneous colon cancer diagnosis, and got unnecessary surgery they regretted, had been cancered.

Isn't the better analogy the person with bowel pain, Munchausens by internet and then goes to a 'provider' who confirms their motivated reasoning?

I think cancer diagnosis is a bad analogy. Transgenderism is about a desire to be the opposite sex, so there is no way to be mistaken about it. If an XY-haver wants to be a woman, they are definitionally transgender.

The actual resolution is that gender identity can change with time (since it is a desire) - the detrans people were trans in the past, but now are cis. Obviously, it is not a resolution that mainstream activists accept, but it's the correct one.

Well, a lot of trans activists (including people in this thread) would disagree with you that "desire" has anything to do with trans identification.

And more's the point – can't people be mistaken about their desires? Have you never thought you wanted something, then realised you didn't really?

Well, a lot of trans activists (including people in this thread) would disagree with you that "desire" has anything to do with trans identification.

Yeah it's a little muddy when you get into the specifics. I think my definition of it as a desire captures the reality of the phenomenon, to extent it isn't made-up (word games, "male/female brains", etc)

And more's the point – can't people be mistaken about their desires? Have you never thought you wanted something, then realised you didn't really?

I think it's more that you have a platonic image of the desire, but when you try and manifest the desire, the reality is lacking in ways you didn't predict in your head.

A man thinks he wants to transition, but the interventions don't work well enough. He's spending an inordinate amount of time/effort, only to fall far short of the platonic image of "transgender woman" that he formed in his mind from pro-trans media and shemale pornography. He is unhappy and wishes he didn't transition in the first place, because he misunderstood what being a "transgender woman" would actually be like.

This might sound like I'm playing word games - but the alternative is for "desire" to lose all meaning. No one can ever see the full implications of what they want.

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Is it desire or delusion, or first one, then the other?

Delusion of competence is belief-level. Self-serving bias and motivated reasoning keep the self-assessment inflated, and the identity ("I am a singer") becomes too costly to revise. Florence Foster Jenkins is the textbook case.

Delusions that fit this pattern get called wish-fulfilling delusions (grandiose delusions, erotomania). The general principle underneath all of it is that the mind resolves the tension between what you want and what is true by editing the perception of what is true.

Many of these other delusionals don't have activists telling them exactly what they want to hear.

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You wouldn't say that someone who got spooked by a very forceful "are you sure there's nothing deeper to your occasional twinges of bowel pain" campaign, was given an erroneous colon cancer diagnosis, and got unnecessary surgery they regretted, had been cancered.

I mean... why not? It's the job of the medical professional to say "calm the fuck down, you don't have cancer" rather then "your wish is my command, cash register go 'cha-ching'!". If they go for the latter, that does sound like getting cancered.

Well, I'm not saying the medical system would have acted correctly - though they might; the optimum number of erroneous cancer diagnoses is not necessarily zero. But I'm not asking you to picture shills who get kickbacks for every colonectomy or anything. Picture, instead, sincere people so keen not to let any actual cancer patients die preventable deaths after ignoring early symptoms that they forget about the effects of their rhetoric on people who are, in fact, healthy. We may criticize such people, but we wouldn't accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible, or of being dishonest when they said their message was targeted at people who actually had cancer. And it certainly doesn't prove otherwise if what they tell the people who got unnecessary surgery is "sorry, turns out you never actually had cancer".

I really like that analogy. Especially since it works for how modern medicine is practiced. People have unnecessary tests done all the time, patients demand frivolous CT scans, and psychiatrists overdiagnose as people medicalize ordinary suffering due to awareness campaigns.

Seeing trans-activism as another overzealous awareness campaign does seem to explain a good part of the movement.

Picture, instead sincere people so keen not to let any actual cancer patients die preventable deaths after ignoring early symptoms that they forget about the effects of their rhetoric on people who are, in fact, healthy. We may criticize such people, but we wouldn't accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible,

But to the extent we don't do that, it's because they have objective-ish diagnostic criteria that tell with a high degree of accuracy (even if it never reaches 100%) whether or not they have colon cancer, and in the event they degree of accuracy is not high, that information is shared with the patient. If the official diagnostic criteria was "patient says they have colon cancer, and does not change their mind for the period of 6 months" we would, in fact, accuse them of only caring about turning as many people into colonectomy-seekers as possible.

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Defenders would say that those procedures and treatments can be done for many reasons besides being trans, so even if someone got them, it doesn't mean they're transed

But there are cases of people who come out in public and say they thought they were trans, were affirmed by everyone around them from the public school system to social workers and medical professionals, then detransitioned, and then get told they were never really trans.

Defenders would say that if someone undertook an unnecessary procedure out of delusion, then it's a personal failure and is not something the fault of what trans advocates have done. They never were and never will be part of the trans community.

Ok, but even if it was out of delusion, and it was a personal failure, how does that not mean they got transed? Aren't medical professionals supposed to be able to accurately diagnose cases?

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Detransition statistics are one of those things where the left and the right live in different realities. Trans advocates claim it basically never happens and so it does much more good to focus on encouraging transitioning for those who want to. Anti-trans claim that it happens a lot and is a deep, disturbing tragedy.

If they really actually believed it basically never really happens, they would debate it. They still, however follow the #nodebate tactics, which means they don't.

They do tend to cite statistics for medical detransition, where the numbers are indeed quite low. In this case, the right wingers are the ones using only anecdotes. I imagine debate seems like a waste of time when your opponent's seem to exist in a world entirely separate from your own. That goes for both sides.

They do tend to cite statistics for medical detransition, where the numbers are indeed quite low.

iirc this is because the collected statistics are for people who registered detransition at the same clinic they transitioned at, as the process is to ask clinics which of their registered patients do they know detransitioned, which... doesn't exactly capture the whole scope of the thing, especially when a lot of it is "stop taking the medication" and a lot of the medication is gotten from brazilian bathtub brewers vis shady discord servers and subreddits.

They'll receive brownie points for citing statistics once they stop trying to ruin the lives of scientists who provide inconvenient statistics.

They do tend to cite statistics for medical detransition, where the numbers are indeed quite low.

Online polls ran by explicitly pro-trans organizations, with "people who still identify as trans" being an entry criterion. And the issue I raised was they don't debate, so their arguments can't be addressed.

the right wingers are the ones using only anecdotes

Literally anyone other than a pro-trans org will give you numbers ranging from 30 to 80% desistence.

So in the same direction as what happened with Project 2025 or whatever that Heritage Foundation manifesto was called: public document whose intended audience was the ingroup getting disseminated by an outgroup, but without even uncharitable reinterpretation or quotemining.

It's not a difficult mystery at all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_propaganda

The Republican midterm strategy has been to repeatedly yell transgender and immigration over and over and over again at voters like the 9/11 family guy skit, hoping to get people to look past the financial disaster/corruption/etc.

We have motive. We have means. We have opportunity. They seem to be targeting right wing families in particular.

The thing that twinges my antennae a bit is that it was addressed to "Students of the XXX family," where XXX is the family that lived here about 10 years ago, for whom we still get mail from time to time, all sent from super right-wing organizations.

And we have evidence of it being a psyop already given the supposed group has no previous history and the only existing organization it has any attachment to has said it's an unauthorized usage of their name.

  • -19

To be clear, your position here is "Republicans are truthfully spreading the things their opponents believe, and this is a bad thing"?

If so, I'm confused at why you're comparing it to "Black Propaganda", which is definitionally about untrue stuff (according to Wikipedia, which is only honest).

If your position is that Republicans are untruthfully spreading things their opponents don't actually support: which things? It might help your comment to be explicit.

The organization is not a serious activist group and does not seem to exist for any other purpose except as a psyop, how does that not inherently count as untrue?

The created story here "the trans are trying to reach your kids through the mail" is not real.

  • -20

Are you pretending the content of their message is an untrue reflection of their opponents' beliefs? Because you keep avoiding addressing this.

I don't consider you a serious activist group; does that mean your comment is untrue?

The created story is 'the trans believe X,Y,Z thing that horrifies the normies', which is indeed real.

Could you try replying to the words in my comment?

Sure

To be clear, your position here is "Republicans are truthfully spreading the things their opponents believe, and this is a bad thing"?

Never said either A or B of this.

So back at your words, try replying to what is in my comment.

If so, I'm confused at why you're comparing it to "Black Propaganda", which is definitionally about untrue stuff (according to Wikipedia, which is only honest).

Is there a more proper term for pretending to be from an "enemy organization" in this way? From what I can tell black propaganda is the closest one.

I'm also not sure it is definitionally about untrue stuff only. "Black propaganda definition" on Google gets me "Black propaganda is a deceptive form of communication that hides its true origin and falsely attributes the message to an enemy, rival, or a fake authority to damage their reputation, undermine morale, or manipulate public opinion."

Nothing there requires the message to be misrepresenting.

And dictionary.com strictly says "propaganda that does not come from the source it claims to come from".

Again nothing there requires it to be misrepresented, merely that the source is a lie. Although I guess they actually made the organization as an LLC, so it's not strictly a lie to say it came from the "Texas transgender student union" as that does exist and was created a month ago for this purpose, it's just purposefully deceptive in the intention is to make people think this is some trans activists.

If your position is that Republicans are untruthfully spreading things their opponents don't actually support: which things? It might help your comment to be explicit.

It's a fake organization. Again not strictly fake, but the way people are meant to interpret it is obvious. And that intended interpretation is false.

  • -12

Is there a more proper term for pretending to be from an "enemy organization" in this way? From what I can tell black propaganda is the closest one.

"Fake, but accurate."

Never said either A or B of this.

So back at your words, try replying to what is in my comment.

So, I ask you a clarifying question: "Are you saying X?" I also add: "If you're NOT saying X, then (...)"

And, in your world, asking the question means I'm not replying to your comment?

That's pretty disingenuous.

Is there a more proper term for pretending to be from an "enemy organization" in this way?

I mean, the OP used "false flag", which is the general term (including non-propaganda stuff, like the Nazi false-flag attacks on themselves used as a pretext for the invasion of Poland).

And dictionary.com strictly says "propaganda that does not come from the source it claims to come from".

This is on par with "I asked the AI and that's what it said".

I gave you two sources but sure let's check some more from my Google search of "black propaganda definition"

The next result is Collins dictionary which says https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/black-propaganda#google_vignette

propaganda that does not come from the source it claims to come from.

Next is Salisbury University https://libapps.salisbury.edu/nabb-online/exhibits/show/propaganda/what-is-propaganda-/the-colors-of-propaganda

Black Propaganda

One of the most deceptive forms of propaganda involves material created by one group but attributed to another. Black propaganda falsely claims a message or image was created by the opposition in order to discredit them.

Then is the Southern Methodist University https://www.physics.smu.edu/pseudo/Propaganda/black.html

Black propaganda is any kind of material that is not obviously propaganda and whose origin is completely concealed. The item is accepted for something other than what it really is.

And last here's the "media manipulation casebook" https://mediamanipulation.org/definitions/propaganda/

black referring to propaganda that disguises its origins, often portraying itself as the target it is trying to discredit.

Weird how none of these links mention falsehood or misrepresentation of material as a necessary detail. Why did they all coincidentally miss that memo? If you can not provide a valid explanation for why all of these preexisting sources all happen to make the same mistake, then kindly stop arguing this point.

Heck even if we want to go to "well that's not what Wikipedia says", actually it does too. For example we can see their short definition in this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Black_propaganda

Black propaganda is propaganda which purports to be from one side in a conflict but is actually produced by the opposing side

Or just by looking at the first paragraph of the main Wikipedia page!

Black propaganda is covert disinformation deliberately attributed to a false source—often the very group it aims to discredit—in order to undermine that group's credibility.[1][2] Black propaganda contrasts with gray propaganda, which does not identify its source, as well as white propaganda, which does not disguise its origins at all.

It's not about whether or not it misrepresented the source, it's about attribution to a false source. The disinformation is because it's literally not from the correct source, the sourcing is a lie.

Which is why the end of the paragraph is

It is typically used to vilify or embarrass the enemy through misrepresentation.

Typically is an odd word for something apparently necessary in the definition. Typically is a word used when there are exceptions!

Likewise it says later

Sometimes the source is concealed or credited to a false authority and spreads lies, fabrications, and deceptions.

Weird if it was a necessary part they would use "sometimes" and not "all times" for spreading lies, tabrications, and deceptions.

I am right, it is not a necessary part of the definition.

The dictionary is a poor source here not because the word isn't correctly defined in the dictionary, but because quoting the dictionary is pulling a "ha ha, it's literally true, so I'm correct". The fact that the leaflets lie about their source literally fits the definition of black propaganda (since yes, it is fake), but it doesn't fit what people care about about black propaganda (which is that it substantially misrepresents the beliefs of the organization it claims to be from).

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propaganda

in order to discredit them.

Are you claiming that the actual beliefs of real trans advocacy organizations are propaganda lies meant to discredit them, comparable to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Do you really not get the distinction people are drawing here?

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The organization is not a serious activist group and does not seem to exist for any other purpose except as a psyop, how does that not inherently count as untrue?

By the organization being real and serious, and the evidence for it being in the OP?

The Republican midterm strategy has been to repeatedly yell transgender and immigration over and over and over again at voters like the 9/11 family guy skit, hoping to get people to look past the financial disaster/corruption/etc.

If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up? Why not just capitulate and become anti-trans and anti-immigration so there will be nothing more to talk about, and we can get onto important issues like economics and corruption?

The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.

If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up?

For two reasons:

First, because our reasons are important. If A supports P for reason X, and B opposes P for reason Y, it is entirely reasonable for A to accuse B of exploiting trivialities while refusing to concede on the matter, if X is more important than Y.

In the specific case of transgender and immigration, X = alleviating the actual suffering of actual human beings, who have suffered more than enough already. This leads into the second reason:

Because We Do Not Do That. It is a central tenet among many on the left, that throwing a few people, especially marginalised people, under the bus, for some nebulous notion of The Greater Good, is a thing that is simply Not Done.

It is the philosophy of Ana Thurmond from UNSONG:

I’m not God, I’m American. Universal salvation or bust.

It is the philosophy of House Pelekai from Lilo & Stitch (or if you were watching Netflix some years ago, Igor from Young Frankenstein):

ʻOhana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind.

It is the philosophy from the Talmud:

Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.

It is the philosophy from the Talmud:

This sounds like you're doing the meme, unless you are actually a follower of the Talmud. ("doing the meme" doesn't seem to be searchable slang, so here)

The odds that someone who is not a believer in X is able to correctly figure out that X supports his political point are pretty much zero. If what you were saying was correct, there would be a lot of Orthodox Jews who happened to believe that trans people's suffering is alleviated here, and would be pro-trans. There aren't, so it isn't correct.

And it is the easily observable truth that some people are beyond salvation, that infinite resources can be wasted on attempting their salvation, and that societies can ruin themselves in that attempt. And even short of that, some acts of salvation are so laughably cost-inefficient and self-destructive that the society performing them permanently degrades its ability to save anyone.

Maximalist principles like the ones you espouse there work in fiction. In real life they're the good intentions paving the road to hell.

If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up?

Because Dem primary voters aren't just out of step with the country as a whole. They're out of step with democrats as a whole.

I've argued with people on the sports thing many times. They believe sports is a salami-slicing strategy the right is using towards the end goal of criminalizing being trans. Thus they believe the appropriate response is to push back hard on the first slice and give the right no leverage. Well, that and to be precise, Dems have never claimed "protecting trans people/immigrants" is unimportant, just [insert scenario involving trans people] is unimportant.

They believe sports is a salami-slicing strategy the right is using towards the end goal of criminalizing being trans. Thus they believe the appropriate response is to push back hard on the first slice and give the right no leverage.

"I'd agree to this if I could trust you" is a respectable sentiment, but it's never uttered so I don't think the "salami-slicing" argument is what they actually believe.

Well, that and to be precise, Dems have never claimed "protecting trans people/immigrants" is unimportant, just [insert scenario involving trans people] is unimportant.

That's fine, but still means they should concede the issue around that specific scenario (sans the salami-slicing excuse).

Depends on A) who you're talking to and B) what you mean by "actually believe." I generally see three arguments from the left on sports, not always from the same people:

  1. Athletic ability isn't fair anyway, so it doesn't matter if trans people compete.

  2. Hormones reduce MTF athletic ability to the level of women

  3. Let the sports bodies decide.

Only a subset of the pro-sports even bother to argue 1 and 2, but pretty much all of them use point 3. They will never concede the argument because they think 3 is the true neutral option given their deference to science (specifically the science that confirms what they want to believe). The other part is that I don't think the left is entirely wrong about the right wanting to criminalize being trans, in that there are is a spectrum of resistance from "I'll use pronouns but internally I think this is kinda silly" to "Hell yes I want to criminalize being trans." The left, in keeping with their tendency to catastrophize, just treats the end of the spectrum as the norm. In keeping with that, they are genuine in believing the salami-slicing argument.

An increasing number of sports bodies, at least at the world level, are adopting genotype-based eligibility rules, maybe with some theoretical exceptions that are probably impossible in practice.

I've seen at least a few people argue "let the sports bodies decide", only to change course once those bodies disagreed with them, but maybe many have quietly accepted those decisions.

An increasing number of sports bodies, at least at the world level, are adopting genotype-based eligibility rules,

My favorite trivia along these lines is that the 3 top finishers in the Women's 800 metres at the 2016 Summer Olympics all had the 46,XY karyotype and produced levels of testosterone in the male range.

Worth noting that, AFAIK, none of them consider themselves "trans" either: the eligibility rules here don't purely exist to handle transgender athletes.

I've seen at least a few people argue "let the sports bodies decide", only to change course once those bodies disagreed with them

I love the graph of "should states decide their own laws on gay marriage?" and how it completely flips as soon as the Supreme Court weighs in.

If those issues are so unimportant, then why don’t you just… give them up?

I think the most charitable answer to this question is that (1) there is a small core of True Believers in the Democratic party which would freak out and sabotage things if the Party adopted the popular positions on trans issues and immigration; and (2) the Democrats genuinely and in good faith believe that if they get into power, the True Believers won't actually get to set the agenda. Therefore, from the Democrat perspective these issues are moot and irrelevant.

But to me, this is one of those partisan politics kind of things where partisan hacks from both sides engage in total and shameless hypocrisy. Democratic Party supporters don't hesitate for a millisecond to seize upon any issue which can be used to gain a political advantage, regardless of the overall importance of the issue and whether it's being used as a distraction. So it's hard to take this sort of complaint seriously.

(2). I think the most active Democrats in power believe they will just do the things they want after winning the election. Right side of history beliefs. So toning down and lying during the election is fine. (1) lie about your position (2). Do the thing (3) everyone likes the thing once it exists (4) continue winning elections.

The average Dem voter might believe they won’t do the thing when in power, but people who are more involved in politics are to the left of their voters.

Support for "victim" groups like trans and illegals is inseperable from leftist ideology. Low information voters may disagree with the object level but ideological believers and thinkers are overrepresented in the party power structure

I think the most charitable answer to this question is that (1) there is a small core of True Believers in the Democratic party which would freak out and sabotage things if the Party adopted the popular positions on trans issues and immigration; and (2) the Democrats genuinely and in good faith believe that if they get into power, the True Believers won't actually get to set the agenda. Therefore, from the Democrat perspective these issues are moot and irrelevant

I'm not following. If it's a small number of True Believers, and they wouldn't get to set the agenda, why not just openly oppose them and ignore their little freak-out?

I'm not following. If it's a small number of True Believers, and they wouldn't get to set the agenda, why not just openly oppose them and ignore their little freak-out?

To be clear, I'm not saying that they definitely wouldn't get to set the agenda, just that the mainstream Democrats sincerely believe that they won't.

But anyway, to answer your question, the primary issue I see is that major candidates need to have an organization supporting their candidacy. These organizations are staffed heavily with low paid and volunteer campaign workers, who tend to come heavily from the ranks of True Believers. So that if a candidate went against the True Believers on a hot button culture war issue, there would be a serious chance of a mutiny, sabotage, mass-quitting, etc. And the person's campaign would be in deep trouble even if the candidate's overall appeal to voters on the issues had improved.

Even putting aside the issue of campaign organizations, provoking a sense of betrayal among the True Believers could result in a lot of damage in obvious ways.

By contrast, once the candidate is elected, appeasing the campaign workers and other True Believers is less of a concern. And the agenda of the True Believers can be stalled in ways that are not overtly confrontational, for example if the candidate, having been elected, votes for some progressive bill but the Democratic party doesn't make an aggressive effort to get the bill through.

By the way, I'm not an expert on this issue but what really stuck in my mind was the most recent presidential election. Kamala Harris and other Democrats desperately needed support from male voters but were largely unable to release the kind of advertisements which would have resonated with male voters. And they were unable to release an ad countering Trump's infamous "they/them" ad. What I attribute this to is the campaign worker problem.

They can play kingmakers or saboteurs

So purge them, what's the issue?

They're sufficiently entrenched now it's very hard to purge them

Ok, but then trying to tell people that an issue that will throw your entrenched establishment into active rebellion is "unimportant" feels just a tad dishonest.

The fact that you resolutely will not do that under any circumstances shows that those issues are, in fact, important and worth talking about.

I don't think that logic holds water. If A and B disagree on many things, A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight A. In fact, there is a clear strategic advantage in doing so: as long as B is attacking A about X, A will have to sink energy into defending X that it could be using to defend other things, but if A ever decisively wins the battle over X, B, who never actually cared, won't actually have lost anything it cared about, so it's all upside.

This could be true if contesting X costs B less than A, but that's certainly not true here: trans issues are losers at the ballot box for democrats and everyone knows it. 'Kamala supports free gender-affirming care for illegal immigrant convicts' was disastrous for her campaign. She certainly didn't bait right wingers into attack her on that point as some devious stratagem to waste their efforts, they dug and dug to find a statement that could be interpreted in that way because they knew it was a winning issue for them. She, very simply, would obviously have been better off giving the issue up -- her especially, given she skipped right over the primary.

"A cares a lot about X" needn't mean "X is a vote-winner for A"; it could mean that A's elites are sincerely morally committed to X, that a Harris couldn't sleep at night if she won a cynical victory by throwing her trans immigrant sisters under the bus. Though I don't think it's trivial that she "would obviously have been better off giving the issue up" even cynically; it may very well be the case that she was stuck in a catch-22 where abandoning trans issues would have alienated as many leftists as endorsing them did moderates. (Obviously the far leftists weren't ever going to turn red, but they could have abstained, and, even more importantly, the activists cadre could have turned on the campaign in a very damaging way.)

Er, isn't Harris supposed to B? @Primaprimaprima asked @magicalkittycat why they were unwilling to give up their (leftist) perspective on trans issues if they don't actually matter. My point is that

Harris couldn't sleep at night if she won a cynical victory by throwing her trans immigrant sisters under the bus

Could certainly be the case, but her cynically playing up trans issues she doesn't really care about so the republicans waste their time on a meaningless battlefront doesn't make sense, because that 'meaningless' battlefront hurt her chances in the election. It could well be that republican politicians don't really care about trans issues and they only push them to win elections, but that wasn't what I thought you were suggesting.

(But of course republican politicians aren't telling people trans issues are an irrelevant distraction from the things that matter, even if that's what they truly believe; they're trying their absolute hardest to keep the focus on them, because they help win elections.)

Though I don't think it's trivial that she "would obviously have been better off giving the issue up" even cynically; it may very well be the case that she was stuck in a catch-22 where abandoning trans issues would have alienated as many leftists as endorsing them did moderates. (Obviously the far leftists weren't ever going to turn red, but they could have abstained, and, even more importantly, the activists cadre could have turned on the campaign in a very damaging way.)

OK, 'not trivial' I'll grant. It's not impossible things would have played out that way. But I still kind of doubt it. I said just 'giving up' the issues, not coming out with a full-throated denouncement (which might or might not have helped, but would have been a lot more risky). If she just mouthed platitudes about human rights and categorically refused to allow herself to get pinned down to any particular policy proposal, it's hard to see how that could have hurt. There are some issues you can't afford to shrug at, but while trans activists are surprisingly influential pound-for-pound, they never had that much reach. Did anyone even know she voiced tepid support for free gender reassignment surgery for illegal immigrant convicts before republicans dug it up? I don't think it won her many votes at all, even in the form of solidly blue voters who would have otherwise stayed home.

Er, isn't Harris supposed to [be] B?

No, at least not in my mind; I intended A to be Blues for whom disavowing trans ideology is categorically unacceptable, and B to be Reds who don't actually care half as much as they've been pretending to ever since they discovered that grilling Blues on the normie-unfriendly aspects of trans ideology is a surefire way to make them look bad to which the Blues have still never found a genuinely popular antidote.

I thought the point was that @magicalkittycat was saying "the Republicans don't actually care about trans; they only pretend to so they can distract the Democrats from talking about the economy", and @Primaprimaprima countered that if the Democrats believed that they could simply stop caring about trans so that the Republicans' cynical attacks would lose their raison d'etre. So I was arguing that the Republicans' attacks could still, in principle, be opportunistic and insincere even if the Democrats' support is sincere and immutable.

(I will stress again that I don't think this model is true; I believe most Republicans are in fact sincere in their opposition to trans, not opportunistic. I was only disputing the faulty epistemology of "if the Democrats genuinely believed the Republicans were being opportunistically insincere, we should expect to see them giving up on trans; therefore, if they don't give up on trans, they must not really believe the Republicans are faking their opposition" as a bit of reasoning.)

A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight A.

Well in that case, it wouldn't really make logical sense for B to argue that A's beating the drum on issue X is just an attempt to distract from some more important issue. Both sides are taking the position that issue X is important. Ok, so B is being dishonest and hypocritical, but so what?

I don't think that logic holds water. If A and B disagree on many things, A cares deeply about X, and X is largely indifferent to B, it may well be that B pretends to be extremely worked up about X to fight

Tell me which issue you want me to vocally support or oppose in return for vocally opposing immigration and transgenderism in progressive spaces, and I'm pretty sure I will give it to you.

If you think Reds are "largely indifferent" to trans ideology and its integration into taxpayer-funded schools, I think you will find the real world a very surprising place going forward.

I can't actually think of a single real-world example where this pattern plays out. A similar pattern, I think, is the one where objectively-small-potatoes policies are seen as a test of control, and so have massive resources dedicated to them, because both sides understand the power of precedent and control of the default.

This is in Texas. Trans ideology is illegal in government schools.

Now that doesn't mean it doesn't happen, but it does mean that at a government policy level, the sort of thing that might be changed by a single election(and if democrats win a trifecta in Texas then they've probably also won the power to override vetos in the federal government and will simply pass whatever they want) is a thing that the reds have decisively won.

I don't believe this, and I don't understand why you would claim it. Undocumented immigration is illegal. Affirmative action is illegal. Weed smoking is illegal, or was until very recently. The Constitution itself offers ironclad protections to free speech and the right to keep and bear arms, in a purely hypothetical way that has no actual impact anywhere Blues win political power.

Laws that can't and won't be enforced should not be referenced as reassurance that the things the law bans aren't a problem worth worrying about. Show me the people in jail for breaking the law, and then we can talk.

Because the red tribe already has the policy victories that would be forestalled by dem governance?

(tried to belatedly edit the following into the first post - here it is as a reply)

I'm not saying that in this case the right's opposition to trans rights or immigration is displaying this kind of hypocrisy. But I don't think the left's refusal to concede those points proves otherwise. Lawfare is a good example: the Left may keep suing Trump over January 6th without actually caring about it half as much as they pretend, because they already maximally hate Trump whether or not he really tried to do a coup - but whether Trump himself wants to be seen as a guy who attempted to do a coup is a completely different question and it would be hugely damaging for him if he conceded "yeah, whatever, I confess, I tried to become dictator-for-life" in some bizarre effort to prove his accusers don't actually care about that.

Black propaganda is disinformation. The things being sent here are actually beliefs of the groups being "impersonated"--they are just being sent to a hostile audience.

Black propaganda is disinformation

The organization isn't a serious one, it was created for the explicit purpose of doing something real activists weren't doing, sending out flyers to students.

The whole thing is a literal psyop.

  • -15

The flyers accurately depicted the beliefs of the real organization. They did not misrepresent the organization's beliefs. The organization didn't authorize the mailings, but a misrepresentation normally means a substantial one, not just any old one. Lying about who sent the flyers, but accurately depicting their beliefs in the flyers, is not a substantial misrepresentation even though in some autistically literal way it's not true.

It's still black propaganda per basically every definition I found.

I suspect you'd have no problems with a Democrat false-flag organization sending people to the Project 2025 Website and acting as though it was an official campaign pledge from Republicans.

Nobody wanted to send anyone to the actual project 2025, it's a 900 page policy document full of standard republican priorities scripted out in boring detail. The project 2025 scaremongering relied on people not reading the document, which was easy, because it was long and boring.

There's no good argument against "I made up something in my head to get mad about", given you've already proven you'll just make up stuff in your head.

The organization is real and serious, it was created for the explicit purpose of trans advocacy. The OP contains an archive link dated prior to any of this drama, with statements proving that the texts were an accurate representation of their beliefs. The current version of the website contains cope about the texts, has removed any of the previously proudly shared resources, again indicating that the organization is real and pro-trans, rather than a false flag.

The whole thing is a literal psyop.

What specific evidence do you have of this?

The organization is real and serious, it was created for the explicit purpose of trans advocacy.

TENT ("Transgender Education Network of Texas) is real, the "Texas Transgender Student Union" (the ones supposedly behind the letter) is not real outside of an LLC set up last month.

TENT has publicly stated that the TTSU is not an authorized representative.

The TTSU is a fake activist organization.

TENT has publicly stated that the TTSU is not an authorized representative.

And? How is that relevant to the issue at all? How does being unauthorized make anything they said untrue?

You said

The organization is real and serious, it was created for the explicit purpose of trans advocacy.

But TTSU the ones who sent the flyers are not real and serious.

If you reread my comment

The organization isn't a serious one, it was created for the explicit purpose of doing something real activists weren't doing, sending out flyers to students.

I am clearly speaking about TTSU, the flyer sending organization, which is a not real and serious organization.

You confused TTSU with TENT, which is a real organization but did not send the flyers.

How does being unauthorized make anything they said untrue?

Not relevant, "the fake group said true things while pretending to represent a real group" doesn't make them a real organization. The TTSU is fake and was created last month https://www.houstonchronicle.com/politics/texas/article/transgender-mailers-22485877.php

Even Republican politicians acknowledge it's not real!

“A legitimate group does not send something like that from a fake address with a fake name, especially on the first day of early voting,” said Dade Phelan, a Beaumont Republican and the former speaker of the Texas House.

I am clearly speaking about TTSU, the flyer sending organization, which is a not real and serious organization.

I'm sorry, I guess I was steelmanning your argument. TTSU being fake is not relevant to the conversation, so I didn't expect you were actually trying to deflect the conversation there.

Not relevant, "the fake group said true things while pretending to represent a real group" doesn't make them a real organization.

It does make TTSU being fake completely irrelevant though.

More comments

Nefarious politics to MagicalKitty appears to be repeating true things the other side does that are highly unpopular.

In my view this is just well-run politics and normal.

I’m basically a 1-issue immigration voter now. So yes remind voters of Dems awful immigration policies.

If I had a second issue it’s boosting fertility. And transitioning people and trans culture is bad for fertility.

Budgetary stuff is unimportant compared to demographics. Money is fake. The Jews created Israel in 80 years with great demographics.

the Transgender Education Network of Texas, or TENT

How legitimate was this group? Aka how were they received/perceived/reported on prior to this latest dust-up? Is the whole thing like "linking to the DSA's policy pages", or more "linking to a fake organization that parrots the discourse of (or is at least similar to) a real one"?

The pamphlet I got had a return address on it of a private house in a suburb of Houston republicans win by double digits- hardly where a real left wing advocacy group would be headquartered(which might be Houston proper, but certainly would not be this cookie cutter suburb).

My understanding from the writeup is that the pamphlet group and the website being linked to are separate orgs, with the pamphlet group being the "false flag".

Real. The group has participated in advocacy for years, has good relations with all the other usual suspects, and there is no indication it is not exactly what it says on the cover. You can search for google with like before:2026 to see earlier references

The recent dustup is due to a fake organization sending texts that simply have a link to the real organization's website.

In the last 20 years it seems like the political class has drifted far to the left of the public such that both Democrats and Republicans tend to run to the right of where they actually govern.

When’s the last time a Republican ran a centrist campaign and then governed to the right? George W. Bush?

Even Trump I ended up as a milquetoast centrist Presidency despite the rhetorical bombasticity.

But there are lots of examples of Democrats running to the center and masking far left tendencies. Spanberger in Virginia, for example. And Talarico in Texas is running that playbook too.

So, from a Republican perspective, it seems like just advertising the true beliefs of Democratic politicians in their own words is a good campaign trick.

Most 80/20 issues are wins for Republicans.

Most 80/20 issues are wins for Republicans.

Most, but right now one of the most salient is datacenters, which democrats win on by being reliably anti-growth.

advertising the true beliefs of Democratic politicians in their own words is a good campaign trick

Indeed and the most powerful election ad from the last presidential election was a video of Kamal explaining how she wants there to be taxpayer-paid sex reassignment surgeries for illegal immigrants in prison. Kamala's campaign could not come up with a response to that despite trying. Potential counter ads didn't poll well with focus groups.

So, from a Republican perspective, it seems like just advertising the true beliefs of Democratic politicians in their own words is a good campaign trick.

Yeah, especially on the trans issue. Your average American parents are horrified at the thought of their children being secretly transed at school.

I'm pretty confident that even in places like New Jersey or New York, if there were a straight up referendum, a significant majority of people would vote to ban transing of minors along the lines of the law in Tennessee.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure my white liberal NJ neighbors are all for gender fluidity and trans.... for other people's kids, not their own.


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