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LateMechanic
23hr ago
It surely depends on the government debt to gdp ratio. But yeah interest spending is government spending like any other, so turning on the fire hose and blasting people with free money is probably more stimulative than high borrowing costs are constrictive. You would have to think the propensity to spend interest income is near 0 to think otherwise. I don't know if that's the same reasoning as neo-fisherians use, or what erdogan is working from.
I'm not up to date with milei either, though I like his chainsaw schtick. If it was his policy to cut rates, the 10-year charts are pretty striking: interest rate, inflation rate. The last I had heard was years ago, that argentina was probably accidentally making their inflation worse by following the orthodox advice of raising rates. It wasn't until yesterday that I looked this up and saw the cut rates preceding the inflation drop.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23hr ago
Of course we do. The entire debate is meaningless semantics. Obviously there is such a thing as biological sex, obviously there are some differences in behavior of the two biological sexes on average. Obviously there is such a thing as a male brain and female brain.
Many trans activists and progressives now explicitly reject all of those premises.
None of that is inconsistent with allowing people to transition.
There are really only a handful of anti-trans people who literally believe people shouldn't be "allowed" to transition. You are an adult who wants to have surgery and hormones and live your life as the opposite sex? Okay. Probably most conservatives would even be willing to go along and use your preferred pronouns out of politeness. They might think you're mentally ill and should reconsider your life choices, but only assholes go out of their way to "misgender" someone just to make sure you know what they think of you.
It's when the "debate" went far beyond semantics and social kindness that trans people became seen as more than just troubled individuals who deserve sympathy. It's not meaningless semantics when we're talking about puberty blockers for children, or men competing in sports and being housed in women's prisons and taking over women's spaces, or people being shunned or professionally harmed for saying there are four lights.
BinaryHobo
hauling up the data on the Xerox line
23hr ago
That does not follow. We have tons of sub-categories that are labelled {adjective}-{super category}. As an example "green-apples". They're still apples, but the category of green apples is useful for certain reasons.
This, of course, doesn't mean you're wrong (or right either), but you argument isn't good and it isn't helpful.
The ultimate argument is that the categories of human gender gets weird near the edges, are the parts near the edges part of the super category, part of the other super category, or something else entirely.
Jiro
23hr ago
If Argentina can cause inflation by mistake, and Japan wants inflation, why can't they copy Argentina?
No_one
23hr ago
Today he tweeted this at Gavin Newsom.
We are all waiting anxiously to watch the 4K footage of marines doing deranged things to you
They should send a strike team directly to your house
1.4K likes.
how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people?
-
if they look unambiguously black
-
if they look ambiguously black and at least one parent is black (recursively)
If the autist is not able to tell if someone looks unambiguously black, there is nothing you can do.
This fails if someone is wearing a good disguise. But that's a general problem with determining anything by sight. This problem also applies in obvious ways to the trans issue.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
23hr ago
I dont think thats a good analogy. While people do try to police race boundaries sometimes, there is not in fact a consensus sorting everyone into white and black. I would tell our autist about definitely white and definitely black people, and the ones in between will depend on whos making the judgement and whats convenient for them at the time. I dont think progressives are happy with this a model for how transgender should work.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
23hr ago
I think knowing what a woman is is pretty deeply rooted in our biology and no amount of gaslighting and enforced consensus can change that. 1984, famously about the Party's ability to make people say black is white and up is down and war is peace, spent a lot of time describing how much effort went into enforcing these edicts, and the implicit message there (though not the one Orwell was getting at) is that people actually knew the truth, even if they knew better than to say it. Even the most loyal enthusiasts might convince themselves they really believed war was peace and we had always been at war with Oceania, but people would slip because they couldn't actually turn off memory and reason entirely.
So it is even with the most devoted adherents of trans ideology. They tell themselves they really, truly believe trans women are women and "woman" is just an arbitrary socially constructed label. But they don't actually want to fuck a person who clocks as the wrong sex (it's more than just genitals, we all know this). On a deep, instinctual level they recognize the difference. To the degree that they are sincere, they may convince themselves TWAW but they have to work at it to keep their words and behavior in line with what they claim to believe or they will slip up. And I think actually a lot of them are insincere and will ditch TWAW as soon as it is no longer the thing all good progressives believe. You'll see then how attached they really were to this professed lack of difference.
That said, you are right about some things. A lot of unphysical guys who've never done sports or martial arts really don't understand just how significant the physical differences between men and women are. If their last time in physical competition was middle school, they probably knew some girls who were more athletic than a lot of boys and hadn't yet seen just how rapidly that changes once the T hits.
I have to admit to being a nerdy, awkward kid who hated sports in school, and I was one of those guys... until I took up martial arts as an adult. At first I was a little confused that a woman with a higher belt wasn't wiping the mat with me the way more experienced men did, and that in fact I had to be careful not to hurt her. This was, you might say, a little red-pill moment.
Which is, I observe, is exactly what it looks like when a pro-T prog guy tries to write women characters. They write women as men with some shallow "loli Dylan Mulanney" cuteness, because they don't actually have a mental model of "women" as having any differences in mentality, life experiences, preferences, traits, qualities or viewpoints compared to men. "A woman is a dude who spends 12 hours writing spreadsheets about Warhammer 40k battleships and then adds a heart emoji and a tee hee at the end. Don't deadname her, bigot."
You've read John Scalzi, I see.
And terfy ladies, you didn't just sow the seeds here. You plowed the fields, fertilized them, then set up aggressive arrangements of killbot scarecrows to fend off any threats to the seeds. I'm not sure how you can recover from that without rewriting a significant portion of third wave feminism, but maybe that's a me problem.
TERFs are mostly second wave feminists and very much want to rewrite third wave feminism. Second wavers largely believe that absent the patriarchy, men and women would behave the same, but physical differences are real. Third wavers are the ones who went post-modernist about gender categories.
LateMechanic
23hr ago
Ill note that you still havent explained why too much inflation is bad, or how we would know what "too much" is.
I assume you're not asking for the various downsides of inflation in general and why people find it annoying when it's above some small amount like 1-2%? My original statement was that people should have the properly oriented mindset, where the problem of 'too much government debt' is along the lines of 'too much of a good thing'. The 'good thing' here is the money in the private sector, not inflation, if that was the confusion. This is all in contrast to most peoples' gut notion that "deficit" and "debt" sound negative and bad and worth minimizing on their own.
I agree that the taxes give value to the IOUs, but I dont think the made up unit gives you all that much long-term
You don't think the US making up their own 'dollar' unit of measurement is too important? You must be on some kind of galactic time scale here for what long term means. This is surely one of the most important things about being a sovereign nation, creating and issuing your own currency.
Unless you can somehow inflate above expectations indefinitely, in the long term you need to tax back what you borrowed plus interest in real terms.
Again, maybe I'm not thinking long term enough. But in the US, we went into millions, then billions, now trillions. Should we find the tens of trillions a special number, such that we wouldn't expect to see quadrillions? When and why would they ever need to 'tax back' this amount? The IOUs just roll over indefinitely.
There is no reason to borrow unless your position as the government gives you investment opportunities above market returns, youd just pay interest for no good reason.
Yeah once you recognize that all money is just transferable credit, you will notice that there is basically no economic difference between central bank reserves and treasury securities. So rather than one being 'money' and the other being 'borrowing', they are actually not 'borrowing' at all. They are just creating money in different forms. This fact has dawned on people like Larry Summers a decade after central bank reserves started paying interest just like treasury securities.
As for paying interest, it's purely a policy choice to pay anything other than 0% on any of these IOUs. It's a government subsidy to savers: they will give you more money for having money. There are various macroeconomic effects for any chosen rate. Currently the policymakers in charge think choosing to pay a higher interest rate is on balance more constrictive than stimulative, and think that low rates are on balance more stimulative.
aqouta
1d ago
The problem with this position taking is that the popular messaging and what most activists actually say is against you. So they're either cynically lying or you very transparently are on the outside.
No_one
1d ago
The amount of research done beforehand by the actors in this case seems remarkably low.
It is worryingly low.
No_one
1d ago
Said organised crime is getting away with it because it is 'patriotic' and not cooperating with foreign agents. The minute Russia would find some gangsters working for the CIA, that's the minute they'd get arrested in an excessively violent manner by the ministry of interior troops. (who, in Russia, operate attack helicopters, tanks and artillery)
LiberalRetvrn
1d ago
Of course we do. The entire debate is meaningless semantics. Obviously there is such a thing as biological sex, obviously there are some differences in behavior of the two biological sexes on average. Obviously there is such a thing as a male brain and female brain. None of that is inconsistent with allowing people to transition. Transgenderism is a transhumanist technological development, not an ideology. The only people who are confused about what a woman is are feminists and christians who think there is some deep meaning to gender roles and gender identity.
On their side against whom? Transwomen? Do you think "I was trying to help B against C, but accidentally helped A against B instead" (with A=cis women, B=trans women, C=conservatives) is an easy mistake to make, even if your distinction between A and B is solely based on who is the target of C's enmity? Consensus men (men as defined by progressives \cap men as defined by conservatives)? I'm pretty sure they do side with cis women against consensus men much more than a few accidental times; let me know if you actually need examples.
(Are you in fact trying to make a serious argument there, or are you just attached to the snappy sound of this line of polemic for your side?)
hydroacetylene
1d ago
That’s fine, but throwing a hissy fit about activating the national guard and then letting the feds commandeer his troops anyways makes him look like a pussy.
In the Texas border standoff Greg Abbott correctly calculated that the administration was too weak/indecisive to take over the army he’d assembled on the border and so he could continue taking over a core federal function while impeding the federal operation of the same. This made him look strong, because he got what he wanted. But Newsom won’t raise his own army, he won’t defy federalization orders, etc. He looks like he’s all bark, no bite- and already has that reputation.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
I would agree with that assessment.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
If you're trying to analogize based on yesterday's event's, it's unclear what crimes, if any, were committed, besides normal low-level protest crimes like failure to disperse and whatever charges you can levy against people throwing objects at police. Getting someone for interfering with an investigation or official duties would require showing both that the agent were actually engaged in official duties and that the person took a specific action to interfere. Realistically, this would look like ICE trying to make an arrest and the protestors physically impeding the officer from doing so. The reports I've read suggest that ICE was merely staging for a raid (which is itself just an interpolation from the authors; there's been no official word that I'm aware of) so there's no official duty at this point to interfere with. At this point it looks like there was a raid that was about to go down but got called off because of the protests. Charging everyone present because their protesting made it inconvenient to undertake a planned future action is already stretching the law beyond anything it's been used for in the past, but it comes with the additional complication that actions that you are claiming are obstruction are core First Amendment activities. So even if you could show that the elements of the crime were satisfied, you still might not be able to get a conviction due to constitutional issues.
Tanista
1d ago
If transwomen and women were identical you'd imagine that progressives would at least be accidentally on the side of women a few times.
Blueberry
1d ago
Trailer: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4yzcg2rtMnI
Netflix made a documentary about the dorky crypto couple who stole 4 billions in Bitcoin. They couldn’t figure out in 6 years (hack in 2016, in custody in 2022) how to wash the wealth.
Stellula
1d ago
Trans women are trans women.
Your (correct) point highlights the biggest flaw in their arguments. "Trans women are women", well no they aren't because you already gave them a category called "trans women" which you can obviously identify, is obviously useful to you, and obviously has a meaning. That meaning is: men who are dressing like women, or in other words again: men.
Rov_Scam
1d ago
Newsome is a clown whose chances of winning the presidential nomination are approximately zero. Ironically, he's generally making the same mistake you are wherein moderation is confused with accommodating and/or praising the Trump administration. While I believe that a moderate is going to win the nomination in 2028, it's going to be a real moderate like Shapiro or Beshear who has show that they can govern moderately and give pointed criticism toward the administration when it does something bad for the state, as opposed to governing like a lefty and trying to compensate for it by schmoozing with Republicans. That, and Newsome has no record of outperforming Biden/Harris is red districts.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
We know that they do because they're able to distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen with 100% accuracy (or at least, they can achieve the same level of accuracy that everyone else does). They have to be able to do this, otherwise the trans movement would fall apart because no one would be able to consistently identify the trans people in the first place. This requires an implicit model of what a (real) woman is, because they need to be able to distinguish the real women (ciswomen) from the men who simply desire to be women (transwomen).
I don't follow this line of argument. Imagine a world in which progressives could not distinguish between ciswomen and transwomen at all, ever. In this world, what progressives would see is essentially that there is a subset of women that a large part of their outgroup inexplicably asserts are not real women, and wants to treat badly. Assuming that progressives have no issue adopting the term "trans" for this subset that the outgroup inexplicably discriminates against, how would this not be fertile ground for a "trans movement"?
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
1d ago
I think your implicit line of argument/theory about the relationship between articulating differences and policing boundaries fails generalisation to the usual counterexamples. Take a boundary that is still policed by most Americans, progressive and traditionalist alike - how do you explain to the autist the difference between black people and white people? You can't take something silly like the one-drop rule, because everyone knows Donald Trump would not enjoy a late bestowal of the n-word pass if it now turned out some great grandmother of his was a castaway African slave, any more than in the discerning conservative's eye anything about the femininity of the serial West Coast testicle shaver would change if it turned out that he did actually have XX chromosomes plus some weird novel genetic abnormality producing the phenotype.
In other words, there is something going on in your post that is similar to "proving too much".
Thank you. That was exactly my thought. In my formative years I learned English from writings by Indians. I am well aware that many expressions I learned from them are unfortunately archaic or used only in India and not in the standard British or American English. I try to avoid them but it is not always easy in a second (actually my third) language.
But they don't just help against "conservatives". The movement against maximal trans rights in Britain didn't run through conservatives but apostates who were themselves lesbians and former feminists in good standing.
I'm not OP, I do think in this situation things likely just dissolve. But if transwomen were making some sort of demand that made them distinct from women (the male version would be being forced to tolerate Sam Smith's ridiculous name shenanigans), without a clear indication of who wins on the stack, you'd at least think sometimes the bulk of the movement would sometimes just side with the women who don't want to deal with it. Especially since they couldn't appeal to the alleged suicide epidemic.
Yes.
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